Book review: The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and treatment

© Jossey-Bass Publishing

If you are confused about your own people pleasing tendencies, need for external approval, and even your own feelings, I suggest you read by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert M. Pressman.

In their work as therapists, the authors discovered an unusual trend - patients with traits similar to adult children of alcoholics, but no evidence that their parents were substance abusers. Moreover, many of the patients did not recall any overt abuse as children. So why then were these patients exhibiting the dysfunctional psychological, interpersonal, and work traits of abuse survivors?

The answer was a different type of dysfunctional family. Coined by the authors as the narcissistic family, what these patients all had in common was that as children, the needs of their parents took precedence over their needs. This is in contrast to healthy families, who put the needs of their children first. Without further explanation, this discovery might not seem wholly worthy of the label 'dysfunction'.

So to explain, a basic goal for most families is to raise healthy children who will one day become independent adults. In a healthy family, parents work to accomplish this task by assuming responsibility for their children's emotional and physical needs. Over time, parents gradually teach their children to be independent by allowing them to assume responsibility for meeting their own needs in a developmentally appropriate manner. Thus, the primary work of children is to learn to become independent adults. Along the way, they learn to identify and act on their feelings, wants and needs. Parents take care of their own needs or seek help from adults. As a bonus, the children have also learned how to be good parents through the process of observational learning.

In narcissistic families, this basic goal becomes skewed and the meeting of parental needs becomes of primary importance for the family. This twist generally takes place some time after infancy, as the authors point out that most children of narcissistic families were well cared for as babies. In fact, it is mostly likely to occur some time after the child begins to differentiate him or her self from the parents and begins to assert their own needs. This normal developmental process is difficult for parents who are most concerned with fulfilling their own needs as a result of job stress, physical or mental disability, or lack of parenting skills, to name a few reasons. To compensate, the parents fight back, ignoring the child's needs and at the same time forcing the child to respond to their own by withholding attention and affection until they do so. In this way, the children's emotional needs go unattended and they are deprived of the opportunity to experience gradual independence and learn about themselves. Instead, they learn to wait to see what their parents expect and then react, negatively or positively, to those expectations.

The consequence of this parenting style is that the children become a reflection of their parents' expectations and are deprived of the opportunity to be unique. Furthermore, the children learn to ignore their feelings or become completely detached from them altogether. As a result of having no emotions on which to direct their actions, the children become dependent upon others for guidance. This is the process of becoming what the authors term a reactive and reflective individual.

The tendency towards reacting and reflecting will follow children of narcissistic families into adulthood. Eventually they are likely to become distressed by their own pervasive need to please others, chronic need to seek external validation, and difficulty identifying their own feelings wants and needs. They tend to suffer from a myriad of emotional stressors including anger that lies just below the surface, depression, chronic dissatisfaction, and poor self-confidence. Many also struggle with indecisiveness as they have learned to make decisions on the basis of other's needs and expectations. Interpersonally, they tend to share a history of failed romances and have difficulty trusting in others. Sometimes their inclination towards distrust is shattered by periods of total self-disclosure, usually made injudiciously, and met with poor outcome. At work they are overachievers, workaholics even, that are never satisfied with their success.

So why bother to identify yourself or your patient as a survivor of a narcissistic family? The answer is that there is hope for improvement. Identification is just the first step. Please check back for part two including steps for recovery.

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Part 2

In my last post, I the reviewed the narcissistic family model originated by authors Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert M. Pressman in their book . I promised to review the author's model of recovery and recommendations for improvement.

The key to recovering from a narcissistic family and thereby improving one's adult self is acceptance. To move on, the adult survivor must accept the full reality of their childhood and the effects that their experiences had on their development, which includes who they are today. In doing so, they must acknowledge two things: First, that they were not responsible for the events of their childhood, and second that they must take full responsibility now. The point of acceptance, the authors note, it not to place blame on parents or caregivers, but for the individual to acknowledge reality, which encompasses taking accountability for positive change today.

Fives stages of recovery

The stages are outline in the context of a therapeutic relationship. As such, they are designed for facilitation by a therapist. Nevertheless, I believe the concept of each is helpful to the casual self-help reader.

Stage One: Revisiting

The first step toward recovery is revisiting the reality of childhood. In doing this, the individual is encouraged to accept that as a child, they never had control. They are also encouraged, as adults, to give up any fantasy they might harbor of somehow creating an ideal family of origin.

Stage Two: Mourning the Loss of the Fantasy

In this stage, the individual mourns the reality perceived from stage one - that they never had, and cannot create, an ideal family of origin. The authors comment that many individuals return home for family events like Christmas or weddings believing that "this time it will work out." The purpose of this stage is to remove pointless hope for the fantasy family, which frees emotional energy for the here and now.

Stage Three: Recognition

Here, the individual acknowledges the vestiges of being raised in a narcissistic family. They come to an understanding of particular personality traits or behavioral patterns (i.e. people pleasing) and must accept that, although the traits are dysfunctional now, they did help them to survive throughout childhood.

Stage Four: Evaluation

This stage flows from the traits recognized in stage three. The individual assesses their current selves, which includes the personality and behavioral traits they now exhibit, and decides which to keep and which to change. Traits to be changed tend to include those that have proved dysfunctional for the adult.

Stage Five: Responsibility for Change

The final stage is the actual implementation of change. The individual takes responsibility for themselves and works to replace dysfunctional behaviors with more functional ones.

In the book, each step is explained thoroughly with helpful techniques and case examples designed to assist the individual along the way. What follows are more tips and case examples used to illustrate areas of dysfunction common to adults from narcissistic families. Below are a few examples.

Area of dysfunction: Problems with assertiveness, including identifying and communicating feelings to others

As a result of their upbringing, these individuals may have difficulty identifying their feelings or even buried them altogether. Thus, they have difficulty discussing them and their wants and needs with others. The authors suggest a simple exercise commonly used to teach effective communication skills called, "I feel...I want". So, instead of slamming doors when your husband failed to make plans for your birthday, for example, state, "Joe, I felt hurt when you did not make dinner reservations for my birthday. I want you to do that now (next year)."

Area of dysfunction: Problems with setting boundaries

Many individuals from narcissistic families are uncomfortable setting boundaries for fear of disappointing others. To overcome these tendencies and gain more personal control the individual must learn to live with some disapproval. The authors lay out eight rules for learning how to set boundaries with others. Here are a few:

"Correction, appropriately expressed, is not destructive, hurtful, or shame inducing."

"One's needs cannot always be met by others, but they can always be appropriately articulated to others"

"Feelings do not need justification - one always has a right to one's feelings"

If you like these tips for self-improvement, I suggest you check out . You will find more detailed strategies for dealing with issues I briefly addressed above and also information on those I have not addressed here including, decision making, deferment of gratification, building trust and improving intimacy, sex, and friendships.

Comment: When pleasing others is done out of fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of punishment or other negative feelings it usually arises from people who have/had overly critical parents. Typically, a need to please and care for others is a healthy trait to have. In the narcissistic family dynamic, it is twisted and distorted to serve the needs of the parents. In that environment, a child must conform to the wants and needs of the parent and does not develop their own individuality or learn to express their OWN emotions or needs.

These dynamics are perfectly mirrored by people in society who look to assuage their fear in the wrong places, motivated by them, seeking some sense of security.

Human relationships are plagued by fear. This cycle all too often begins in our first relationship with our parents. Too self-absorbed to recognize what their child truly requires of them, many parents betray their own child's weakness and dependency on his caregivers - his emotional need for comfort, security, trust, and the loving acceptance of those closest to him. Having missed out on these important periods of growth, this boy, now a parent himself, may come to feel threatened by the emotional needs of his own child, becoming dependent on his own children and spouse to provide what he never had. The vicious cycle spirals on, and in turn, his own children learn to stifle their needs, deny their own feelings, and live as hollow reflections of the needs of their father. When a child must meet the emotional needs of a parent, and not the other way around, the parent-child relationship is inverted. Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert Pressman call this the 'narcissistic family dynamic', and the problems it causes are directly relevant to the vast geopolitical problems the world currently faces.

Such children, like their parents, seek some source of comfort, some sense of security, but not knowing where to look and what to look out for, they often find it in all the wrong places: their own children, their lovers, their work, some religious or political cause. As much as they may deny it, they are motivated by the very fears they experienced as children - afraid of being alone, not belonging, uncertain, unloved, confused, abandoned. They find shelter from the pain in some literal or symbolic arms of embrace, yet it is incomplete in some way, like the 'security' of a sinking ship or of a castle built on foundations of sand. Not wanting to let go, and face that pain again, they shore up their defenses - a rallying of troops to give 'the people', their own fragmented personalities, a sense of security. But such a cover-up is built upon and dependent on lies, things half-seen through the lens of denied and distorted emotion. We may be denying that we are in a relationship with a psychopath, someone who, despite the abuse and mental torture they subject us to, offers us some sense of comfort and stability in life. Or we may deny our own betrayal of our loved ones' emotional needs: the child we criticize and deform according to our own twisted ideals or the lover we demand to be someone they are not.

I find it fascinating how these dynamics of a single human soul mirror so well the delusions of the many. Just as we rally our mental forces to hold onto that equilibrium we desperately fear losing, we rally our military forces to protect us from enemies that do not exist, covering up problems at home that dwarf those projected 'out there'. How does this come to be? So far in this series, I've described psychopaths - individuals devoid of conscience, incapable of remorse, and hungry for power - and their infiltration of corporations and politics - two seats of power in the modern era.

Manipulating mass emotion, particularly fear, is their . It's commonly said that politicians exploit fear, but what is missing from this truism is an understanding of exactly what motivates them to do so, why they're so good at it, and the extent to which they go about doing so. Psychopaths understand human behavior, often better than we understand ourselves. In the last article I quoted a diagnosed psychopath, Sam Vaknin, describing how he used emotional abuse and insults to break down his victims. It was just one example of the special psychological knowledge possessed by psychopaths, refined after a lifetime of observing and interacting with 'others' whose foreign emotional reactions strike them as so comical and ridiculous. When this special knowledge is translated onto the global stage, you get geopolitics and all the propaganda and lies that accompany it.

Ponerology 101: The Truth Behind the War on Terror

Additional narcissism resources