Healing Children of Narcissistic Parents: The Power of Empathy-Driven Parenting

2024-02-24 21:05:00

Narcissistic parents are not that uncommon. In the book It Ends with You, published by Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, psychotherapist with 30 years of experience, Caryl McBride shows healing paths for children traumatized by narcissistic parents and suggests how to end the story with yourself.

Most children from narcissistic families who grow up say they have a deep-seated fear that they will become like their narcissistic parents. But the antonym of narcissism is empathy. So if we want to break the legacy of narcissistic parenting, our first task if we have children or plan to have them someday is to learn how to parent them empathically.

What is empathic (soft) parenting? It means that when problems arise, we first try to understand and validate our children’s feelings before taking action. This is the cardinal rule of empathic parenting, and it applies to almost any situation. There is only one exception: when a child is in danger and you need to act very quickly to protect him. For example, if a child runs out onto the roadway, he must first be stopped, and only then empathy must be used. But in most cases, empathy and confirmation still come first.

If you think back to how you were raised in a narcissistic family, you will most likely realize that you were not seen or heard. You were probably just taught to follow the rules set by your parents. Your feelings weren’t important and you weren’t comfortable expressing them. But with empathic parenting, feelings are everything.

Empathy is when you care regarding what a child feels and you acknowledge those feelings so that he himself understands that his feelings are real. This does not mean indulging every childish whim. No, this means that the child is always seen, heard and understood – and at the same time taught to follow the rules and do the right thing. The parent is still the boss because the child does not feel safe unless the parent is in control. But you don’t control your child’s emotions: he has the right to feel what he feels.

Let’s look at the basics of empathic parenting, divided into five stages.

Help your child identify his feelings.

Ask your child regarding the feelings they expressed to make sure you understand them correctly.

Validate and sympathize with his feelings.

Ignore the reasons for these feelings until steps 1–3 have been completed.

Finally, get to the root of your child’s feelings and see what can be done regarding the situation.

How can you help children identify their feelings? If you grew up in a narcissistic family, then most likely you are not familiar with this “playbook”, so you may need to practice recognizing your own feelings and then teach your child the same. Don’t forget: in narcissistic families, children are taught that their feelings are not important, so you as a parent will need to use your new skills to teach your children that their feelings are important.

To better understand how children learn regarding feelings, let’s first look at babies. At an early age, children do not fully understand their feelings and do not know how to express them until we teach them to do so. They usually express their feelings through actions: punching or kicking, crying, whining, sulking, or throwing things. You may now be thinking:

“My narcissistic parent behaved exactly like this!” Exactly! This is because the narcissist is emotionally stuck in childhood. That’s why he acts like a six year old at times.

Here’s an example of how three-year-old Piper copes with her feelings while meeting her friend Amanda, also three. Piper is lucky: her grandmother just gave her a doll for Christmas, and the girl treasures it very much.

But guess what Amanda wants to do? Also play with the doll. She comes up, takes the doll and begins to rock it in her arms. Piper is shocked. She thinks: “This is my doll!” She walks up to Amanda, shoves her, takes the doll away and starts crying. Piper is very upset that Amanda took her doll, but doesn’t know how to identify these feelings or what to do regarding them.

If Piper’s parents lack empathy, they may well scold her for not sharing the doll, force her to give the doll to Amanda, or even punish Piper by telling her that she can no longer play with the doll today. If they did that, Piper wouldn’t understand what was going on at all and would be completely confused. She will most likely think that she is a bad girl, but will not understand why. After all, she’s probably thinking right now: “This is my doll! Amanda shouldn’t take my doll!

If Piper’s parents respond empathetically, they will follow the five rules outlined above to cope with the situation.

First, one of Piper’s parents will lean in to look her straight in the eyes and ask how she’s feeling. If Piper cannot explain, the parent will begin to ask leading questions. For example: “Honey, what’s wrong? Why are you upset? Piper may (or may not) identify her feelings as confusion and anger, although she understands that she is angry at Amanda for taking her doll.

If Piper can’t identify her feelings, an empathic parent will say, “Honey, I think you’re mad at Amanda for wanting to play with your doll.” Then Piper might, for example, answer “yes” and continue crying.

The parent will then demonstrate empathy and validation of Piper’s feelings and say something like, “I understand, honey, that you don’t like that Amanda wants to play with your special doll. Sharing your favorite toys is very difficult. I had this too when I was little. It’s okay to have feelings, and so is it to be angry. We all get angry sometimes. Let’s talk regarding it.”

Piper will have the opportunity to express her important feelings, feel seen and heard, and have an empathic parent validate her feelings. After this, the child usually calms down, and it is easier to move on to the next stage.

Now the parent can talk regarding how to share toys and help little girls decide how to play with the doll together, or can come up with some other solution. Perhaps Amanda will also talk regarding her favorite toys.

The most important thing here is to allow the child to have their feelings and normalize and validate them before making a decision. If you are already practicing this process, you know that this kind of empathic attention helps soften most tantrums and gradually teach the child to identify and understand his own feelings. The child will understand that it is normal to have feelings and that it is good to talk regarding them.

With young children, we start with the most basic feelings that they understand: anger, sadness, joy and fear.

Many situations that a small child will find themselves in can be tied to them. When I treated children in therapy, we drew faces (angry, sad, happy and scared) and discussed each feeling. On the Internet you can find special tables of feelings for almost every age group and hang them on the refrigerator or some other convenient place. Just in case, look for feeling charts for adults too!

The process of identifying and discussing feelings can be done with children of all ages. Let’s take the example of elementary school and third grader Barry. One of his classmates bullies him at school, but his parents know nothing regarding it.

One day Barry wakes up in the morning and says he won’t go to school. He says that he hates her, that his stomach hurts. This is something new for Barry’s parents, as he used to love school and was a model student.

The non-empathetic parent will give a whole lecture regarding how important school is and claim that since Barry doesn’t have a fever, he’s going to school. And no objections!

An Empathetic Parent Will Go Through a Five-Step Process

Once they are sure that Barry really has a stomach ache, the parents will ask how he is feeling and what is going on. Children Barry’s age will answer this question truthfully, telling you what is happening to them and how they are feeling, if they are confident that you will listen. They need you to be with them, to listen and understand them.

When Barry tells his parents that he is being bullied at school, they will help him identify the feelings: he is upset and afraid.

Barry’s parents confirm his feelings and sympathize with him.

Dad might say something like, “I understand what it’s like to be afraid to go to school when a classmate teases and threatens you.”

Then parents move on to actually solving the problem of bullying. They don’t boil it down to Barry being bad because he doesn’t want to go to school.

The same five-step process for sorting out children’s feelings can be applied to teenagers. For example, 15-year-old Olivia wants to go to a party with her friends on Saturday night, but her parents don’t want her to go because they don’t know the person who’s throwing it. They say they won’t let her go. Olivia throws a tantrum, calls her parents bad names, says she hates them, and slams the bedroom door.

The parent, who lacks empathy, is outraged by the girl’s behavior and shouts at her, while at the same time coming up with some kind of punishment: “How dare you talk to your parents like that? We’ll take your phone away for at least a week!”

The empathic parent calmly moves through five stages, first tuning into Olivia’s feelings and identifying them.

1, 2, 3 and 4. When Olivia is angry at her parents for not allowing her to do the same things as her friends, and unhappy because she is not allowed to spend time with people her own age, her parents confirm that she the feelings are normal and sympathize with her need to be with her friends.

5. Validation will help Olivia calm down and listen to reasonable solutions. Her parents insist on following the rule – they must know whose house she spends time in – but they help Olivia come up with some ideas on how to still hang out with friends in the near future. They talk to their daughter regarding the importance of respectful behavior, but do not punish her for outbursts of strong emotions.

They realize that helping Olivia deal with her feelings is much more important.

These examples of empathically considering a child’s feelings rather than punishing them seem very common, but I have heard many discouraging stories from older children regarding how narcissistic parents severely punished them for expressing strong feelings. In such families, children should not burden their parents with their problematic feelings; the children’s feelings are not recognized or respected.

The beauty of the Five Rules of Empathy is that they can be used in all types of relationships at any age.

These rules are also taught in family therapy so that couples learn to listen to each other, share their vulnerabilities, identify feelings and show empathy for each other.

Photo: Maria Symchych / Shutterstock / Fotodom

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