Setting boundaries in an alcoholic/addicted home is not easy. After all, at least one parent is violating one of the most basic boundaries of parenting by being unfit and bringing no end of pain and fear into the household. Addicts violate the safety of the home and everyone in it, and that, along with all of the denial and deception that surround addiction, are fundamental boundary violations.
Women: Wired for Connection
Women are wired for connection from birth, and, in terms of codependency, this can be a liability. Nature has designed the female of the species to pick up on the subtle signals from others so that we can be sensitive caretakers of our young (Brazendine 2006). Robert Ackerman, author of Perfect Daughters, conducted a study in 1989; he found that “daughters of alcoholics reported a significantly higher need for control, over-reaction to change, and feelings of overresponsibility for others. They also rated themselves higher in difficulty with intimacy, approval and affirmation, and judging themselves harshly as compared to daughters of nonalcoholics. In an open-ended, follow-up survey, 33 percent of the adult daughters of alcoholics (versus 9 percent of the adult children of nonalcoholics) reported the greatest parenting issue for them as parents was their “need for control” (Ackerman 1988). They reported taking on too many responsibilities for their children by overprotecting them, had extremely high expectations of their children, and “felt responsible for making sure everything in the family was under control”(ibid).
Simply being aware of women’s qualities of connection can allow women to manage this extra sensitivity; it is, after all, a gift of nature. Women’s ability to pick up on subtle signals and read moods are beautiful qualities when understood. Our world has relied on that ability for centuries to bring tenderness and sensitivity into the home and toward children, and now, thankfully, that ability is finding its way into the workplace and the political arena.
Healing trauma is healing codependency. As historical pain is processed rather than projected and the self becomes more distinct and present oriented, codependent behaviors begin to clear up naturally.
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The Narcissistic Parent:
Disappearing Into
Someone Else’s Story
“The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother’s face and finds himself therein . . . provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother’s face, but rather the mother’s own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.”
—Donald Woods Winnicott
“I felt like it was all about them, like what was going on inside of me was sort of invisible, like what they wanted or needed always came first. We were just always tiptoeing around so we wouldn’t set them off.” ACoAs often describe family dynamics that circulate around the immediate needs of the addict. They talk about how they often found themselves staying quiet and “well-behaved” so as not to disturb a drunk or hungover
parent. They also describe a world in which their other parent was stressed out and working double time to make the family seem “normal.” Or they describe the opposite—a parent who had sort of collapsed into helplessness and left the job of parenting to whomever—if anyone—would fill in. Too much of the time, CoAs have limited access to not one but two parents.
Children are naturally needy. When they feel that there is no room for their needs because the parents’ needs are sucking up all of the relationship oxygen, they develop circuitous ways of meeting their needs through others—codependency in the making. These kids often experience their parents’ needs as more immediate and important than their own. Children tend to feel that they are disappearing around their narcissistic parents. The message is strong that their parents are the center of the universe.
Children learn that the way to connect with the narcissistic parent is to satisfy their needs first, so they subordinate their own needs to their parent’s. They may idealize the narcissistic parent in order to gratify him or her, because they discover that it is a way to remain in that parent’s favor. They may learn to not ask or even expect an attuned response to what they need, because asking and not getting what they are asking for is just too strange and it hurts, or they assume another person will not want to meet their needs. So they attempt to meet their needs privately, within themselves and by themselves. Eventually they may feel uncomfortable even having needs, and so they try to hide them, even from themselves; they shut down that feeling within them.
Their own inner worlds can feel hazy and confusing to them while the worlds of others seem clear and distinct.
Why Living with Addiction
Feels Like Living with Narcissism
The narcissist tends to view other people as extensions of himself, not necessarily as individuals in their own right. A narcissist often prefers to have people around him who behave in such a way as to meet and gratify his own needs or enhance his own vision of himself. If others act separately from him, have too many of their own points of view or their own opinions, they threaten the narcissist’s equilibrium.
How does this mirror addiction? Addiction creates a kind of narcissism and self-absorption. It is constantly preoccupying; it takes over a person—body, mind, and soul. For those who live with an addict, love them, and depend on them to be at the other end of a relationship, life can be discouraging. It’s a lot like living with a narcissist, because no matter what you do or how hard you try, you will always come second: second to the addict’s pressing needs, second to their constant preoccupations, second to the disease.
Another scenario that can make CoAs feel alone is if the nonaddict parent is narcissistic. When this is the case, children can have a very complicated time meeting their own needs because they have a lot of people to tend to first. They have two very self-absorbed, preoccupied parents.
An Underdeveloped Sense of Self
Both narcissism and addiction reflect immaturity. A narcissist has not made it through feeling and understanding his own needy childhood self and matured into a stage of development where he can actually feel his way into the world of another person and empathize with what he or she might feel. First of all, the narcissist does not necessarily know what he feels, and second, he can’t reverse roles with other human beings and feel “as” them for just a brief moment and then return to his own self. While he can feel in the abstract for causes or large bodies of people, he has trouble feeling appropriately with the human being across the breakfast table. Narcissists are stuck somewhere along the developmental continuum in a place where what matters to them is to satisfy their needs first and foremost. Their needs, however, have an immature sort of flavor. Like a child who cannot see past his pressing need of the moment into what satisfying it might cost in terms of his relationships, the narcissist cannot really understand how to meet his own needs while in relationship with another person.
In this sense, narcissists are immature in a way similar to the way in which addicts are immature. Self-medication is self-destructive, and the person engaging in it is putting his own overpowering emotion before anything else. This reflects a self that cannot come up with more mature and functional ways of mood and pain management. Self-medicators have trouble tolerating their own neediness and pain, translating it into words, and processing it to get to the other side of it—as do narcissists. Both often
take refuge in grandiose fantasies manipulating others as a way to shore up their sinking sense of self. The narcissist and the addict have a lot in common here, and in this way they may attract each other. The unspoken bargain may be that neither will call the other on their selfishness.
Wouldn’t it be nice, we think, to be free of this burden of awareness of the needs and feelings of others and simply ask
ourselves one question. What do I want? But if you peek inside the inner world of the narcissist or the addict, you might be startled at the emptiness and loneliness you’d find. Because ultimately, being oblivious to the cares and needs of others leaves narcissists as well as addicts feeling like strangers in their own relational worlds. Whatever they are doing to meet their needs isn’t working all that well for the long run. And those who love a narcissist can feel the kind of helplessness, hurt, and rage that result from loving someone who cannot fully love them back.
The Narcissistic Parent
The narcissist views people as extensions of the self rather than separate beings with their own needs, drives, emotions, and personalities. The narcissist looks at people and thinks, Where do they fit into my life? What can they do for me? Children require attunement from a caring adult to learn to tune in on themselves, so having a narcissistic parent can be a lonely or even a shocking experience. In order not to feel so alone, these children may find themselves desperately trying to flatter, take
care of, placate, or please their parent. They may be more preoccupied with what will gratify their parent than with how they might amuse or please themselves in a effort to somehow share their parent’s “space.”
“I feel like I am just sort of there,” says Jasmine, “like my feelings just don’t matter. Basically I just sit and listen to my mom go on and on about herself. It’s boring. The best I can hope for is that she might refer to me or say something about me, but she rarely talks to me, asks me questions, listens to the answers, and thinks on what I am saying. It’s just always . . . all about her. She brags all the time about any dumb thing she might be doing. If she asks how I am, it’s been so long since I’ve heard it that I can’t even think of what to say, so she just keeps talking. It’s The Mom Show.”
In her mother’s presence, Jasmine feels invisible, bored, hurt, enraged. She wonders if her mother even remembers it is she on the other end of the phone. She doesn’t dare to interrupt her mother’s monologue because there seem to be no breaks in it, no room for another person. Her mother uses distancing language when she talks to Jasmine. She gets Jasmine’s name wrong or acts as if she is not at all special. Because a child already feels, in a sense, “one down” to a parent’s natural authority, such treatment can feel especially disempowering. With the narcissist, caring can feel like a one-way street: I listen to you, I think about you, I hear, acknowledge, and understand you. But you do not feel obliged or motivated to do those things for me. If Jasmine wants to share the light with her mom, well, the spotlight doesn’t move so Jasmine has to. Jasmine can scoot into a corner of Mom’s light and share some of it. But she doesn’t get the light turned on her. That would leave Mom in the dark, at least in Mom’s mind, and in Mom’s mind, there is not enough light for everyone. For children, this can be an experience that constitutes a million small shocks to their system—little moments that gather strength over time and interfere with their own development of a sense of self.
There is nothing more important to the child than to be seen by the parent. When children cannot direct their parent’s “sight” toward them when they want or need it and when they cannot feel “seen into” by their parent, they can feel deeply alone. They are left to make a Hobson’s choice—that is, to choose between two equally bad options: To remain close to my mom, do I more or less put my own self on a shelf and simply adjust to being there for her? Or do I move away from her, risk not pleasing her, separate, and have her see me as a problem?
Narcissists can appear almost helpless or endearing in their need, and they can engender a wish in another person to take care of them; but if you do not fill their needs or take care of them as they wish, you will likely be dismissed because you are simply not doing your job of thinking about them. In this sense, the narcissist is the odd combination of fragile and aggressive.
One of the necessary steps of individuation from the parent is to be able to feel our own feelings while in the presence of the parent, to experience our own self as separate and distinct from our parent but still connected to him or her. The narcissist does not encourage a separate but connected relationship—you are part of their foreground or part of their background. They may think of you while you are in their presence, but you do not get the feeling that they carry thoughts of you around with them; out of sight is out of mind. For these children, the relationship with the narcissistic parent may be a deeply hurtful and demoralizing experience. They feel that they can never be who they really are and be seen by their parent, that their parent will never really know them. And they are probably right. If you do not put a narcissistic parent first, he or she may experience it as a personal assault and will not necessarily accommodate your need to be autonomous; your actions may even be perceived as a threat.
Sibling Competition
Children of narcissists can become schooled in endless, subtle ways of pleasing their parents; they can feel proud, clever, and even superior to their siblings who cannot seem to get the idealizing role right. Rather than gaining a sense of self from their own estimable activities and relationships, they may gain a sense of self from being the chosen child, the one who understands how to stay close to Mom and how to please her. The child who pushes back, who says, “What about me? I’m here, too,” may create unpopular waves.
When children have a feeling that their parent is there for them and can give them the love and attention that they crave when they need it—when a parent can respond in an attuned way, in other words—children can relax and feel like there is enough “parent love” to go around. When this is not the case, it can give rise to sibling competition.
Playing Favorites
Siblings may perceive (erroneously or correctly) that the narcissistic parent is playing favorites, which can leave some siblings feeling passed over or discounted. The favored child will often be the one who does not challenge the narcissist but gives him or her the demanded attention and adulation. The child has witnessed what happens to siblings who disagree with their parent. He or she may be loath to risk losing either the glow of the parent’s approval and affection or the feeling of place and power that come from being chosen over other siblings.
The narcissistic parent may also play children off against each other, holding one sibling over the other—for example, saying, “I don’t have this problem with so and so, just with you.” Meeting his or her own needs is primary for this parent. If a child should talk about feeling hurt or passed over, the narcissist is likely to stare blankly or become irritated. Children in these situations may learn one of several things: to give up and feel that they will never please a narcissistic parent; to fight an endless fight in which their parent will always see them as “difficult” when they disagree; or to succumb and become the child that the narcissistic parent wants. In the third “solution,” this child remains special and chosen but at the expense of his own individual sense of self.
Narcissism and Neurobiology:
Early Attachment and Self-Regulation
We pick up on the moods of others through the phenomenon of limbic resonance. Our nervous systems extend beyond the borders of our bodies, they link with those of the people close to us in a silent; radiating rhythm that helps regulate everyone’s physiology. Children require ongoing neural synchrony from parents in order for their natural capacity for self-directedness to emerge. In other words, it is through successful relationships that we achieve a healthy sense of autonomy. Human physiology does not direct all of its own functions; it is interdependent. It must be steadied and stabilized by the physical presence of another to maintain both physical and emotional health. “Limbic regulation mandates interdependence for social mammals of all ages, but young mammals are in special need of its guidance: their neural systems are not only immature but also growing and changing. One of the physiologic processes that limbic regulation directs, in other words, is the development of the brain itself a
nd that means attachment determines the ultimate nature of a child’s mind” (Lewis 2001). “The limbic system plays an important role in guiding the emotions that stimulate the behavior necessary for self-preservation and survival of the species. It is responsible for such complex behaviors as feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction, and it also assigns free-floating feeling of significance, truth, and meaning to experience” (MacLean, 1985). “Destruction of parts of the limbic system abolishes social behavior, including play, cooperation, mating, and care of the young” (van der Kolk 2005).
Attachment literature could allow us to extrapolate that in their very early development, narcissists may not have had the quality of interaction and attunement from their caregivers that would have allowed them to develop a solid enough network of neurological wiring to become empathic. Their “we state” or co-state appears to be underdeveloped. If we see narcissism as related to early trauma or a primary attachment rupture, we could surmise that narcissists are left with a somewhat incomplete sense of attachment, that they experience their inner world as an internal emptiness or void that they cannot fully tune into, and therefore they have trouble tuning in on the internal states of others or mentally reversing roles with them. This can give narcissists a sort of superficial quality; Surfaces are important to narcissists; in an absence of a strong sense of an inner world that is connected to the inner worlds of those around them, the narcissist often seems to try to get things to “be right” by getting them to “look right.”
Though narcissists may appear to be fiercely independent, on the inside they are forever searching for the kind of early attachment that would allow them to internalize the caring presence and energy of a love object so that they can feel whole on the inside. The road to a narcissist’s heart is to admire them, to nourish them, to feed them. As a primary developmental need that was never met, it makes sense, but it is a problem for another adult because adult roles like partnering and parenting require that we are able to equally share a “we state,” that we can be tuned in to another person and allow them to tune in on us. This state is neurologically wired in very early in development through the caring, attuned physical and emotional holding that goes on in a parent/child relationship. Being close to a narcissist may ask that we be willing to be swallowed and digested whole. This can be unpleasant for the “other” person.
The ACOA Trauma Syndrome Page 9