(note: in my rush to get this published, I noticed I made a mistake in what the daughter says to her mother.
But I decided to leave it in as it can be interpreted as "it's not enough" or "I'm not enough".
Sometimes when mistakes happen this way, they are perhaps unconscious ways of saying two things at once.
I'm reminded of John Lennon, as he used to have double meanings in his phrasing. Paul McCartney refused to see them as mistakes and encouraged Lennon to use them, so I'm doing that in this case)
INTRODUCTION
AND WHY I DECIDED TO PUBLISH THIS POST BEFORE
I PUBLISH THE ONE ON HOOVERING
For those of you who have been reading my blog regularly, I was supposed to publish my article on hoovering (hoovering means "attempts to win you back into a relationship with someone who has abused you), however I thought this article might explain why hoovering often has everything to do with narcissists missing your form of narcissistic supply.
Hoovering has everything to do with getting the narcissistic supply from you again that they miss.
The hoovering that narcissists do can sometimes work in getting you back, but it often leads to a pretty miserable trauma bond if it does work, and not a very healthy one or happy one. You can tell how unhappy it is by either reading the article that follows or in particular, reading the section below entitled "NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY IS ALSO BASED ON WHAT NARCISSISTS HEAR
Hoovering has everything to do with getting the narcissistic supply from you again that they miss.
The hoovering that narcissists do can sometimes work in getting you back, but it often leads to a pretty miserable trauma bond if it does work, and not a very healthy one or happy one. You can tell how unhappy it is by either reading the article that follows or in particular, reading the section below entitled "NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY IS ALSO BASED ON WHAT NARCISSISTS HEAR
AND THEIR OWN INTERPRETING PROCESS IN TERMS OF WHAT THEY HEAR" (they don't hear much without a lot of distortion of facts - which hopefully becomes clear as you read).
The point is that you will always be relating to their disorder in every conversation you have with them, in everything you do for them, and in relating to them in general. Their disorder rules both them and you, and as I said, every conversation.
And since their disorder often means they are abusive, the abuse and the disorder go together. If they've abused you before, they will most likely abuse you again because that is the form that their personality disorder has taken.
Most narcissists are abusive, and escalate abuse as long as you're in their life, and it's not anything new, and it doesn't have anything to do with you as I hope you will see once you've seen the section about what narcissists hear below. They will also be doing things very, very similarly to how other narcissistic abusers behave. All of the same tactics, even many of the phrases, are alike between one narcissistic abuser to another. Even what they rage about is similar.
Anyway, I was looking around for articles I thought I'd written about narcissistic supply, and I found this one somewhat done, the one I'm publishing here. This one is about children, but I think you can apply it to adult relationships in some way too.
As usual, I have links to many things I raise as well as giving you other articles for you to look through at the end of the post.
(note: this introduction will probably be taken down once the post on hoovering is up)
The point is that you will always be relating to their disorder in every conversation you have with them, in everything you do for them, and in relating to them in general. Their disorder rules both them and you, and as I said, every conversation.
And since their disorder often means they are abusive, the abuse and the disorder go together. If they've abused you before, they will most likely abuse you again because that is the form that their personality disorder has taken.
Most narcissists are abusive, and escalate abuse as long as you're in their life, and it's not anything new, and it doesn't have anything to do with you as I hope you will see once you've seen the section about what narcissists hear below. They will also be doing things very, very similarly to how other narcissistic abusers behave. All of the same tactics, even many of the phrases, are alike between one narcissistic abuser to another. Even what they rage about is similar.
Anyway, I was looking around for articles I thought I'd written about narcissistic supply, and I found this one somewhat done, the one I'm publishing here. This one is about children, but I think you can apply it to adult relationships in some way too.
As usual, I have links to many things I raise as well as giving you other articles for you to look through at the end of the post.
(note: this introduction will probably be taken down once the post on hoovering is up)
HOW NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY
BECOMES A CHILD'S BURDEN
BECOMES A CHILD'S BURDEN
While our computer was down, I was reading articles on my phone and came across this article by Bernadette Donovan titled If you want to maintain a close bond with your kids as you get older, say goodbye to these 7 behaviors, published by Daily Motivation News (or DMN).
In it she lists these things parents should let go of:
1) Trying to be their best friend
2) Dismissing their feelings
3) Overprotecting them
4) Not respecting their privacy
5) Micromanaging their lives
6) Ignoring your own flaws
7) Failing to listen
With the exception of the first and third things listed in this article, I thought, "Wow! This sounds so much like narcissistic parenting!" For the first and third things on the list I changed them in this way:
With the exception of the first and third things listed in this article, I thought, "Wow! This sounds so much like narcissistic parenting!" For the first and third things on the list I changed them in this way:
1) Trying to make them into narcissistic supply (flattering sycophants)
2) Dismissing their feelings
3) Forgetting that they are a person with a personality, thoughts, feelings and ambitions of their own and most likely with more capabilities in those areas than you may be giving them
4) Not respecting their privacy
5) Micromanaging their lives
6) Ignoring your own flaws
7) Failing to listen
A lot has been written about narcissists having children in order to get narcissistic supply from them. Narcissistic supply refers, in this case, to helping the narcissistic feel good about themselves (praises and flattery, helping them feel in charge and in command, making them look good in social circles, giving them undivided attention and special treatment, letting them win arguments, and enabling them to influence the lives of others in both altruistic and bullying ways, as well as enabling them to have domination, power and control when ever they want to have it).
I think we can see why children cannot live up to these impossible standards of narcissistic supply and why these children might adopt trauma responses to these demands and expectations instead. The major trauma responses are fawn, fight, flee and freeze, although more are being added as I write this.
For most of us, if we aren't giving our narcissistic parent what they deem as good or adequate narcissistic supply, they rage at us and punish us. Some of the ways they might punish us are replacing us with someone else in their affections, or showing contempt for us, or they run smear campaigns on us, or rage at us some more, and more and more, until we break down and "give in", or they hit us, or demand praise (no "ifs ands or buts" forcing us to adopt inauthentic expressions), or neglect us, or criticize us to the point where we lose sight of our best qualities. Part of most of these punishments entail trying to make us a sycophant child even if we don't want to, giving up the self and eroding ethics in order to be a full time, ever-ready, on-demand, totally controlled and manipulated, endless source of narcissistic supply for the parent.
The punishments are different from one narcissist to the next, but if you are a person who is relating to a person with heavy narcissistic traits, the types of punishments are likely never to change, no matter how much they promise otherwise, even in a hoover, and often narcissists add new abuses to the ones they are already using. It is because abuse escalates including adopting even more punishing tactics and methods.
Pity the poor child who has to live under these codes of conduct, right? As well as the chaos making and never-enoughness narcissists feel towards their kids and use it to destroy a child's self esteem, sense of safety, learning, ambitions and sense of self that differentiates from the parent's personality, as well as the parent's demands and opinions.
Why opinions? Because narcissists see their children as an extension of themselves. The golden child is seen to have the narcissist's best traits and breeding, and the scapegoat the worst traits of the narcissistic parent.
Indeed, if you are listening to your narcissistic parent bash away at your self esteem, see if they are really talking about their own worse traits first rather than yours, and I'd bet you'll find that narcissists are quite successful self-labelers in this regard rather than other-labelers.
There is a reason why they are so poor at other-labeling, which I get to later in the post.
But for now:
They are not able to see children for themselves, as individuated, or notice there are differences from their own behaviors to theirs because of their propensity to have black and white thinking (splitting - the psychological term for it) and on-going projection, projection being extremely common among narcissists as a defensive mechanism especially when they feel like their grandiosity is being threatened or eroded, when they are jealous, and when they are trying to alter reality (the truth).
Usually projection comes with rage too, at least as far as narcissists are concerned. I'd even go as far as to say that the more rageful they are when tearing a child's self esteem apart, the more projection they are using. From all I have seen, rage and projection go together, almost always, and once they go through the rage/projection phase, they will play the victim shortly afterward and expect apologies from a child who doesn't have the qualities the parent is saying they do - especially for covert narcissists and malignant narcissists.
So the apologies from the child are not going to be authentic, only fear-based, only because the parent wants the apologies and demands them, and most children find if they don't apologize that they will be punished for not agreeing to their characteristics matching the narcissist's. That brings up a host of other problems for the child, injustice only being one tiny aspect of the egregious problems that come from feeling forced to apologize when you don't mean it and did not do what the narcissist accuses you of doing.
Looking through forums, scapegoats overwhelmingly feel that they were not treated well, or reasonably, or consistently, or fairly, or even kindly for the most part. They may have had some bread-crumbing, or the parent managed down the child's expectations of love or reasonable treatment, or they may have had some enticement to keep them "in the game" albeit in a controlled, serving, hurt state, but for the most part they weren't treated right in childhood. A lot of the reason why can be explained by the projection and rage combo throughout their childhood, and the threat of it day in and day out which produces hypervigilance in the child and has emotional, psychological and physical manifestations, which often carry into adulthood (another link).
Parents who are narcissists will not care what this does to their child except if the child backs away, avoids them, no longer shares with them, or abandons them. But the physical, emotional and physiological aspects of what their child is going through will either matter very little to them, be rapidly belittled or dismissed, and for malignant narcissists, the symptoms that the child is manifesting won't matter at all to them. Narcissists are blame-shifters.
There is no way to get through to them that what they, the parent, is doing to them. The reaction the child will get will almost always be is the blame-shifting one, or the "that's not me, that's you!", "That's your fault, not mine!", or with coldness, "I'm sorry you feel that way. Maybe you just need to run away and never come back", or "I can't help what you're feeling! Those are YOUR feelings to deal with, and deal with alone," or "Your feelings are always kind of crazy. Do you want me to take you to psychiatrist so that he will put you on meds that make you feel bad? Hmm? Is that what you want?". All of this, of course, is just more escalation of the projection, blame-shifting and rage.
The help for these symptoms has to come from outside the narcissist's realm of influence - just about always.
And if the narcissist is trying again, and again, to pass their own worst qualities on to a child, it mostly means that the child will be abused if that child isn't already. Since the child serves as the narcissist's worse qualities, it is, for all sakes and purposes, a type of self-flagellation. It explains to some degree why they DARVO (i.e. play the victim after abusing). They've victimized themselves, because in the end, the scapegoat who receives all of this abuse often goes no contact after one trauma response after another trauma response, and nothing works to clear away the conflicts (fixes by narcissists only work in the narcissist's favor, never in the child's favor). In terms of feeling healthy, loved, cared about, fulfilled in the world, un-abused, scapegoats are serving no good in the role the parent put them in.
The narcissist is left with their worst traits to face yet again (or pass on to another person through innuendo or suspicions or coercion - the more likely outcome ... they always have a number of scapegoats to dump on).
What narcissists are often left with is either no children, or a golden child who isn't a good enough servant, sycophant, enabler, flatterer, mind slave, phrase-repeater of the narcissist, or grateful enough. Again, never enough-ness plays into most relationships that the narcissist has, even, to some extent, the golden child. Just one little minor flaw in either sycophancy or mirroring can set a narcissist into a rage, and the golden child isn't exempt from it, especially if they are the only one left of the children who will deal with the narcissistic parent.
That is because the personality disorder never changes. The personality disorder is always in charge and culpable, not the people surrounding the narcissist who the narcissist has decided to pick on. Raging, projecting, giving you the silent treatment, conspiracy theories, chaos dramas, scapegoating, playing the victim, head games, and breadcrumbing you on love, attention, care, and sometimes food, and other needs you have as a child, are all due to narcissistic traits that almost all narcissists use on at least one of the children.
Reminding yourself continually that narcissistic traits are part of every conversation you have with that parent, I think erases trying to make sense of anything they have to say or do. It's a lot easier to DEEP them too (a method devised by the mental health community to deal with narcissists), once you realize that narcissistic supply, power and control are all that they care about.
Talking about the narcissist: In the end it doesn't pay to project your own worst qualities on to others, but narcissists lack the wisdom and foresight to see this, certainly the kind of narcissist who abuses to try to get their own way in everything, everywhere and with everyone. If they are raging about not getting their way and playing the victim, they aren't enlightened, and probably will never be enlightened or learn anything new except more drastic splitting and projecting.
For us though, it is like playing a record that skips and hoping that it won't skip and replay the same parts over and over again. That's not going to happen because there is a scratch that the needle touches which puts the needle back into the prior groove. Nothing new or better is going to happen with the narcissist either which is why scapegoats, especially, go with the flee response in the end.
WHAT THIS HAS TO DO WITH NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY
Thus trying to fit children into the mold of fulfilling all of these narcissistic supply demands does not work, and if it does for awhile, it probably won't last. There will be a lot of disappointments for the narcissist. There may even be heartbreak for those children who can no longer live under these expectations.
There are reasons why adults fulfill these roles better, but it doesn't mean that the relationships are less toxic.
Sycophancy when demands for narcissistic supply are involved has enormous repercussions for adults, so imagine what it does to a child. Either a child is going to hang on, against all odds, to ethics or "give in" to the narcissist because of the narcissist's threats, abuse or coercive control. I think we can all see that "giving in" to the worst parts of them, the most evil parts of human nature, is not a good thing.
It doesn't produce what is best in humans which are the things I listed that children need (consistent love, consistent care, respect, honesty, truth, etc) plus compassion, peace, inventions, creativity, higher capacity for learning, building rather than destroying, diplomacy instead of threats and invasions, all of these things are what our higher, more evolved, selves want and need, just as we did as children.
A lot of what narcissists represent is a de-volution of our species, not an evolution, and I think even small children can see the difference, and know that going that way, even if it's because there are threats over their heads, will never garner the results that a utopia of on-going peace and love will garner.
If violence is so much a part of our species, then why do people who are exposed to it get PTSD? Even our minds are not made for it. And anyone, even the strongest among us, can get PTSD - except primary psychopaths (and who would want to be them?). With enough "giving in" to a world of criminality, invasions, violence, wastelands of burnt up buildings and trees, endless triangulations, endless head games, endless lies and untruths, endless competitions and breaking of the rules, and all the other sincerely bad-for-anyone narcissistic supply demands that are never about respect for others, and the autonomous lives others lead, children still know the difference between peace and hell.
And they also know they have a choice: to be fawning sycophants to bullies, bribers, coercive controllers, invaders, liars, cheats, triangulators, people who create unloving environments with fleeting belonging, or to be strong and seek a better life for themselves and the next generation.
Narcissists will always test us, and turn our world upside down when they aren't getting the next narcissistic supply they think they want so badly. It's up to us to test ourselves though, and our strength, and our resolve "not to cave into" all of this (if one can dare to dream of a better life than being hostage to narcissistic supply).
The reason why children don't make very good narcissistic supply is because:
1. Children need consistent care, consistent love, consistent respect, consistent incorruptible empathy, to trust the parents in their life to put the child's best interests at heart at all times, to provide safety from violence and exploitation and abuse from others, emotionally regulated parents, lots of parental and adult patience, to be taught by example by parents, honesty, and truth - all impossible goals for a narcissist.
2. What narcissists care about most (and demand) is money, complete loyalty (even though most are incredibly disloyal themselves), flattery, competition, being spoiled, being the center of attention, being put on a pedestal, having a high reputation that does not necessarily resemble their own character, to have power, control, domination and a scapegoat (or scapegoats) in their family life, to have the last word, to play head games without it being noticed, to have loyalists and sycophants who do what they are told to do by the narcissist without question, to win every argument, to lecture others without it being construed as controlling behavior, to triangulate without anyone suspecting or noticing, to have agendas and manipulations that they hope most people are blind to, to be able to be disloyal without repercussions, to be able to blame-shift anything they feel is uncomfortable on to someone else without repercussions, to be able to rage at people without repercussions that make the narcissist feel ashamed and put the narcissist in a precarious social position, to be able to lie and be believed, to be able to rage and abuse and have it kept secret by their victims and have this behavior normalized by their victims, to have children and a spouse make them look good no matter what they do or say - most are impossible for children to fulfill. If they do fulfill some of this, then it is highly toxic for the child, and it is a relationship that is truly toxic as well.
1. Children need consistent care, consistent love, consistent respect, consistent incorruptible empathy, to trust the parents in their life to put the child's best interests at heart at all times, to provide safety from violence and exploitation and abuse from others, emotionally regulated parents, lots of parental and adult patience, to be taught by example by parents, honesty, and truth - all impossible goals for a narcissist.
2. What narcissists care about most (and demand) is money, complete loyalty (even though most are incredibly disloyal themselves), flattery, competition, being spoiled, being the center of attention, being put on a pedestal, having a high reputation that does not necessarily resemble their own character, to have power, control, domination and a scapegoat (or scapegoats) in their family life, to have the last word, to play head games without it being noticed, to have loyalists and sycophants who do what they are told to do by the narcissist without question, to win every argument, to lecture others without it being construed as controlling behavior, to triangulate without anyone suspecting or noticing, to have agendas and manipulations that they hope most people are blind to, to be able to be disloyal without repercussions, to be able to blame-shift anything they feel is uncomfortable on to someone else without repercussions, to be able to rage at people without repercussions that make the narcissist feel ashamed and put the narcissist in a precarious social position, to be able to lie and be believed, to be able to rage and abuse and have it kept secret by their victims and have this behavior normalized by their victims, to have children and a spouse make them look good no matter what they do or say - most are impossible for children to fulfill. If they do fulfill some of this, then it is highly toxic for the child, and it is a relationship that is truly toxic as well.
Thus trying to fit children into the mold of fulfilling all of these narcissistic supply demands does not work, and if it does for awhile, it probably won't last. There will be a lot of disappointments for the narcissist. There may even be heartbreak for those children who can no longer live under these expectations.
There are reasons why adults fulfill these roles better, but it doesn't mean that the relationships are less toxic.
Sycophancy when demands for narcissistic supply are involved has enormous repercussions for adults, so imagine what it does to a child. Either a child is going to hang on, against all odds, to ethics or "give in" to the narcissist because of the narcissist's threats, abuse or coercive control. I think we can all see that "giving in" to the worst parts of them, the most evil parts of human nature, is not a good thing.
It doesn't produce what is best in humans which are the things I listed that children need (consistent love, consistent care, respect, honesty, truth, etc) plus compassion, peace, inventions, creativity, higher capacity for learning, building rather than destroying, diplomacy instead of threats and invasions, all of these things are what our higher, more evolved, selves want and need, just as we did as children.
A lot of what narcissists represent is a de-volution of our species, not an evolution, and I think even small children can see the difference, and know that going that way, even if it's because there are threats over their heads, will never garner the results that a utopia of on-going peace and love will garner.
If violence is so much a part of our species, then why do people who are exposed to it get PTSD? Even our minds are not made for it. And anyone, even the strongest among us, can get PTSD - except primary psychopaths (and who would want to be them?). With enough "giving in" to a world of criminality, invasions, violence, wastelands of burnt up buildings and trees, endless triangulations, endless head games, endless lies and untruths, endless competitions and breaking of the rules, and all the other sincerely bad-for-anyone narcissistic supply demands that are never about respect for others, and the autonomous lives others lead, children still know the difference between peace and hell.
And they also know they have a choice: to be fawning sycophants to bullies, bribers, coercive controllers, invaders, liars, cheats, triangulators, people who create unloving environments with fleeting belonging, or to be strong and seek a better life for themselves and the next generation.
Narcissists will always test us, and turn our world upside down when they aren't getting the next narcissistic supply they think they want so badly. It's up to us to test ourselves though, and our strength, and our resolve "not to cave into" all of this (if one can dare to dream of a better life than being hostage to narcissistic supply).
NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY IS ALSO BASED ON WHAT NARCISSISTS HEAR
AND THEIR OWN INTERPRETING PROCESS IN TERMS OF WHAT THEY HEAR
AND THEIR OWN INTERPRETING PROCESS IN TERMS OF WHAT THEY HEAR
In addition to what they require for narcissistic supply, they are terrible at listening (poor at "other-labeling" as I said earlier in the post, but there is so much more to it, and includes most everything in discussion except "the gray rock topics": impersonal subjects like cooking, nature, travel, space, chemistry, physics, engineering, gardening, laundry, art, etc - and many therapists will tell you that these are the only discussions you should have with a narcissist if you are going to keep a narcissist in your life).
To make matters worse in talking about interpersonal topics, the narcissistic supply they do receive is going to be distorted because of what they are able to hear and not hear. Here are some examples:
Everything they hear from other people has filters:
* suspicions about what they are hearing
* projection
* their ego is involved ("is what is being said flattering to me or not?" - this kind of thinking style)
* worried that they will be betrayed ("how much loyalty do they have for me in what they are saying?" - this kind of thinking style)
* worried that you will see - into their insecurities, secrets and their evil side and denounce them
* a distrustful nature
* lack of empathy - you can only get so far having a conversation with a person with a lack of empathy. It's as if they say internally to themselves, "If I'm being called on to have empathy he (or she) has something to think about."
Not caring about your feelings nullifies a lot of what you have to say, as well as nullifying a whole swath of the conversation. Talk about selective hearing! Which I discuss next:
* selective hearing and selective interpreting (only hearing how things might effect them in the future - Dr. Ramani has an excellent video on this)
* denying they are ever culpable for anything
* too ready with come-backs before you get to say what you want to say - At the point where they have their come-backs is the point where they stop listening to you, even if you've said "let me finish what I have to say" or "please don't interrupt me."
A lot of conversations with narcissists are about verbal sparring, rather than a conversation with sensitivity that takes both of you into account. It's not about sharing. Or ideas. Or going on a "perspective adventure" or about opening the "empathy chakra."
If you listen to them, the interruptions of their "come-backs" are most often defensiveness, or because they think their "come back" is so brilliant and so important that they can't wait until you're finished to speak.
While some of us non-narcissists do this on occasion too, especially if we were not loved as children, or the parenting style with us was insecure attachment, the difference is that we can can grow out of this whereas the narcissist won't.
* giving the person they are hearing either flaws or attributes which they put ahead of what they are hearing from that person, i.e. the narcissist filters what they are hearing through what they think the personality of a person is, and whether they like that person or not.
If they dislike you, or hate you, they won't hear what you have to say no matter what.
How to tell if a narcissist hates you:
For overt grandiose narcissists: they tell you that, usually more than once. And you can tell because they don't care what you feel.
For covert vulnerable narcissists: it's harder to tell, but some tell-tale signs are the cold shoulder, snippy one-word answers when you ask them what is wrong, they are spreading false narratives about you to others, they engage in some smear-campaigning about your character, they look affronted when you speak to them, they dismiss most of what you have to say, and they "rain on your parade" when you are happy or celebrating something.
For malignant narcissists, they scheme against you, and sometimes take things from you which are not theirs, or are joint property, or they brainwash children to think of you as dangerously insane or as a monster.
If they hate you, I see no point in talking to them, because as I said, they aren't interested in a word you have to say and it can be dangerous as they most often want to hurt people they hate, as well pointless. They aren't even open to whether they may have gotten you wrong, and frankly they don't care if they get anyone wrong.
* interpreting other people's words as lying to them (where suspicions come in) - and that's because they often lie especially when they want to feed their grandiosity that it is projection that others lie as much as they do
* feeling that they can read other people's minds and that other people can read their mind enough to know why the narcissist is angry or hurt over something (totally delusional and contributes to distortion of what they hear in a major way)
If you need to question this and you are scapegoat, how many things did you experience as a child that the narcissist never knew was happening. If they can read minds so well, and there was a huge event or many events in your life that you felt you had to keep secret, or did keep secret, and impacted you emotionally, then they don't read minds.
Even when you experience something with a narcissist, narcissists gaslight a lot, and insist that you didn't experience something that you both know you did. This isn't exactly mind-reading: it is the opposite.
* insisting that people are thinking, feeling and experiencing certain things that those people are not thinking, feeling or experiencing (called invalidation and perspecticide), also contributes majorly to distortion of information and the truth. All narcissists invalidate and try to devalue the perspective of others.
* feeling that they understand body language and facial expressions more than they actually do.
They feel they have enough information from body language to judge and brand others with their opinions. It's very much like the former in that they insist they know what you're thinking, feeling and experiencing when they do not.
They feel they know other people when they do not.
If they insist that a look on your face, or an attitude in your voice means something about you (when it doesn't), they are pretty far down the rabbit hole of distorting reality in most, if not all, situations.
Sociopaths, psychopaths and alcoholics often see hostility when there isn't any - often it's a brain matter in all three cases. For the sociopath, it's often the result of their own hostility and hypervigilance (fight or flight responses), and exploitation of others. For the psychopath it is because of their autonomic nervous systems which are different from others in the population and control their brain. And for alcoholics it is because alcohol distorts their perspectives, especially in this area.
Malignant narcissists are part sociopath, and this can increase seeing hostility in others when there isn't.
* gaslighting - trying to distort reality to fit the narrative they want that will make them look better, or superior, to exploit the truth, or to exploit the child. They also assume others gaslight them too. My post on gaslighting is HERE.
* interpreting other people's words and actions as "acting" (again where suspicions come in, and this is where we get false accusations) - and it also has to do with the fact that they put on acts and change their personalities, likes and dislikes to mirror people. They don't really have much of a personality, or they have the beginning of one that was arrested in childhood. This means they are chameleons and mirrors who largely use other people's personality styles, expression styles, styles of dress and hair, pretend their interests are the same as yours, to express themselves. Not having their own developed and accepted personality aside from the personality disorder which dictates how they act and perceive, means, in essence that you are talking to the personality disorder.
What does this mean exactly?:
Narcissists are extremely predictable and they don't differentiate that much from other narcissists except in DNA, the most outstanding traits among them all being a lack of empathy, divide and conquer objectives and strategies (triangulation), arrogance, entitlement, exploiting, dysregulated emotions (most often in the form of raging overtly or covertly), and most often bullying or coercing too.
If you try to explain to them why you weren't acting or why you wouldn't have a reason to act, they will put their beliefs before your words, thereby silencing you to say anything more.
Eventually what this turns into (and every child abuse victim with a narcissistic parent can relate to this in spades, even a golden child who is more likely to take on acting for both safety and promotion reasons) is that when you are not acting, you are deemed to be acting, and when you are acting (mainly to appease the parent) you are deemed not to be acting. It proves they have no idea what truth is or how it should be treated.
Most people treat the truth reverently.
In fact, for the narcissist, the truth is an amorphous thing that can be molded and interpreted any old way to fit agendas and win arguments.
* arrogance - The narcissist can't hear you because everything other people have to say is discounted to a large degree because they think they are superior to others. Also, unless the communication isn't of a flattering nature that's enhancing their arrogance, or dis-flattering enough to detract from their arrogance, they tend to get bored and go "off-line" (not hear). This is when you get the brick wall kind of stare. Or they might do a double-take and ask you to repeat something. Or they might leave the room when you are in mid-sentence.
Again, Dr. Ramani brings this up in the same video I'm looking for. Unless the conversation has to do with them, and the effect on their future, they can't be bothered to hear what you have to say.
* lack of object constancy - people they originally love bombed are treated drastically differently by the narcissist. Often a difference of opinion, or an argument, or being away from the narcissist for a short period of time can mean they devalue you and discard you from their life.
For narcissists, the lack of object constancy means constantly losing relationships and meaningful connections.
Utilitarian love also falls under the category of lack of object constancy.
If you're trying to communicate with someone who has a lack of object constancy, it can feel uneasy, baffling, tumultuous, unreliable, often like a wall of silence, and often the ultimate conclusion that most of us make is that they are untrustworthy. With a lack of trust in them, communication either becomes purely emotional or goes completely off-line, especially when you realize that even emotions don't move them.
It can also produce trauma because the high majority of us have object constancy, value it and assume others are just as invested in it, innately understanding that if we have an argument, a different opinion or are away for awhile, we don't stop communicating with them afterwards.
When parents do this to children, neglect is usually the outcome, but abuse can also follow especially if the child reacts (which most children tend to do), thereby setting off the parent's shame-rage cycle, producing more and more trauma for the child as the narcissist's shame-rage cycle intensifies and escalates.
The message that the lack of object constancy sends to a child is to be silent and not react (i.e. develop a freeze response - very unhealthy), eventually producing estrangement.
Most narcissistic parents realize the impulsivity that led to their decision of a discard, and that is when they hoover. If the child is successfully hoovered back into the relationship, it tends to be a cycle of abuse, with discards followed by hoovers. As mentioned before, in the case of children "discards" tend to mean neglect (emotional, psychological, physical), abandonments, silent treatments, absurdly long "time outs" with the more severe outcomes being false imprisonment (and for child abuse victims that usually means locking a child in a room and not allowing him or her to come out for days, weeks, months or years, a criminal offense ... I discuss one of the more egregious cases in this post, but the phenomenon of locking a child abuse victim in a room for hours or days by their abuser is not unusual and is part of the escalation and intimidation process).
For the child, the outcome of estrangement is the healthiest outcome even though it comes with a lot of grief. For the parent, they lose narcissistic supply because of the impulsivity that innately comes from a lack of object constancy, and as a result can often go through a narcissistic collapse, with on-going paranoia becoming the final outcome (paranoia is discussed later in the post).
* a belief that they are always winners and the most intelligent person in the room no matter what the reality is around them. This is tied to their arrogance which I discuss above. The reason why it's hard to communicate with a person with a mindset like this, is that any suggestion that they haven't thought through things enough, or actually didn't win something, will set off their rage, and will mean that they will turn vindictive towards you or give you the alternate challenge that you must be loyal to them under any and every circumstance, via sycophancy.
And yes, insisting you be a sycophant can be a form of punishment because most of us don't like being sycophants.
* belief oriented - They are primarily belief-oriented, not fact oriented, and they believe that others are too. In fact, I'd bet they believe we are in a constant world of distorted facts, distorted agendas, fakeness and fake flattery in order for exploitation and sabotage to take place. Again, this may be as projection-oriented as anything they judge.
* tactic, agenda and manipulation oriented - everything they say is oriented to get more narcissistic supply, power, control and domination over you and others. Unless your issues can be manipulated to that end, they are not that interested. It is one reason why, when you go to them about a dire issue, they get bored or largely discount it as unimportant. You are more likely to be judged, lectured at, and told what to do without them understanding much about your issue. In other words you won't get comprehension about the issue, or empathy, or a solution which makes sense or will be effective.
If you complain that the issue is not resolved, they often shut the conversation down (i.e. silence you, which can have the effect of you turning away from them and adopting other relationships where people are more capable of listening than they are, which in turn, enrages them - it's hard to figure out why, when they really don't want to hear you out, or to be empathetic, understanding, and give you fixes that actually work.
The problem with relating to someone who is so tactic and manipulation oriented is that those things will always come first in your conversations with them. They may want to play "the great sage" and lead you in a certain direction, but it is too self-oriented to be effective for you.
* exceptional confirmation bias - once they've made up their minds (and it can seconds), especially in judging other people, they've made up their minds for good. Most of the confirmation bias they have took very little investigation, very little thought (mindless), most often impulsive even if it's "a forever decision", and distorted by their ego and flawed interpretations. Sometimes the flawed interpretations are CPTSD - triggered interpretations, especially for covert vulnerable narcissists, the narcissists who weren't spoiled or the golden child.
Confirmation bias is usually way more pronounced in narcissists than it is in the general population.
* distortion of past events - this can make it almost impossible to discuss present events that are tied to the past events.
* insisting on the distortion of reality, and pressuring you to agree to the false narratives they tell - again, real communication cannot happen with this agenda. It's coercion instead of a conversation.
* intolerance of other people's differences, different ways of looking at things, different thoughts and perspectives, different lifestyle, their creativity, their openness to new ideas, and autonomous decision-making - again, with intolerance, there is no hope of a real conversation. This can turn to coercion by the narcissist pretty fast. They are notorious for obsessive criticizing, making fun of people, and vilifying those who don't think and believe exactly in the way they do, or in the way they want people to think and believe.
Sometimes people feel so intimidated that they renounce their former perspectives, personality and dress to fit in with the narcissist and their group of sycophants, but again, this isn't healthy and there will be repercussions along the way because of that fact. The worst part of it is that there is not much self-pride in being a sycophant.
Just as often, however, people feel put off by the menacing disdain, and feel good about who they are, how they think, and their perspectives no matter how much they are being criticized by the narcissist and their flying monkeys. This is especially true of people with integrity. They can just as easily have a bad opinion of the narcissist as the narcissist has of them.
The resisters of the narcissist may also move into more autonomous thoughts and perspectives than usual (seen as rebellion by the narcissist) because they feel hypervigilant or sick internally being around the narcissist and their sycophants. Some of us are a lot more sensitive to the health signals in our body enough to want no part in being any kind of narcissistic supply for narcissists, and some of this may also come from very early childhood experiences of not feeling well around adults who did not have our best interests at heart. Hypervigilance at an early age can have its positives in that it can be counted on to be a "detector of toxicity"
* never enough-ness - this is a huge topic among child abuse survivors: "I was always told as a child that I was not enough and didn't do anything good enough", "I was always told I wasn't good enough for them", "The dog was treated better than I was", "Mom always expected apologies, but when I gave them to her, even when I did nothing wrong which was a big sacrifice and self-flagellation on my part, it still wasn't good enough", "Nothing was ever good enough for my Dad. He'd rage all night about how his workers, no matter how many he had hired and fired over the decades, were never good enough for him. He terrorized everyone he knew, even us kids, to work harder and harder for him to no avail."
Narcissists never feel satisfied with the amount of narcissistic supply you already give them, even if and when they become your whole world, when your whole life is relegated to their demands, so in that way they are like bottomless pits, trying to get ever more narcissistic supply.
The reason they can't hear you when you are deemed to "not be good enough" is that they are focused on that rather than what you are saying. The want, want, want - is all that matters to them.
Some of the phrases you hear are: "You better do this when I get home", "You better not disappointment me or you'll get it", "You better do ----", "You better believe me when I tell you", "You better do it the way I like", "You better not do it your way or you'll mess it up and I'll be furious", "You better not say anything to anyone about this", "So I rule your life; it's all that you deserve", and so on.
There isn't a "you" in these demands and commands - they have managed your expectations down to being a puppet for them, the ultimate in narcissistic supply. If you try to make it "I'm in this too, and I have my own ways of thinking things through and doing things", most often they aren't interested in your methods. "Don't tell me how you do it, you do it the way I tell you to do it."
Narcissists aren't just self centered in terms of them thinking primarily about themselves, they are self centered in just about any way you can think of, including not taking into consideration that you are person, a person with a brain of your own, that you have your own ways of doing things, that if you have reached your total full capacity in adulthood, you are creative enough, are smart enough, have enough feelings, are capable of learning as much, and that you are capable enough, and that you are "enough." You are as enough as they are enough.
Don't fall into the trap of their "never enough" bullying style of thinking when it comes to yourself.
Be aware that all narcissists have this "never-enoughness" problem, and that it's their personality disorder driving it, not you.
Actually the never-enoughness is a burden, an albatross, that they carry as it promotes more negative thoughts such as rage that won't go away, obsessional thinking about who they hate, resentment, jealousy, obsessions with labeling others and criticizing them, envy, obsessions about hurting others, acting happy when they don't feel happy, playing the victim when they know they were the perpetrator, acting arrogant and grandiose when they feel inadequate, and just about every negative feeling and action they have is generated through this "never-enoughness".
Even if they have a narcissistic collapse and try to get a pity party going to tell you that they always felt they weren't good enough to others, realize also that it is part of the personality disorder. Unless they are depressed, or suicidal, it's just another desperate act to get narcissistic supply.
* gratitude shaming - there is such a thing as "gratitude shaming" in narcissistic abuse ... and it also goes with the narcissist grasping at getting positive narcissistic supply after they haven't treated you well. Gratitude shaming is about the narcissist shaming you because they feel they are not receiving enough gratitude for who they are and what they've done.
Gratitude shaming tends to happen right after they've abused you, or criticized you, or bread-crumbed you, or cheated on you, or blamed you for things that weren't your fault, or after they've hit you, or when they're trying to hoover you back after they've abandoned you.
It's about shaming you for noticing that they are cruel to you - you're supposed to ignore that and show gratitude instead.
From someone who lives in a constant state of "never-enoughness" when it comes to you and everyone else!?
Again, it's both hypocrisy and projection. Why projection? Because they don't show gratitude for who you are and what you do when they live in a constant state of criticizing you, flaw-picking, dreaming up the next false narrative about you, and ultimately abandoning you, showing you constantly that you aren't "good enough" for them.
It should show you that sycophancy, gratitude, not noticing the bad stuff about them, not holding them accountable for the hurtful things they do, and being a mind slave to them are all that really matter to them. The question for you to ask is that all that matters to you too? And are you willing to be bullied so that the narcissist can get it (note: narcissists bully people to get what they want, including gratitude) - because if you want more from a relationship than being a sycophant, bullied, and supplying flattery when they are harming people, including you, then their tactic of gratitude shaming is not going to work on you.
Trying to relate to someone who is ungrateful in spades and who shames you for being ungrateful yourself when you've brought up the things they do that are hurtful, means you're only going to be heard if you've agreed to be one of their flatterers/sycophants, and a full time agree-er and repeater of all of their thoughts, phrases and agendas, i.e. a constant source of narcissistic supply.
No one needs to be narcissistic supply to a narcissist.
In fact, it baffles me why so many people sign up for the job willingly especially when a narcissist is wielding power so destructively, so abusively, and when it will be noticed by others that you have an affiliation to them, and their bullying. You have a right to talk about things that aren't flattering to them, especially if they've been thoughtless and cruel to others or to you (which they will be if they are narcissists). If you go along with sycophancy, they keep living in this cloudy fantasy world that all people flatter them even when they are mean, and that something is direly wrong with you or anyone else who dares not to be a sycophant. Are you going to go along with everything they want to the point of destroying yourself or others? Are you going to fight for them and take the blame for them when their cruelty gets noticed and other people want them to be accountable? Why, it's like being a mindless soldier of a corrupt leader.
I would say that having a reputation as a thinking, questioning, research-guided, non-sycophant is a way better life than a non-thinking, dictated-to, phrase-repeater, robot-like sycophant.
Will they try to punish you for rejecting this job they want to put you in? Sure they will. Probably even hurt you more than you imagined, because remember: they get what they want through bullying.
But after awhile they'll probably stop after they find better sources of narcissistic supply than you were. That can happen pretty fast, so maybe it's worth the wait. Again there are plenty of people who are willing to be sycophants (just look at our present government in the USA). Let them do the job if they choose.
Also if you threatened them with demands for narcissistic supply in every conversation and told them they needed to kiss your ring and make you their leader, would they do it? Of course not! They'd throw a tantrum.
If you're a child, you can't get out of this unless you are physically abused, sexually abused, starved, locked up in a room or basement, recorded emotionally abusive situations and showed them to authorities, or they pushed and shoved you around, at least in the United States, although some states have begun to tighten laws particularly about coercive control. Anyway, as an adult you have a right to leave this thankless childhood job behind, especially if you can not get caught up in learned helplessness type of thinking patterns that keep you stuck dealing with this.
I think it's obvious you can't talk to a person with a mind-set like this unless you've advertised that you're looking desperately for work or volunteerism as a sycophant ("desperate, will do any job" kind of advertising too).
* paranoia - narcissists have extraordinary levels of of paranoia, especially over the people they hurt.
Why?
Because if they feel hurt, they rage and very often retaliate and scheme how to hurt the other people worse than they were hurt (escalation is always the name of the game for narcissists who abuse and use abuse to solve their problems). They figure you're like that too.
And because they are paranoid of being found out in terms of the amount of abuse and retaliations they enact, they rage at the person they are abusing, hoping that the intimidation will keep the person (or child in this case) in a state of silence about the abuse.
To make matters worse in talking about interpersonal topics, the narcissistic supply they do receive is going to be distorted because of what they are able to hear and not hear. Here are some examples:
Everything they hear from other people has filters:
* suspicions about what they are hearing
* projection
* their ego is involved ("is what is being said flattering to me or not?" - this kind of thinking style)
* worried that they will be betrayed ("how much loyalty do they have for me in what they are saying?" - this kind of thinking style)
* worried that you will see - into their insecurities, secrets and their evil side and denounce them
* a distrustful nature
* lack of empathy - you can only get so far having a conversation with a person with a lack of empathy. It's as if they say internally to themselves, "If I'm being called on to have empathy he (or she) has something to think about."
Not caring about your feelings nullifies a lot of what you have to say, as well as nullifying a whole swath of the conversation. Talk about selective hearing! Which I discuss next:
* selective hearing and selective interpreting (only hearing how things might effect them in the future - Dr. Ramani has an excellent video on this)
* denying they are ever culpable for anything
* too ready with come-backs before you get to say what you want to say - At the point where they have their come-backs is the point where they stop listening to you, even if you've said "let me finish what I have to say" or "please don't interrupt me."
A lot of conversations with narcissists are about verbal sparring, rather than a conversation with sensitivity that takes both of you into account. It's not about sharing. Or ideas. Or going on a "perspective adventure" or about opening the "empathy chakra."
If you listen to them, the interruptions of their "come-backs" are most often defensiveness, or because they think their "come back" is so brilliant and so important that they can't wait until you're finished to speak.
While some of us non-narcissists do this on occasion too, especially if we were not loved as children, or the parenting style with us was insecure attachment, the difference is that we can can grow out of this whereas the narcissist won't.
* giving the person they are hearing either flaws or attributes which they put ahead of what they are hearing from that person, i.e. the narcissist filters what they are hearing through what they think the personality of a person is, and whether they like that person or not.
If they dislike you, or hate you, they won't hear what you have to say no matter what.
How to tell if a narcissist hates you:
For overt grandiose narcissists: they tell you that, usually more than once. And you can tell because they don't care what you feel.
For covert vulnerable narcissists: it's harder to tell, but some tell-tale signs are the cold shoulder, snippy one-word answers when you ask them what is wrong, they are spreading false narratives about you to others, they engage in some smear-campaigning about your character, they look affronted when you speak to them, they dismiss most of what you have to say, and they "rain on your parade" when you are happy or celebrating something.
For malignant narcissists, they scheme against you, and sometimes take things from you which are not theirs, or are joint property, or they brainwash children to think of you as dangerously insane or as a monster.
If they hate you, I see no point in talking to them, because as I said, they aren't interested in a word you have to say and it can be dangerous as they most often want to hurt people they hate, as well pointless. They aren't even open to whether they may have gotten you wrong, and frankly they don't care if they get anyone wrong.
* interpreting other people's words as lying to them (where suspicions come in) - and that's because they often lie especially when they want to feed their grandiosity that it is projection that others lie as much as they do
* feeling that they can read other people's minds and that other people can read their mind enough to know why the narcissist is angry or hurt over something (totally delusional and contributes to distortion of what they hear in a major way)
If you need to question this and you are scapegoat, how many things did you experience as a child that the narcissist never knew was happening. If they can read minds so well, and there was a huge event or many events in your life that you felt you had to keep secret, or did keep secret, and impacted you emotionally, then they don't read minds.
Even when you experience something with a narcissist, narcissists gaslight a lot, and insist that you didn't experience something that you both know you did. This isn't exactly mind-reading: it is the opposite.
* insisting that people are thinking, feeling and experiencing certain things that those people are not thinking, feeling or experiencing (called invalidation and perspecticide), also contributes majorly to distortion of information and the truth. All narcissists invalidate and try to devalue the perspective of others.
* feeling that they understand body language and facial expressions more than they actually do.
They feel they have enough information from body language to judge and brand others with their opinions. It's very much like the former in that they insist they know what you're thinking, feeling and experiencing when they do not.
They feel they know other people when they do not.
If they insist that a look on your face, or an attitude in your voice means something about you (when it doesn't), they are pretty far down the rabbit hole of distorting reality in most, if not all, situations.
Sociopaths, psychopaths and alcoholics often see hostility when there isn't any - often it's a brain matter in all three cases. For the sociopath, it's often the result of their own hostility and hypervigilance (fight or flight responses), and exploitation of others. For the psychopath it is because of their autonomic nervous systems which are different from others in the population and control their brain. And for alcoholics it is because alcohol distorts their perspectives, especially in this area.
Malignant narcissists are part sociopath, and this can increase seeing hostility in others when there isn't.
* gaslighting - trying to distort reality to fit the narrative they want that will make them look better, or superior, to exploit the truth, or to exploit the child. They also assume others gaslight them too. My post on gaslighting is HERE.
* interpreting other people's words and actions as "acting" (again where suspicions come in, and this is where we get false accusations) - and it also has to do with the fact that they put on acts and change their personalities, likes and dislikes to mirror people. They don't really have much of a personality, or they have the beginning of one that was arrested in childhood. This means they are chameleons and mirrors who largely use other people's personality styles, expression styles, styles of dress and hair, pretend their interests are the same as yours, to express themselves. Not having their own developed and accepted personality aside from the personality disorder which dictates how they act and perceive, means, in essence that you are talking to the personality disorder.
What does this mean exactly?:
Narcissists are extremely predictable and they don't differentiate that much from other narcissists except in DNA, the most outstanding traits among them all being a lack of empathy, divide and conquer objectives and strategies (triangulation), arrogance, entitlement, exploiting, dysregulated emotions (most often in the form of raging overtly or covertly), and most often bullying or coercing too.
If you try to explain to them why you weren't acting or why you wouldn't have a reason to act, they will put their beliefs before your words, thereby silencing you to say anything more.
Eventually what this turns into (and every child abuse victim with a narcissistic parent can relate to this in spades, even a golden child who is more likely to take on acting for both safety and promotion reasons) is that when you are not acting, you are deemed to be acting, and when you are acting (mainly to appease the parent) you are deemed not to be acting. It proves they have no idea what truth is or how it should be treated.
Most people treat the truth reverently.
In fact, for the narcissist, the truth is an amorphous thing that can be molded and interpreted any old way to fit agendas and win arguments.
* arrogance - The narcissist can't hear you because everything other people have to say is discounted to a large degree because they think they are superior to others. Also, unless the communication isn't of a flattering nature that's enhancing their arrogance, or dis-flattering enough to detract from their arrogance, they tend to get bored and go "off-line" (not hear). This is when you get the brick wall kind of stare. Or they might do a double-take and ask you to repeat something. Or they might leave the room when you are in mid-sentence.
Again, Dr. Ramani brings this up in the same video I'm looking for. Unless the conversation has to do with them, and the effect on their future, they can't be bothered to hear what you have to say.
* lack of object constancy - people they originally love bombed are treated drastically differently by the narcissist. Often a difference of opinion, or an argument, or being away from the narcissist for a short period of time can mean they devalue you and discard you from their life.
For narcissists, the lack of object constancy means constantly losing relationships and meaningful connections.
Utilitarian love also falls under the category of lack of object constancy.
If you're trying to communicate with someone who has a lack of object constancy, it can feel uneasy, baffling, tumultuous, unreliable, often like a wall of silence, and often the ultimate conclusion that most of us make is that they are untrustworthy. With a lack of trust in them, communication either becomes purely emotional or goes completely off-line, especially when you realize that even emotions don't move them.
It can also produce trauma because the high majority of us have object constancy, value it and assume others are just as invested in it, innately understanding that if we have an argument, a different opinion or are away for awhile, we don't stop communicating with them afterwards.
When parents do this to children, neglect is usually the outcome, but abuse can also follow especially if the child reacts (which most children tend to do), thereby setting off the parent's shame-rage cycle, producing more and more trauma for the child as the narcissist's shame-rage cycle intensifies and escalates.
The message that the lack of object constancy sends to a child is to be silent and not react (i.e. develop a freeze response - very unhealthy), eventually producing estrangement.
Most narcissistic parents realize the impulsivity that led to their decision of a discard, and that is when they hoover. If the child is successfully hoovered back into the relationship, it tends to be a cycle of abuse, with discards followed by hoovers. As mentioned before, in the case of children "discards" tend to mean neglect (emotional, psychological, physical), abandonments, silent treatments, absurdly long "time outs" with the more severe outcomes being false imprisonment (and for child abuse victims that usually means locking a child in a room and not allowing him or her to come out for days, weeks, months or years, a criminal offense ... I discuss one of the more egregious cases in this post, but the phenomenon of locking a child abuse victim in a room for hours or days by their abuser is not unusual and is part of the escalation and intimidation process).
For the child, the outcome of estrangement is the healthiest outcome even though it comes with a lot of grief. For the parent, they lose narcissistic supply because of the impulsivity that innately comes from a lack of object constancy, and as a result can often go through a narcissistic collapse, with on-going paranoia becoming the final outcome (paranoia is discussed later in the post).
* a belief that they are always winners and the most intelligent person in the room no matter what the reality is around them. This is tied to their arrogance which I discuss above. The reason why it's hard to communicate with a person with a mindset like this, is that any suggestion that they haven't thought through things enough, or actually didn't win something, will set off their rage, and will mean that they will turn vindictive towards you or give you the alternate challenge that you must be loyal to them under any and every circumstance, via sycophancy.
And yes, insisting you be a sycophant can be a form of punishment because most of us don't like being sycophants.
* belief oriented - They are primarily belief-oriented, not fact oriented, and they believe that others are too. In fact, I'd bet they believe we are in a constant world of distorted facts, distorted agendas, fakeness and fake flattery in order for exploitation and sabotage to take place. Again, this may be as projection-oriented as anything they judge.
* tactic, agenda and manipulation oriented - everything they say is oriented to get more narcissistic supply, power, control and domination over you and others. Unless your issues can be manipulated to that end, they are not that interested. It is one reason why, when you go to them about a dire issue, they get bored or largely discount it as unimportant. You are more likely to be judged, lectured at, and told what to do without them understanding much about your issue. In other words you won't get comprehension about the issue, or empathy, or a solution which makes sense or will be effective.
If you complain that the issue is not resolved, they often shut the conversation down (i.e. silence you, which can have the effect of you turning away from them and adopting other relationships where people are more capable of listening than they are, which in turn, enrages them - it's hard to figure out why, when they really don't want to hear you out, or to be empathetic, understanding, and give you fixes that actually work.
The problem with relating to someone who is so tactic and manipulation oriented is that those things will always come first in your conversations with them. They may want to play "the great sage" and lead you in a certain direction, but it is too self-oriented to be effective for you.
* exceptional confirmation bias - once they've made up their minds (and it can seconds), especially in judging other people, they've made up their minds for good. Most of the confirmation bias they have took very little investigation, very little thought (mindless), most often impulsive even if it's "a forever decision", and distorted by their ego and flawed interpretations. Sometimes the flawed interpretations are CPTSD - triggered interpretations, especially for covert vulnerable narcissists, the narcissists who weren't spoiled or the golden child.
Confirmation bias is usually way more pronounced in narcissists than it is in the general population.
* distortion of past events - this can make it almost impossible to discuss present events that are tied to the past events.
* insisting on the distortion of reality, and pressuring you to agree to the false narratives they tell - again, real communication cannot happen with this agenda. It's coercion instead of a conversation.
* intolerance of other people's differences, different ways of looking at things, different thoughts and perspectives, different lifestyle, their creativity, their openness to new ideas, and autonomous decision-making - again, with intolerance, there is no hope of a real conversation. This can turn to coercion by the narcissist pretty fast. They are notorious for obsessive criticizing, making fun of people, and vilifying those who don't think and believe exactly in the way they do, or in the way they want people to think and believe.
Sometimes people feel so intimidated that they renounce their former perspectives, personality and dress to fit in with the narcissist and their group of sycophants, but again, this isn't healthy and there will be repercussions along the way because of that fact. The worst part of it is that there is not much self-pride in being a sycophant.
Just as often, however, people feel put off by the menacing disdain, and feel good about who they are, how they think, and their perspectives no matter how much they are being criticized by the narcissist and their flying monkeys. This is especially true of people with integrity. They can just as easily have a bad opinion of the narcissist as the narcissist has of them.
The resisters of the narcissist may also move into more autonomous thoughts and perspectives than usual (seen as rebellion by the narcissist) because they feel hypervigilant or sick internally being around the narcissist and their sycophants. Some of us are a lot more sensitive to the health signals in our body enough to want no part in being any kind of narcissistic supply for narcissists, and some of this may also come from very early childhood experiences of not feeling well around adults who did not have our best interests at heart. Hypervigilance at an early age can have its positives in that it can be counted on to be a "detector of toxicity"
* never enough-ness - this is a huge topic among child abuse survivors: "I was always told as a child that I was not enough and didn't do anything good enough", "I was always told I wasn't good enough for them", "The dog was treated better than I was", "Mom always expected apologies, but when I gave them to her, even when I did nothing wrong which was a big sacrifice and self-flagellation on my part, it still wasn't good enough", "Nothing was ever good enough for my Dad. He'd rage all night about how his workers, no matter how many he had hired and fired over the decades, were never good enough for him. He terrorized everyone he knew, even us kids, to work harder and harder for him to no avail."
Narcissists never feel satisfied with the amount of narcissistic supply you already give them, even if and when they become your whole world, when your whole life is relegated to their demands, so in that way they are like bottomless pits, trying to get ever more narcissistic supply.
The reason they can't hear you when you are deemed to "not be good enough" is that they are focused on that rather than what you are saying. The want, want, want - is all that matters to them.
Some of the phrases you hear are: "You better do this when I get home", "You better not disappointment me or you'll get it", "You better do ----", "You better believe me when I tell you", "You better do it the way I like", "You better not do it your way or you'll mess it up and I'll be furious", "You better not say anything to anyone about this", "So I rule your life; it's all that you deserve", and so on.
There isn't a "you" in these demands and commands - they have managed your expectations down to being a puppet for them, the ultimate in narcissistic supply. If you try to make it "I'm in this too, and I have my own ways of thinking things through and doing things", most often they aren't interested in your methods. "Don't tell me how you do it, you do it the way I tell you to do it."
Narcissists aren't just self centered in terms of them thinking primarily about themselves, they are self centered in just about any way you can think of, including not taking into consideration that you are person, a person with a brain of your own, that you have your own ways of doing things, that if you have reached your total full capacity in adulthood, you are creative enough, are smart enough, have enough feelings, are capable of learning as much, and that you are capable enough, and that you are "enough." You are as enough as they are enough.
Don't fall into the trap of their "never enough" bullying style of thinking when it comes to yourself.
Be aware that all narcissists have this "never-enoughness" problem, and that it's their personality disorder driving it, not you.
Actually the never-enoughness is a burden, an albatross, that they carry as it promotes more negative thoughts such as rage that won't go away, obsessional thinking about who they hate, resentment, jealousy, obsessions with labeling others and criticizing them, envy, obsessions about hurting others, acting happy when they don't feel happy, playing the victim when they know they were the perpetrator, acting arrogant and grandiose when they feel inadequate, and just about every negative feeling and action they have is generated through this "never-enoughness".
Even if they have a narcissistic collapse and try to get a pity party going to tell you that they always felt they weren't good enough to others, realize also that it is part of the personality disorder. Unless they are depressed, or suicidal, it's just another desperate act to get narcissistic supply.
* gratitude shaming - there is such a thing as "gratitude shaming" in narcissistic abuse ... and it also goes with the narcissist grasping at getting positive narcissistic supply after they haven't treated you well. Gratitude shaming is about the narcissist shaming you because they feel they are not receiving enough gratitude for who they are and what they've done.
Gratitude shaming tends to happen right after they've abused you, or criticized you, or bread-crumbed you, or cheated on you, or blamed you for things that weren't your fault, or after they've hit you, or when they're trying to hoover you back after they've abandoned you.
It's about shaming you for noticing that they are cruel to you - you're supposed to ignore that and show gratitude instead.
From someone who lives in a constant state of "never-enoughness" when it comes to you and everyone else!?
Again, it's both hypocrisy and projection. Why projection? Because they don't show gratitude for who you are and what you do when they live in a constant state of criticizing you, flaw-picking, dreaming up the next false narrative about you, and ultimately abandoning you, showing you constantly that you aren't "good enough" for them.
It should show you that sycophancy, gratitude, not noticing the bad stuff about them, not holding them accountable for the hurtful things they do, and being a mind slave to them are all that really matter to them. The question for you to ask is that all that matters to you too? And are you willing to be bullied so that the narcissist can get it (note: narcissists bully people to get what they want, including gratitude) - because if you want more from a relationship than being a sycophant, bullied, and supplying flattery when they are harming people, including you, then their tactic of gratitude shaming is not going to work on you.
Trying to relate to someone who is ungrateful in spades and who shames you for being ungrateful yourself when you've brought up the things they do that are hurtful, means you're only going to be heard if you've agreed to be one of their flatterers/sycophants, and a full time agree-er and repeater of all of their thoughts, phrases and agendas, i.e. a constant source of narcissistic supply.
No one needs to be narcissistic supply to a narcissist.
In fact, it baffles me why so many people sign up for the job willingly especially when a narcissist is wielding power so destructively, so abusively, and when it will be noticed by others that you have an affiliation to them, and their bullying. You have a right to talk about things that aren't flattering to them, especially if they've been thoughtless and cruel to others or to you (which they will be if they are narcissists). If you go along with sycophancy, they keep living in this cloudy fantasy world that all people flatter them even when they are mean, and that something is direly wrong with you or anyone else who dares not to be a sycophant. Are you going to go along with everything they want to the point of destroying yourself or others? Are you going to fight for them and take the blame for them when their cruelty gets noticed and other people want them to be accountable? Why, it's like being a mindless soldier of a corrupt leader.
I would say that having a reputation as a thinking, questioning, research-guided, non-sycophant is a way better life than a non-thinking, dictated-to, phrase-repeater, robot-like sycophant.
Will they try to punish you for rejecting this job they want to put you in? Sure they will. Probably even hurt you more than you imagined, because remember: they get what they want through bullying.
But after awhile they'll probably stop after they find better sources of narcissistic supply than you were. That can happen pretty fast, so maybe it's worth the wait. Again there are plenty of people who are willing to be sycophants (just look at our present government in the USA). Let them do the job if they choose.
Also if you threatened them with demands for narcissistic supply in every conversation and told them they needed to kiss your ring and make you their leader, would they do it? Of course not! They'd throw a tantrum.
If you're a child, you can't get out of this unless you are physically abused, sexually abused, starved, locked up in a room or basement, recorded emotionally abusive situations and showed them to authorities, or they pushed and shoved you around, at least in the United States, although some states have begun to tighten laws particularly about coercive control. Anyway, as an adult you have a right to leave this thankless childhood job behind, especially if you can not get caught up in learned helplessness type of thinking patterns that keep you stuck dealing with this.
I think it's obvious you can't talk to a person with a mind-set like this unless you've advertised that you're looking desperately for work or volunteerism as a sycophant ("desperate, will do any job" kind of advertising too).
* paranoia - narcissists have extraordinary levels of of paranoia, especially over the people they hurt.
Why?
Because if they feel hurt, they rage and very often retaliate and scheme how to hurt the other people worse than they were hurt (escalation is always the name of the game for narcissists who abuse and use abuse to solve their problems). They figure you're like that too.
And because they are paranoid of being found out in terms of the amount of abuse and retaliations they enact, they rage at the person they are abusing, hoping that the intimidation will keep the person (or child in this case) in a state of silence about the abuse.
It doesn't take much to hurt a narcissist either (they are much more sensitive to being hurt than to hurting others, by a long shot, which is where the imbalance comes in as well as the lack of empathy). The smallest inconsequential phrase can do it, especially if they feel it hits their reputation. Not getting invited to a party can do it. Refusing to engage with them in gossip can do it. Yawning can do it. A facial expression that they don't like can do it. Expecting an apology from you when you didn't do anything wrong can do it. Or they just distort the truth so much that they see things or hear things that don't exist, also somewhat common among narcissists.
The amount of rage, or the ending of a relationship over these kinds of things, the amount of retaliations exhibited over these things, the amount of false narratives and smear campaigns over your character afterwards, the amount of fear they want to put into you, tells the story of how hurt they are (or how much they feel their reputation is being threatened more likely).
How much they want to hurt you back is also something to keep an eye on. It tells the story of how much empathy they have for you as opposed to how sorry they feel for themselves. If it's incredibly lopsided where they are playing the victim all of the time, and painting you as the victimizer when they've retaliated to extremes, that explains how high they are on the narcissism scale, and how low they are on the truth-telling scale.
If the reaction is much, much more abusive than the yawning, or slip, or thoughtless phrase you gave them, then that's the story of how abusive they are, and how far they'll go to abuse you without regrets or thoughts like "I don't feel good about going any farther with this", and how regulated they are, and how dangerous they are.
And yes, they mean to hurt you. It's rare for a narcissist to say, "I didn't mean to hurt you." Or "I regret hurting you as much as I did." They will almost always justify the hurt, and try to normalize the amount they hurt you with as well.
And the reason they hurt others to the extent they do is because they don't have thoughts like "I didn't mean to hurt her as much as I did", or the emotional regulation to even consider these perspectives even if there are others who question the narcissist's ambitions to hurt others.
They also generally inflict a lot more pain on others than they receive, so that should also speak volumes about who they are and to what lengths they are willing to go with damaging other people.
Paranoia that they will be "found out" in terms of this level of abuse and retaliation, especially if it concerns their children (as most people care about the fate of children, and care about child abuse), can increase their paranoia a lot.
The more obsessive they get about hurting you and keeping it a secret, the more paranoia they are enduring - you can count on it.
One of the reasons they end relationships permanently, even with their own children, is because they are so incredibly paranoid at being found out, that in order to play the victim successfully, they can't have that child in their life. If you're hearing, "I need to protect myself from my child. My child is a monster!" the relationship with that parent should be over. Also, don't ask why they are smearing your name again, ask yourself if this is just another case of projection, especially if the retaliation went above and beyond what ever you did or were perceived to have done. They can't allow themselves to have a relationship with you if they feel the desire to play the victimhood game to an absolute hilt.
Often the child will end the relationship just after the narcissistic parent did just to let the narcissist know that they are not going to come back begging, or putting up with the narcissist's false narratives, which is discussed in the "lack of object constancy" section above. It has to do with a combination of the shame-rage spiral and narcissistic collapse, traumatizing the child enough that the child flees (i.e. the flee trauma response kicks in ... again, the main trauma responses are fawn, fight, flee, freeze).
And this, folks, is just one of many reasons why about 90 percent of scapegoats are estranged from a parent.
Once the narcissist is displaying this much paranoia and this much fake victimhood, there really is nothing to talk about with them again. You're just going to run into their shame-rage spiral again and again, only so much worse, so much more violent or annihilating for you, with worse "punishments" and retaliation than the last time. They want the narrative so badly (with you only, not with others) that they hurt you so badly because you seemed threatening to them (i.e. more like their reputation). Abusive parents who have killed or neglected their children even use this narrative and you can look up cases of this for yourself. It's a DARVO on steroids.
Even if you haven't gotten to the point of slipping up (yet), or forgetting to invite them to a party (yet), or haven't had a facial expression that made them furious (yet), their paranoia will still run the show and the conversation, and in this case it might be that you'll do one of these things *some day* just like all of the rest of the people they've known throughout the years, endlessly disappointing them over narcissistic supply, that they won't be able to help themselves and hurt/trash you again.
All psychologists say that if you get too close to narcissists you'll get hurt. Narcissists probably even know this, otherwise their paranoia wouldn't be so off the charts.
Enablers and sycophants who normalize, give credence to their lies about being victimized, DARVO-ing for them, and give credence and narcissistic supply to all their paranoias, are actually setting themselves up for their own dismissals and retaliations from the narcissist however many sycophants are willing to totally break with their own ethics and reputation.
With all of this going on it stands to reason that a child being understood by a narcissistic parent or caretaker is going to be unfeasible and often leads to an insecure attachment style or a disorganized attachment style.
Even when you give them the narcissistic supply they want, they often say things like:
* "You don't really mean that" (especially if they've hurt you a lot, or egregiously)
* "You're a liar. I know one when I see one."
* "You're just saying that because you want 'that toy' for Christmas!"
* "You can stop flattering me now. There's some ulterior motive going on here."
* "You can stop now. I know what flattery is really about!"
* "Do you really mean it? You must be one of my closest, most loyal friends", especially if you believe they were the victim of someone else (when they really weren't). And later on when they perceive that you found something out that contradicts their narrative, or when they "believe" you might have found something out, they might say, "You aren't as loyal as I thought you were", or "Just how loyal are you to question how I treated my (add person's name here)?"
For the golden child, having to provide constant narcissistic supply to get the parent regulated and consistent emotionally, it can still be looked at as a form of child abuse, and definitely a form of parentification.
For one thing, there is too high a risk of the golden child abandoning his authentic budding personality in return for being a mirror and sycophant to his narcissistic parent. Narcissists focus very heavily on how the behaviors of others aren't good, or good enough, for them. The constant need for narcissistic supply will also mean the parent will spend most of their time with the child either disapproving of behavior or approving of behavior, and because they can't comprehend what children are saying to them, the parent fills in the blanks of how their children behaves with their own personality traits (projection - and this is ultimately why and how narcissists create roles such as the golden child and the scapegoat).
There are also so many down-sides to being a full time sycophant to an adult and losing your own personality, interests, thoughts, attitudes, reality and judgements to adopt the parent's. Golden children also run a high risk of becoming another narcissist by taking up Jekyll and Hyde behavior which can start by observing the parent doing it: being the ultimate lapdog flatterer, but then complaining about the parent behind their back.
All of the narcissists I have known manifested Jekyll and Hyde behaviors and some of it was sickening, like praising a person's singing abilities in the most sticky-sweet kind of way while they were present, and over and over again, for instance, and then laughing and making fun of them endlessly after they left the house, about how they were irritating and out of key in their vocal style was after the singer had left the house (mocking and play acting the most irritating parts of their vocal styles).
In general, narcissists spend a lot more time trash-talking about other people in this way than any kind of authentic admiring, and this is one reason their heads are full of negativity, why their attitudes are negative, why their judgements of others are so negative, and why they live as a "never-enough" grasping narcissistic supply addict. They continually make rash decisions based on the narcissistic supply they are receiving too, like for instance, changing their Last Will and Testament at a second's notice over how much narcissistic supply they believe they are receiving (and through all of the filters mentioned above).
I would say that many golden children aren't particularly happy being close to their parent, that it's anxiety-producing, and sometimes down right nauseating, especially when the parent is trying to get them to believe in an event that isn't true, and that never comported with reality, but they are too afraid of losing the gravy train, so keep up the pleasing behaviors regardless, saying "yes" to all of the crazy-making false narratives, whereas scapegoats give up on pleasing their parent, being stuck in the parent's never-enoughness mind-prison.
In other words, the molding and constant labeling of the child is completely over-done and often completely wrong. As I've said in the section before this one, most narcissistic parents do not care about reality/truth or of seeking it (that it should be, and can be, manipulated for their own agendas). Many children from narcissistic families are constantly being molded and groomed to accept the judging and labeling to the point where the child's defenses of their actions, thoughts and feelings are either not taken into account at all, or where the parent's ego feels threatened because narcissists feel they have to be right in every situation, even if it's a gross injustice of the authentic reality, that it's a hit to their "superior image" or self esteem if a child challenges their beliefs. And the child endures their parents rage or abuse once again over it (in the manner of the shame-rage spiral and most often the cycle of abuse).
Anyway, when a child lacks in being a good source of narcissistic supply, the narcissistic parent often gets rageful or punishing over it, no matter what other circumstances the child is enduring, further challenging the relationship with that child, and challenging the endurance of that child to take on more trauma symptoms.
If the child is not going through anything major, the challenge is going to be either a mild punishment (favoring another child temporarily and intermittently neglecting the child who is a lousy narcissistic supply giver), or abusing the child (absurdly long time outs, favoring another child permanently, on-going neglect, silent treatments and rejections, repeated scenes of raging at their child, tearing their child's self esteem and interests apart, hitting, triangulation, betrayal, gaslighting, false narratives to describe them, including most of the punishments and abuses I talk about in the right hand column under "narcissistic abuse section" ... which also continues in this section, and if you were scapegoated, in this section.
Talking to a narcissist means that their personality disorder is going to be the main thing you'll be relating to and up against. You're not going to find convictions of morality because they don't have any. You're not going to get them to see your side of view because they don't care about reality or the truth. You're not going to find empathy because they either don't have any, or it is on the very low side. You're not going to find reasonable solutions because they don't have any. You're not going to find conversations satisfying because they are too self centered to think about how they, or anything else in your life, effects you. You're not going to find a satisfying connection with them because they are incapable of love, at least adult love (it would resemble more how a distracted 2 year old expresses love). And you're not going to find any kind of consistency of affection (more like hate followed by love bombing or hoovering, followed by more hate, followed by another hoover, round and round, especially if you are anyone else other than the golden child). You're not going to find ways of talking to them without triggering their rage, shame and jealousy because there aren't many positive emotions inside them to overcome the negative ones.
Think of them as either a spoiled rotten golden child who had to give up their budding personality to please a bully or abusive caretaker ... or conversely, a small insecure, shame-filled, imperfect child, at least in terms of what one caregiver or bully possibly labeled them as in early childhood years: expecting impossible standards in perfectionism in deeds, looks and words that matched the bully's demands resulting in covert vulnerable narcissism. Both kinds of child's personalities were somehow arrested in early childhood, and they've surrounded themselves with a thick wall of impenetrable arrogances, made up stories, denials, defenses, armaments and battle tactics. While they operate these defenses, armaments and battle tactics with a lot of impulsiveness and rage, the wall is too thick to hear you. And that's what talking to a narcissist really feels like.
Being fully estranged means not talking to your parent. And most of these reasons are why children of narcissists find themselves not wanting to talk to their parent, besides the trauma symptoms they undergo by getting too close to the narcissist (even adults get trauma symptoms from getting too close to a narcissist), and this is especially the case if the narcissist's child got burned and exhausted by being "a not good enough sycophant" or they were the narcissist's abused scapegoats.
The amount of rage, or the ending of a relationship over these kinds of things, the amount of retaliations exhibited over these things, the amount of false narratives and smear campaigns over your character afterwards, the amount of fear they want to put into you, tells the story of how hurt they are (or how much they feel their reputation is being threatened more likely).
How much they want to hurt you back is also something to keep an eye on. It tells the story of how much empathy they have for you as opposed to how sorry they feel for themselves. If it's incredibly lopsided where they are playing the victim all of the time, and painting you as the victimizer when they've retaliated to extremes, that explains how high they are on the narcissism scale, and how low they are on the truth-telling scale.
If the reaction is much, much more abusive than the yawning, or slip, or thoughtless phrase you gave them, then that's the story of how abusive they are, and how far they'll go to abuse you without regrets or thoughts like "I don't feel good about going any farther with this", and how regulated they are, and how dangerous they are.
And yes, they mean to hurt you. It's rare for a narcissist to say, "I didn't mean to hurt you." Or "I regret hurting you as much as I did." They will almost always justify the hurt, and try to normalize the amount they hurt you with as well.
And the reason they hurt others to the extent they do is because they don't have thoughts like "I didn't mean to hurt her as much as I did", or the emotional regulation to even consider these perspectives even if there are others who question the narcissist's ambitions to hurt others.
They also generally inflict a lot more pain on others than they receive, so that should also speak volumes about who they are and to what lengths they are willing to go with damaging other people.
Paranoia that they will be "found out" in terms of this level of abuse and retaliation, especially if it concerns their children (as most people care about the fate of children, and care about child abuse), can increase their paranoia a lot.
The more obsessive they get about hurting you and keeping it a secret, the more paranoia they are enduring - you can count on it.
One of the reasons they end relationships permanently, even with their own children, is because they are so incredibly paranoid at being found out, that in order to play the victim successfully, they can't have that child in their life. If you're hearing, "I need to protect myself from my child. My child is a monster!" the relationship with that parent should be over. Also, don't ask why they are smearing your name again, ask yourself if this is just another case of projection, especially if the retaliation went above and beyond what ever you did or were perceived to have done. They can't allow themselves to have a relationship with you if they feel the desire to play the victimhood game to an absolute hilt.
Often the child will end the relationship just after the narcissistic parent did just to let the narcissist know that they are not going to come back begging, or putting up with the narcissist's false narratives, which is discussed in the "lack of object constancy" section above. It has to do with a combination of the shame-rage spiral and narcissistic collapse, traumatizing the child enough that the child flees (i.e. the flee trauma response kicks in ... again, the main trauma responses are fawn, fight, flee, freeze).
And this, folks, is just one of many reasons why about 90 percent of scapegoats are estranged from a parent.
Once the narcissist is displaying this much paranoia and this much fake victimhood, there really is nothing to talk about with them again. You're just going to run into their shame-rage spiral again and again, only so much worse, so much more violent or annihilating for you, with worse "punishments" and retaliation than the last time. They want the narrative so badly (with you only, not with others) that they hurt you so badly because you seemed threatening to them (i.e. more like their reputation). Abusive parents who have killed or neglected their children even use this narrative and you can look up cases of this for yourself. It's a DARVO on steroids.
Even if you haven't gotten to the point of slipping up (yet), or forgetting to invite them to a party (yet), or haven't had a facial expression that made them furious (yet), their paranoia will still run the show and the conversation, and in this case it might be that you'll do one of these things *some day* just like all of the rest of the people they've known throughout the years, endlessly disappointing them over narcissistic supply, that they won't be able to help themselves and hurt/trash you again.
All psychologists say that if you get too close to narcissists you'll get hurt. Narcissists probably even know this, otherwise their paranoia wouldn't be so off the charts.
Enablers and sycophants who normalize, give credence to their lies about being victimized, DARVO-ing for them, and give credence and narcissistic supply to all their paranoias, are actually setting themselves up for their own dismissals and retaliations from the narcissist however many sycophants are willing to totally break with their own ethics and reputation.
With all of this going on it stands to reason that a child being understood by a narcissistic parent or caretaker is going to be unfeasible and often leads to an insecure attachment style or a disorganized attachment style.
WHEN CHILDREN GIVE THEIR PARENT
THE NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY THEY WANT
THE NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY THEY WANT
Even when you give them the narcissistic supply they want, they often say things like:
* "You don't really mean that" (especially if they've hurt you a lot, or egregiously)
* "You're a liar. I know one when I see one."
* "You're just saying that because you want 'that toy' for Christmas!"
* "You can stop flattering me now. There's some ulterior motive going on here."
* "You can stop now. I know what flattery is really about!"
* "Do you really mean it? You must be one of my closest, most loyal friends", especially if you believe they were the victim of someone else (when they really weren't). And later on when they perceive that you found something out that contradicts their narrative, or when they "believe" you might have found something out, they might say, "You aren't as loyal as I thought you were", or "Just how loyal are you to question how I treated my (add person's name here)?"
For the golden child, having to provide constant narcissistic supply to get the parent regulated and consistent emotionally, it can still be looked at as a form of child abuse, and definitely a form of parentification.
For one thing, there is too high a risk of the golden child abandoning his authentic budding personality in return for being a mirror and sycophant to his narcissistic parent. Narcissists focus very heavily on how the behaviors of others aren't good, or good enough, for them. The constant need for narcissistic supply will also mean the parent will spend most of their time with the child either disapproving of behavior or approving of behavior, and because they can't comprehend what children are saying to them, the parent fills in the blanks of how their children behaves with their own personality traits (projection - and this is ultimately why and how narcissists create roles such as the golden child and the scapegoat).
There are also so many down-sides to being a full time sycophant to an adult and losing your own personality, interests, thoughts, attitudes, reality and judgements to adopt the parent's. Golden children also run a high risk of becoming another narcissist by taking up Jekyll and Hyde behavior which can start by observing the parent doing it: being the ultimate lapdog flatterer, but then complaining about the parent behind their back.
All of the narcissists I have known manifested Jekyll and Hyde behaviors and some of it was sickening, like praising a person's singing abilities in the most sticky-sweet kind of way while they were present, and over and over again, for instance, and then laughing and making fun of them endlessly after they left the house, about how they were irritating and out of key in their vocal style was after the singer had left the house (mocking and play acting the most irritating parts of their vocal styles).
In general, narcissists spend a lot more time trash-talking about other people in this way than any kind of authentic admiring, and this is one reason their heads are full of negativity, why their attitudes are negative, why their judgements of others are so negative, and why they live as a "never-enough" grasping narcissistic supply addict. They continually make rash decisions based on the narcissistic supply they are receiving too, like for instance, changing their Last Will and Testament at a second's notice over how much narcissistic supply they believe they are receiving (and through all of the filters mentioned above).
I would say that many golden children aren't particularly happy being close to their parent, that it's anxiety-producing, and sometimes down right nauseating, especially when the parent is trying to get them to believe in an event that isn't true, and that never comported with reality, but they are too afraid of losing the gravy train, so keep up the pleasing behaviors regardless, saying "yes" to all of the crazy-making false narratives, whereas scapegoats give up on pleasing their parent, being stuck in the parent's never-enoughness mind-prison.
In other words, the molding and constant labeling of the child is completely over-done and often completely wrong. As I've said in the section before this one, most narcissistic parents do not care about reality/truth or of seeking it (that it should be, and can be, manipulated for their own agendas). Many children from narcissistic families are constantly being molded and groomed to accept the judging and labeling to the point where the child's defenses of their actions, thoughts and feelings are either not taken into account at all, or where the parent's ego feels threatened because narcissists feel they have to be right in every situation, even if it's a gross injustice of the authentic reality, that it's a hit to their "superior image" or self esteem if a child challenges their beliefs. And the child endures their parents rage or abuse once again over it (in the manner of the shame-rage spiral and most often the cycle of abuse).
Anyway, when a child lacks in being a good source of narcissistic supply, the narcissistic parent often gets rageful or punishing over it, no matter what other circumstances the child is enduring, further challenging the relationship with that child, and challenging the endurance of that child to take on more trauma symptoms.
If the child is not going through anything major, the challenge is going to be either a mild punishment (favoring another child temporarily and intermittently neglecting the child who is a lousy narcissistic supply giver), or abusing the child (absurdly long time outs, favoring another child permanently, on-going neglect, silent treatments and rejections, repeated scenes of raging at their child, tearing their child's self esteem and interests apart, hitting, triangulation, betrayal, gaslighting, false narratives to describe them, including most of the punishments and abuses I talk about in the right hand column under "narcissistic abuse section" ... which also continues in this section, and if you were scapegoated, in this section.
IN CONCLUSION
Talking to a narcissist means that their personality disorder is going to be the main thing you'll be relating to and up against. You're not going to find convictions of morality because they don't have any. You're not going to get them to see your side of view because they don't care about reality or the truth. You're not going to find empathy because they either don't have any, or it is on the very low side. You're not going to find reasonable solutions because they don't have any. You're not going to find conversations satisfying because they are too self centered to think about how they, or anything else in your life, effects you. You're not going to find a satisfying connection with them because they are incapable of love, at least adult love (it would resemble more how a distracted 2 year old expresses love). And you're not going to find any kind of consistency of affection (more like hate followed by love bombing or hoovering, followed by more hate, followed by another hoover, round and round, especially if you are anyone else other than the golden child). You're not going to find ways of talking to them without triggering their rage, shame and jealousy because there aren't many positive emotions inside them to overcome the negative ones.
Think of them as either a spoiled rotten golden child who had to give up their budding personality to please a bully or abusive caretaker ... or conversely, a small insecure, shame-filled, imperfect child, at least in terms of what one caregiver or bully possibly labeled them as in early childhood years: expecting impossible standards in perfectionism in deeds, looks and words that matched the bully's demands resulting in covert vulnerable narcissism. Both kinds of child's personalities were somehow arrested in early childhood, and they've surrounded themselves with a thick wall of impenetrable arrogances, made up stories, denials, defenses, armaments and battle tactics. While they operate these defenses, armaments and battle tactics with a lot of impulsiveness and rage, the wall is too thick to hear you. And that's what talking to a narcissist really feels like.
Being fully estranged means not talking to your parent. And most of these reasons are why children of narcissists find themselves not wanting to talk to their parent, besides the trauma symptoms they undergo by getting too close to the narcissist (even adults get trauma symptoms from getting too close to a narcissist), and this is especially the case if the narcissist's child got burned and exhausted by being "a not good enough sycophant" or they were the narcissist's abused scapegoats.
FURTHER READING
Do narcissist parents have children for supply? - forum, myptsd.comThe Impact of Narcissistic Supply - by LaKeisha Fleming, and reviewed by Ivy Kwong, LMFT for Very Well Mind
The Concept of Narcissistic Supply
Pleasing a narcissist is thankless, like filling a bottomless pit.
When you say "Yes" to a person, make sure you are not saying "No" to yourself - by Darlene Lancer, JD, LMFT for Psychology Today
What Is Narcissistic Supply? - by Nakpangi Thomas, PhD, LPC, TITC-CT, medically reviewed by Lynn Byars, MD for Choosing Therapy
An Insight into the Mind of a Narcissist - by LaKeisha Fleming, and reviewed by Ivy Kwong, LMFT for Very Well Mind
The Unraveling of a Narcissist: What Happens When the Narcissistic Supply is Lost - TherapyWithAb.com
What Happens When The Narcissist Has No Supply? | When A Narcissist Collapses - by Dr. Emily Mayfield for Mindset Therapy (You Tube)
a lack of narcissistic supply - what does it mean - a Google search
No Narcissistic Supply Self Supply Or Forced Supply - by psychologist, Sam Vaknin, for Vaknin talks
(note: Sam Vaknin, by his own accounts, has been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and has described himself as a malignant narcissist, so the perspective is both as "an insider", i.e. inside the mind of a narcissist, and through his education in psychology)
The Unraveling of a Narcissist: What Happens When the Narcissistic Supply is Lost - TherapyWithAb.com
What Happens When The Narcissist Has No Supply? | When A Narcissist Collapses - by Dr. Emily Mayfield for Mindset Therapy (You Tube)
a lack of narcissistic supply - what does it mean - a Google search
No Narcissistic Supply Self Supply Or Forced Supply - by psychologist, Sam Vaknin, for Vaknin talks
(note: Sam Vaknin, by his own accounts, has been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and has described himself as a malignant narcissist, so the perspective is both as "an insider", i.e. inside the mind of a narcissist, and through his education in psychology)
another article along the same lines as the one above: The Narcissist's Reaction to Deficient Narcissistic Supply - by Sam Vaknin for Healthy Place
Impacts and Management Strategies - Bay Area CBT Center (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
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