Estimates range about the prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), putting it between 0.5 percent and 6.2 percent of the general population. Even if the high estimate is accurate, the likelihood of having a parent or spouse with NPD is pretty low, and the chances of having multiple family members with the disorder becomes minuscule, right?
Wrong. And here’s why.
The Narcissism Disease Cluster
You may have heard of disease clusters, where certain diseases or disorders occur in an unusually high incidence in close proximity. NPD, a serious psycho-emotional disorder, is no exception to this phenomenon, with clusters happening in families across generations and connected through both biology and marriage.
If you’re feeling like you keep drawing the short straw with regard to narcissists in your life, here are reasons narcissism may be clustering around you and cause for hope that you can end the cycle.
Narcissism: Your Normal
If you’ve grown up in a narcissism disease cluster with one or more NPD parents, stepparents, and/or other family members, sadly narcissism is probably your normal. The familiar is a powerful force for most of us (even and especially unconsciously), and you may find yourself drawn by and to further narcissists, as friends, bosses, and romantic partners. The narcissist’s projection, gaslighting, and belittlement are all too familiar to you, and you’ve been groomed to take abuse and blame yourself for it in the process. If you were scapegoated by a domineering narcissist father, for example, chances are you will wear a kick-me sign on your back in future relationships until you learn to find a healthier new normal.
The Good News: Regardless of what you grew up with, narcissism is not normal. Unlike the narcissist, most people develop relatively stable selfhood, learn empathy, and possess a reasonable moral compass that guides them in their relationships. Growing up under the shadow of NPD by no means dooms you to develop the disorder, nor does it mean you must repeat its patterns. Educating yourself about the diseased roots and destructive patterns of NPD and becoming self-aware in your relationships are powerful steps to break its grip over your life.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
Like all primates, humans learn from others, particularly caregivers such as parents, grandparents, and even older siblings. If you have narcissist models, you are likely to repeat at least some narcissistic patterns. You may pick up your narcissist parent’s traits and become narcissistic yourself, perpetrating onto others the abuse you endured. You may emulate an enabling parent and find yourself acting as a flying monkey for a narcissist spouse. Or you may raise a narcissistic child, unwittingly creating an unhealthy environment like the one you grew up in and possibly passing along a genetic predisposition to NPD.
The Good News: Primates, particularly humans, are highly adaptive animals with flexibility and the capacity to continue learning throughout life. Poor modeling in your family of origin can be overcome and replaced with healthy patterns. The influence of good models, for example in the form of a nonNPD parent, relative, friend, and/or teacher, can be a powerfully transformative force for good. And bad examples often provide the most lasting lessons.
Genetics
Highly conditional caregiving, often including forms of abuse, neglect, and/or overindulgence, has long been blamed as the cause of NPD. However, a genetic component is increasingly recognized in the development of the disorder. As with many conditions, such as addiction and schizophrenia, a combination of nurture and nature is most likely at work in a child developing narcissistic adaptations that inflate into full-blown NPD in adulthood.
The Good News: A healthy, resilient connection between children and their caregivers can most likely turn off the genetic switches in a young person’s DNA that influence the development of NPD.
Generational Trauma
Tragically, narcissism is often the radioactive gift that keeps on giving from one generation to the next. A dysregulated mother may pass on her NPD to her son, who repeats the pattern through abusive behaviors with his own children, who in turn continue the cycle with their children. Even a child from a narcissistic family who does not develop NPD may marry a partner with the disorder, increasing the likelihood of creating a narcissistic disease cluster and perpetuating the damage in future generations.
The Good News: While by definition generational trauma tends to ripple forward, it is by no means a foregone conclusion. New generations bring different parents, parenting styles, social influences, and genetics into play that all offer opportunities for healthier outcomes. Most living beings by nature move toward light and healing, choosing peace over discord and love over cruelty and hate.
Listen to Julie being interviewed on The Addicted Mind Podcast and Narcissist Apocalypse Podcast.
Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books.
Need support? Julie provides specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world.
Related Articles by Julie L. Hall
- 12 Unspoken Rules of Engagement in the Narcissistic Family
- Why Narcissists Will Never Love You and It’s Dangerous to Love Them
- How Narcissists Torture Others and Believe They’re Right to Do It
- The Narcissist’s Disrespect, Envy, and Contempt
- Why and How Narcissists Play the Shame Game
- Waking Up to Narcissistic Abuse
- Big Sissies: How and Why Narcissists Get Worse with Age
- How and Why Narcissists Are Highly Skilled Abusers
- The Narcissist Parent’s Psychological Warfare: Parentifying, Idealizing, and Scapegoating
- 7 Defining Traits of the Narcissist
- Raised by a Narcissist? 11 Healing Things to Do for Yourself Right Now
- The Paradox of the Narcissist’s Unrequited Self-Love
- It’s You and Me Baby: Narcissist Head Games
- 7 Things a Narcissist Will Never Do
- The Narcissist as Human Parasite: Are You a Host?
- 4 Insidious Ways That Narcissistic Abuse Isolates the Victim
- Behind the Narcissist Mask: The Bully, Coward, Liar and Fraud
- How to Protect Your Child from Your Narcissist Spouse
- The Challenge of Setting Boundaries with Narcissist Parents
- Understanding Narcissistic Rage and Why It Is Not Your Fault
- The Strength of the Scapegoat in the Narcissist Family
- Adult Children of Narcissists Face Trauma-Induced Health Risks
- Seven Sure Ways to Spot a Narcissist
- What Raging Narcissists Break: A Damage List
- Horrid and Shocking Things Narcissists Say and Do
- The Dos and Don’ts of CoParenting with a Narcissist
- What the Narcissist Fears Most
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
3 Comments
This article is especially enlightening and helped me understand what was going on in life. I wondered “why me” for so long.
I chose to break some patterns and now know why it is so hard and left somewhat alone.
It’s like riding a rollercoaster and jumping out. The crash hurt and has been bumpy but I’ll never get on it again.
[…] The Narcissism Disease Cluster in Families and How to End the Cycle […]
My late malignant narcissist mother was SO screwed up that when I “went NC” 35 years ago she couldn’t deal with the notion of not having absolute control over me, so she drank herself to death and hid it, but not before she irrevocably convinced all the relatives about my “mental illness, drug abuse and violence” (or something like that…in my case I never actually heard the details, this is what I’ve heard from others is characteristically claimed though). Shouldn’t there be some sort of “resource” that the “family trashcan” could access that could help reconnect these broken families from the damage caused by the misinformation disseminated and still in effect DECADES later that only existed to serve the forgotten ego problems of some long-dead individual with a personality disorder? Or are we the living condemned to suffer from these issues for the rest of our natural lives? (The one thing I know is that therapists aren’t willing to do it, and they generally don’t know how to do it anyway.)