For so many of us, the holidays elicit complex emotions about our core human needs for home, family, love, and belonging. For those with narcissistic family members, this time of year tends to intensify our hopes and fears about fulfilling those needs,…
First published on Psychology Today November 10, 2019 As a narcissistic abuse recovery coach, I offer several fundamental insights to clients that anyone working to recover from long-term narcissistic abuse needs to know. 1. A larger pattern is at work. If you have a history…
Abuse in the narcissistic family is typically understood as a set of overbearing behaviors stemming from the narcissist’s outsized self-importance and impaired empathy. Narcissists dominate family members with their excessive neediness, selfish demands, antagonism, hypersensitivity, and unrealistic expectations. But neglect,…
There is nearly always someone enabling the narcissist. Being fundamentally dependent on others for the self-assurance and definition they lack, narcissists don’t get very far without enablers. An enabler supports the narcissist’s insistence on control, inflated persona, exaggerated entitlement, and…
Whether you’re an adult child, partner/spouse, or other family member of a person with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), perhaps the most difficult aspect of the relationship is coming to grips with the fact that this person does not and will…
As the saying goes, we often hurt the ones we love, but many narcissists torture others deliberately, whether to boost their self-esteem or for sadistic enjoyment, or both. Merriam-Webster defines torture as “the infliction of intense pain to coerce, punish,…
Published on HuffPost 11/19/17 Partners, children, and anyone else subjected to the narcissist’s disrespect find themselves working to figure out how to avoid it and gain their elusive respect. If we can just decode the mystery of what they respect,…
Being fundamentally ashamed of themselves, people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are experts at playing the shame game with those around them. Often confused with its cousin guilt, which is a feeling of distress about something we have done, shame…
Whether partners, children, other relatives, or friends, narcissist’s caretakers are sustaining forces who enable narcissistic personalities in their delusions, manipulations, and abuse. When the caretaker is a spouse, s/he has likely been seduced by the narcissist, swallowing hook, line, and…
Published on HuffPost, 10/20/17, 1:42 a.m. ET. Those of us exposed to trauma know all too well the experience of distressing nightmares. We may thrash around in bed and struggle to speak or cry out. When we finally reach consciousness,…