Understanding The Effects Of The Narcissistic Parent. The narcissistic parent's role in the family can have an effect on the child's process of development or growth. Through observing the narcissistic parent's ideas and principles, or the lack of them, you can see how this may have an effect on the child. The narcissistic parent forms your way of thinking.
Your ideas and beliefs about yourself, other people and the world. You may also learn certain coping mechanisms from the narcissistic parent. The information and skills gained from experiences or situations around the narcissistic parent, are what you then take with you to go out into the world, to achieve some level of productivity or success.
The problem is, the ideas, beliefs, coping mechanisms, information and skills learned from the narcissistic parent are not going to be efficient for achieving any level of sustainable productivity or success. Everything you learn or experience from being around the narcissistic parent is going to be based off their dysfunction, their disruption of normal social relations. Narcissists have a fixed way of thinking.
They believe that their ideas and beliefs are the correct and most efficient way of dealing with things. Due to their exaggeration of their own importance or abilities, they can often be misperceived as being confident or self-assured people. This can have a strong influence on the child. The child will naturally begin to adopt the narcissistic parent's way of thinking, ideas and beliefs as their own, due to the narcissistic parent's arrogant and forceful personality.
It has a strong impression on the child. The child is receptive and willing to accept suggestions and ideas from the narcissistic parent. The problem is, the narcissistic parent does not have the ability to give the correct or suitable knowledge. They don't give them the right attitudes or ways of thinking. So inevitably the child will adopt the fixed mindset, ideas and beliefs of the narcissistic parent.
Narcissists do not develop their qualities or traits. Yet, they want to spread these qualities and traits around other people. They want to teach people to accept their way of thinking, their ideas and beliefs, without questioning them. So these undeveloped qualities and traits are then passed on to the child. Which gives the child an arrested psychological development. It keeps them stuck in an emotional level of development.
So your psychological and emotional age could be very different to your chronological age. A normal child grows out of arrested psychological development through occasions where they might gain approval from their parents, who will then respond with excessive admiration and praise? The child then acquires a more accurate sense of self and a set of personal ideals and values from these two processes. But if you were brought up by a narcissistic parent, you never had this.
You never received the admiration and praise that you needed to develop a more accurate sense of self and a set of personal ideals and values. As well as the narcissistic parent's neglect, arrested psychological development can be caused by childhood traumas or disturbances. Arrested psychological development is the cause of many personality disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder.
It creates a person who has an arrested development in their ways of thinking, their ideas and beliefs. Many of which are passed down from the narcissistic parent. Which could be things that they never developed or never resolved. Maybe the narcissistic parent had a limited experience in certain areas of life and this is what was passed down to the child. The narcissistic parent can only pass down what they have experienced or what they have learned in life.
If there was a lot of conflict or aggression in the narcissistic parent's life, this will be passed down to the child. The child can only learn what the narcissistic parent is giving to them. If the ways of thinking, ideas and beliefs are incorrect or inefficient, it is going to prevent the proper psychological development of the child, who is relying on the teachings of the narcissistic parent.
The child then leaves the family believing that they can succeed with these ways of thinking, ideas and beliefs. Once they go out into the community, they then realize that lacking the qualities or abilities to be able to compete in society. Because of this, many of them resort to manipulation or trying to control the environment, so that they can always hold the position of dominance or having the advantage.
Without the manipulation or control, they would never be able to compete. There would be no competition with people who have received the correct instruction or people who have been developing their abilities. They don't want to change, they don't want to develop anything. So when they try to compete with people who are developed, they have to resort to manipulation or trying to control the environment.
The way that the narcissistic parent passes down their ways of thinking and coping to their children, they are influencing their formation and development. They are molding the child to be just like them. Which means that they might experience the same failures. One of the children might experience something outside the narcissistic parent's teachings. They experience the effectiveness of this, over the teaching that they were given.
Because they were able to witness the effectiveness of this new teaching, they are more likely to change and adapt to these new circumstances. They may then adopt new ways of thinking, new ideas and beliefs which may be more effective in society. This is probably something that many of you have experienced. This person within the family is known as the scapegoat child.
The more productive and successful you become, the more hated you will become by the rest of the family, who choose to stay in that fixed mindset. They will reject or exclude you. Gossip about you behind your back. They will see you as an outcast. A person who has been rejected or ostracized by their family or social group. Because you are different to them, and you have chosen to reject their way of thinking, their fixed mindset.
You will feel as though you are different from whom you used to be back then. You have acquired different likes and interests, different patterns of behaviors.By rejecting the fixed mindset and adopting new ways of thinking, new ideas and beliefs, you have created the opportunity for growth. With growth comes change. And the more that you apply the knowledge that you have acquired from your growth, you may find that you begin to separate and distance yourself from those who choose to stay with the fixed mindset.
From those who are in a state of arrested development. As you continue to grow, you will continue to get better. You will develop your qualities and abilities and achieve greater levels of success. But people with the fixed mindset will never get better, they will never achieve a higher standard in life. They don't want to change or get better.
They prefer to focus on manipulation or trying to control the environment. Likewise, they remain stuck in a state of arrested development, where they never grow or change. They never develop their qualities or abilities, which means that they never achieve greater levels of success. They might get lucky occasionally, where their manipulation gives them the opportunity to acquire something. But it never lasts, it never sustains them.
They always go back to the standard that they are used to, the standard that they are more comfortable with. Because they don't want to grow or change. And they don't have the developed qualities or abilities that would be necessary to sustain anything that they acquired through manipulation. Fixed mindsets, ideas, and beliefs that are learned from a dysfunctional family will only make it difficult for them to compete with those who are in a constant state of growth and development.