Growing up in a toxic household can, unfortunately, influence your psychological and emotional personality as an adult in a negative way, especially if you have narcissistic parents. So, if you were raised by narcissistic parents, these 18 common adult traits may be relatable.
Struggle with Self-esteem
Children of narcissistic parents often battle with low self-esteem. This is impacted by their parents constantly criticizing or comparing them to others, which makes them feel inadequate. This can also impact other areas of your life and, if not dealt with, can keep you in a constant comparison mode with others.
Difficulty Setting Boundaries
When your narcissistic parents are inclined to overstep your boundaries, it makes it difficult for you to say no to things and people as an adult. You might go through life feeling selfish or guilty constantly, especially when you need to assert your needs.
Chronic Self-Doubt
Growing up in an environment where your achievements were minimized, or your decisions were constantly questioned can instill a deep sense of self-doubt, affecting your ability to trust your judgment. This chronic self-doubt, as Choosing Therapy reveals, leads to excessive people-pleasing behaviors later in life.
Hypersensitivity to Criticism
Because children are often exposed to constant criticism from their parents, anything you say to them can be triggering or a personal attack. This will continue into their adulthood, where they will show hypersensitivity to criticism, even if you are giving them constructive feedback.
Difficulty Trusting Others
Living with narcissistic parents isn’t the best environment to be in, and many times, children are exposed to manipulative behaviors as well as feelings of betrayal. This can result in deep-seated trust issues in both professional and personal relationships, with victims finding it hard to trust even the most genuine personalities.
Perfectionism
Many times, when someone is an extreme perfectionist, it could mean that they were raised in a household where their parents were the same, which heavily influenced them. One of the common characteristics of narcissistic parents is adopting high standards, hence why this trait is so common.
Feeling Responsible for Others’ Emotions
The burden of managing your parent’s emotional well-being comes with being raised in a home with narcissistic parents. As expected, this belief system carries on into your adult life—you feel responsible for others’ emotional well-being, whether in professional or personal relationships, and it can be a heavy burden for many.
Struggle with Empathy
Empathy allows you to build healthy social connections with others. Children who struggle or lack empathy struggle to read the room—they can’t identify people’s feelings and emotional states easily. Psychology Today says this is a common trait of a narcissist, and unfortunately, it will also rub off on any child they raise.
Fear of Abandonment
Parents who have narcissistic tendencies are prone to being inconsistent in their emotional support for their children. When you face this as a child, you, too, become the same and start fostering an acute fear of abandonment. This influences how close your relationships can get or how far apart they can be.
Overachieving or Underachieving
Being an overachiever isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but upholding a particular family image through constant achievements can be detrimental to one’s mental and physical well-being as a child. Sadly, this doesn’t stop in adolescence, and due to burnout, striving to overachieve will only lead to underachievement.
Anxiety and Depression
The emotional turbulence experienced by being raised by narcissistic parents can have a deep impact on long-term traits in children, such as their emotional and mental health. More often than not, environments like these produce adults who suffer from depression and anxiety.
Attraction to Narcissistic Relationships
Because someone is so used to being raised by narcissists, they will be more familiar with this on an unconscious level. Tragically, this automatically, without even knowing it, unconsciously draws them toward similar dynamics in their relationships, continuing the cycle of emotional abuse.
Constant Need for Validation
Seeking external validation becomes a coping mechanism when narcissistic parents only recognize their child’s biggest achievements. This leads to constant dependency on others for validation and self-worth, as CNBC asserts that narcissistic parents only “flaunt their children loudly when they score a winning goal or get a part in the school play.”
Difficulty Enjoying Success
Even though you may be a highly successful individual, when you are surrounded by these toxic characteristics, you find it difficult to enjoy your success. You may even feel discomfort or guilt about it. This derives from your parent’s need to use your successes and accomplishments to boost their egos.
Emotional Detachment
It’s easier for individuals raised in narcissistic households to emotionally detach from others than it is for those who are brought up in loving, healthy families. Being emotionally detached from your feelings helps you cope with the unpredictability of relationships and life itself.
Complex Relationship with Anger
Due to the fear of reaction from your narcissistic mother and father as a child, you may start suppressing your anger as an adult, and bottling this up can be extremely harmful to you and those around you. You may even show a tendency to express repressed anger into frustration or worse.
Fear of Rejection
PsychCentral explains that unconditional love is a more positive approach than conditional love, but sadly, anyone raised by narcissistic parents will only experience love conditional on how they behave. Naturally, this can negatively impact them and bring up fears of rejection, which is reflected in their unhealthy relationships with others.
Sense of Isolation
Finally, if you have had a narcissistic upbringing, trying to understand others can be difficult. Being brought up in a loving and supportive family will be unfamiliar to you, which will sadly isolate you, causing you to withdraw from many social scenarios. So, if you notice a friend experiencing these symptoms, make sure you show them some support.
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