According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; APA, 2013), narcissists are emotionally cold, lacking in empathy, and insensitive to the feelings and needs of others. What can you do if you’ve had a parent like this?

If we grow up with a narcissistic parent, we often struggle with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety (Määttäi, Määttä, Uusiautti, & Äärelä, 2020). Research has shown that children of narcissistic parents can even suffer from complex trauma (Mahoney, Rockspoone, & Hull, 2016).

Pi Venus Winslow, a survivor of narcissistic parenting, now works as a life coach to help others recover from such parenting. Narcissistic parenting, she told me in an interview, "trains us to be codependent and compliant. We can become people-pleasers with a desperate need to look good to maintain our image. We become acutely aware of other people's emotional states while being disconnected from our own."

“We struggle with low self-worth, inadequacy, and anxiety,” she explains. We have a lot of fear—"fear of judgment, rejection, and conflict. We may fear people in power.” And we can neglect our own physical and emotional health because our narcissistic parents neglected our needs.

“Believing that we're unlovable, unintelligent, we can develop a victim mentality,” she says. We get into relationships with other narcissists, she says, because the pattern feels “familiar to us.”

Our narcissistic parents did not provide us with what Abraham Maslow (1971) identified as our basic needs for food, shelter, safety, security, and love. As Winslow says, all children need “to be cared for, to be seen, to be understood. We need love; we need connection; we need significance, certainty, and security. And we need a sense of belonging and purpose.”

Winslow points out that “a lot of adult children of narcissistic parents really struggle with being emotionally stuck in old childlike ways of feeling.” We can become chronically stressed, hypervigilant, and easily triggered by........

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