Narcissistic parents lack the ability to validate their children. Their brains are wired differently, and it is pointless to seek validation from them.
Narcissists cannot process empathy. Their selfishness means that they actively seek to use people, including their own children.
Your unprocessed pain doesn't disappear. It just changes addresses, moving from one relationship to the next. Until you sit with it, feel it, and let it go. Emotional maturity is feeling your emotions without becoming them and feeling your pain without becoming its narrative.
Hard truths about human emotions that nobody teaches you:
1. Anger is almost never the primary emotion. It is usually fear, shame, or hurt wearing a mask.
2. You cannot logic your way out of an emotion. You have to feel it first.
3. Jealousy is information,it tells you exactly what you want but won't admit to yourself.
4. Most arguments between people are not about the topic being argued. They are about feeling unseen.
5. Suppressing emotions does not make them disappear. It stores them in the body as tension and illness.
6. Grief does not follow stages neatly. It arrives randomly, years later, in grocery stores and traffic jams.
7. Humans feel physical pain from social rejection because the brain processes both in the same region.
8. You cannot genuinely feel gratitude and anxiety simultaneously. One always cancels the other.
9. The emotion you judge most harshly in others is usually the one you refuse to acknowledge in yourself.
10. Emotional regulation is a skill not a personality trait. It can be learned at any age.
11. Most people confuse emotional numbness with emotional strength. They are complete opposites.
12. The most painful human experience is not loss or failure,it is spending your life being someone you are not
To know that you’re a genuinely good person and only want to help people and then to see a narcissist have a a seathing hatred for you, like they are aggressively focused on you with intense anger like they really want you dead, as if you’re some kind of a monster, as if you’ve done something unthinkably bad like you’ve murdered their whole family or something, and you have no idea where it’s coming from. Like it makes no sense, you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. Like they’ve fabricated this entire alternate reality completely on their own. It’s so bizarr.
And then they have to justify that anger to others because they can’t let anyone else figure out how irrational they really are.
So they convinced everyone that this innocent person really did do something terrible for them to be so angry and obsessed.
Until you’ve seen that, you just can’t understand how detached, dangerous and disturbing malignant narcissists really are.
Michael Mott, a 41-year-old with 20 prior arrests including attempted murder, was identified as the man who walked in front of a Frontier plane in a near-disaster at an airport shortly after a recent arrest.
Dr. Stephen Porges is the neuroscientist who created polyvagal theory after 50 years studying the autonomic nervous system.
Polyvagal theory reveals 10 signals your nervous system is stuck in chronic threat mode (& you don't realize it):
1) Voice tight all day.
@Theholisticpsyc When someone is driven by shame, they often choose control over connection. The lesson isn’t to fix them it’s to stay grounded in your values and protect your peace.
Malignant narcissists are viciously abusive—but what makes them so devastating is who they choose to target. They don’t attack people for bad behavior; they attack people for being pathologically healthy. They go after the innocent, the non-aggressive, the genuinely good. It’s as if they’re determined to pull out the worst in someone just to “prove” they were never a good person. They aim to destroy good people for the sake of it.
Why?
For a narcissist, reality is a competition for moral high ground—one they can’t win honestly.
Good people naturally earn respect, trust, and affection through their character. To a narcissist, this feels like an existential threat. If others see someone else as more admirable, it exposes the narcissist’s own emptiness.
So they flip the script. If they can drag a good person down—make them lose their composure, tarnish their reputation, or look hypocritical—they erase the contrast. It’s not just about hurting the victim; it’s about proving to themselves and everyone else that no one is truly better than them.
Covert narcissists can be difficult to see through if you’ve never been abused directly by one before. And even then, it can be hard to believe. They work obsessively to create a false public image of innocence or even of being an activist of positively regarded functions.
Only privately do certain people see their true intent, the callousness, selfishness, recklessness, negligence, often sadistic, carefully selective abuse these individuals commit discreetly or on a one-to-one basis.
It thrills them to know they’ve procured such a solid public image of being innocent or trustworthy, that they can be blatantly abusive in private, knowing that their victim will only look crazy or dishonest if they try to expose the covert narcissist for what they really are.
Your family called you "selfish" for having boundaries, "ungrateful" for wanting respect, "difficult" for refusing their version of you. They were describing your strength, not your weakness.
@SerahOceane I wish that women had been respected by the church when I was growing up. Male dominance taught by the church and in my family did me no favors. It only caused me to shrink and not stand up for myself.
#CPTSD#ChildhoodSexualAbuse#SBC