How narcissistic parents can prevent you from experiencing love and joy

Having a narcissistic or self-absorbed parent can cause you to form emotional callouses. You may be so used to disappointment that you learn to not have high standards. They can’t hurt you by withholding love if you don’t expect any love from them.

This is a winning strategy for a kid because it protects the child from feeling more hurt. It is beyond the mind of an eight-year old to reason that ‘dad doesn’t show love from me because he was conditioned by society and his own father not to.’ The eight-year old just knows that not receiving love really really hurts and they got to stop that kind of pain from happening.

The cost of this adaptation is that the brain has trouble containing things so neatly. It may not just say ‘dad = no love’, it may also say ‘no one will love you so don’t try and find love’. It may say people can’t ever be trusted with your heart, so don’t hand it over to anyone. Nothing gambled, nothing lost.

It can even stop you from feeling great happiness at any point. The adaptation can protect you from great pain, but at the cost of rarely feeling great joy. Both emotions are at extreme ends of the scale, and by cutting off emotional access to one, you lose the other. If you are calloused to disappointment, then your mind can never risk feeling too high, because that leaves you at risk of a gigantic fall.

Without bringing these adaptations to awareness through self-work and therapy, the risk is that you may numbly zombie walk your way through life. Therapy can help first in the awareness part, and later in actionable steps around being comfortable with risk. Together we can flip the script and learn that it is indeed safe to have hopes for love, security, and joy.