Narcissism-A Trauma Response

Healing from narcissistic abuse has actually become a trend these days. Although this is a good thing, it’s important to understand that narcissism is actually a learned behavior as a result of childhood trauma. I have seen unhealthy narcissist attributes in the majority of people, including myself. This is because as children, the majority of us were traumatized. There are many adults walking around that don’t even know that their parent’s parenting style was traumatizing and had lasting negative impacts on their psyche. This is because this way of parenting (punishing until the child submits) is normal in our society. We had narcissist parents that were traumatized by their parents. Their parents were narcissists that traumatized them and so on and so forth. 

I had no idea I was a narcissist until after I had my children. As they grew into toddlers I realized I was continuing the cycle of unhealthy parenting that was programmed into my brain during my own childhood. Part of my healing was stopping this cycle and implementing new perspectives into my psyche and healthier parenting strategies. This was the inspiration of my first book Becoming Whole Through Parenting. I had so many inner child wounds that my children were triggering me into these childhood flashbacks. I was going into flashbacks without having any awareness as to what was happening in my mind and body. Why was I so triggered? Why was I in a constant state of fight or flight? I wanted to become a better mom so I had to first admit to myself that my behavior had to change. This was extremely hard; But also liberating.

The majority of the population is experiencing similar flashbacks in their parenting, in their marriage, and in their relationships without having any awareness that they are experiencing a “flashback.” They will have some external experience that will shift their normal personality into one of a trauma based coping mechanism that was learned in childhood. These look very similar to narcissistic behaviors. Some develop trauma based narcissism which can be healed, and some people are narcissistic in their core, which unfortunately can not be healed. 

These different coping mechanisms are identified in the book Complex PTSD as the 4 F types: fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Yes, most of us are walking around with PTSD and do not even know it!

Another result of our trauma was to go into one far end of the polarity continuum. We adopted  “this or that” thinking. Which in other words is black and white thinking. Our psyches weren’t able to develop a balanced, well rounded, all encompassing way of thinking. Instead, our consciousness was split, segmented,  and fractured into pieces. This means as we grew and developed our minds gravitated to one end of the polarity spectrum. We learned to be in fight mode all the time. Or, we learned to not react at all and we were in freeze mode all the time. Some of us became hot, some of us became cold. Some of us learned to be extremely introverted, and some extremely extroverted. These aren’t just personality types, but ways we learned to cope with stress. A healthy psyche would have learned to fluctuate between introverted and extroverted tendencies. We would have learned to listen to our bodies and give our self quiet time when needed, and social time when needing connection. 

A healthy relationship with yourself is seeing your ability to move in a healthy way between doing and being, between holding on and letting go, between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation, between intense focus and relaxed day dreamy reverie. We are able to move and flow with our emotions when we have a healthy and balanced perspective. 

But for most of us we learned to cut off our emotions which resulted in split consciousness. “Negative” emotions were suppressed so much that it split our personalities, split our minds and split our energies into two. This causes good/bad, t”his or that” thinking which is a very limited and narrow perspective to hold. 

Part of healing is changing your perspective from seeing just “black” or just “white” and seeing that world is actually both colors. Not only is it black and white but also grey, yellow, red, green and orange too. There are many different “perspectives” or “truths” that can be held at the same time, even if they look contradictory. This takes our perspective from small and narrow, to all encompassing. We learn to grow and expand our consciousness to encompass both ends of the continuum which frees us from polarization–or what some like to call duality.

When we are able to see multiple perspectives simultaneously it relieves us from our trauma based narcissism. It will overflow into our relationships as we are able to solve conflicts better and see the other person’s point of view. We are able to honor our own experience and perspective, while acknowledging and honoring someone else’s experience and perspective as well; even if it is different than our own.