6. People With Narcissistic Parents.
People who come from families where one or both parents exhibit highly narcissistic traits already have a built-in magnetism for narcissistic individuals in their adult lives. Throughout childhood, they had to learn to endure the endless manipulation, triangulation, gaslighting, lies, chaos and conflict, and since they were children who couldn’t turn to anyone else for care, they also learned to equate those things with love.
As adults, this confusion of love with chronic chaos, invalidation, and conflict may act as a perfect setup for entering a romantic relationship, friendship, work relationship, or any kind of relationship with the same presuppositions about what love is, which makes them very vulnerable to narcissists who need exactly that kind of person to be able to satisfy their ego-related needs through the same mechanisms this now adult person experienced with their parent or parents.
Recommended: “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”: How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility- By Dr. Ramani Durvasula PhD.
Essentially, even as adults, they are willing to endure these cruel cycles of idealization, devaluation, and discarding, narcissistic rage from their narcissistic partners, friends, bosses and sense some kind of familiarity, which is not deja vu from past lives or anything magical or metaphysical, but a recapitulation and repetition of the same patterns they were accustomed to in their family of origin and later in life.
The key to helping these people is getting into a therapeutic setting where they may be able to consciously recognize those narcissistic ties and patterns and view them as unhealthy, and hopefully, make a clear distinction between love and narcissistic abuse, which would help them get into and maintain healthy relationships characterized by joy, laughter, shared values and interest, relationships where they get the true meaning of the word love- respect, mutuality, reciprocity, consistency, and growth.
Read More: Things Only A Covert Narcissist Would Say.
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