Adult Children of Narcissists Show These 23 Behaviors
Were you raised by a narcissistic parent? Here are 23 behaviors you may relate to.
Written by Shahida Arabi, MA, published trauma expert and researcher
An earlier version of this article first appeared in other publications in February, 2024; copyright belongs to author, Shahida Arabi.
Your life doesn’t stop being traumatic once you turn eighteen. It continues as a cycle of trauma reenactment. You may wonder why you become easily entrapped in toxic relationships with people who resemble your parents or exploitative friendships that seem to reenact your childhood adversity. This is because adult children of narcissists tend to become subconsciously drawn to dangerous people as a result of their upbringing. Their bodies and minds are accustomed to chaos and even biochemically “addicted” to it due to these early traumas. You are still working through ancient programming and beliefs.
Your independence is vital for your own safety and well-being. So is your alone time. Being hyper-independent and alone most of the time may seem like a lonesome burden to people who weren’t raised by a toxic parent. But for you, it’s absolute bliss. Being alone means you finally get to choose who gets to be in your life and who has the ability to affect your emotions on a daily basis – a choice you never got to make as a child when you were constantly bombarded with the problems of the adults who were supposed to take care of you. As an adult, you find yourself savoring your alone time as you give your nervous system the time and space it always needed to heal.
You gravitate toward narcissists, and they gravitate towards you. Dangerous people and situations ironically feel more like “home” than safe ones, and you find yourself always waiting for the other shoe to drop. You find yourself easily entangled in relationships or friendships with narcissists in adulthood – and paradoxically, this can initially feel “safer” than a healthy relationship, which is not in line with your sense of “normal.” You don’t trust what seems “too good to be true” or what’s easily handed to you, because you had to work hard for everything you have now and even had to endure punishment or nitpicking when you achieved amazing things as a child. Instead, you find yourself waiting for the “catch” (even when there is none) when it comes to happy and safe relationships, accomplishments, or situations. Your subconscious mind operates on the philosophy that, “It’s better the devil you know than the one you don’t.”
You’re hypervigilant – to everything. At the same time, you’d make a great FBI agent or detective. You may feel like you’re always on alert for what’s around the corner. That’s because your childhood trained you to pick up on subtle signs that chaos was about to ensue – the sound of your father’s footsteps may have clued you in as to when he was about to rage, or the shrill shriek of your sibling may have alerted you to abuse going on in the next room. You are especially adept at reading microexpressions, shifts in tone, gestures, and nonverbal cues. This hyper-attunement to danger can serve as a superpower that helps you identify red flags and toxic people – but it can also be exhausting to be so attentive to everything at all times.
You were an adult before you ever got to be a child – and now, you sometimes still feel like a child in an adult’s body. You may have grown up being told that you were very “mature” for your age. People often comment on how you seem to have wisdom beyond your years. Yet as an adult you find yourself still feeling like a child at times. That’s because as a kid, you were simultaneously infantilized and parentified. Narcissistic parents demean their children into feeling like they can’t venture out into the world on their own without their help to keep them dependent on them; on the other hand, they also shoulder their children with the burden of being parents to their parents.
This parentification trains young children to manage the emotions of their parents while also failing to meet their basic developmental needs. As an adult, you’re a natural caretaker. You “picked up” after the adults in your life, tending to their issues at a young age, ensuring theywere taken care of. In adulthood, you may repeat this pattern and be prone to codependency in relationships, becoming overly empathic to toxic people who drain your energy. You grapple with the unmet needs of childhood as you learn to set healthier boundaries and reparent yourself.
You have a deep craving for connection – yet it scares the living daylights out of you. Narcissistic parents tend to become enmeshed with their children, treating them like objects and extensions of themselves. As an adult, becoming too “close” to someone frightens you because that means they have the power to harm you and take over your life. You tend to feel “suffocated” in relationships, even if you have a pattern of jumping from one relationship to another…