Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents: The Echoes
Beth McLarnan
Adler Graduate School
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Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents: The Echoes
The term narcissist is often used to describe someone who is self-centered, conceited,
vain; or simply an insensitive, egotistical, know it all. As a personality trait, there is a notion that
a mild case of narcissism can actually be healthy, that it helps people cope with life‟s ups and
downs; while an intense or severe case is harmful, primarily to the narcissist themselves. The
understanding that severe psychological damage can be done by a true narcissist, to the people
who love them, is not widely understood or addressed; in many cases narcissism is minimized as
a form of mental illness. In an article about Narcissism in Psychology Today, Carl Vogel writes:
Intensely narcissistic people often live tumultuous lives, as few people can tolerate them
for long. But having a milder version of the personality type comes with many side
benefits. Subclinical narcissists are happy. They are less likely to be depressed, sad or
anxious, and rate their subjective well-being more highly. They're less reactive to stress,
and recover more rapidly from it. (Vogel, 2006)
How does one determine whether the level of narcissism present is mild or severe? A true
narcissist stays off the radar; in fact they are model citizens: they pay their bills on time, mow
their lawns every Saturday, attend church on Sundays, and are active members of the PTA.
Narcissists may be annoying, hard to get along with, ego-maniacs, but there is a certain level of
cultural admiration for the tyrannical, workaholic, CEO who came from nothing and built an
empire. They may be a jerk, but a successful jerk nonetheless, and their antics to be endured if
one wants to get ahead. Whether the tyrant is a boss or a spouse, psychologists advise their
clients to treat the narcissist as if they were temperamental children, to “butter them up, let them
be the center of attention, don‟t expect much, don‟t cross them, keep a sense of humor” (Vogel,
2006).
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This is very good advice if you‟re an adult, but what if the narcissist happens to be your
mother, father, or primary care giver? A parent who manipulates a child into meeting their own
emotional needs is no longer “charismatic, charming, exasperating or downright ludicrous“, but
cruel and abusive; the effects of which are rarely diagnosed or treated in the children or adult
children of narcissists. The symptoms of a narcissistic family system are exactly what make a
diagnosis so difficult−everything seems so “perfect”.
The emotional damage done by a narcissistic parent can, in many ways, be even more
devastating to the healthy ego-development of a child than overt abuse, because it is so insidious.
Although many of the same symptoms occur in the client‟s life that stem from the incest family,
the alcohol troubled family, the physically abusive family, and so forth, none of those issues
were present in the narcissistic family. In fact, the family of origin seems to have functioned
quite well—at least on the surface. Like “a shiny red apple with a worm inside”, the narcissistic
system hides its dysfunction, even from the people who grow up inside of it. This masking is
what makes treatment so difficult; you cannot heal what you do not understand.
The term narcissist is derived from the story in Greek Mythology about a beautiful young
man named Narcissus who was so infatuated with himself that he fell in love with his own
reflection in a pool of water. He grew so frustrated that he could not have the object of his
affection (himself) that, to end his suffering, he plunged a dagger into his heart and died. There is
another character in the story that is often forgotten: Echo. According to the story, Echo was a
beautiful, but overly chatty, nymph who was cursed by Hera so she could no longer form her
own words, only repeat what others said. When she falls in love with Narcissus and finally hears
him say “I love you”, she can finally tell him that she loves him too. She does not realize that he
was declaring his love for his own reflection, not for her. The story of Narcissus and Echo
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exemplify the narcissistic family system. Narcissus is the self-centered parent who looks for their
idealized image to be reflected in everyone and everything around them. Echo symbolizes the
child, who is a mirror for the narcissistic parent, and must reflect back their idealized image in
order to hear the words “I love you”. The child never learns to develop a separate “voice” that
expresses who they are or what they need. What they do develop, however, is an uncanny ability
to know who their narcissistic parent wants to be, and what they need. In a narcissistic family
system, the parent-child roles are reversed: if the child can correctly meet the emotional needs of
the parent, then maybe, just maybe, they will be loved in return.
In a healthy family, parents are able to see their children as separate individuals—they allow
them to express their own opinions and feelings; to make mistakes, to grow, and discover who
they are as people. John Bradshaw, the author of Healing the Shame that Binds You, writes:
What a child needs most is a firm but understanding caretaker, who needs to be getting
his or her own needs met through other adults. Such a caretaker needs to have resolved
the issues in their own source relationships, and needs to have a sense of self-
responsibility. When this is the case, such a caretaker can be available to the child and
provide what the child needs.” (Donaldson-Pressman, & Pressman, 1994, p. 94)
A narcissistic parent, however, is incapable of giving their child this understanding and
freedom. Just as the echo child needs someone to reflect in order to exist, the narcissist does not
exist without a reflection—and that reflection better be flawless or it will make the parent look,
and feel, like a failure. The parent‟s emotional needs are met by appearing perfect; they will
spend their lives striving for superiority in order to mask their deep feelings of inferiority. Alfred
Adler wrote:
The fundamental dynamic of human striving is a constant movement from a felt "minus"
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to an imagined "plus". The striving is influenced by: the type and intensity of the "minus"
feeling (inferiority or insecurity); the degree of activity; the strength of the feeling of
community; and the particular goal of an imagined "plus". (Stein, para. 15)
What exactly goes on in a narcissistic family on a day to day basis that makes it so damaging?
If an overtly narcissistic parent is an alcoholic dad who, in a rage, breaks furniture during the
sleep-over, or a neglectful mom in short shorts at the casino cussing like a sailor, then what does
a covertly narcissistic family look like? Unfortunately, it looks more like Joan Crawford with
drawn on eyebrows, and giant shoulder pads chasing little Christina around screaming, “No wire
hangers!” In Christina Crawford‟s memoir, Mommie Dearest, she exposes the abuse that went on
behind closed doors, shattering the façade of the loving family with perfect children that her
mother had so carefully manufactured. On the surface, Joan Crawford‟s four adopted children
were clean, well dressed and obedient. The house was beautiful, Joan Crawford was a successful
movie star and she bought the kids the best money could buy. After the memoir was published, a
few people who knew Joan believed what Christina said, but most of those closest to the family
denounced her as a spoiled brat who was trying to make money off of her dead mother. Bette
Davis was outraged by the book:
I was not Miss Crawford‟s biggest fan, but wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do
respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her
daughter. I‟ve forgotten her name. Horrible. What a vile way to cash in on her mother‟s
name. Miss Crawford wasn‟t my close friend, but what her daughter, who I understand
was adopted, did was absolutely vile. To do something like that, who saved you from the
orphanage, foster homes, who knows what. If she didn‟t like the person who chose to be
her mother, she was a grown up and could choose her own life. (Chandler, C. 2008, pp.
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283-284)
Christina Crawford‟s story is a perfect example of the Echo child. It was her duty to
unconditionally love her mother, but her mother‟s love was always conditional. In Christina‟s
book, she explains this role reversal beautifully:
The image was of a bottomless pit into which you could pour years of loving kindness,
and attempts at reconciliation, without visible results. It failed to erase the one
mistake…there just wasn‟t enough love in the world to fill her need…She demanded
constant reassurance of devotion that she left no room for love. It was impossible to love
her. (Nathiel, 2007, p. 45)
To a narcissist, love equals performance and performance equals love. Their thought process
is: “If you love me, you will make me look good, and when I look good, I will love you.”
However, the expectations of a narcissist change constantly—what pleased them yesterday may
incur their wrath the next, depending on the circumstances, or who they want to impress. The
secret and deep seeded fear of every narcissist is that they are truly worthless—that if they are
not better than, or at least as good as, everyone else, they are inferior, and therefore unlovable.
They are empty vessels needing continual reassurance, and their child can never be good enough,
for long enough, to be loved. Unfortunately, this failure to please is almost always interpreted by
the child as a result of their own inadequacy.
Since the parent‟s approval or disapproval is arbitrary and unpredictable, the Echo child can
never quite let their guard down. To trust, or feel safe, in a moment of peace, is to be
disappointed when the calm turns quickly into a storm, seemingly out of nowhere, and for no
apparent reason. They learn to not trust as children and, as adults, “they may want to form close
and loving relationships, but have difficulty letting down the barriers to trust they have erected”
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(Donaldson- Pressman & Pressman, 1994, pp. 13). To survive somewhat emotionally intact, these
barriers were necessary to the child‟s psychological and physical safety.
The need for psychological and physical safety as essential building blocks for the
development of trust is an elementary stage described in most developmental
psychological systems (including those of Erikson and Maslow). In a narcissistic system,
children learn to distrust their own feelings, perceptions and self-worth; this skewed
reality follows them into adulthood, affecting every area of their lives. “When one is
raised as a reactive/reflective being—as an Echo—one has not been taught the skills
necessary to live a satisfying life. (Donaldson-Pressman, & Pressman, p.18)
Communication in the Narcissistic Family System
There are rules in a covertly narcissistic family; elements that keep the narcissist feeling in
control, but keep the rest of the family in a constant state of wary anxiety.
The purpose of these rules is to insulate the parents from the emotional needs of their
children—to protect and hold intact the parent system. Therefore all of these unspoken
„rules for maintenance‟ of the narcissistic family system discourage open communication
of feelings by the children and limit their access to the parents, while giving the parents
unlimited access to the children. (Donaldson-Pressman & Pressman, 1994, p. 32)
How old is a child when the parent begins to sees them as a threat? Does it start as soon
as the baby comes home from the hospital? On the contrary, for the first twelve to twenty four
months, they are able to meet the infant‟s, physical and psychological needs, so that some level
of trust is formed between parent and child. When children are younger, their behavior is more
rewarding to the parent—they coo and giggle as infants, so that meeting their needs is more of a
task that requires very little emotional maturity on the part of the narcissistic parent. As the child
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grows, however, and begins to develop a unique, and separate identity, their opinions, and
healthy need for individuation causes the parent to feel threatened, and rejected. In a healthy
family, a toddler‟s constant questions, and defiance can be somewhat annoying, but to be
expected. For a narcissist, this natural curiosity, and independence is interpreted as being
intentionally hurtful.
Somewhere between infancy and adolescence, the parent loses focus (if they ever had it)
and stops seeing the child as a distinct individual with feelings and needs to be validated
and met. The child becomes, instead, an extension of the parent. Normal emotional
growth is seen as selfish or deficient, and this is what the parent mirrors to the child. For
the child to get approval she must meet a spoken or unspoken need of the parent;
approval is contingent on the child meeting the parent system‟s needs (Donaldson-
Pressman, & Pressman, 1994, p. 30).
The echo child learns, the hard way, to keep their feelings, problems, mistakes, questions, and
opinions to themselves, or face severe disapproval, rejection and punishment from their
narcissistic parent. If they do share their true selves in a moment of unguarded honesty, they may
find those intimacies thrown back in their face at a later date. The communication style of the
disapproving narcissist is indirect because they fear clear, and honest confrontation. Instead of
“Mary, will you please take out the garbage?” One hears: “It would be nice if someone besides
me took the garbage out once in awhile, do I have to do everything around here? Mary, I thought
you said you were going to do this, you let it get too full and the dog got into it! I suppose you‟re
on the phone with that girl who you said was skipping school. Well, go ahead, if you hang out
with losers long enough you‟ll end up one too.” The simple request to take out the garbage is not
about the garbage at all—it is a loaded gun of communication. Indirectly, the narcissist has used
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the garbage to: (1) elevate themselves as the only one who cares and actually does
„everything‟—insinuating that nobody else does anything; (2) singles out someone to blame for
the dog making a mess; and (3) brings up a previous confidence shared by Mary about her friend
skipping school, and equates Mary, the friend, and the full garbage can to Mary ending up a
loser. In this scenario, Mary may have just gotten home from school, or been helping the
neighbor lady find her cat, but that is of no concern to the narcissistic parent. Mary‟s feelings are
of no concern to this parent either, and to express them, or try explaining why she did not have
time to take the garbage out, is pointless.
A child that finds themselves in a similar situation to Mary‟s will respond to the parent in one
of two ways: fight or flight. To fight back is perceived as rebellious, selfish and disrespectful. To
choose the flight option will be mistakenly seen by the parent as compliant obedience. Either
way, the narcissist believes they are right, and the children was wrong—end of story. The
garbage is not just the garbage; this whole situation is another opportunity for the narcissist to
reassure themselves that they are not a failure as a parent; they are, in fact, a good parent by
pointing out how irresponsible Mary was. On the surface, that sounds like a reasonable
explanation that few would see as „child abuse‟, but it is. To cloak shame under the guise of
caring is precisely what causes such psychological damage to the Echo—they do not understand
why, if they are so loved, do they feel so worthless and unlovable? They conclude that what
mom or dad said about them must be true, that they really are ungrateful and lazy.
Another ineffective communication technique used in narcissistic families is triangulation.
The narcissistic parent uses a third party to talk through—a dog, a child, or even the other parent,
to create a buffer against intimacy, and to not accept responsibility for what they say or how they
say it. A more common and destructive form of triangulation is to use one person against another
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to form an “alliance” with the narcissist. This is sort of a “divide and conquer” technique where
the narcissist positions themselves so other family members cannot form relationships with each
other. The narcissist needs to be the center of attention, and sees close relationships within the
family much like a jealous child would: “If they love each other then they do not love me.” The
parent will gossip about one child to another, share intimacies about their spouse, betray
confidences or even make up lies in order to remain “in the loop”. The concept of intimacy
being established because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the way a narcissist tries to
feel in control. In other words, they believe: “If they do not like each other, then they will have to
love me”.
A narcissistic parent is essentially an emotional child who relates to their own child as a
“peer”— another adult who is trying to compete with them, or deliberately wants to make them
look bad. To a narcissist there is no “us”, there is only “them or me”. They live in a world that is
right or wrong, black or white, good or bad; if someone else is right then they must be wrong, if
someone else is loved then they are unloved, if someone disagrees with them, that means they
are trying to make them look stupid, and so on. Every feeling or experience of another is
somehow a reflection of the narcissist‟s worth and value—whether it has anything to do with
them or not. For example, if their child gets in trouble at school because they forgot their
homework and feels bad about it, the narcissistic parent‟s first thought will be embarrassment—
now the teacher will think they are a bad parent—they should have made sure the homework was
done. Instead of being empathetic, or using this as a teaching moment, they are angry. The child
is not permitted to express regret. The parent has already grabbed the situation, twisted it around,
pulled it to close to them, will manipulate the child into feeling guilty for making angry. The
narcissist has taken the focus off of the child‟s needs and placed it on themselves. The
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discouraged child is now expected to comfort the parent so they don‟t feel bad anymore.
When this form of emotional co-opting occurs repeatedly, year after year, a child not only
stops telling the parent anything that may upset them, they stop being consciously aware of their
true feelings at all. To feel is to be disappointed, so the protective walls go up, creating emotional
safety from the narcissist and from feeling hopeful. Why desire intimacy and closeness if it
means being rejected? Why bother just to be humiliated and emotionally abandoned? Trust leads
to pain; therefore, trust becomes synonymous with pain.
The process of building a protective wall around the heart is not a conscious one; it is the
magnificent brain‟s clever rewiring that helps the child survive a narcissistic system of emotional
abuse and neglect. Unaware that this rewiring has occurred, the adult child of a narcissist has
trouble figuring out why they have trouble with intimacy; why they lie when the truth would be
easier to tell, have anxiety attacks, or find themselves in abusive work situations over, and over
again.
Although the process of healing is difficult, it is possible for the Echo to find their voice and
live a healthy life. If their therapist or counselor is familiar with the narcissistic family system, it
is not difficult to spot an Echo client who displays ACOA symptoms, but whose childhood
seemed “fine”. What prevents someone who was raised in a narcissistic family from becoming
one? It is the presence of an adult in their life: a teacher, parent, aunt or neighbor, who,
knowingly or unknowingly, loved, and accepted them. If there was one person who did not get
mad if they made a mistake, or did not expect anything in return if they did the child a favor,
then through this healthy “mirror”, they could see themselves reflected as valuable, unique and
loveable. They could experience being “good enough”, just as they are. It is this same positive
parent-child model that will help heal the adult child of a narcissist. Not tough love, not behavior
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modification or psychoanalysis, but a healthy, truthful mirror of the client‟s inherent beauty that
is not based on what they do, but who they are. The beauty is flawed, imperfect, and prone to all
sorts of mistakes, and miss-steps; but these are to be accepted, and learned from, not feared. That
is the truth that will finally set the Echo child free.
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References
Chandler, C. (2008). Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Donaldson-Pressman, S. &. Pressman, R. (1994). The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and
Treatment. San Francisco: Jossy-Bass.
Nathiel, S. (2007). Daughters of Madness: growing up and older with a mentally ill mother.
Retrieved November 22, 2009, from Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OOnO0TLvQFEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q
=&f=false
Stein, H. (n.d.). Retrieved November 22, 2009, from Alfred Adler Institutes of San Francisco &
Northwestern University: http://home.att.net/~Adlerian/q-a-4.htm
Vogel, C. (2006, January 01). A Field Guide Narcissism. Retrieved November 14, 2009, from
Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200512/field-guide-
narcissism
