Being ‘The Problem Child’, or: Growing Up With Narcissism.

Six years into my journey of recovery from narcissism and childhood abuse, I understand with a comforting familiarity what Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘it was not that I didn’t remember, it was that I could not bring myself to remember.”

I grew up in a home that was constantly praised by people on the outside for its charity, its strong women, and its endurance. My mom liked to ‘take in strays’ as she called it, and express that she didn’t need a man to support her. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like an advanced, modern, feminist home in the ‘90’s, wherein my mother was raising two strong, young women to be independent and self-determining. But my mom was (or I guess, still is) a covert narcissist.

On the inside, my childhood home was a condemning, violent, shame-filled and unstable place. Police officers frequently knocked on our door during yelling matches. I was forced to work as early as 12, and hand money over to pay for rent and food, instead of my mother seeking proper governmental support for being a single parent. Where people saw my mother claiming she never needed a man to fulfill her, I heard constant vitriol about my father and how terrible all men are. Where people saw a supportive mother who wanted to be close to her children, I had a mother who asked if she really had to show up to my school plays, concerts, and recitals and wasn’t I a little old to need so much attention? Where people thought I was spoiled, I experienced a mother who, each year, told me this birthday was going to be my last. I was manipulated, scapegoated, gaslit, physically and sexually abused, publicly humiliated and blamed.

By 13 years old, I was suicidal. By 14, I was drinking and smoking heroin. By 16, I was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and I rarely made an appearance at home during evenings, weekends or holidays. I quickly became what any dysfunctional family unit would call ‘The Problem Child’. Afraid to face their own truths, most of the negative attention of the family was directed at me. I took on the blame for the general misery and toxic environment that was my childhood home.

 This is manipulative work of a narcissist: the projection of an outward image of perfection while creating a cruel and cold environment with their families.

For many years, I felt very confused. Once I got sober, the confusion seemed to intensify: Drinking was an amazing way to numb the pain of lost memories and a short-lived childhood riddled with neglect and abuse.

 It has taken me thirty years to come out of the fog of narcissistic abuse. I am still emerging from the fog on a daily basis. Sometimes, I will simply be reading a book that triggers a realization and suddenly, I am in a black hole of grief. For three days, I will be thinking to myself ‘how did I not remember that?’, then I am left reliving and re-feeling all the pain that was not safe for me to feel as a young child.

After being in the work of untangling my life from abuse for the past six years, I realize there were signs that there was significant abuse in my childhood all along. I just didn’t know how to read them. 

1.     My childhood memories were all hazy

For many years, I only remembered what I would call ‘black spots’ in my childhood. Before the age of 13 or 14, there were big swaths of time that seemed to be completely erased from my memory.

I would try to look back and think about my childhood, or what it was like growing up and I couldn’t. Not only could I not recall what I now know to be abuse with any clarity, but I could not recall ‘the good times’ either.

My entire childhood was a black hole that I could not see through until I gained some physical and mental sobriety.

Outside resources such as ACA, therapy and reading about CPTSD has helped me to identify the abuse. They’ve also helped me to recall memories from my own childhood.

2.     Something felt ‘off’, but I never knew what

Things always felt terrible when I was a child. There were countless days that I would be ‘sick’ and not go to school. I frequently missed class in high school. I was constantly exhausted, suffering severe migraines, stomach pains and intense body aches. I would have mystery illnesses for days that no one could diagnose. They would just one day disappear. I had an eating disorder.

Going home always felt like a death sentence to me. After a day of school or a weekend at work, coming home felt like crawling into a coffin. Coming home after spending a weekend at a friend’s place felt like burying myself again and again. And I spent many weekends at friends’ places.

I could never put my finger on why I hated being at home so much, or why being around my family caused so much anxiety. I could never figure out why I had such severe panic episodes, depression, and dissociation.

Eventually, I learned about covert narcissism and the dysfunctional family unit. It was as if someone pinned my life on the donkey’s ass, for the first time ever.

The gnawing feeling in my stomach that I have felt my whole life, intensified until eventually it moved into my throat and came out as I spoke my truth.

3.     Alcohol and drugs felt grounding to me

The only thing that got me through the things I could not bring myself to remember was drugs and alcohol.

Growing up, I was often stuck in a day dream, not grounded in reality. Day dreaming was a huge escape for me as a child. I had to be able to dream that somewhere, somehow, life was better and easier than this.

Once I found drugs and alcohol at 13, I felt my feet touch the ground. My shoulders relaxed. My jaw unclenched. I laughed easier. Not only that, the thoughts of dying and hating myself started to float away.

It became my only ark in a flooded plain of abuse and terror.

Alcohol brought me to myself before it brought me to my knees. (But after that, I needed community-care of course).

In recognizing the signs in the past few years, much of the fog created by abuse and narcissism has lifted. I am still pulling on strings and seeing what belief system or memory unravels with a simple tug. I am constantly amazed at the well of memory in my body that needs to be released.

When you begin to heal from growing up in a narcissistic home and undo the damage of being the generational Problem Child, you begin to see them everywhere: in the grocery stores being ignored by dad, on the streets being shamed by mom, even in your friends homes, being bullied by their older sisters. Each time I encounter one of my own, I pass on an immense amount of golden light, casting a protective shell around them.

I pray that they too will be lifted from the fog. If not today, then tomorrow, or the next day. But I pray for them that it happens, just as it happens to me, and that one day they can speak the truth that is silenced inside them for years to come.