His trauma became our trauma

Imagine a 7 year old child that has a Dad for a bully. He yells and rages, intimidating everyone. His demands are exceptional with no room for mistakes. When asked a question, you have to carefully choose your words. Working hard to not upset him. If you answer the “wrong” way, he blows up at you and maybe even strikes you. You are always worried about upsetting him. Talking to him is not safe.

Mom is a peacemaker, trying hard to tiptoe around dad and keep everyone happy. She runs interference as much as she can between you and your dad. Thus, Dad’s anger is often directed at her. He pushes her, hits her, and even throws her against a wall. This is not an environment that promotes a feeling of safety. Even if this only happens once in a while, that feeling of safety will not coexist with this.

Going to bed at night is not safe. Their arguments in the middle of the night shock you out of a deep sleep. You are startled by the yelling and slamming of doors. You try to hide under your covers and drown out the sound with your pillow, but this does not work. Then, in the wee hours of the morning, dad drags you out of bed and forces you to pick who is right. Forcibly standing you between himself and mom, he demands an answer from you. 

“Mom said this…I think that…Who is right?” The silence is deafening! All you can hear is your heart pounding out of your chest. Your mind is spinning in a thousand directions. How many answers can you consider in a moment’s span of time? You clearly don’t feel safe and you shouldn’t. Your feelings are quite valid.

The Effects of dealing with Trauma

Trauma causes people to make changes in the way they interact with their world. Safety is a perception. When we experience trauma, our system will work hard to re-establish a perceived sense of safety. What behaviors do we pick up then in response to this trauma?

Let’s go back to this 7 year old child. There is not a perceived sense of safety around dad. But this is the living situation and a daily part of this child’s life. Living without a feeling of safety is horrendous. Our system will work in overdrive to re-establish a sense of safety.

So what behaviors does this 7 year old child learn?

When standing between the parents, dad demanding that you pick sides and mom in horrified tears, you learn to control and manipulate your words. You can’t choose between mom and dad. Nor should you have to, but here you are. “I need to protect mom, and I need to not upset dad.” Let the tap dancing begin. You learn to circle the conversation around to avoid taking sides. You learn to skirt the issues. You learn to appease with empty words. You learn to say what is needed to get the job done and to get yourself out of the situation.

In your daily life at home, when dad is excessively angry, demanding, and aimed at you, what does 7 year old you learn? You learn that communication is not safe. You learn that being vulnerable is dangerous, especially around people who are supposed to love you and care for you. You learn to take care of yourself and to avoid dad’s feelings. You learn to use your words in order to figure out what dad wants to hear so he will stop talking. You learn to manipulate words and to dodge any responsibility. You learn that it isn’t safe to be genuine and spontaneous. You learn that you cannot trust the words of your loved one, and that you cannot trust their intentions.

What about mom in this picture?

Mom pretends that everything is okay. She so badly wants everything to be ok that she overcompensates for dad’s behavior. She convinces herself and this 7 year old child that everything is fine. From a genuine desire to offset the damage being done, she praises this child for everything they do. 

What does 7 year old you learn from mom?

How to pretend that everything is fine. How to forget about any of the problems and pretend they didn’t happen. How to just move on in life. This lays the foundation for abuse amnesia. Ever heard of that? It’s when the abusive behavior seems to just vanish. It disappears into thin air. It went to never never land. Never to be talked about again. Never to be brought up. Never to be resolved.

In never never land, we just seem to return to this weird place of okayness. Things are just okay. Everything moves forward with some sort of normalcy. You’re looking around wondering if anyone else saw that. Wondering what happened to the issue that we just survived, where did it go? Do I dare to bring it up again? NOPE. If they can pretend that it didn’t happen, then so can I. We join them on the journey to Never Never Land.

This 7 year old gets older. I would say that they grow up, or do they? If they do not have the emotional support to face this trauma, to voice it, to process it, then this trauma carries forward. It gets passed onto others.

What children of covert narcissists’ learn

Remember what this child learned

• to manipulate conversations in order to keep themselves safe

• to skirt the issues and say whatever is needed to get out of the situation

• to dodge responsibility and accountability

• to not trust

• that vulnerability isn’t safe and should be avoided at all costs

• to forget about the bad behavior as quickly as possible

• to pretend like everything is fine

• to live in Never Never Land

These learned behaviors that served the purpose of keeping them safe become a part of their everyday life. This becomes how they interact, especially with those closest to them, the ones that make them feel vulnerable. In trying to survive and avoid this trauma, they simply carry the effects of it into the lives of their own family. As an adult, they believe that it is a thing of the past and that it stayed in the past. In reality, it is very much so a thing of their present and will continue into their future. And they don’t even realize it.

Imagine a young driver has had a car accident and quickly learned to be tense as a driver. In the car, they are reactive to everyone around them. They yell at their own kids for any tiny noise or distraction in the vehicle. These kids learn that being in the car isn’t safe, so they become tense in the vehicle. As they grow up and become young drivers, the tension and reactiveness carries on with them. Their own hypervigilance creates an unsafe situation, creating the very problem the parent is trying to avoid. This parent’s trauma becomes their child’s trauma.

The covert narcissist’s wall of self-protection

Narcissistic traits are a form of self-protection from traumas that one has experienced. If these were during childhood, this is before a child is old enough to have coping skills in place to handle trauma. They rely completely on the reactive survival instincts. If this is within their own home, from their caregivers, then normalizing this behavior is also happening. They think that every home is like their home, every family is like their family. They believe that that is normal and how everyone interacts. Thus these survival skills are here to stay!

My husband’s childhood was filled with trauma. Yes, he had some good times. There were pleasant memories in his past. However, there were some extremely traumatic ones too. His father was aggressive, antagonistic, abrasive, and abusive. To both my husband and his mom. At a very young age, life became not safe for my husband. Thus he put survival tactics in place. 

A defensive wall to hide behind, a facade to make him look good and hide his internal self, manipulating others to get his way, making sure that nothing was his fault, skirting responsibilities, and passing the blame. This left me and the kids feeling distant and hurt. His defensive wall left gaping holes in our relationships. No way to be close to him. No way to be vulnerable around him. No way to be spontaneous and genuine. Instead, we felt like everything was our fault, carrying all the blame. So the very thing that he was protecting himself against as a child is exactly what he created in adulthood. It is self-sabotaging, and I don’t think he had any idea.

His trauma became our trauma.

This is why it is so crucial to do some trauma healing, for yourself and then learn to help your children. I have recently become certified in trauma coaching. I do offer individual trauma-informed coaching. It’s time to help our kids while they are still young. It’s time to break these cycles. I wish you so much peace on your journey of healing.

The Emotional Dysregulation of a Covert Narcissist

I’m mad! So I yell at you, punch the wall, storm off, stomp my feet, shove the chair, and slam the bedroom door! I don’t care that you don’t like it! I don’t care that you now feel bad. In fact, I’m going to wait in my room until you come and apologize to me! Who am I?

I'm a 2 year old toddler throwing a fit, or a teenager dealing with hormones, social anxiety, and overwhelming schoolwork, or a full-grown adult covert narcissist.

How do you handle the situation?

For the 2 year old, you parent them. You take away their favorite toy, have them take a time out, and let them know that this behavior is not okay. You talk with them about emotions. Help them to learn how to handle being angry, and tell them that you love them.

For the teenager, you probably ground them. Take away their phone and the car, can’t spend time with their friends. Cancel their fun events. And encourage them to make amends. You talk with them about how their behaviors affect those around them, trying to help them to see outside of themselves. And you try to connect with them and you tell them that you love them.

For the adult covert narcissist, you tiptoe around them. Figure out what set them off and add that to your checklist of things to make sure never happen again. After countless attempts of trying to connect with them, resulting only in circular conversations, you instead wait for this behavior to disappear, for the abuse amnesia to set in, and you both pretend that it never happened.

The problem is this behavior is the same from a 2 year old, to a teenager, to a full-grown adult. As such, it is understandable from a toddler, expected from a teenager, and shocking from an adult.

What is Emotional Regulation?

When asked what is emotional regulation and how do you teach it to your children, let’s start by identifying what it is not.

• It is not spilling your emotions all over the other person

• It is not when someone is experiencing negative emotions and thus treats the people around them with sharpness, blame, rage, entitled anger, yelling, slamming doors, and breaking things. This is like kicking the dog because you are mad.

• It’s not, “I’m mad, so I can do whatever I want. You better get out of my way.”

This is entitlement. While everyone does have a right to get angry at times, this does not give you the right to stomp all over everyone else’s feelings, to behave like a 2 year old or a hormonal teenager.

Emotional regulation also is not the sulking victim mode. Being cold and distant, using the silent treatment. Sulking around, dropping self-care, disassociating, addictions. Being defensive and hypersensitive. This also leads to the people around you walking on eggshells to keep you happy. Going out of their way to meet your needs and expectations to avoid the painfulness of your cold and harsh attitude. 

So what does healthy emotional regulation actually look like?

Let’s look at it first in you and then you can work on teaching this to your children. You cannot teach this to your children if you don’t know how to do it yourself. You have to put your own oxygen mask on first and then help you child. 

You may have heard of the saying “Do as I say, not as I do.” That really doesn’t work in parenting. You can’t tell them to spend less time on electronics, while your nose is in your phone all the time. They will do as you do, not as you say. You can’t tell them to treat others with respect while you walk all over people and treat them with disdain. This won’t help your kids to learn courtesy and respect.

You can say whatever you want. Your words mean nothing if you aren’t listening to them yourself. Don’t try to teach emotional regulation to your kids while you are emotionally dysregulated. So let’s start with you!

Identify your emotions

It starts with learning to identify your own emotions and admit them to yourself. Give yourself the permission to be human! Use the emotions wheel. Work on understanding how you are feeling. Don’t just ignore the chemistry that is going on inside of you. Instead, work with it and make peace with it.

Say things like, “I am overwhelmed today. Life feels heavy, scary, uncertain. This feels horrible to me. I really just want to take a break from the weight of it.”

Or “I feel really optimistic today. I am hopeful for what is coming, eager and motivated to move forward. This feels good to me.”

Everyday or most days write down how you are feeling in 2-3 sentences. Get used to acknowledging your feelings. Start verbalizing them. Tell them to a few trusted friends or family members.

Now, Help Your children

Help them to do these same things, especially after you have a little practice at it. Encourage them to write them down in a couple of sentences of their own. Give your kids an emotions pillow, keychain, or poster. Talk through all the different emotions on it. Get them a journal to use. Encourage them to write about their own feelings too. Identifying the emotions and learning to read them is a starting point. Now what do we do with them?

Express your Emotions

Learning to express your emotions in a healthy way is extremely important, both for you and those around you. What does it mean to express your emotions? Let’s begin again by looking at what it is not.

Not expressing your emotions is not emotional regulation. There is a misconception here and I want to address it here. Emotional regulation doesn’t mean don’t ever be emotional. We seem to put this expectation on ourselves. We over-regulate, putting a huge cap on our own emotions, shoving everything inside and bottling it all up.

In fact, we often praise people for being able to stay silent and controlled, swallowing their feelings, remaining stoic. They are so mature and capable. It’s like their feelings don’t exist.

This isn’t healthy and it isn’t sustainable. You become like a psychological grenade, just waiting to explode or implode. This can manifest as either or both physical issues and mental struggles.

Many victims of covert narcissistic abuse think that they are managing the situation really well by keeping their thoughts and feelings to themselves. Swallowing their own feelings, they stay silent. Anything else is too risky. Yes, this is a timebomb waiting to go off. And it doesn’t do our kids any favors.

Exercise for Emotional Expression

So how do we express our emotions in healthy ways? Write down each of the main emotions, happy, sad, angry, fearful. Under each one, write a few ways to express that emotion. 

Happy

• Sing and dance

• Go for a walk

• Call a friend

Sad

• Curl up in bed with a stuffed animal

• Hold you dog or cat

• Have a good cry

Angry

• Go outside and let out a scream

• Hit your pillow or a workout bag

• Go for a run

• Spend time alone

Fearful

• Call a friend and tell them about your fear

• Listen to comforting music

• Pray or meditate

As you get better at this, start including the more refined emotions, such as anxious, busy, vulnerable, or distant. Do this same activity with your kid. Help them make their own list. It can and should be different from yours. There are no right or wrong answers here. Learning to express your own emotions is an individual journey. Even for our young ones. Encourage them to be creative.

Healthy Expression of your emotions

Healthy expression of your emotions does not always come out calm and peaceful. It isn’t always controlled and mature. Sometimes it needs to be explosive and seemingly out of control. This is healthy, but must be done in a way that doesn’t stomp all over those around us. For example, you may have a strong emotional reaction to your child not being ready to walk out the door on time. You are so frustrated with this repeated offense, and you just want to get moving. You don’t start screaming at them, threatening them, grabbing them. You might tell them to meet you in the car, walk out ahead of them, get in the car, and let out a frustrated scream alone. You aren’t losing your mind. You aren’t going crazy. It is okay for you to have an emotional response to the situation. You don’t have to be stoic and unreactive, showing extreme patience, chasing away your own feelings. Instead, acknowledge how you feel, name it, express it, feel it and process it.

There is nothing easy about this walk, especially when you are in a narcissistic relationship. But you can do this! It gets easier too, the more you do it. Especially when you begin to see and feel the benefits. Reconnecting your head and heart back together is a significant part of the recovery from cognitive dissonance. Your heart already has its feelings. Help your mind to get on board with it. I wish you so much peace on your journey of healing.