Comments on: Raising a Narcissist

By: Neil Petersen

Neil Petersen — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 20:21:08 +0000

In reply to Sarah-anne Lake. Hi Sarah-anne, glad to hear you have moved past that relationship. It's always sad when adults have these types of relationships with their parents that prevent them from enjoying their independent adult lives. Ultimately, it's something that the person who is affected has to solve, with the help of a therapist, and if that doesn't happen sometimes the people around them just have to move on.

By: Sarah-anne Lake

Sarah-anne Lake — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 08:33:44 +0000

I dated a man for years who’s mother invalidated him when he was growing up and his father was very controlling. My boyfriend was always trying to please his dad and had a false belief about his father, always putting him on a petastal while always blaming his mother for everything. He would constantly break dates with me if his dad asked him to help him around the house hoping maybe his dad would do something with him. He would always exaggerate his relationship with his father as a really close one, which I believed at first till I realized that it was far from the truth. He was always putting others down while making himself look good. He always talked about himself and never cared about me and things that would go on in my life, which took me sometime to come to terms with. Everything always revolved around him, always wanting me too feel bad for him and if I tried to tell him about my problem’s his always were worse than mine. He never let me meet his parents or go to their house where he lived, nor would he meet my family. When I met him he made it sound like he moved back home to help his dad as he said that his dad had diabetes and so he had to give up his good job to help take care of him, none of that was true. His dad did have diabetes but it later came up that he moved home as he was having problems at his job as he found it too stressful. He always made himself sound like the people at his job couldn’t do without him and when something would go wrong at work it was always the other person’s fault, “not his”. The longer I got to know him I realized that I was dating a Narcissist.

By: Neil Petersen

Neil Petersen — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 15:32:15 +0000

In reply to Nola Johnson. Yeah, this is one of the limitations of studies based on adults' memories of their parents' behavior: you can't say for sure how much the differences have to do with what's being remembered and how much they reflect actual differences in parenting styles. From this perspective, the study that found an association between parental overvaluation and narcissism seems to have a more solid design because it asked for input from both parents and children. Of course, even then, self-report is self-report, so you can't be 100 percent sure. (But you can always run more studies!)

By: Nola Johnson

Nola Johnson — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 02:09:25 +0000

It seems to be that doing surveys about ‘invalidating parents contributing to raising a narcissist’ could never provide an accurate outcome, because a narcissist will always feel invalidated by their parents, unless (and sometimes, even if) the parent grovelled at their feet.