How do you help a child of a Narcissistic parent most? By showing compassion.
Believe their story and validate their emotions. Let them know it is safe to trust their own intuition and character analysis judgments.
STOP trying to convince them that their parent means well and is only trying to help them. If their parent has a Cluster B personality disorder and you insist on telling that child their parent loves them when and if they do not, TRUST THE CHILD.
Start treating them like an intelligent human being who has been targeted for abuse and victimized — not a perpetrator or co-conspirator.
Some people are born to or are being raised by Cluster B parents or step-parents. It is not their fault, they did nothing to deserve it, and their fundamental human rights are likely to have been violated routinely and comprehensively since birth.
If your personal life story is one riddled with abuse since childhood or you are wondering how to help a child you suspect might have a toxic mother or toxic father, thoughtfully and reflectively consider the following excerpt:
I know of a young child who’s parent displays most, if not all, signs of NPD. The child has said that they feel like they have to comply with any demand the parent makes and be basically complacent in what they want. The child mentioned that it feels like this parent controls them and it doesn’t always feel like love. They want the child to do what’s convenient for them and what they want the child to do. Even when the possible NPD parent is confronted by others about behaviors the child has mentioned, this parent has said on more than one occasion that they believe the child has some mental health issues and needs helps. The mantra of this parent is that they are the only ones who ever act in the best interest of the child, which we rarely see. The child feels as if they are being controlled and said they don’t think they could ever be comfortable sticking up for themselves in saying they don’t agree with what the parent is saying. The child has mentioned she will say she doesn’t like living with the other parent, just to please the possible NPD parent, even though that’s not how the child feels. The child even said they feel like this parent tricks everyone into believing what they say and the child has been witness to the parent constantly lying to basically keep up appearances. It’s heartbreaking. The manipulating of the court system is dead on. I’ve never seen someone play the victim so well. Time and time again people who know this parent well, continue to fall for their lies, blame shifting and constant need to make everyone believe they are the victim. It is clear this parent wants the child to love them and the people they want the child to love and no one else. They want the child to love them the most as they think they are the most important person in the child’s life. It’s a horrible and beyond frustrating situation. You just want to help this poor child but even after it was proven the child was a victim of horrible behavior at the hands of the parent, this parent wants to fight for 50% legal custody back, after it was lost due to serious physical abuse and lying to authority figures. I am curious at why a person who has had a child lie to a doctor, CYS, and school counselors, teachers, etc. would be capable of being trusted to make the right decisions in the best interest of the child, truly. There has never been any true responsibility taking from this parent and they continue to blame it on the other parent. It’s sad for everyone involved, especially the innocent child. The child said they don’t believe the parent will ever get the help that is needed and fears having to live a life where they need to be bowing down to a parent that doesn’t truly respect them as an individual. The court system needs to start being receptive to recognize this behavior and putting safety guards in place for children that are victims. It’s a long process and not something that is fixed short term. A big fear is that things will be copacetic for a short time and the abuse will resume, but be even more covert. I think the court needs to focus less on parent-child relationship until that parent has truly received the help they need. To go above and beyond what is required to prove they want to change. But it’s a matter of them feeling like they have no control, which NPDs need. They need to control every aspect of the child and try to control the other parent and their families. It’s a never ending cycle and you feel as if you are in a bad dream. We can only hope that the court system will start to recognize this behavior and TRULY act in the best interest of the child, instead of being so easily manipulated by people who work so hard to make sure they are viewed as a perfect parent and the victim.
— Anonymous Reader
If you are feeling sorry for the person who wrote it and the child they describe — connecting with their pain (on an emotional level with empathy), wondering how to help — that’s wonderful. But if you are unable to put yourself in the shoes of the child being abused chances are your helpful actions and intentions to intercede on the child’s behalf in order to make YOURSELF feel better are incredibly likely to do more damage than good.
In a home with a Cluster B parent, children who are underage or adult children at risk of losing things like sentimental property and their inheritance have to tread water around their toxic family members very carefully. One wrong word, ill-timed look, or facial expression that reveals anything but “resting bitch face” (a neutral and nonaggressive, non-hostile, non-provoking posture) can literally cost them physical, emotional, and financial safety.
A child of a toxic parent who understands the difference between right and wrong on a social and moral level does not need to be told their parent is deviant. They also do not need to be actively lied to by a Flying Monkey errantly striving to make them feel better by lying and telling them their Cluster B parent loves them.
People with Cluster B personality disorders — namely Narcissistic Personality Disorder and most especially Anti-Social Personality Disorder — are not biologically capable of feeling complex emotions. What that means is while a normal, healthy-thinking, and functional adult might have unconditional love for a child, a Cluster B parent only has USES.
No Cluster B parent has children because they are looking forward to getting to know a child as it grows. Cluster B parents have children for things like tending to manual labor, plowing the fields, sacrificing their own needs in order to please a selfish parent, and acting (for lack of a more evocative term) like old-fashioned “house niggers”. The only difference is in a home with Daddy Issues or a Mommy Dearest, slaves who were trained to handle housekeeping details and allowed to live in the house were treated much better than the average son or daughter raised in a toxic Narcissist or Anti-Social person’s hell.
There’s massive confusion in the mind of a youngster who is kind-hearted by nature or emotionally sensitive when and if they are forced to associate with a Cluster B parent. They are expected to either conform (as Enablers) or to grow up to be even bigger bullies than their toxic parents.
Generationally speaking, narcopathic WWII generation and Baby Boomers have historically made the most toxic grandparents.
In younger families where breeding at a young age is encouraged, Generation X and Generation Y children of narcy people are already having babies to please their parents. So are the most toxic millennials. What that means is there are three full generations of toxic family members in the most Cluster B families with baby booties on ground (so to speak) already, with the most abusive parent generations of elders soaking up the grandeur of being named “Great Grandparents” while promoting their narcissistic values and stinking thinking onto their own adult children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren already.
The right way to help the YOUNGEST generation of children is to teach them about Narcissistic Abuse tactics in order to validate their experiences as well as to protect them from personalization. If a child can be taught to observe rather than personalize and react to abuse, they have a chance of making the decision to go NO CONTACT with abusive people when and if they live to be old enough to functionally escape the grasp of their abuser(s).
Being mad at a Cluster B parent for acting Cluster B, making false promises to change, and offering up insincere apologies for their cyclical or situational abuse behavior patterns is about as productive as trying to knock the knees off an egg. You might as well be angry at them for being tall or for having blue eyes.
Seriously.
It is absolute LUNACY to even remotely suggest that a Cluster B person cares for other human beings in a reciprocally meaningful, loving, or truly affectionate of ways. It reflects a massive character flaw in the neuro-ego of any person who gaslights a victim by telling them that their abusive parent loves that child in ANY way.
Love never hurts. Love simply cannot lie to self-promote or ever willingly and without conscience betray. When a child tells about abuse and is not believed or they hear a parent lie and strive to do things like poison the well against them or smear campaign, truly the mind, body, and spirit break.
Validating a child’s blood tie to a family unit to give them a concept of origin then encouraging them to seek validation from people who are NOT socially toxic is the right way to break captured birds free from their family of origin cage. Letting them know they are believed without forcing them to prove abuse happened in order for them to heal is essential, but so is letting them wake-up to the reality that their abusive parent is likely to get worse (rather than better) with age is humane.
If a compassionate do-gooder seeks to be confrontational with an abuse victim about the way they are being treated, understand that they can put the victim in harm’s way. Respecting the rights of an abuse victim to go low contact, NO CONTACT, or to remain enmeshed with abusive or narcissistic people as THEY decide is the right way to show support.
In some cases, that might mean making a discreet call to social services at the request of the victim. In others, it might mean NOT calling DSS, the police, their Guardian Ad Litem, a school faculty administrator, or even a concerned non-toxic grandparent in order to keep the child safe.
Since children of Cluster B or abusive parents all tend to mature almost out of the womb, they tend to have a pretty good idea about what will (and conversely what will NOT) help to keep them safe. They also might want to stay long enough for themselves to see if their parent can change — never fully realizing that if their parent has NPD, ASPD, BPD, or HPD their behaviors are likely to grow worse rather than better with age.
As such, making sure academic research materials are ALWAYS made available to them from an early age on is key to helping them get a handle on the karmic life circumstances they were born into — whether willingly or unwillingly (depending on your perspective spiritually). While the most Machiavellian and cruel people will tell an abuse victim that the reason they were born into an abusive environment is that they deserved it [or their soul must have chosen it so somehow abusing them on a continued daily basis must be okay], all they do by asserting such claims is blame shift responsibility for the Abuser’s actions onto the victim while striving to foster in that targeted person a crippling sense of toxic shame.
Kids raised being told things like they ruined their parents’ lives by being born, that they “deserve” abuse, or who are told love means they have to tolerate taking abuse are bound to grow up with personal issues. Adult children who continue to be told the same gaslighting stories by Flying Monkeys and Abuse Enablers are likely to regress to having heightened emotional responses to PTSD triggers rooted in a lifetime of suffering at the hands of both self-entitled, profoundly psychologically uneducated do-gooders as well as their toxic family — one likely to be riddled with 50 shades of messed up Abusers.
As far as proffering advice to the person who wrote the excerpt — learning as much as you can about Cluster B personality disorders, Narcissistic Abuse tactics, and brainwashing [the kind they do in cults] is likely to put YOU [the Reader] in the best position to help. By making sure when and if an abused child elects to confide in you, you indicate an awareness that what is happening to them is a PATTERN that reflects the symptomatology of the perpetrator), you can truly help them.
You see, a child born into an abusive family with no book smarts (due to age and lack of exposure to intelligent psychiatric materials) is easily convinced to keep family secrets. They are prone to suffering situational abuse at the hands of an abusive person who tells them their behavior, actions, words, or very existence forced the user and abuser to rage on them.
Since children told on a routine basis that they are not A) being abused and B) they DESERVE the abuse the abuser claims is both not happening and deserved simultaneously are likely to end up feeling extremely confused. Validating their subjective feelings of having BEEN abused, hurt, upset, or used without forcing them to go into battle to right the wrongs of their attacker is simply the most healing thing a true FRIEND (or caring, compassionate person) can do.
Sometimes just having another person there to listen to a story and say, “Man — that’s messed up. What your [mother or father] [did or said] to you is really messed up. You have every right to feel embarrassed, angry, upset, or hurt…” is all it takes to stop an abuse victim from truly believing they are going insane.
[Abusive personality types love to lie about their actions or deny having said antagonistic, baiting, or provoking words and then telling anyone who will listen that the upset, spiritually and socially vexed victims are “imagining things”, have a “vivid imagination”, are outright lying, or are absolutely fawking insane. To be the victim of such pervasive Machiavellian gaslighting ruses is nothing short of something called CRAZY MAKING, as the victim is forced to distrust their own physical sensations, memories, and perceptions based on the lies of people who sadistically abuse before, during, and especially after they traumatize a victim intentionally when no one is looking.]
Since abusive parents love to lay on the charm in public and attend PTA meetings, their children seldom have ANYONE who they are able to confide in or talk to when and if they need comfort or emotional support. They are tasked with morally and socially raising themselves as well as to help nurse their own inner child back to health — typically starting from infancy or toddlerhood forward.
When you are little and KNOW in your heart someone is abusing you, that you don’t deserve it, and that the adults in your world are acting self-centered, narcissistic, anti-social, and just plain wrong it might be hard to find the right words to describe it. As such, if you are an adult who a child turns to for life coaching or private mentoring — and NO we don’t mean a therapist paid by a Cluster B parent to abuse a child further by proxy on behalf of an abusive parent so they themselves can take home a fat paycheck — help them with their vocabulary terms.
What is a Narcissist? What is a Sociopath? What is a person with Borderline Personality Disorder? What does the term “Histrionic” mean? What is a symptom? What does the term “comorbid” mean? What is empathy? What is entitlement? What is brainwashing? What is Stockholm Syndrome? Why do some people pathologically lie? What is a bully? What is the difference between verbal abuse and physical abuse? What is Domestic Abuse? How is Domestic Abuse different from Domestic Violence? What is PTSD? What’s a trigger? What does it mean to say someone is projecting? What is reverse projection [attributing a core nature of good to all people rather than simply to those biologically capable of being good at their core]? What is gaslighting? What is a “no-win situation”? What is a false apology [apology offered without sincerity to placate a victim into overlooking or excusing behavior without the transgressor being forced to take accountability for their own actions, words, deeds, or ever needing to change behavior]? What is false victimization [as in when a parent blames the child for the adult raging or having a temper tantrum, taking out their stress from work, their own romantic entanglements, or life on their child following the “SHIT ROLLS DOWNHILL” method]? What does the phrase Cluster B mean? What is the difference between a Problem Drinker and an Alcoholic? What is Al-Anon [a.k.a. #ALANON]? What is a drug addict? What is situational abuse? What does the term “honeymoon” mean with regard to domestic violence or Narcissistic Abuse? What is a TBI? What are Social Services? What is an authority figure? How does the court system help protect abuse victims? How could the laws be changed to help kids who are being abused? What can people who are trying to help a child being abused do to make things easier — rather than harder — on them as abuse victims? How can people help a child still forced by law and age as well as bound by affection to living with and tolerating abuse from their Cluster B parent? “Why doesn’t my mommy or daddy love me? ” — because they have limited to no ability to process complex emotions like empathy and physically, based on their brain structure, biologically can’t. “Why do they keep acting like this? ” — because people enable them and they like it. What is undermining? What is poisoning the well? What is sabotaging or sabotage? What does the phrase “walking on eggshells” mean to people who read self-help literature and psychology books every day? What is Narcissistic Rage? What’s a Narcissistic Supply Source? What does the phrase “going no contact” mean? What does the phrase “Gray Rock mean”? What’s enmeshment? What is helicopter parenting? What is toxic parenting?
If you take the time to give tech-savvy kids the right buzz words to research on places like their local school computers or at the public library where their parents cannot track their browsing history and punish them for it, “helpers” are more likely to actually succeed in helping the child. Granted, the helper does not get as big a buzz from leaping into the fire to pull a burn victim out… but still. If you are trying to help because a situation another human being is going through upsets YOU, then you simply are not striving to help that person for the right reasons.
In order to help an abused child who is being pervasively victimized and re-traumatized by their own toxic mother or horrible father, just be there to listen. Validate their emotions without making them feel like a rape trial victim. And by all means, be there ready and willing to answer any purely academic questions you are able to answer for them after sacrificing YOUR personal time to enhance your own knowledge base about Narcissistic Abuse and the side effects of living around or near a Cluster B person.
Doing so really is the most expedient and morally just way to help a child help themselves up out of the Flying Monkey soup. Truly compassionate people are likely to understand the gist of this message — while Covertly Narcissistic people with self-centered or self-aggrandizing motivations and intentions to “save a child” in order to feel like a hero (rather than acting in the child’s best interest) are likely to be offended.
