10 Symptoms of Daughters with Narcissistic Parents

Signs and Symptoms of Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

If you’ve grown up around narcissistic parents, especially if you’re a woman, then you’ve probably learned just how tiring that relationship can be, regardless of how much love is shared between the parents and daughters.

This article will dive deep into the world of narcissism and how it affects the relationship between the daughters of narcissistic fathers and mothers. If you’ve been embroiled in this type of relationship most of your life, you can expect:

1.     Trouble with boundaries

2.     Being a people-pleaser

3.     Fear of abandonment

4.     Low self-esteem

5.     High levels of self-criticism

6.     Insecurities

7.     Codependency

8.     Inability to express emotions

9.     Reduced empathy

10.  Aggressive behavior

These symptoms can have a long-lasting impact on the lives of daughters, an impact that can be reduced and alleviated with the help of the talk therapy provided by the talented counselors at Serenity Space Therapy. To help decide how much you may benefit from professional therapy, let’s explore this narcissistic relationship in more depth.

Maternal Narcissistic Behavior

While narcissistic behavior in parents can have a lot in common regardless of whether it’s coming from the mother or father, there are some distinctions to be made, and some hallmarks that are unique to mothers or fathers. So, let’s start this off by exploring the narcissistic behavior expected from a narcissistic mother.

From a maternal perspective, expect manipulation, undermining behavior, and personal gain through exploitation.

How Narcissistic Mothers Treat Their Daughters

To put this into a bit more detail, let’s explore a little more closely the relationship between narcissistic mothers and their daughters. At the end of the day, a narcissistic mother will often prioritize their own needs over those of their daughters. Given enough time, this dynamic can significantly impact a daughter, even into adulthood.

Expect to see regular manipulation by a narcissistic mother as they seek to maintain control over their daughter. They’ll often guilt trip, play the victim, and twist situations to their favor. At the extreme end, the daughter may experience severe levels of gaslighting.

Often, the love itself will be conditional, making the daughter feel as though they have to do something or behave in a certain way to receive the love they desire—to such an extent that the love will feel transactional and not unconditional.

The Mother-Daughter Dynamic in Narcissistic Relationships

The dynamic between young or adult daughters of narcissistic mothers is typically competitive by nature. A mother who cares only about herself will typically see their daughter as a rival. After all, the daughter represents all the youth, potential, and accomplishments-to-be that have come and gone for themselves—or were never there to begin with.

A narcissistic mother might also neglect their daughter’s emotional well-being, which can lead to them feeling entirely invalidated. That’s easy to understand when every feeling, need, or opinion is either downplayed or dismissed altogether.

The general theme is that a narcissistic mother will often place her needs over her daughter’s, leading to a feeling that any and all affection is conditional based on what the daughter can do or provide for their mother.

Impact of Narcissistic Fathers on Daughters

Often, a narcissistic father will have a lot in common with a narcissistic mother, but it can present itself slightly differently, affecting the overall impact that a father will have on his daughter. In this next section, we’ll explore the father-daughter dynamic a little more deeply.

Effects of Paternal Narcissism

Since fathers play a slightly different role in a daughter’s life than their mother, the effects of narcissism impact the child’s life in slightly different ways. On a certain level, a narcissistic father will take the role of an authoritarian—perhaps an extreme version of “my house, my rules.” The father exerts total control, perceiving any disobedience as an affront to their deserved respect. All the while, they remain emotionally distant, making the daughter feel neglected in the process.

This behavior can have a long-term effect, well into adulthood. Because of the abuse early in life,  daughters of narcissistic fathers can experience a host of effects throughout life. With an emotionally distant and controlling father, these women are often subconsciously attracted to similar men—narcissistic or not—who might turn out to be just as distant and controlling as their father.

Because of what narcissistic fathers do to their daughters, regularly intruding on boundaries, they grow up having a hard time setting them for other people, something that typically has a long-lasting effect on the rest of their lives.

Common Behavioral Patterns

The ever-present weight of narcissism causes a slew of different negative behavioral patterns. To lay them out plainly:

·        Perfectionism: As they try over and over to gain the approval of their fathers, daughters often develop a need to succeed in school and eventually work—and other aspects of life—leading to issues when they don’t meet those lofty goals. This fear of failure can also lead them to worry about disappointing others.

·        Hypervigilance: If a narcissistic father repeatedly criticizes or reacts negatively to their daughter, she will often develop levels of anxiety that might cause them to become hypervigilant, becoming constantly on alert.

·        Identify confusion: As they’ll spend a large part of their life tending to their father or mother’s needs, the child might grow up without really realizing who they are, overshadowed instead by narcissistic parents.

Long-term Relationship Effects

As you can imagine, the stress and anxiety of having a narcissistic father can lead to long-term relationship effects once the child leaves the house and starts forming bonds with friends and romantic partners. This can lead to:

·        People-pleasing: Similarly, as they try to gain the favor of their father during their formative years, the daughter will go on and continue putting other people’s needs over their own, usually sacrificing their own well-being, mental or physical, in the process.

·        Trust issues: Once a daughter becomes old enough to start to realize the effects of a life thus far spent under the heel of a narcissistic parent, they will likely have more difficulty trusting others.

·        Difficulty forming boundaries: Though we’ve touched on it briefly, it bears repeating that daughters of narcissistic fathers will oftentimes grow up to have difficulty establishing and maintaining boundaries.

Narcissistic Parent-Child Dynamics

Of course, a narcissistic parent leaves a mark even once you’ve left from underneath the roof of the parent in question, but what can you expect during a child’s formative years? Let’s explore that dynamic in a bit more detail; it can primarily be defined by manipulation, a lack of empathy, and the prioritization of the parent’s needs over the child’s.

Emotional Manipulation Tactics

Where emotional manipulation is concerned, a narcissistic parent will leverage a few different tactics to exert control over their child, selfishly influencing their thoughts, actions, or feelings. Often, manipulation can be subtle and insidious, often difficult to notice, so familiarizing yourself with the common tactics implored.

Being passive-aggressive: If you’ve ever experienced passive-aggressive behavior from a friend or loved one, you know what to expect. The same goes for a narcissistic parent. Basically, everything they say and do will have a foundation of hostility, with lots of sarcasm and minor little insults.

Guilt tripping: When a parent guilt-trips their child, they leverage their sense of responsibility and sometimes morality to exploit their insecurities. A parent might complain that, “I break my back all day at work—the least you could do is clean your room before I get home.” It’s fine to have responsibilities and to do those responsibilities, but guilt-tripping is a manipulative way to get them done.

Love bombing: This tactic involves lavishing the child with love, affection, or even gifts in an attempt to ingratiate them and make them emotionally dependent on the parent. Sometimes, this behavior can also undermine the other parent, or maybe cause the child to think that one parent loves them more than the other.

Gaslighting: This might be the worst of all manipulation techniques since it aims to completely distort the child’s view of reality—which, considering that they have spent their life around their parent, growing up under their room, the child might never realize they have fallen victim to gaslighting. This tactic, at its most basic, leverages repeated lies until the child believes them. Mixed with the other emotional manipulation, a child might have no reason to believe otherwise for any lies, even ridiculous ones.

Since daughters of narcissistic mothers and fathers might have spent years and years being subjected to these and other forms of emotional manipulation, the impact might not be an easy one to resolve. Talk therapy can prove to be an exceedingly effective way to help undo the years of damage caused by narcissism. That’s where Serenity Space Therapy can help if you’re in Arizona or Florida.

Generational Patterns and Impact

As unfortunate as it may be, the impact of a narcissistic parent may pass down from generation to generation, even for the children of daughters of elderly narcissistic mothers. This means that even if the daughters and granddaughters, et cetera, aren’t narcissists by nature, they may very well pick up narcissistic traits from their parents and grandparents.

This can include anything from guilt-tripping to people-pleasing to being emotionally distant to full-on gaslighting. The best way to free yourself of this cycle is to first become aware of the instances of narcissism in your life—which hopefully this article helped to do! From there, therapy can prove to be immensely helpful.

Why Narcissistic Mothers Become Jealous of Daughters

If you look at enough instances of narcissistic mothers and daughters, you’ll notice that a lot of time, the mother will become jealous of the daughter. This is because, often, the mother will view the daughter as an extension of themselves. This can naturally lead to jealousy over the daughter’s youth, representing what the mother had lost over the years.

Attractive daughters, especially ones more attractive than their mother, relatively speaking, can lead to a lot of jealousy because the mother feels threatened or overshadowed. The same can be said for any success the daughter finds when it exceeds that of the mother.

At its most extreme, this level of jealousy can lead to a mother viewing her daughter as a competitor—which can even lead to sabotage and undermining behavior.

How to Heal from Narcissistic Parenting

If you’ve made it this far, you can see the profound impact that growing up with a narcissistic parent can have, the degree to which depends on how severe the narcissism is. At the more extreme end, it can take a veritable lifetime to unravel the damage that was caused and hopefully help you keep from perpetrating the same behavior onto other people, including your own children.

Once you acknowledge the impact that this behavior has had, you can begin to take steps to heal from it. This can include simple steps—like building a support system of people who uplift you to setting firm boundaries with your parent (even if it’s like pulling nails). With enough time, practicing forgiveness once you’re well and truly ready can also prove to be immensely healing.

Where steps you can take yourself stop, professional therapy can begin. There, modern cognitive behavioral techniques and good, old-fashioned talk therapy can help unravel the years of emotional trauma.

Conclusion

The effects that daughters of narcissistic fathers or mothers can expect to experience can be truly substantial, even if it isn’t fully realized until well into adulthood, even if the signs and symptoms can be numerous, like guilt tripping and gaslighting.

If you need extra help learning how to cope with a narcissistic parent, Serenity Space Therapy is here to help. Either online or in-person, our talented team is here to help anyone who is looking to heal from the effects of a narcissistic parent. If you live in Arizona or Florida,

FAQs

• What kind of person stays with a narcissist?

  Codependency goes hand-in-hand with narcissism. A narcissist’s behavior breeds an emotional dependency on the victim, so they may eventually grow to be attached to the reward system, no matter how toxic the relationship is.

• How do you outsmart a narcissistic parent?

  The best way to outsmart a narcissistic parent is to work to fortify your own emotional well-being, through setting boundaries, not taking what they say personally, and refusing to engage with their efforts.

• What is a narcissistic borderline personality disorder mother?

  A narcissistic mother with borderline personality disorder can be a really challenging relationship to maintain. They often implore a lot of manipulation, conditional love, and are extremely self-centered.

• What is the difference between a covert narcissist and a BPD mother?

  A mother who is a quiet narcissist will use subtle manipulative tactics to maintain control over their child, such as gaslighting and emotional manipulation. Compared to that, a mother with borderline personality disorder is much more emotionally unstable, prone to traumatizing mood swings.