The swinging pendulum

narcissistic abuse online discourse

Pallavi Dawson

’s note below inspired this post.

Pallavi gets at some unfortunate things that are happening in public conversation about family abuse now. This is my addition, not an attempt to put words in her mouth:

1. The backlash from the casual misuse of “trauma” and “narcissism” is here. The pole flipped again. Now, it’s more common to hear commentators talk about how claims of narcissistic abuse by parents are fake, or not justified, or “mean” (notice that the children, as always, are the bad ones).
   

   This makes it much harder for those who talk candidly about the objectively real problem of narcissistic parental abuse. It’s very real. But we have to start over and try to “prove” to people that we’re not making it up, because the public is primed now to see what we say as an example of spoiled, entitled brats who abuse their innocent and loving parents.
   

2. This should be so obvious that it can’t be missed, but the opposite is true. If these adult children—the ones who go no contact, accuse their parents of emotional abuse—are truly the narcissistic, wicked, entitled brats that they are called, then can you think of the next obvious question?
   

   Take a moment.
   

   OK. It’s so obvious you’re going to laugh (or get mad at me for pointing it out). Why are the children that way and what influences in their childhood led them to be this way?. Can you think of any?
   

   It’s parenting. If you’re having an initial negative reaction to that, please wait a moment. I didn’t say “only the parents and no other influences,” and I also didn’t say, “never school or peers or cult-like organizations.” I didn’t say that. I didn’t “only blame parents.”

   That I felt obligated to take that detour, and to pre-defend what I said, points to the problem: too many adults are reactively primed against holding parents responsible at all. The very mention that any responsibility rests with the parents provokes an immediate defensive reaction. That indicates distorted thinking. We are so selfishly wrapped up in what we, as adults and parents want, that we think first of how to defend the parent before we have even considered that it’s possible that the parent has any responsibility.

That’s extraordinary. Think about it. The claim “parents have responsibility for how they raise children, and the effects they have on them” is treated as if that were the extraordinary claim. It’s a reversal.

And many people who react defensively are themselves probably good parents. They’re probably good people. They almost certainly disapprove of child abuse.

Why, then, do these good people have such a hard time accepting that bad parents exist, or that good-enough parents sometimes make serious mistakes?

The good people, the good parents, then, end up working as enablers of abusive parents. They don’t mean to, but that’s what they’re doing. They’re shutting down the candid conversation of parental abuse by emotional reactivity that shuts down the conversation because they have been inappropriately personalizing it.

I give private hour-long coaching and consulting sessions. Many parents, and many adult children, have come to me with stories of abusive family members. While most clients talk about their parents—usually parents who display Cluster B (narcissism) behaviors—a number of my clients have had what appear to me to be abusive adult children who mistreat their parents.

That is also real. And in those cases, the apparently abusive adult child has some combination of these things going on:

-There is childhood trauma. Mom and dad got divorced (yes, my clients are the mom or the dad in this scenario) and it had a bigger effect on the kids than was predicted. My clients are often very sorrowful for this, and wish they and their ex had done it differently. They’re not bad parents. But there was family trauma. Good and bad things co-occur.

-The adult child went off to a college, or a social grouping, or a job, where woke victim politics was in charge. Like kids joining a cult (because that’s what’s happening), they get isolated from their family and friends, and become convinced that their families are evil. They mistreat their parents and family, and are sometimes terribly abusive. In these cases, there is also usually some trauma in the family life when the kid was growing up even if mom or dad weren’t abusive.

-Yes, a small percentage of abusive adult children do seem to have basically been “born that way.” I’ve seen it, or at least I’m convinced I’ve seen it. It’s so hard for parents. But, it is a small percentage that have no apparent abuse or neglect in their background, but who yet turn out to be narcissistic abusers.

It’s disheartening that serious personal and social issues are subject to the pendulum swing that governs our politics, aesthetics, and morals in modern American society. But that’s what happens. We appear to be in the “nuh-uh they’re just bad kids and their parents didn’t do nuffin’” phase of the pendulum’s arc.

Pleasant things and unpleasant things co-occur. Both parties can be “bad people.” Both parties can be “good people.” One party may be abusive, and the other party may really be an innocent victim (all children are innocent victims, though we don’t really believe that despite claiming that we believe it).

All of those combinations, and more, occur every day, all the time.