Why You Just Have to Accept That Your Narcissistic Parent Is Never Going to Love You Back
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My father was the first to invoke the word “hate” when it came to describing our relationship. My girlfriend and I were in the car with him. He said something awful. I responded. He went into a typical, petulant, narcissistic huff and grumbled, “Great, now you hate me too.”
Even in the heat of the moment, I thought it odd that he’d pick that word. It has taken me thirty years to recognize his choice was a consequence of the feelings he harbored for me.
With narcissists, every accusation is a confession. We know that already, but that phrase has relevance on levels we haven’t yet given ourselves permission to explore.
Looking back, I recognize that his hate began about the time I turned thirteen. As I grew into my power, he grew into his hate. Perhaps if I’d stayed a soft little boy all my life, we could have maintained a state of perpetual indifference. He could have gone on with his forgetting of my birthdays, and even my name. I could have gone on pretending I didn’t need recognition or affection from anybody.
It was a dynamic of survival and I just barely survived.
One of the main skills you learn from growing up with a narcissist is self-actualization. It’s not taught to you. You figure it out as you thrash around in the storm looking for a lifeline.
But the self-actualization you learn under those circumstances is tainted. It consists of an understanding that expectations lead to disappointment. If you stop yourself from hoping, you can never be disappointed. If you stop yourself from feeling, you can never be hurt.
You survive, but you die anyway.
Really all you teach yourself is to not trust anyone. I know my dad was bullied terribly as a child. I pity him as a child. As an adult, he has a responsibility to process and overcome his pain.
The trauma of the parent should never be seen as the child’s responsibility to fix. His job was to love me. He abdicated that duty.
It took me a long time to overcome the liabilities of my indoctrinated worldview. I carried traces of that stunted emotional development into my marriage. My wife taught me that I could trust her. We learned to celebrate each other.
When you teach yourself not to have expectations, you are cut off from recognizing the expectations of others. It’s a self-imposed blind spot that becomes a self-inflicted wound. That attitude sabotages any chance of ever cultivating any sincere and enduring affection.
Today, I pay attention to my wife’s expectations and I aspire to meet them. Sometimes I fail, but I try. We forgive each other. We do better. We don’t fester in eternal frustration.
No expectations, no disappointment, is no way to live.
My dad could tolerate me when I was small and weak, but he started to get nervous as I grew. He was careful to keep me broken down. He emphasized my weaknesses and never celebrated my achievements. He humiliated me in public every time it seemed I might be feeling good about myself.
I accepted his behavior as that of a normal, loving parent.
I didn’t realize until much later that his behavior was an example of hate.
Even now, he wouldn’t admit that’s what he felt. If i confronted him he’d likely go into a rage. Either that, or he’d go into his typical, petulant, narcissistic huff. “You’re so ungrateful,” he’d say. “Everything was fine until you went insane.”
The tragedy of my father’s life is that it’s unexamined. At no point did he ever reflect on his behaviors and recognize how he pushed away anyone who truly cared. Their affection made him uncomfortable because he’d trained himself to think it impossible.
He taught himself to hate anyone who loved him, and he made us suffer for it.
“It’s not me that’s cruel, it’s the world,” he’d claim. “Why am I to blame? Why do you hate me? I’m just beating you to make you tougher so you can survive? Don’t you see? Everything good in your life is because of me!”
He drove friends and loved ones away and had the nerve to feel grievance rather than remorse.
The question he should have asked is whether or not his cruelty was truly necessary?
Could he not have fortified those around him by another means? Perhaps a means that offered less brutality?
“We’ve always done it this way? Look at me! That’s the way my parents raised me and I turned out okay!”
Alone and angry and aggrieved is not okay.
I think in my case I broke the cycle through a combination of fear and resentment. I grew stronger than he is. I earned better grades. I had beautiful girlfriends. I was better looking, funnier, more popular. I exceeded him in every way and he hated me for it.
I now have children of my own. They, too, are better than me in every way possible. Their mother is from Peru and we live in Northern Wisconsin. They possess a beauty that renders people awkward and stunned. My children are better athletes than me. They’re smarter. They engage in astonishing flights of creativity. In every way possible they’ve exceeded me.
I do not resent them for it.
In fact, nothing could bring me more joy. I celebrate their power every day. I do my best to cultivate it. I see them on a trajectory that will lead to heights I could have never imagined.
I’ve never once felt any resentment for them over their good fortune. I’m only relieved that they didn’t have to endure the same torments the universe had in store for me.
The difference between me and my father is that I don’t hate my children. I don’t even hate my father. But he hates me. He’s always hated me, even if he’s never been able to admit it to himself.
As I became stronger, he did his best to break me down. Again, I didn’t realize I was in a life or death struggle with an enemy. I thought this was simply the way growing up had to be. I tried to abide by the unspoken rules of our relationship, even though they didn’t make sense to me.
My father’s rules were contradictory.
He became mad if I got good grades and mad if I didn’t. I tried and tried but he couldn’t be pleased.
I see now that confusion was his strategy. He wanted to overwhelm me into complacency. Cultivating impostor syndrome, accusations of moral depravity, calling me a deadbeat, all of this was leveraged to make me voluntarily abdicate my autonomy.
“Why even try when you’ll never be as good as me?”
Self-doubt and self-destruction are the two primary weapons of an authoritarian. They know they lose their power when challenged. When they recognize a potential enemy is growing in strength, they commit to a strategy of sabotage.
In my early twenties, I was a broken person. I dropped out of college because of crippling anxiety. I couldn’t speak to my fellow classmates. Whenever I opened my mouth, I had to prepare for humiliation. I’d learned that humiliation was how people communicated with each other.
My conscious mind had convinced itself that’s how they shared affection. But my second mind, my intuitive mind, knew better.
It took me thirty years to consciously recognize that my father hated me, but some part knew right away. I began to distance myself from him. The longer the absences went, the more I was able to heal. I started running marathons and doing cross-country ski races. I stacked successes. I became more powerful. I achieved things impervious to the malicious robbery of his spiteful comments.
Crossing the finish line of a thirty mile ski race in subfreezing conditions, I felt at peace. The volume was turned down. His influence was on the wane. I began to recognize I didn’t need him.
Abusive people try to make you dependent. They ruin your self-esteem by claiming you’re worthless. Then they try to present themselves as the only relationship that you will ever need.
“You aren’t smart enough to support yourself. You need me. Get over it. You should be more grateful.”
How many times have I heard him say, “You should be more grateful?”
Grateful for what? Your hate?
The hardest part of getting away is coming upon a new challenge. Life is hard under the best of circumstances. You face obstacle after obstacle. You can get away from an abuser, things can be going fine, and then something hits that will drive you back to them.
Because they hate you, they’ll leverage the moment for all its worth. “Only I can fix this problem. You see? You see? You need me. You can never escape me. Stop pretending that you’re something you’re not.”
They are out there counting on the trauma bond to bring you back. To sever that, you must find a new support community. You must ask for help from the people he’s made you think will never offer any. That’s the last challenge you have to overcome before you’re finally free. That’s the last bit of grooming you have to expel.
Understand your narcissistic abuser hates you. Never give them the benefit of the doubt. Any time they appear to be doing something kind, it’s only so that they can abuse you further.
My father was the first person to invoke the word “hate” to describe our relationship. He accused me of having the feelings he harbored. It confused me when he used that word. I hadn’t realized then that he’d accidentally told the truth about himself. I had a long way to go to free myself of his influence.
The tragedy in all this is that, at any point, he could have simply put his hate away. He could have made the choice to celebrate my victories rather than view them as a mirror for his shame. He could have resolved to become an ally rather than an adversary.
He pressured me to choose between loving myself and loving him. He framed self-love as selfish. My wife taught me different. For decades, I tried to make myself see the world from his perspective, but in the end I chose myself, I chose my wife, I chose my kids.
My narcissistic father hates me, but I still love him. It’s such a shame to consider all he was given that went to waste. Even now he refuses to recognize the truth, but his, not mine, was the life that became a sacrifice to hate.
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