The Narcissistic injury

What is the narcissistic injury?

When we talked about borderline personality disorder we touched a little on why you might be tempted to enter and stay in a relationship with an abusive partner. However, a separate discussion of this topic is needed because things are not simple. Why would you stay in a relationship that is hurting you anyway, even after you’ve made it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that the relationship is hurting you?

The answer is narcissistic wounding. Narcissistic wounding is what a person who, as a child, felt unloved or unwanted by their parents carries with them all their life. The term narcissistic wound was introduced by Freud in 1920.

There are psychologists who look at the subject of narcissistic wounding from a situational perspective and believe that narcissistic wounding occurs when an event (and especially a person) threatens to reveal the truth: that the narcissist is nowhere near as powerful, important or valuable as he or she thinks.

We’re talking about a perceived threat to the narcissist, not necessarily a real one, and we’re talking about the narcissist’s subjective “truth” that he or she doesn’t essentially consider themselves worthy of the admiration they claim. In reality, it is quite possible that the narcissist is indeed worthy of admiration, but his perception of his own personality is distorted by his personal beliefs.

Personally, I do not share this view. I believe that the narcissistic wound is a single traumatic event (even if it can be chronologically divided into several stages) and that all subsequent events do not produce new narcissistic wounds but reopen the original wound. This occurs when the person’s coping mechanisms fail for one reason or another.

James Frosch, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, takes a similar view but puts it a little more dramatically: “Existence itself is a narcissistic wound. It is the early realisation that others are separate from us and that, because of this, they may not respond to our wants and needs. It is the agonizing later realization that the people we care about and need will one day die, and we will meet the same end.”

What he says, however, has an extremely serious basis: the narcissistic wound is about each person’s needs and desires, and especially about the failure of those needs to be met in childhood, by parents (especially mothers).

Which means that almost all people have, to a greater or lesser extent, a narcissistic wound. Did you think the article wasn’t about you and told yourself you were just reading it out of curiosity?

It’s important to make a clarification here: just because you have a narcissistic wound doesn’t mean you suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. Avoid falling into the trap of the medical student syndrome who, as they read about different disorders and their symptoms, thinks they suffer from each one. The diagnosis is only made by a specialist, not after reading an article.

Narcissistic personality disorder is not only typical of the narcissist and in fact underlies all category B personality disorders: antisocial, narcissistic, borderline or histrionic and sometimes also C: avoidant, codependent or obsessive-compulsive (but mostly codependent).

How does narcissistic injury appear?

From birth until the age of about two, every child is completely dependent on his mother and considers her an extension of himself. During this period the mother is seen as omnipotent and, as such, capable of taking care of all the child’s needs. When the baby cries and the mother breastfeeds, the baby learns two important lessons:

• that he, the baby, is important to his mother
• that he can take actions on the world around him, actions that produce consequences or results (e.g. he is fed because he cries)

In addition to physical needs such as food, the child also needs emotional nourishment. From his point of view, the mother must sense when he needs this and respond positively to these needs, regardless of his own physical or emotional state.

When these primary needs are not met, two things happen:

• the baby gets stuck at this stage
• develops a deep shame related to the belief that he or she is not worthy of love and not able to cope in the world

From this point on the child, and later the adult, will need two things:

• a narcissistic source: i.e. people to feed all these unfulfilled needs (and how he decides to procure this resource will decide the pathological elements of his personality)
• a defence mechanism against the deep shame inside him

For example, the narcissistic exhibitionist gets what he needs by using a large number of people to give him much-desired attention and adoration and by avoiding shame at all costs.

The covert narcissist solves the need by attaching to one person and projecting shame onto others. Projection involves merciless criticism of one’s partner or children. The hidden narcissist will seek a partner whom he can either adore or who will adore him, through whom he will seek to relive the story of the helpless child or the distorted mother. He will attach himself to this partner with all the energy at his disposal. Almost always, he will also attach himself to at least one of his children, since the adult relationship is impossible to satisfy all his infantile needs for attention and affection.

Perpetuating the narcissistic wound

A mother with a narcissistic wound will perpetuate it in her children if she does not make the necessary effort to heal. The main way this perpetuation occurs is by devaluing the needs and personality of the children.

Devaluing attachment needs is the most common form. For example, the mother leaves home and leaves the 3-year-old alone, telling him she will be back after a certain time. The child can’t read the clock or the mother is late: as time goes by the child’s anxiety increases and from crying to desperate cries for the mother. She returns home to find the child in a general panic. Instead of acknowledging the effect of her actions on the child, the mother blames her for the way she has been feeling and tells her that she should have known he would come back. In this way, the mother not only ignores the child’s emotional state but also causes shame for her need for attachment. The mother is actually also hiding a grief about the separation and shame for leaving her child alone and not being able to respond adequately to his needs. The child, however, does not understand all these implications and only learns that he should not need his mother.

Other types of devaluation are intellectual, physical, sexual and creative.

Emotional effects of narcissistic injury

A child whose efforts to adapt to the world have been undermined by a parent grows up with a disappointment that is reflected in addictions, anxiety and depression, and a general sense of directionlessness in life.

The effects can also include either inappropriate romantic relationships (with partners who are married, too old or too young, abusive, emotionally unavailable and so on) and transient, or a complete lack of this kind of closeness. The wounded child may grow up to be a highly competent professional person but will eventually discover that achieving professional success does not solve the problem of lack of purpose in life. Thus, the sense of directionlessness will be further amplified.

People who are exclusively career-driven (e.g. women who give up having children in favour of a career) are deeply narcissistically wounded. Unfortunately, often that moment of realization that career success is not the answer to the problems they face comes late, at an age when starting a family becomes problematic.

Although the parent is the one who suppressed the desire to grow up in the child, this lack of support now lives on in the child who has become an adult, when the person with the narcissistic wound has become the source of their own discouragement. The person cannot understand what has happened to them on their own and uses denial to avoid having to face the reality of their own life: that their parent did not give them what they needed as a child. Denial, however, also prevents healing and only by short-circuiting this defence mechanism can the person overcome this blockage. Dismantling denial and defence mechanisms can only be done through therapy.

Some emotional reactions to narcissistic injury

People with narcissistic injury have various reactions to it: some people develop fantasies (and even magical thinking) in which they imagine that there is no separation. You may have heard this idea from various spiritual gurus, that we, all humans, are one. If you found this idea appealing, you most likely have a narcissistic wound responding to this idea. The seduction comes from the promise that separation from the parent is no longer an issue and the pain caused by that separation can be suppressed.

Another variant of this idea is the fantasy of the soul mate, with whom the person hopes to merge completely at some point when they meet. It is actually the desire to reunite with the mother and, as long as it is maintained, it prevents the formation of a functioning adult couple. Adult couples do not completely merge with each other: what happens is that the relationship adds elements on top of each other’s individuality, and the couple in no way suppresses each partner’s individuality.

Other common emotional reactions to narcissistic wounding are shame, feelings of helplessness, humiliation, anger and self-blame.

People with narcissistic wounding frequently feel that they have let themselves down or that other people have let them down. The disappointment stems from the confrontation of childish and unrealistic aspirations for emotional fusion with reality. Frosch said that “patients are frantically searching for the ideal because they cannot tolerate the limitations of reality. This is why they experience chronic frustration”.

A kind of conclusion

I wanted to write about these things to let you know that you don’t have to feel this way for the rest of your life and healing is possible.

It will be long lasting because you will have to dismantle all the mythology you have created around your childhood, your relationship with your parents and intimate relationships in general.

But you may not live your whole life with that feeling of inner emptiness.