TRANSCRIPT
Does spoiling cause narcissism? Does being loved too much by a parent cause a person to be narcissistic? Does a person who gets cared about too much and has too much time devoted to them by their parents become narcissistic?
I’ve had that comment given to me many times over the years because I argue it’s the opposite. Now, people say many times, “Oh yeah, you say that trauma causes narcissism, but I’ve seen so many people who weren’t traumatized, who weren’t abandoned, who weren’t neglected by their parents, who became narcissists.” And they give examples of people who were spoiled, who were doted on, who weren’t given boundaries by their parents, who were given so much attention, who were treated like little gods of their universe, and how they were the ones who grew up to become narcissistic.
Well, aside from the fact that I don’t even like the word narcissistic—it’s a diagnosis—there’s a lot of things about it that I don’t like. I think there’s easier ways to say it, like being very unhealthily self-centered, being very selfish in an unhealthy way, being really unimpacted by others’ needs, putting oneself first or one’s false self first. All different ways of saying kind of being narcissistic.
Well, my answer to these people is that yes, in some ways, when parents do a lot of these things, like spoiling kids and giving them way too much attention and not enough boundaries, and giving them everything they want, and letting the children make all the rules and things like that, that can, on the surface, leave these children to end up with this thing called narcissism. But underneath it, what I’ve seen is that I’m still holding very strong and fast to my original analysis that it’s neglect, that it’s disrespect, that it’s trauma, that it’s abandonment that leads children to become this thing called narcissistic.
What I’ve seen is that when children are being raised in an environment where they’re told they’re always right, when children are spoiled, when they’re given everything, when they have no limits, when they’re told anything they do is great and amazing, when all their needs are supposedly attended to, often that’s just on the surface. And underneath it, that’s where the real dynamics are going on.
The real dynamics is those children really aren’t being loved that much. Their real deep needs are not being met, or more importantly, often their deep needs were not met before all this spoiling and doting and all that really happened. Because what I’ve seen a lot of times is when the children were very, very little, they really were emotionally disregarded by their parents. They were rejected emotionally; they were abandoned. Their real needs were not being met in often very, very profound ways.
And it set up a dynamic inside the child where they became so hungry and needy for love, so, so desirous to get someone to pay attention to them, see them, hear them in all the ways that they were not seen and paid attention to by their parents at their most primal ages, often when the kids were 0, 1, 2, 3 years old.
And often what I think is at some level the parents know it. They know that they really, really failed their children badly. And a lot of times what they do is, in compensation for what they didn’t give the child, they try to make up for it. The problem is these parents, most of the time, have no clue how to really meet the child’s needs. And what they’re dealing with is a child that’s not only older—four, five, six, seven years old—who has all the appropriate needs for a four, five, six, seven, eight-year-old, whatever the age the child is, but they also have all their unmet needs from when they were younger that are no longer age-appropriate.
And often the parents, not only do they not know how to meet the needs of the child who’s older, but they still don’t know exactly how to make up for what they did wrong. And it becomes a lot harder to make up for it when the child is older. So what do they do? So often they compensate for it by not having boundaries, by giving the kids all sorts of extra age-inappropriate choices, by giving the children all sorts of junk and things that they don’t need, by letting them eat whatever they want, letting them say whatever they want, and in a way they can raise that are really, you know, in ways that make them even more out of control.
But the primary thing underlying all the spoiling, all the lack of boundaries, all the things that seem like that’s what’s making the kid narcissistic, underneath that is still all that unmet need, all that original basic trauma, all that basic disrespect. Because in a person who gets labeled with narcissism, if they really do meet those criteria, that person is a person who is full of so much deep, powerful, painful unmet need. That’s a person who’s just so desperate to be loved, to be seen, to be heard, to be important—all the things that a very, very, very little child, even a baby, wants and needs. And when they’re older, it’s pretty clear if they exhibit that behavior that they didn’t get it once upon a time.