Psychology says the cruelest thing about being raised by a narcissistic but charming parent isn't anything they did at home - it's the structural impossibility of being believed by anyone outside the house, and a child who learns early that the world will never see what they see grows into an adult who has stopped trying to be understood by people who weren't there - Silicon Canals

"Most discussions of narcissistic parenting focus on what happens inside the house. The criticism. The control. The manipulation. The endless requirement that the child organize themselves around the parent's emotional needs. These are all real, well-documented, and worth talking about."

"But there is a second feature of being raised by this kind of parent that gets less attention, and that, in the testimony of many adult children of narcissists, ends up doing more long-term damage than the household abuse itself. It is what happens, structurally, when the child tries to talk about it to anyone outside the house."

"The feature in question depends on a particular kind of narcissist. Not the obvious kind. The charming kind. The narcissist who is, in public, beloved. The one whose colleagues describe them as warm. The one who is the friend everyone in the neighborhood admires. The one who, when their adult child finally tries to describe the household to a friend or a partner, produces, in the listener, a small confused look that says: but I have met your parent, and your parent is lovely."

"What this produces is a structural mismatch in the available evidence. The child grows up watching both versions. The neighbors, the teachers, the family fri"

Narcissistic parenting often centers on criticism, control, manipulation, and demands that children organize around a parent’s emotional needs. A less discussed long-term damage involves what happens when children try to describe these experiences to people outside the home. This harm is tied to a particular type of narcissist: the charming, publicly admired parent. In public, the parent appears warm and lovely, while the abusive or controlling behavior is reserved for those closest to them. When the child shares their account, listeners may react with confusion because they have met the parent and found them pleasant. This creates a structural mismatch in evidence, making the child’s testimony hard to accept.

Read at Silicon Canals