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Recovering from Narcissistic Family Systems: Part Two
122 Plays10 months ago
Today, we’re continuing the conversation from last week on understanding narcissism! If you didn’t get a chance to listen to Part One, make sure you start there!
Today’s episode is Part Two of a two-part series on recovering from narcissistic family systems, and Julie sat down with expert Pamela Madsen to discuss how to redefine your role, set boundaries, and heal your relationship with yourself if you have experienced the difficulties of having a person with abusive narcissistic behaviors in your life.
About today's guest:
Pamela Madsen is a Licensed Professional Counselor, owner, and clinical director for Sea Change Psychotherapy in Buckhead. Pamela specializes in working with adult individuals and couples at the intersection where trauma meets eating disorders, substance use, or anxiety disorders. This often comes along with chronic health conditions, infertility, spiritual injuries, and relationship difficulties. Pamela also works with therapeutic injuries and compassion fatigue. Pamela is trained in EMDR, DBT, Radically Open DBT, and is currently completing Internal Family Systems therapy certification. She has worked at higher levels of care and is a second career professional that comes with understanding workplace performance pressures. Her clients are perfectionists and high achievers who struggle to feel connected to others. Her clients struggle with work-life balance and burnout, have complicated feelings about their family, have difficulty trusting others, and long to finally understand their feelings. Pamela is currently completing her doctorate in counselor education and supervision. She has served on the Diversity and Inclusion Council of Buford City Schools District. She is also an executive board member of the Atlanta chapter of the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals.
Get in touch with Pamela:
https://seachangepsychotherapy.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Season 2
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to season two of Outside of Session. I'm your host, licensed clinical social worker, and therapist BFF, Julie Hilton. This season, I'm interviewing some incredible guests who also happen to be experts in their fields. Mental health, motherhood, spirituality, and so much more, I can't wait for their stories to be told. These are all the conversations I'm having outside of session.
Understanding Narcissism and Recovery
00:00:46
Speaker
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of outside of session. This week we are continuing the conversation that we started last week with Pamela Madsen talking about narcissism and recovering from narcissistic abuse. The conversation turned just so fascinating. So if you didn't get a chance to listen to last week's episode, make sure you check that one out first because you won't want to miss a single thing.
00:01:17
Speaker
What's the, what do you feel like the likely likelihood is of being able to successfully set some boundaries with that parent so that the relationship can change because it needs to change, but stay intact and actually get like more healthy, healthier, more healthy? Well, yeah, more healthy, more manageable. Well, the first step in that is working with the client to grieve.
00:01:45
Speaker
the relationship that they wanted and needed and also need in the future, they are not going to get.
Setting Boundaries with Narcissistic Parents
00:01:56
Speaker
It's crushing. Oh gosh. When you see that click on the pain, and that might take a while in therapy to really grieve over and over again. I'm not ever going to have that relationship with my parents when they're 80.
00:02:15
Speaker
You know, we may be as adults, one of our values is to care closely for and love our parents as they get closer to dying. And I'm not going to be able to have that, this fear of feeling relief when their parents pass. You know, that's another layer to it.
00:02:33
Speaker
what we what we kind of talk about is like this is going to be a little bit of like a whack-a-mole situation where I'm going to set a boundary and then we're going to try something else and I'm going to set a boundary and they're going to try something else and um like my clients well they'll go into like situations with their family like I think I messed up I didn't set the boundary right and I'll say you know what that's okay because you know the good news is
00:02:56
Speaker
they're going to do it again. So you're going to get another try. It doesn't matter how many times you mess up because you can keep, they're going to keep doing this and you can keep getting better at it. And once they realize like, Oh, like I didn't fail. Like, no, you're just, you have to practice it, but it's also whack-a-mole. So it'll move. And what we hope we can do is push that person into a corner where their only option to relate to us is the healthy one.
00:03:22
Speaker
And mostly what they figure out then is, oh, the ways I've been trying to talk to, relate, and connect with my child in the past aren't working. They're not getting what I'm looking for. This is the only thing left to try. They try it and everything's fine and you can have a conversation or lunch together. And they say, okay, this is the only way left to do it.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I'm also thinking about how important grief is. And another thing that came to mind is when the adult children have children of their own.
Grieving Unmet Parental Expectations
00:04:04
Speaker
I see that as being a time where people really realize it's so easy for me to think of my kids' emotions and to parent them in different ways, that that's when a lot of grief comes in of, why couldn't my parent do this for me? Oh yeah, especially when someone has a new baby, like their first child, and they hold that baby in their arms for the first time.
00:04:32
Speaker
And they look at them and then the things that come to mind for them, like the things they want to say to their baby are, you're the most magnificent baby ever born, right? The most beautiful, I want all good things for you. I will protect you. And then they start to remember and hear like the things that were said to them and almost like, like a ton of brook tips, I'm like,
00:05:00
Speaker
I can't imagine those words ever coming out of my mouth and saying them to this baby, like this precious child in my arms. And then that is often a real painful time. And it kind of takes that elation of a new parent away just a little bit. But it's just another part of the healing process. Our mother wounds often come out when we have
Narcissism vs. Child Abuse
00:05:26
Speaker
a baby. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
00:05:29
Speaker
It's good, I think, for a therapist to even think about is, like, as I'm hearing all of the abuse that my clients go through, I have to ask myself, like, is this just in an abusive parent? Or I don't want to try to ask, like, what is the difference when you know that it's narcissism versus just child abuse? Okay. Well,
00:05:52
Speaker
I think- I don't know if that's like an actual question. Well, yeah, no, I think I feel what you're asking because I think what we often what we're thinking of narcissistic abuse is really obvious. You know, someone's standing over you shaking their finger and face saying, you're no good. Look at what you did to me. Right. And it's it wasn't something that that
00:06:22
Speaker
person is obviously done to that person, right? So there's two types here.
00:06:29
Speaker
overt narcissistic abuse, and then there's covert narcissistic abuse. Okay. I know, right? So this will, I think this will help. Um, so that covert is like, it's obvious. You can point it out. Like you can sense it, um, pretty easily. The covert narcissistic abuse is a little different. So, um, that person tends to look, um, they might be very like philanthropic almost, right? So they're doing like kind things there.
00:07:01
Speaker
They're controlling how people see them. That impression management is really strong by doing what looks like caring tasks, like taking dinner to the neighbor whose father died or something like that.
Narcissism in Religious Settings
00:07:14
Speaker
And their hyper focus being on like, look at what a good person I am.
00:07:22
Speaker
That is just more of controlling that facade. Everything's fine here. Don't look here. But when they go home and that child gets, you know, a couple of B's on their report card, you know, they're an embarrassment to the family. They didn't make the all-in-all. That used to be published in the newspaper when I was younger.
00:07:44
Speaker
So that would have been the time for that parent to really shine, look at me. My kid has all these great accomplishments, and that speaks to what a wonderful parent I am. And in our kids' accomplishments, we do play some role, but they're their accomplishments. It's a nuance that's very different. That is extremely interesting to me coming from
00:08:14
Speaker
a religious aspect. Have you heard of the book when, oh gosh, what's it called? When narcissism comes to church? I have heard of it. I haven't read it, but it is not uncommon that I work with either narcissism from the pulpit, right? So we get a lot of spiritual injuries around us too, but also in families where religion is used like as a weapon.
Public Image vs. Private Reality
00:08:43
Speaker
I'm literally debating if I want to ask you about that now or if I want to talk you into doing a whole episode on that. Either one. If you want to talk about that later, we can. It is its own little animal. Spiritual injuries are so complicated because people draw. I guess here's the connection. In many religions,
00:09:10
Speaker
the deity is like a father figure, right? And if we have an abusive relationship with our biological father relating to the spiritual leader as a paternal relationship or a maternal either one,
00:09:32
Speaker
is it comes from a place of mistrust. I mean, the framework is that it's an abusive relationship. So that punishment approach of religion fits right in there. And helping my clients grow to develop their own values and beliefs about their spirituality is a real key piece of the healing, is that maybe they were taught that God is this vengeful, punishing person. But when they read the text of their religion,
00:10:03
Speaker
their God is actually more of a benevolent, caring person and they can't, um, they have to separate like, Oh, like heavenly father, earthly father, two different things, right? That, um, and maybe that's the kind of parent I needed what is described in their faith, but they didn't get that here from their biological parents. So then we have to work on developing that inner parent for them. Yeah, absolutely. And,
00:10:30
Speaker
And I've seen that a lot too where from the pulpit there is this image of such care and such relatability and doing so much for the community, but then people who are actually in close proximity are constantly being just torn down and berated and they see a completely different side. And so there's so many people in the community and the congregation that would say, you know, it's such a shock when this,
00:10:59
Speaker
this thing came out because every interaction that we have, again, it's that very surface level interaction that was really done for the image. And I think that that's what can be so invalidating for the clients that you end up working with is because everybody else's view of this person is that, oh, they're so caring, they're so genuine, because I think there's a lot of acting going on, right?
00:11:27
Speaker
It's almost like people don't believe what they have experienced and the views that they've experienced because the majority of people that are at least an arm's distance away or more don't have that experience at all. Right. You might have parents who are characterized as like Warden June Cleaver,
00:11:49
Speaker
From Leave It to Beaver, that might be the description given to their family and their parents. How that effectively shuts down accessing support is
00:12:05
Speaker
Other people are confirming that everything is perfect and great in your life. So the person carries this pain that's experiencing the abuse, right? So that's where we start to see eating disorders show up or even substance use or other self-injurious behaviors, really any of those. Because now the door has been closed to access help. That's just my heart.
00:12:33
Speaker
Right? Because because that's where the self trust has been lost, too. Because at some point, you, you might be saying like, No, this is wrong. This is not okay. This is really hurtful. But then when you have other people say, No, that's not who this person is, it invalidates everything about what you know. So you end up doubting yourself. And I say this all the time that that's what trauma does. It makes us not trust ourselves. We think that we don't interpret things wrong. We think
00:13:00
Speaker
We don't interpret things right. We think that we read the room wrong. We think that we did something to cause it. We think that we're overreacting. That's where those mind games come in, right? Where things feel like they're just being twisted and you walk away from the situation saying, maybe I was wrong for feeling that way.
00:13:22
Speaker
Exactly. So not only do you get the act of gaslighting from the perpetrator, but you get it from like this, the social systemic gaslighting, and then you do it to yourself as well. It is, it is very effective. And all begins with like that focus on impression management, you get it that individual can then recruit, um,
00:13:43
Speaker
bi-collateral, right? Recruit this reinforcement that maybe the child in that situation is the problem. And, you know, children internalize everything. So now it's, I'm not good enough. I need to, I'm not pretty enough. And oh
Gaslighting and Self-Doubt
00:14:05
Speaker
goodness, the politics of physical appearance and narcissistic family system is so important. Again, with the image, right?
00:14:15
Speaker
Or I said that in your face. You're like, oh. Yeah, the politics of physical appearance being so important.
00:14:30
Speaker
Hey everyone, I just wanted to pause for a quick moment to say thank you so much for all the love and support that you're showing outside of session. If you haven't already, do me a huge favor and hit the subscribe button. Give me a five star review and share this podcast with all of your friends. Help me take this show to another level. Now back to today's episode.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah, because when you say things like that, I have these little things jump up about me that I've heard people say that their mom's making sure that, you know, at 14 years old that they were wearing lip gloss every time they left the house or like, because you have to look put together, you have to like the demands that were put on them. Yes, maybe put some lipstick on before we leave and then not too red, you look like a whore.
00:15:24
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. So you can't be right. You can try to be perfect that that still won't be right. Yeah, you can't be right. It would not benefit someone who has used narcissistic abuse to control you for you to finally be right because then you would stop pursuing, making them happy and meeting their needs. It does not benefit them for you to ever be right.
00:15:52
Speaker
That's so profound to hear you say that. Their goal is not actually for you to be perfect. The goal is for you to think that you're not and to remind you that you're not because that will produce a kid that never stops trying. Well, more succinctly, the goal is that you continue to try to meet their needs.
00:16:18
Speaker
So if the child is perfect, looks beautiful, always put together, performance athlete, stellar student, very well behaved, right, around the parent's friends in particular. If the child looks perfect and the parent looks great, right, oh,
00:16:43
Speaker
We must be such wonderful parents for our children to be so performative, right? Or even like the child having a boyfriend or a girlfriend if it's a male. So if our daughter can attract this really great young man to date her, we must be really great parents. And then this gives them then the ability to receive respect and admiration from their peers
00:17:13
Speaker
and their parents, which is pretty key. So the grandparents. Yeah. Oh, really? So that's a big piece of it, too.
00:17:20
Speaker
Oh, it's definitely a family system. Yeah. It doesn't, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. That's interesting. So you, you started to try to talk about gaslighting a minute ago and I had tons of questions about that. Um, because I think that that's another one of those buzzwords that I have clients and people ask me all the time now, like, is this gaslighting? Am I being gaslit right now? Um, is it gaslit or gaslighted?
00:17:48
Speaker
I mean, I guess we, the semantics of it, I call it gaslighting. Yeah, I call it gaslighting. And it's actually, you know, I'm sure folks are going to Google this, that it comes, the term comes from an old movie where the husband, husband and wife, and he decides he's trying to
00:18:08
Speaker
like get rid of his wife and wants to have a different kind of life. So he decides he's going to make her think she's going crazy. So he starts to leave the gas light on and then she'll say it's on and he'll turn it off and then turn it back on and like, and starts to make her doubt her own perception, trying to drives her to insanity because the reality she sees does not match the one she's being told. And that is what gas lighting is.
00:18:36
Speaker
I did not know that. I did not know that's where it came from. That's really- It's all black and white movie. Yeah. Okay. So it's when the reality that you perceive, you're being told that that's not reality. Yes, exactly. It's a good way to define it. So how do you see it show up with, especially with adult children?
00:19:02
Speaker
Um, mostly around their feelings, right? Okay. Right. So, um, you know, if biggest piece being here, if the child has feelings, that's really takes away from the narcissistic individual's ability to get their needs met. Right. Um, so they need their kids to have fewer feelings, smaller feelings, no needs, that kind of thing.
00:19:26
Speaker
And they then also recruit the child to meet their needs, right? Taking care of the parents, what we do, right?
Narcissistic Traits in Relationships
00:19:31
Speaker
So, you know, if the child is hurt, right, they'll say something to the child like, you're not hurt or you're not sad. You're just scared. Shake it off.
00:19:47
Speaker
Gosh, I feel a little throwback to some coaching moments I've seen with my kids in sports. You're not hurt. You're just scared. A child has broken ankles. So it is telling them what they feel. You're not angry. You're just whatever. Mostly it's the sad, though. There's definitely avoidance of sad. We hear that a lot.
00:20:14
Speaker
Okay. So you're not this, you're that. What about, um, what about things like, well, that's not how I meant it. So you shouldn't have taken it that way. Yes. That's a great example. Um, well, again, telling them like,
00:20:37
Speaker
You're not supposed to feel that way. You're supposed to feel differently. But no one can tell us what we feel. This is pretty important to remember. When someone's telling you how you feel, this is the biggest red flag.
00:20:52
Speaker
Let me qualify that a little bit. That's different than someone helping you label your emotions. Tell me more about that. Let's see if we can understand a little deeper. That's not what narcissism sounds like. Tell me more about that. Never. They want to shut it down. They want to shut down the discussion because any of this would require them to accept accountability for the part they play. They may not be 100% at fault.
00:21:16
Speaker
Right? This is a relationship. So there's two people involved, right? They may not be 100% involved or at fault, but they want to avoid any accountability. So it can be things too like, well, I lied to you about that. Like if they get caught in something, I lied to you because I knew that you would blow up or because I knew that it would hurt you. And I, right? Like they're justifying their lives by saying, I knew what you would feel.
00:21:45
Speaker
No, they don't. They don't know that what you're going to feel. Yes. They'll assign. So they assign intent to every behavior or action. They go ahead and assign the intent. They're not curious about it and it puts them in a victim's stance each time. So again, even though they lie, they're saying, but the intention was to spare you from a negative feeling. So it was justified. It's okay that I lied because I did it for you. I did it for you.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yes. Or, you know, you had me walking on eggshells all around you. I didn't have a choice. That's a good one too. Yeah. Yeah. But again, this is something that we all do to a certain extent, right? Yeah. One, I think, you know, I think a lot of times when people listening to this might say, Ooh, I've done that. Am I a narcissist? Right. And you probably noticed like,
00:22:39
Speaker
Throughout this, I've not used that term narcissist. I like people with narcissistic traits or individuals that experience a lot of narcissistic behavior because I really don't like to make it an identity. I don't know that that's really helpful. It's really pathologizing because those are people that need help too.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, folks are going to be hearing some elements of this conversation that you and I are having in themselves. And I think one of the biggest takeaways in relationship is that when we make a mistake, we can acknowledge it. Actually, the strength of a relationship is
00:23:19
Speaker
increased in how we handle a rupture. So if I were to recognize, if I were called up by my spouse for doing something like that, I could say, you know what? You're right. Give me a minute. That's not how I want to show up here. What I was trying to say, and obviously not very well, is
00:23:45
Speaker
Um, I would like some quality time with you instead of like, you never take me out anymore. Right. You can always back it up and do a do over. You kind of, and we always feel closer in relationships when people acknowledge, um, a hurt that they've committed against us or, um, and
00:24:12
Speaker
heal from it, right? Yeah. Try to do better. We're not looking for perfection. We're just going for the good enough relationships. Absolutely. And I think that like when we had with our, with our parent, with our spouse, whoever, if we hear that we hurt them, if our response is to want to correct that,
00:24:32
Speaker
I mean, that's a pretty good indicator that they are not on our sister. Right. And I think that's going to bring us right. So the word we've not said yet, which is empathy. Right. And that's the key piece. You kind of just like really beautifully described what that looks like is like, I don't want you to hurt. And so I'll acknowledge that and do differently because the goal isn't to hurt you.
Advice to Younger Self
00:25:00
Speaker
But the E word, right, empathy, that's the key piece that's missing for individuals that have strong traits of narcissism.
00:25:11
Speaker
have a strong felt sense of other people's emotions. They may have cognitive empathy, so they understand what emotions are and they can see them on people, but it may not move them to care, right? And that's when you start to get into more of like antisocial behaviors and things. And those sit side by side on a spectrum of
00:25:38
Speaker
of pathology. But that is the key piece. Does this person understand that I have feelings and want them to not hurt? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's a good way to kind of like sum it up, right? Because I'm just thinking about
00:26:01
Speaker
someone with empathy, how they respond differently. We might, we still get defensive. We still, we want people to understand our intent. We want it to be able to say, I did not, I would never want to hurt you. I didn't mean it that way, but that's very different than saying, I didn't mean it that way. So you shouldn't feel that way. That's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't mean it that way. So you shouldn't feel that way. Anybody that whips out the should, we know we're, we're being guilted. Yeah.
00:26:29
Speaker
That's so much. I feel like I have, I'm going to go process some of this too of like, Oh yeah, I have such a better understanding of even how to help clients with it. But before we wrap up, thank you again, by the way, for being here. This has been awesome. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. The last question that I kind of ask all of my guests to wrap up is if you could go back and tell your younger self one thing at this point in life with all of the wisdom that you've got and all the experiences that you have now, what would it be? What would you tell her?
00:27:00
Speaker
Oh, gosh. Obviously, I've had some lived experience with narcissistic abuse. I couldn't have been able to speak the language of hell without it. So I would probably say the younger me is trust that you'll be able to use these hard times for good. It won't be in vain. So I think that's what we do as therapists.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, it is. I love that so much. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Julie. Yeah, absolutely. So I will have people as information in the show notes. And so if people want to get in touch with you, they'll know where to find you. But that's all we have for today. Anything else you want to say before we hop off? No, I appreciate you taking the time and all of the effort you put into producing this podcast is so helpful for our community. Yeah, absolutely. I love doing it.
00:27:54
Speaker
Well, that's all we have for you guys today. We will see you guys next week. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of outside of session. Remember while I am a licensed therapist, this podcast is not a substitute for individual therapy. The contents of this episode are for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you are having a mental health emergency, please dial 911 for immediate assistance or dial 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline.