The Tyranny of Narcissism: Surviving Personal and National Trauma

The Friday Edition | No. 47

The Tyranny of Narcissism: Surviving Personal and National Trauma

I try to tell people about narcissistic abuse – about being born into a family with a narcissistic mother, an enabling father, and a web of enablers and bystanders. I try to explain how terrible it was and still is – how it terrorizes and lingers in the mind and body long after childhood ends. Few seem to listen or hear me. Unless you have lived through it, maybe it is just too hard to grasp the magnitude of suffering – or maybe no one cares to know. A child under the tyranny of narcissism is subjected to manipulation, lies, gaslighting, scapegoating, abuse, abject neglect, and transactional love and affection riddled with unrealistic and ever-changing conditions. This leaves the child in a powerless state of limbo, traumatized and fractured well into adulthood. The narcissistic parent demands the child sacrifice their own identity, soul, and dreams to serve their needs – not just in the moment, but forever.

You grow up believing you have reclaimed your power, and that no one will control, abuse, or demean you again. But the cycle and patterns return. Another abuser enters: a boyfriend, a husband, a coworker, a boss, a professor. And then, the worst possible thing – a malignant narcissist, a sexist misogynist, a racist, and a rapist who has been criminally indicted too many times to remember, and convicted – enters not just your life, but the country’s highest office. He is running for president. It feels surreal.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

_Edward R. Murrow