What kind of upbringing will make a person a narcissist?

Lydia Colton

An abusive upbringing. Emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or severe neglect.

A lot of the times, people erroneously assume that helicopter parenting and spoiling a child and failing to discipline a child result in the child growing up into a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD.)

This is false. It is true that helicoptering, spoiling, and failing to discipline children can cause them to develop into narcissistic adults with feelings of entitlement and arrogance.

However, narcissism and NPD are two very different things, despite the misleading name of NPD. Even a very narcissistic individual is not someone with NPD just because they are very narcissistic.

NPD is a specific set of traits and behaviors that are highly dysfunctional for the individual (and toxic to those around an untreated one.)

NPD develops as a result of not having the basic childhood needs of safety, protection, and nurturance met.

Unfathomably to me, many people take for granted that they are functional adults, and seem to assume they magically manifested such functionality in themselves. This is deceptive; humans are not born knowing how to be functional adults. If you don’t believe me, go look at a toddler.

Childhood is comprised of several developmental stages that are navigated in order. In order to navigate a level of childhood development successfully, the preceding levels must have already been navigated successfully. Each level that is not successfully navigated results in the proceeding levels also not being successfully navigated. You can’t build a tower of blocks starting with the fifth level block. Such is childhood development, where stages have critical time periods within which the skill must be developed. (See: The case of Genie, a victim of severe childhood abuse and neglect who could never be taught language because she did not learn it in her early years during the critical stage for acquisition of this skill.)

Now you may ask: But if children in abusive homes do not successfully navigate the stages, then how do they reach adulthood being able to do more than a toddler can do? Good question, I’m glad you asked.

The child’s brain is determined to develop in order to be able to survive. What it does when the basic needs to navigate a stage (and therefore subsequent stages too) are not met, is it comes up with coping mechanisms and defense strategies in order to semi-successfully navigate the stage at the critical time period it must be developed. Imagine you want to build a tower of blocks, but your blocks are misshapen and uneven. You find other little objects, like folded papers or some glue, to attempt to set one block on top of the other despite their misshapenness and uneveness. Now at least you have a tower. Albeit a weird looking janky one.

Enter: Personality Disorders. Personality disorders (PDs) are a set of trauma symptoms and now-maladaptive coping and defense strategies. The coping and defense strategies are the folded paper and the glue; the trauma symptoms are the misshapen and uneven blocks themselves.

But why NPD versus other PDs? Every child is born with a different set of genetics. Every abusive environment is different. Children’s brains will adapt exactly and only exactly how they need to in order to navigate developmental stages. Different situations call for different coping and defense strategies. This is why many PDs share certain criteria (all of them share emotional dysregulation - which is a symptom of trauma) but do not share all of the criteria (because the coping and defense strategies the particular childhood environment called for are necessarily different.) The devil’s in the details. Like the saying goes: Every happy family is the same. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Substitute nurturing for happy, and abusive for unhappy, and there is your reason that there are 10 PDs with some similarities for trauma symptoms, but many differences for the plethora of coping and defense mechanisms variously differing childhood situations demand.

Psychiatry has been very dismissive of the mountains of evidence that neuroscience has produced over the last several decades regarding childhood development, childhood trauma, and personality disorder criteria. Ironically, psychiatry dismisses and minimizes the research of a field that studies in detail the organ psychiatry presumes to treat.

This is a shame, because psychiatry often misleads adults who are suffering from childhood abuse trauma problems. Psychiatry has been misdiagnosing those with abuse histories with mood disorders (like bipolar 2), or poorly categorizing them with personality disorders only. This miscategoriztion of PDs misleads the general public, who starts to believe that trauma/PD effects are either an all or nothing, yes or no deal. Trauma is on a spectrum, as are its effects. This is why it is often difficult to know if someone you love has a PD; they could have abuse trauma, but not rise to the black-or-white yes-line of psychiatry’s PD diagnostic criteria.

Psychiatry often misleads its clients with PDs by misinforming them that they are stuck with their PD forever, and they must take medication to alleviate the symptoms because there is no “cure.” Psychiatry essentially says: “You have a misshapen, uneven, glue-and-paper, jumbled together mess of a personality. You are stuck with it. But we will try to help you try to work with this janky-ass tower of yours.”

This is wrong. There is no need for a cure, because PDs are not a “disease.” And, the tower is not stuck like that - neuroscience has known this for a while. But what does neuroscience know - it only studies the organ psychiatry medicates!

It turns out, you can knock the tower down and rebuild an improved one in its place. But if processing and integrating trauma were truly as simple as striking down a set of blocks, no one would be asking questions about PDs on quora, because there would be none to ask about.

No, it is very, very, very difficult to build a better tower. First, you have to knock the old one down; a better one can’t be built on top of a shaky one. You need to raze the current tower to the ground. You can only raze it piece by piece. First, comes out the paper, piece by piece. Then comes off the glue, glob by glob. Then comes off the blocks for sanding the misshapen edges. Then, you have to clear out the foundation. This takes years of effort and turmoil. After that, you are now ready - to begin to begin.

In terms of more literally what must happen: The individual becomes aware of their trauma, and begins to attempt to lessen their use of maladaptive coping and defense strategies. Then, they begin the deeply arduous work of processing the dissociated emotions from all of those years of terrifying, shame-inducing, rage-eliciting, panic-striking mistreatment at the hands of giants needed for survival. Then the person begins to navigate childhood stages all over again, learning skills like self-regulation and self-esteem building that were never successfully achieved the first go-around.

Not every adult with a history of childhood abuse is able to do this. Not every adult wants to do it. Many adults with childhood abuse histories are able to build a happy and functional life without processing and integrating the trauma; instead they work with the coping and defense mechanisms they have to mitigate the damage such mechanisms will do to them. If their symptoms are not that severe and they are able to control their mechanisms to enough of an extent that they do not harm their lives or those of others, then they can have a stable, comfortable, and functional life. For those who can and do process and integrate their trauma, the road is long and it gets worse before it gets better. Eventually there is a level of freedom one could not have imagined earlier, as one is able to renavigate development in a manner of their own choosing.