What kind of upbringing will make a person a narcissist?
When a toddler cries, he is truly miserable. The tears sooth his wounded ego and are a cry for help. It’s usually over some mishap, some frustration, some failure, some disappointment. His emotional reactions to these things all have one thing in common: shame. What is supposed to happen at these moments? Mother to the rescue, that’s what’s supposed to happen, with her consoling voice, her patience, and her gentle encouragement.
What just happened? Another little lesson in shame repair. It’s OK to make mistakes, be frustrated, fail, be disappointed. It’s OK. It happens to everyone, young and old. And as these little lessons in shame repair repeat themselves over and over, gradually the toddler’s brain lays down its own shame repair circuitry and can perform its own regulation. Result: a self-reliant, confident, tolerant little person with realistic expectations of himself and of others, ready to leave the nest.
It all has to happen during the first 1,000 days of life, i.e. before the age of 2. It happens mostly in the right prefrontal cortex of the brain. After 2, the left cortex proliferates faster, primarily to learn language. That’s how Nature intended us to acquire this all important psychological/social skill for us to take with us into adult life as integrated individuals who are OK with our limitations and with the limitations of others.
If the toddler is deprived of this nurturing, patience, and gentle encouragement, but instead experiences that crying for help doesn’t bring help, the result can be an adaptation where he stops being himself and pretends to be the ideal child that never cries and thus secures his mother’s expectations, i.e. love. The adaptation works. His mother does not abandon him.
A smothering mother — one who tries to be perfect — can also lead to deficient shame repair. That’s because the child is deprived of discovering the world and his place in it. If his mother is always “in his face,” telling him what to do and be, he will not experience freedom and wonder. He will not experience enough little failures and frustrations. He will constantly be under the impression that his mother knows best. As long as he lives up to his mother’s instructions and expectations, he will not become his own person. There will not be many shame repair lessons because there will be precious little for him to be ashamed about. A “perfect” mother can give him the impression that he too has to be perfect.
The consequence is that he doesn’t explore the world and his place in it with joy and security. His emotional separation from his mother is fraught with anxiety and hesitation. He fails to really become his own person. He is constantly afraid and ashamed of the person he truly is because that brings him so much inner discord. He deprives himself of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to be sincere with his need for help, to learn the skill of shame repair. So when he later goes out into the world, he is handicapped. He is haunted by a shame the origin of which he cannot remember, by an ancient feeling of not being worthy of love. His self-image, his self-esteem is shaky. He has a deficiency in shame repair brain circuitry.
Call it what you will: inferiority complex, weak ego. He is dependent on others to reassure him of his worth. He constantly seeks validation. Etc., etc., and when he doesn’t get what he is so desperate for, he has a meltdown and goes into a reflex rage.
That is NPD. It is a tragedy for the person who acquired it, his victims, and for society.
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