The Effects Of Narcissistic Parent- Child Dynamic | Ashok Gupta | Gupta Program |

And how might this impact on Tina the ballerina? See if you can recognize any of these impacts. So Tina the ballerina, who may have grown up with a narcissistic parent or a parent that displayed these traits would have experienced a lack of nurture, empathy and bonding. And she may keep asking herself, am I worthy? Am I good enough? And often children of narcissists will become overachievers because test taught her to realize that it didn't matter who she was, it was all about what she did and what she achieved and how she made the mother feel better about herself or the father. Remember in this presentation, although we're talking about females here, it can be male or female on either side. Okay, So a narcissistic mother may live her life through the achievements of her child. And so Tina learns that it's not about me as a person. I'm not love for me. I'm loved for what I achieve or what I prove in life. So once again that mirror. When Tina looks at herself in the mirror, she doesn't see Tina the ballerina. She sees what her parents saw in her. She defines herself by her parents perception. So it can be overachieving or sometimes in the children of or the grown children of narcissists, there can be underachievement, self sabotaging underachievement. It can go both ways there. And a lack of self love compromises romantic relationships. So relationships can become co dependent where when we go into a relationship we feel that we need to look after the needs of and of the other person. And once again those attachment styles are impacted upon, we might go into a severe anxious attachment style. In those situations there can be hypersensitivity, insecurity and a feeling of being really self conscious. And once again that lack of safety didn't feel safety as a child. And therefore as a grown adult. Physically, mentally, emotionally, we may constantly be hypervigilant about our life and our surroundings to prevent us from experiencing the danger, the trauma that we may experience as a child. Once again impacting on our attachment styles and how we connect with people around us. Do we become deeply anxious about how people treat us and what we think, in which case we become anxious attachment style or do we become quite avoidant and ambivalent? Yeah, so what? So even in those avoidant traits, what we're trying to do is protect ourselves from hurt and pain. So sometimes in a relationship we may decide that relationships aren't worth it. We may even decide that we're not going to be in a relationship or we may think our relationships mean pain, so I'll become emotionally distant. And any of these strategies may also enter. So. So, for instance, we have Anita, the doctor who is the helper. Sometimes we perceive that we were only good enough as a child with a BPD parent or an NPD parent if we were constantly helping and being good little girl. So as an adult, we find that the needs of other people outweigh our own needs, and that starts defining us. Any of these traits can develop. And one of the ones that's most important here that we haven't even mentioned, she will make an appearance. It's Melissa the cheerleader, okay? Which is actually our inner critic. Now, our inner critic doesn't want anything bad to happen to us. Our inner critic is trying to motivate us and push us and protect us from dangers. But often in these situations, our inner critic is an internalized voice of that parent. So. So whatever was the voice, that was our mother or our father, if there was a lot of criticism, a lot of rejection, even abusive comments, they become internalized within our inner critic. And suddenly, whatever we do in life, there's that strong voice putting us down. And we think, why am I behaving like this? Why do I keep putting myself down? It's not your fault. It's once again a protection strategy. Because. Because the brain thinks if I protect you by criticizing you, then you'll avoid criticism from other people because you'll make changes in your life. So once again, everything is a protection strategy. The npd, the bpd, the wounded child that experiences this, these are all protection strategies. And in terms of the brain neurology of this and very fascinating brain neurology, we know that actually those inhibition mechanisms are compromised. So what happens is we have our prefrontal cortex and our amygdala and people who've experienced trauma, developmental trauma, abuse, or neglect, there are more pathways from the amygdala up to the prefrontal cortex than there are from the prefrontal cortex down to the amygdala. So when there are strong emotional reactions, they can no longer be inhibited by our conscious, rational mind. So we may find, as the adult children of NPD or bpd, that we find it hard to emotionally regulate. We might be more emotionally reactive, and those emotional reactions may last longer than other people. And this is one of the reasons why we have a more sensitive amygdala, which then makes us more prone to these conditioned responses in illnesses such as me, CFS and fibromyalgia. And we also, ironically, Know that people who experience bpd, they're also potentially more prone to getting these types of illnesses as well because of that dysregulated autonomic nervous system. So where do we go from here? What are our next steps? Remember that here we are not diagnosing anybody. So I don't want you to look at this presentation. Think I need to diagnose a parent? This is simply about the impact that it has on us. And can we recognize these traits and does it facilitate healing now? How can it facilitate healing? Well, when we look back on our childhoods, if we recognize some of these traits, it enables us to realize that this was something in the past and it doesn't need to be relevant now. And it enables us to heal that inner child, the Tina, the ballerina that lives within us, all that wounded part of us. It becomes easier to heal her because we can nurture her and give her what she didn't get as a child through our own self love. So what is self love? We hear it banded around self love. We just got to love ourselves. What does that really mean? It means that we make an attempt to discover and heal the pain from the past and then reparent ourselves back to normality, helping this part of us realize that the strategies that were relevant as a child are no longer relevant as an adult. Because we are resilient and strong. We have that strong spirit within us. We all have it. And our past is not our destiny. So how do we heal Tina? Well, first of all, the understanding. So today is just the very first initial step, the understanding of some of these patterns that may have occurred in our lives. And then we look at processing any emotions of anger or grief. As we watch today's presentation, we may experience feelings of grief for the loss of a nurturing parent or a nurturing childhood that we never had. But it's remembering that wasn't lost time. There is a deeper, karmic reason for this. There's a reason for why this came into our lives. And it's for us to grow and develop and evolve to the next stage of our evolution as human beings, for our soul's evolution. It's amazing work that we're up to right now. So from understanding can then come the next step of processing our emotions. And I would love for you to work with a therapist or a coach to support you through that. It can help us to potentially feel compassion. And that's what we tried to do today is feel compassion for that person who exhibits narcissistic or borderline Traits they don't mean to do what they're doing. They're not deliberately being mean. That's because they are wounded for their own developmental traumas in their own childhoods. And at one point it's just compassion. It may even be empathy for what they're experiencing. Because actually there's a chain. There's a chain of that energy that gets passed down from generation to generation. And at one point in time we can decide to break that chain. That is our destiny. From that stage comes a sense of acceptance that now I understand the past and I process my emotions, I begin to feel some compassion for those actors in my life and I can begin to get to a sense of acceptance for what I experienced. And from that acceptance, are we ready to get to a stage of forgiveness? We may not be. And that's okay. It's okay if what we experienced was very severe and we aren't ready to forgive. But at least there can be an acceptance and letting go and a release of the past and then finally that self parenting within a child work. You know, we've worked with so many different modalities and we find that inner child work so incredibly powerful at healing this Tina within us, that lives within us and bringing her into an adult life because she may be stuck at the same developmental age at which these experiences occurred. There may be a seven or eight year old child just living within us that we now can. And she's isolated, she's lost, and she keeps coming up to the surface, bubbling up to the surface and impacting our adult interpersonal relationships. So how can we look to heal this part within us? And we do a lot of that within the Gupta program as well as part of our recovery process from chronic illness. So where do we go next from here? Well, this has been such an important topic and we've had such a great reaction from people that what I now want to do is actually interview certain people who support the survivors of borderline or narcissistic traits and actually understand how they work with clients. So these are future Facebook lives that I'm sure we'll do where we're going to interview some experts in the area and really enable some deep, powerful healing within all of us. So in terms of some books and some interesting places you can go. I'll put these up now. So perhaps you can take a picture of this in terms of certain books that we recommend, or certainly I recommend that I've read that have been really powerful in terms of their deeper understandings of these types of conditions. So there's surviving a borderline parent understanding the borderline mother, will I ever be good enough? And we also recommend mindfulness meditation, and that has been shown when we've been through traumatic childhood experiences. Mindfulness and meditation can be a great way of just being able to calm down our nervous system, ready for that inner child work or that support. So please do consult a therapist if some of the things that we've talked about today have really triggered something within you, some awareness or perhaps even an emotion, and look to that process of healing. And finally, if you do suffer from a chronic illness, may it be me, cfs, fibromyalgia, chemical or mould sensitivities, or a whole range of physical illnesses, then please do Visit our website, guptoprogram.com where you can find lots of free videos and resources to support you with healing from those chronic conditions. So I hope we've taken you on a compassionate journey here, Awareness. We haven't gone into the healing, but we've just wanted to help you become more aware of how we may go from Tess, who had a challenging childhood developmental trauma that he or she may have experienced, right through to how that then impacted on her behaviors as a parent, which then impacted on Tina and her childhood experiences, which then impacted on Tina as an adult, which then meant that she had a more sensitized nervous system, which then made her more prone to certain mental, physical and emotional disorders. And it's now time to break that chain, to be aware, become more aware of ourselves, take responsibility for our own reactions and our conditions and say, let's let go of the past now. Let's heal what we experienced and then move forward with grace and heal that inner child and bring it to our conscious, adult, rational self. So I hope you've found that useful. It's certainly been fascinating for me to research this area and share the experiences of many of our clients. And really, as I said, I hope that this has enabled compassion for ourselves, compassion for the actors and actresses in our life that played those roles. Now we can look to move forward and we'll do more work on this in future events. I know that we always like to end on a song. So after this presentation, if you've been affected by this presentation, I really encourage you to meditate. It's really important that you just go to a place of stillness right now to allow the mind to process what we've gone through. And let's just finish on a song. And I know it's a song that I've sung a number of times, but it's a beautiful healing song that can just help us come to rest with what we've talked about today.