🎠What it means to have grown up with narcissistic abuse
Growing up with narcissistic abuse meant your reality was constantly questioned, your emotions were invalidated, and your worth became dependent on serving someone else's ego and emotional needs.
You may have learned to become a master chameleon, constantly reading micro-expressions and adjusting your personality to avoid triggering rage, silent treatments, or emotional withdrawal. Your parent treated you as an extension of themselves rather than a separate person with your own thoughts and feelings. You became their therapist, their emotional support, their audience - anything except simply their child who deserved unconditional love and protection.
You may have developed an exhausting hypervigilance around your own behavior, constantly monitoring yourself to ensure you're not becoming like them, while simultaneously struggling with boundaries because you never learned what healthy limits look like. Love became conditional performance art, where your value depended on how well you could manage another person's emotions and reflect back their desired image of themselves.