Trauma
The patterns followed you into adulthood and you've been recognizing them in your own life and you don't know how to stop running them.
The household revolved around them. You learned to read their moods before you read books. You either became the kid who managed them, the kid who disappeared, or the kid who fought them, and the role followed you out of the house. As an adult, you’re hypervigilant in relationships, you struggle to know what you actually want, you over-give or you withhold, you pick partners who reproduce the same setup. You’ve identified the source. The identifying hasn’t stopped the patterns.
The childhood ended. The adaptations are still your default operating system.
The patterns keep showing up.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came up needing something specific from the parent that the parent couldn’t give: to be seen as a separate person, to be valued for who you were rather than what you reflected, to be safe from their need for you to perform. You may have absorbed the lesson that being you was conditional on being useful to them, and you’ve been running that program in every adult relationship since. You may have built your identity around being the not-them version of you, and the construction has had its own costs.
Knowing the parent was narcissistic doesn’t change the patterns the survival required. The patterns of accommodation, vigilance, self-erasure, and over-giving are pre-rational. They activate before you can think.
For the present-day parental relationship, see My mother is narcissistic or My father is narcissistic . For the broader CPTSD framework, see I have CPTSD . For the relationship patterns these often produce, see I keep dating the wrong people .
The understanding is one thing. The doing-something-different is the other thing.
Strategic therapy works in your present relationships, not your childhood. We identify where the four-year-old’s survival role keeps getting recruited into adult interactions, and we change the responses that have been keeping you castable in it. The pattern goes quiet because no one in your life keeps drafting you for the part.
You stop auditioning for the role you were assigned at four.
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