The pressure to be as the narcissist insists you are
There is a form of psychological abuse committed by narcissistic parents that is hard to identify for a child. It is a psychological process that is designed to mess with the child’s sense of himself or herself. In fact, therapists sometimes get paid the ‘big bucks’ so that they can bring all of their professional and personal training in therapy to know when it’s happening and work to resolve it. Outside of trained professionals, it can be very difficult get out of these interpersonal knots.
I am referring to a process called projective identification. In today’s blog I will describe this tactic in detail. Next, I will offer an anonymized case example of Terry* and his narcissistically abusive mother. Through the example, several features of projective identification will be illustrated. Last, I will offer one way of recovering from this kind of abuse.
Pathological Projective Identification
Pathological projective identification involves a parent relocating an unbearable sense of himself or herself and ‘finding’ it in their child (Seligman, 2018). Next, the parent acts coercively to influence the child to see the relocated fragment of the parent’s experience as the child’s own. In essence, the parent influences the child to identify with what he or she is projecting. This is a fragile arrangement, however, and the parent must continually work to keep the location of the unwanted experience in the child rather than himself.
A case example
The process of projective identification is illustrated in how an adult male client named Terry* described the nearly nightly bouts of emotional and verbal abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother throughout his teenage years. Terry’s mother came from a very well-heeled family and she idealized her tycoon father whose professional success stood in contrast to his ability to act paternally towards her. He was rarely home and insisted on seeing her as a sychophantal ally for her to have any sort of interaction with him. Her father had enemies in her family – including her mother and her brother. Terry’s mother felt compelled to be on her father’s side in these disputes. In therapy, Terry recalled knowing it was a matter of when not if his mother would decide he had done something ‘selfish’ and scream at him for being uncaring and irresponsible.
In treatment we worked to reconstruct what triggered his mother’s attacks at him. Rather than Terry being a ‘selfish kid’ as he was coerced to conclude growing up, his therapist inferred that his mother was relocating her own intolerable feelings of selfishness and finding them in Terry. Attending to herself in her own childhood would have compromised her ability to comply with the strictures her father insisted upon if she were to be in his life. She seemed practiced in denying her own needs and seeing them in others. Terry’s parents divorced when he was ten years old and Terry described his father as unavailable to confide in and disinterested in involving himself enough to protect Terry from his mother’s abuse.
Terry would describe how a seemingly trivial oversight in his completing of a nightly chore would often evoke her attack. She might perceive him to have hastily loaded the dishwasher after dinner and then scream at him for only caring about himself and being completely ungrateful for how hard she works to care for him and his sisters. Importantly, Terry’s mother did not consciously deliberate to determine that Terry was ‘being selfish’ – rather, she knew he was selfish. His mother showed complete certitude in her accusations and condemnations of his character.She was right in a sense that defied challenge from anyone – including Terry. He had no choice but to comply with her projection of him and experience himself as selfish and inconsiderate. Doing so allowed him to go on being with his mother in an important way. He would typically walk away from her tirades in tears and go up to his room with feelings of panic and helplessness.
Features of pathological projective identification
The parent MUST be right
Terry’s mother’s verbal attacks on Terry illustrate several features of this psychological process for both parties. To start with, Terry’s mother had to be right about her accusations towards Terry. There is a lot at stake when the parent dislocates an internal state into a child. The implication is that the parent could not psychologically survive to know about this aspect of himself or herself. The intensity of shame, terror, and/or despair would presumably be too great. The parent is convinced at a deep level that he or she would have nobody to safely express these feelings to so that he or she could feel more regulated and able to be soothed. Instead the feelings must be ejected and found – with absolute certainty in the communication – in the child. Terry’s mother could not survive being wrong that her son was selfish in these moments. There is no set of verbal counterarguments that can convince someone like Terry’s mother – in such moments – otherwise.
Terry’s experience in these nightly attacks highlights the impact of his mother’s absolute requirement that she be right about him. He recalled sensing that all he could do once she grew furious at him was endure her hostility. He knew there was nothing he could say to change her mind about him. It was as if his and her very sense of having a shared reality depended upon him complying with her efforts to get him to identify with the selfishness she could not stand in herself. Terry was hamstrung from being able to protect himself from her because to deny her accusations meant to break apart the only way available to exist with her as his mother and he as her son. That is the ‘or else’ quality that is imposed upon the recipient of the other’s projection. To not comply obliterates the only form of connection that is available – something that must be avoided at all costs by a child in relation to a parent.
Negation of the child’s subjectivity
Terry felt implicitly abandoned in the course of these exchanges. Part of the demand that he think about himself the way she insisted he does was that anything he felt, thought, or cared about was wholly disregarded by her. All that mattered was his mother’s psychology and what she needed to stay intact in these moments. She did not have the capacity to notice her own feelings and stay responsive to Terry. This led to a chronic sense for Terry that relationships did not offer much for him – he very much saw them as arrangements that took from him.
The impingeing quality of a parent’s projections
Pathological projective identification emits a call to the child that cannot go unheeded. The child feels the weight of the parent’s desperation behind this tactic. The child’s need for the parent sharpens his or her sensitivity to the parent’s psychological demands and motivation to meet them. The very nature of projective identification involves one person needing an unbearable state of mind to exist in someone else or a profound breakdown could occur. There is a felt imperative to orient to and comply with what the parent is looking to find in the child. When pathological projective identification is at play, the parent will always find what he is looking for – and the child will help him do so. The child assists in this process by heeding the call to be what the parent requires him to be. It is not experienced as a choice for the child but rather as the only way to maintain a form of connection to the parent – something that feels absolutely necessary.
Terry experienced this pressure to attend to his mother’s projections as fear of what she would do to him if he did not. He could not exactly name – at first – what he feared she might do. Over time, we grew to understand that he felt the pressure to play along with how she seemed to have to see him or something terrible would happen. Therapy helped him understand that the ‘something terrible’ might be the psychological collapse of his relationship to her and potentially her ability to remain intact if he did not identify with her projection.
The artificiality of what is identified with
Terry and his therapist worked through the ways he simultaneously felt abandoned and urgently called upon in relation to his mother. He had a vague strange sense of himself as ‘bad’ or ‘selfish’ but even that felt somehow unreal. He knew that her insistence of who he was felt ill-fitting at a core level. This is an important indicator that pathological projective identification was operative with his mother. The ways he thought of himself as bad and later defective had a hollow and subtly artificial sense to them. Although Terry had great difficulty thinking of himself as anything other than selfish and inconsiderate at the beginning of treatment, he knew that they never really rang true and he was left with a sense of not feeling like he knew himself.
Identify with the projection or have and be no one
One of the most insidious aspects for a child caught in this arrangement with a parent is how terrible the alternative of not identifying with the parent’s projections would be for that child. A child looks to his parent for accurate reinforcement of who he is in the world. A parent’s contingent and affirming responsiveness to the child’s expressions lead to such reinforcement (Seligman, 2018). A lot happens in these arrangements. The parent is saying “I am here and exist independently from you and you are there and exist independently from me. I am curious about you and want to understand as much as you will allow me about you.” The child now has the requisite space and relational context needed to develop a sense of his authentic way of being with himself and with others.
In pathological projective identification, no such space exists between the parent and child. The parent is saying, “I am here and terrified. No, wait the problem is over there in you. You are terrible. Why are you so terrible?”. The parent cannot regard the child as an independent other person to be found out about. Instead the parent already knows who the child is – the receptacle of her projection – yet also has no clue. The child feels this. He can either be known in a pseudo way as what his parent is coercing him to identify with or he can feel completely unknown – and unknowable – to the parent. The latter prospect is akin to a psychic annihilation for the child. To feel unknown by – and unknowable to – a primary caregiver can mean that one does not really exist and that the parent does not really exist. Such encounters yield a sense of unendurable emptiness, void, terror, despair, and rage. As crushing and ill-fitting as it may feel to identify with the parent’s projections, this alternative is likely worse.
Recovery from projective identification
There are two important aspects to recovering from this tactic of abuse. First, one must find new relationships that are stable, consistent, respectful and affirming. Doing so helps to stem the suffering from the implicit abandonment suffered by such children. Second, one must find information within oneself and without that reflects who the person actually is – not just what they were forced to identify with. Such children have had to identify with a false – and negative – notion of who they are. It will be essential to accrue experiences in relationships where they are received accurately.
Seligman, S. (2018). Relationships in development: Infancy, intersubjectivity, and attachment. New York, NY: Routledge.
Jay Reid, thanks for giving a clear explanation on this confusing subject. Projection is clear to many I guess. It’s more easy to grasp. Often we can reqocnize someone is projecting their own stuff /problems onto others/us. When they are telling or yelling we are bad or lacking in some way we clearly see this is not about us. Therefore we don’t accept the projection and move on if we cann’t find solution with these people.
It can also work differently. And this happens a lot with Narcissists and the like.
They often start with projecting their idealized self into you. By idealizing you. This kind of projection is harder to resist and much easier to accept for many.
People in pain, lonely people, people who are searching for meaning in their live are often very open to this kind of projection from Narcissists/Sociopaths.
That’s how cults are born. Projective identification starts with accepting the projections of someone else, believing them. Then the realisation of a pseudo-personality starts to evolve. This installed pseudo-personality can think of him/herself very good or very bad. It just depends on the Narcissist/Sociopath projecting their issues/ideas/idealisation on them and how well they accepted their projections.
I always got the message from my mother I was very bad and worthless. As a child and adolesent I more or less internalised this projection from her. But I kept fighting all along in my way. It wasn’t till I was 19 that it started to show to me that I was actually far beyond all in my eduction class at the time. In fact I felt ashamed being 2 months ahead of the rest and put myself low key all the time. I took no credit at all for myself. And no-one gave it to me. Especially not my mother. But this continued. In every other education I took afterwards I got the best results of all every time (sounds grandiose maybe but it’s a fact). Still took it for granted and still got no credit at all from my mother or family members.
All by myself I managed to become a licensed psychiatric nurse/manager in outreaching psychiatry. I did this for 25 years. I should be feeling proud or satisfied in some way. And I do once in a while. I know now I wasn’t bad, stupid and worthless rationally but it steels feels I ought to doubt my integrity and feel ashamed asif I was a scum con-artist all those years.
You can reject the projective identification but many others won’t. And that can make you very lonely.
That is my fear right now reading this. Without the family that abuses me I don’t have a family and my child doesn’t have grandma, aunts and cousins. Still, the way they treat me spills onto my son and will break his heart. I can’t bear to see him treated that way and I need to get space for my own peace of mind. The rumination I succumb to isn’t healthy for either of us and gets better when I am away from those types of personalities. I have to believe I can do this on my own. Maybe only join them for Holidays? I wonder if I will ever not be vulnerable to them.
Same here. Without the family that has labelled me paranoid and then, when I rejected that label, they called me emotional, sensitive, and when they wouldn’t engage with my defence of myself, they called me angry and abusive for trying to have a conversation…………. without these people who are summonsing me in to the part of daughter although they clearly think very little of me, I have nobody. I’m 51 and I do have two teenage children and a job and a few friends with their own lives, but I can’t believe that it’s just me, standing in my own corner. That’s it. At the moment I cannot do it. I cannot square up to be invalidated and erased by people who are telling me to ”get help” (because I objected to being labelled paranoid). The punchline is of course, my dad went to a psychiatric hospital with depression and paranoia.
I was the scapegoat. Because they were mine, my children were scapegoats, too. My narcissistic mother told my son at age four that he “had the devil in him,” when he misbehaved. Led to months of tears and nightmares.
Two days after my father’s death, my younger brother came to my house and told me, “The whole family knows you’re crazy,” to explain why I was not invited to the funeral of my beloved father. My aunt (my mother’s sister) said she’d pick me up and while I waited at home, she never showed up. While I waited they held the funeral.
After that I went full No contact. It’s been 36 years and I never regretted my decision. My children and I were alone but protected from the evil of my mother’s narcissistic influence in their life and mine. Stay away. It’s better to be alone than take them and you into a situation that’s unhealthy with the potential for permanent psychological damage. My son is 42 and STILL remembers what his grandmother said and how it made him feel.
Ge Rijn, I’m sorry your family could never appreciate your academic accomplishments and hard work! I’m not sure whether you have this same issue, but I am always surprised at the persistence of my desire for authentic connection and for recognition from people who will never be able to give those things– and despite my INTELLECTUAL understanding that my longing is hopeless. It’s been hard to give up the “bargaining” and hoping that if I can just find the right way to express myself, or if I “audition” for them long enough that I will be able to create connection. I find it very hard to give up hope for that connection and to embrace the grieving.
Way to go!! I’m so glad you stood up for your life.
You should always be be proof your accomplishments.
We were not created to be stupid individuals.
We were created to be intelligent and change our world to make it better!
Throughout my life my narcissistic mother projected onto me what she thought me to be but when I went to school my teachers told me I was the opposite. Other adults, such as parents of friends adored me and I was often the teacher’s pet. But to my mother I was every bad thing she could think of and she told me so over and over again. Oddly, during my mother’s last contact with me she listed my flaws one by one and they were all projections of herself. She described all her flaws and tagged them onto me. It was a very telling experience.
Oh my god this is my mother that you’re talking about isn’t it, LOL
Thank you for this article. So informative.
In my story, through an utterly malicious narcissistic smear-campaign, my family did everything they could think of in order to invalidate my true identity in the eyes of those that actually saw me for who I was… on a different continent! Whom I had become, and I was thriving, that they did not “approve” of as it was “not what they had imagined for me” .
He decided to call my place of work where I had built a reputation over many years… and began spreading rumors, complete lies and slander about me under the guise of “family concern” – and half the people believed him! I did not even know about his phone call for over a week and by that time it had spread like a virus. They did the same with anyone that they knew that knew me. I was receiving an ongoing private grant at the time they attempted to maliciously interfere with that as well.
This is the moment you find out who sees through the lies and who sees you for who you truly are. Huge revelations.
Over time most people found out the truth, not all of them though. One cannot know who heard what or who thought what nor can one go on guessing like that.
One of the hardest things to experience, to watch who you ARE who you have BECOME suddenly be “replaced” by your family’s crazy projection that you thought you had managed to escape by moving far, far away… Now they set out to infect your new life and your new people and your true identity which they cannot bear watch blossom as it “does not fit” the family script?
Meaning all of a sudden you cannot go back to your daily life that you LOVED the same way – as people look at you “different” even though you had NOT changed overnight – only their perception of you changed, yet you did nothing and said nothing, a true nightmare.
So how is that for a narcissistic attack to taint one’s name and professional and social standing with flat out lies in the eyes of those that validated him/her for who he/she actually WAS – in order to continue to attempt changing him/her to make him/her the way “they want” instead of the way that he/she is.
Thanks Jay.
I noticed that the projective identification process its hard to know who you are from what you have been identified with your whole life. I know i have made mistakes but they wont let me live them down. While their actions are never brought up.
Thank you SO VERY MUCH for your blogs! I can’t tell you how much they have helped me. As the oldest child of 5 children, I was the scapegoat. It’s too complicated to put into 1500 words or less and I live in Texas, not California otherwise I would be on your doorstep. Is there a reputable psychotherapist in the Houston, Texas area that you would recommend? I haven’t cried for YEARS, but, I have cried reading your blogs.
Completely astounded- your blog was like an awakening. I have never seen anything like this. I’m 46. I have been married for 20 years, and only last year did I discover my husband’s dependency on his dad and uncle, who are completely in charge.. and they then turned my husband against me. I guess I got in the way of something. It became very unpleasant as the emotional abuse at home became without any compassion, compromise or even awareness. Manipulation, alienation, lost my job and my mind for a while. It is heartbreaking to see this relationship that I can see absolutely is how he has been all this time, but something happened and it is as though he switched off the face he wore for me.
No child should ever have been subjected to that. i am stunned. I don’t know if I should be angry or sympathetic. Whichever I choose he sees me as an object or function, and I seem to know nothing or assume by default that I am trying to blame him for everything.. I can see he is being controlled too. Even his language and accusations aren’t his.
I had no idea or even concept of this existing.. I hope it isn’t something I should be more clinically concerned about, although I am.
Still very new to it, really sad and shocked, and it scares me tbh. The person seems to change depending on the need, as does the language and defensiveness. I think something must have triggered him to need to go back to his dad & uncle. There is absolutely no question who is right. It isn’t me. I have started divorce proceedings because I don’t know how to bring him back & I can’t get him to be with me in conversation, anything. He sees me as the enemy.
If anyone else has a similar experience, please reach out, there are not many people that believe a word of what I try to explain. “He’s too lovely to be like that. ” Yes he is, but I really hope that this isn’t it forever. I don’t like him too much right now.
My husband is completely controlled by his mother. She turned him against me. Meanwhile, he said he loved me to my face, but he was cold and carried animosity for me for some unknown reason… something she did to turn him against me…
I had similar experience I was raised by narcissistic mother enabler father golden child sibling and I was the scapegoat. I married a narcissist as well and he betrayed me and destroyed my life along with the help of my cruel meddling sadisitic mother, the things that were said and done to me and about me were cruel beyond words and I have gone no contact and if my mother died tomorrow I even be upset thats how little I care for her
‘
*wouldn’t b upset I the least is she passed on, I really dislike her for the pain she has caused me.
Hello, I just read your article & can speak from experience that every word rang so true. Thank you for writing it so beautifully.
I would like to see more articles on narcissistic siblings. My dad was verbally abusive at times but from what I’ve read, I don’t think he was a narcissist. On the other hand, 4 of my siblings seem to fit the mold but from what I’ve read so far, it keeps being written that narcissistic children have to have at least one narcissistic parent as part of the reason they turned out that way. There are so many labels to put on people now days, I’m not sure what to think. I love your articles by the way.
Does anybody by any chance know how to find the complete list of Jay’s videos in the order he released them? Or if not in the correct order, at least how to find all of them? I keep finding them haphazardly on the internet- I don’t how many there are and I think listening to them in order would be great. However first priority is finding them all. Thank you if anybody has any insight!
Hi,
You can actually see all the released videos at my youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiW53MYnuTPjZ64M_fVzl-Q
Thanks,
Jay
Jay,
Thank you so much for responding. I actually was on youtube channel already. I usually listen to you on my phone and a.) hadn’t seen the “sort by” option more visible on my computer (duh!) and also b.) had it in my head somehow that you started producing these weekly at the beginning of Covid which would have meant there was more than 59 videos. As it turns out 🙂 I have listened to every single one of these great videos (most many many times). Thank you so, so much. Once again, I just can’t tell you how helpful these have been. I just can’t get over how deeply this resonates with me on almost every big broad issue and in the tiny little details. These videos are making me feel seen, heard, connected and somehow safer in myself and in the world even though I have never met you. Thank you thank you. I am so grateful to you that I would almost say that I would start cheering for the Eagles but that just isn’t going to happen, I won’t lie! 🙂 (Nothing against them but have my own diehard loyalties!)
This is so clear and helpful. I’m wondering if you have any practical advice about how to handle the projective identification while it’s in process. Advice for adults susceptible to identifying with the projections (so not for children being abused the first time around). Thank you!
Jay thank you so so much for your content. It has helped me so much. Not just rechurned narcissistic information echochamber that is the usual. 😊 thank you
I really found this helpful, Jay…thanks! The parts about projection I can definitely relate to. So often while I was growing up, I would find myself being berated for things I didn’t do, or having an “attitude” when I didn’t.
I was often afraid simply to exist because somebody somewhere was offended by my mere presence. For many years, I believed that I was indeed the problem. It wasn’t until I learned more about narcissistic abuse that the idea of projection started making sense.
So now it makes even more sense! Some people need a scapegoat, a person onto whom they can displace all of their shame and other issues.
Projection is a way for them to feel better about themselves and to feel like “I’m OK…it’s YOU with the problem”.
This was done to me since childhood, and I carried the burdens of other people for a long time.
Thanks again for shedding more light on this.
Hi,
Thankyou Jay for your videos and your emails, I have read your views on narcissism regarding parents and it is so helpful, I can relate to it so much(I am the scapegoated child), the emotional pain I went through as a child was awful, the only child not to be given xmas presents, or birthday presents, only child to be beaten up daily.
Yes then I went into a narcissistic marriage for 30 long years and focused on my 3 children, i felt like the blind teaching the sited to see, I cut off my family and just had to cope with my abusive ex. I did it, I succeeded, I have 3 beautiful, loving, successful adult children(all doctors).
But then I met a doctor online(dating site) and with no emotional awareness for myself I fell in love(big mistake), unfortunately he is a narcissist, I am trapped in this relationship. Too embarrassed to tell anyone what is happening to me. I listen to youtube videos and I am beginning to learn. But I am stuck I am missing information I need, this man is a specialist doctor and he knows what he is doing, he sees my vulnerability and plays on it as a professional. I cannot sleep, eat probably, I lost my job, he has now opened a separate bank account and he is demanding I put money into it.
I write this with tears, I have never told anyone what he is doing to me, he uses me in every worse way you could image, calls me awful names, he screams in my face for hours, then as he is doing it he kisses my forehead, he uses me for sex, then tells me we are not partners, then the next day we are partners again, he uses sex sites, tells me he has stopped using them, then I find out he hasnt, I turn away when he kisses me as I am frightened of STD’s and he wonders why I turn away. He holds my hand when we walk, and hugs me as we walk down the street, then he disrespects me in front of his family.
He tells me he loves me, then when he pays for a dinner in a restaurant he calls me a women who sells love for money. I feel awful most of the time(99%), cant think straight, lonely, cant concentrate on filling out a job application.
Your comment on splitting myself in two, real got through to me, half of me wants him to love me back, the other half hiding the pain.
what I cannot find is how to break the bond, of a loveless, abusive childhood, then a loveless long term relationship, then a trauma bond with a professional, i need to break this bond, he is one step ahead of me. he has my bank cards.
Dear Jay,
Thank you for writing this article.
My mother forced me to accept her negative projections from an early age and at the age of 53 I still struggle with the suffering and pain it has caused me.
My mother says I am ‘bad’, I have to be ‘bad’, nothing I can do can change it. If I don’t accept it she becomes violent towards me. From an early age, she would fly into terrifying rages filled with horrible insults which would leave me shaking with fear. She told everyone how ‘bad’ I was. As I got older, I began to challenge her view of me, it was then that the physical violence started. She would show no remorse after hitting me. By my mid-teens I was suicidal, something she was completely oblivious to. If I cried, she would smile with enjoyment at what she had done to me. After launching an attack on me, she feels fine and has no memory of what’s she’s done, or remembers it differently to me. It’s always totally justified by my ‘badness’.
For any child that has to endure this, it’s akin to the worst torture.
Thank you for researching and writing about this little known form of child abuse.
The Narcissistic mother will tell you “You’re imagining things” or that you have a”Vivid imagination” when you try to confront her about some lie or other manipulative thing that she has done to you. Even when there is clear undeniable evidence of what she has done, she will not address any part of it and will blame you for “attacking her”. So it is kind of like you are being told you’re making up lies about her and by coincidence her behavior is the same as your lie. You may as well bang your head against the wall, it will feel the same in the end.