characteristics of a narcissistic father explained — 1 brief investigation

a father with these characteristics is a particular kind of weather that you do not realize is weather until you have moved out and noticed it has stopped raining. it took me two years to notice the rain had stopped. i am dry now. mostly.

i started this draft at the post office i avoid, mentally, while standing at my desk pretending i was about to walk over there with a stamped envelope i never stamped. it is now 12:38pm on a tuesday. carla is in a vendor walkthrough on the third floor. i have an hour before lunch becomes a problem.

let me lay out what i mean by characteristics of a narcissistic father, because the phrase gets thrown around and nobody defines it, which is, ironically, the first characteristic. the second is that he defines you anyway.

writing this from my desk. carla is upstairs. i have time but not energy. close enough.

the pillar piece on this whole topic, if you want the wide-angle, is my long write-up on gaslighting — the parental version is a sub-genre of that bigger pattern, with worse music and a longer run-time.

1. characteristics of a narcissistic father, the disclaimer

i am not a clinician. i looked some of this up on the shows i watch and read parts of three books. one i listened to on a train, which counts. so when i list the characteristics of a narcissistic father, i’m doing it the way a man at the bar might do it: with confidence, some receipts, and the knowledge that you, the reader, have already met one.

the trick of this whole investigation is that the characteristics are not loud. the loud ones are easy. you spot them at thanksgiving. the dangerous ones are quiet. they look, from the outside, like strong opinions and family leadership and he just knows what he likes. those phrases are doing a lot of work. they are, in fact, doing all of the work.

one good test is whether the children of this father describe their childhood in weather metaphors. “it was stormy”. “you had to read the room”. “we never knew which dad we were getting”. houses are not supposed to have a forecast.

2. the post office i avoid where this draft started

there is a post office i avoid, two blocks from my apartment, because the woman behind the counter once asked me, in front of a line, “are you the one who got the certified letters”. i was. i had been. she remembered. the post office i avoid is the geographic anchor of this entire investigation, because every certified letter i did not open was, in some indirect way, a continuation of a tone i first heard at home.

not all of them, obviously. some were just bills. but the tone of an unopened envelope — the formality, the implied disappointment, the assumption that you have done something wrong and the document is here to confirm it — that tone was the soundtrack of certain dinners.

learning to flinch at envelopes is a skill you have to be taught, and somebody taught me. that somebody had a recliner and a remote and an unmistakable way of clearing his throat before reciting a verdict on whatever you’d done that week.

3. items 1 to 4, the hot-take-collection ones

i keep a running list of characteristics of a narcissistic father the way i keep my hot takes — half on a post-it, half in a notebook i can’t find, fully convinced i’m right. items one through four are the ones i would defend at the corner bar with mike, who, for what it’s worth, has not filed his returns since 2019 but has the cleanest theory of fathers i’ve ever heard.

1. the verdict voice. he doesn’t have opinions; he has rulings. dinner is a courtroom and he is the judge and your job is to be a credible witness for his version of yesterday. if you forget a detail, that’s perjury. if you remember it correctly, that’s contempt. you cannot win the room. you can only stay out of session.

2. the highlight reel. he tells the same three stories at every gathering. in all three, he is the protagonist who saw it coming. the rest of the family is supporting cast. you, his child, are a prop. you are the then we had a baby beat in the second act. the audience is supposed to nod. you are supposed to smile. somebody has to refill his glass.

3. the inheritance, but only the embarrassing parts. he gives you his temper, his stubbornness, his refusal to ask for directions. then, when you display any of these, he calls them your problem. the bad genes are yours; the good ones are his. (a hot dog IS a sandwich, by the way — he taught me that one. fight me. it’s the only opinion of his i kept.)

4. the apology that isn’t. “i’m sorry you feel that way” is the entire wardrobe. admitting a thing happened is, for him, a structural injury. you will get the wardrobe item. you will be expected to wear it and say thank you.

4. items 5 to 8, the subscription-audit corroborated

i did a subscription audit last month. i was looking for a streaming service i was paying for and not using. one charge, on inspection, turned out to be a magazine he’d subscribed me to in 2014 “because you should be reading more of this kind of thing”. it has been auto-renewing for eleven years. the magazine arrives at his house. he reads it. he sends me articles. i would not make this up.

5. the proxy hobby. he picks an interest for you, signs you up, pays for it once, takes credit for it forever. years later, when you have no relationship to the interest, he will introduce you at parties as “my son, the [thing]”. you will smile. you will not correct him in public. that’s the trick. he chose the venue.

6. the conditional generosity. the gift always comes with a clause. he didn’t pay for the trip; he invested in the trip. he didn’t help with the deposit; he made it possible, which means he gets to comment on the lease, the neighborhood, the colour of the door. (i still have the third yoga mat, by the way. he bought me the first one in 2017 “to help with that anxiety thing”. he never used the word anxiety again.)

7. the audience problem. he is a different man at the office. coworkers love him. neighbours love him. the only people qualified to confirm the pattern are the people inside the house, who have been trained, since age six, to keep the brand intact. big daddy with adam sandler is not, structurally, the dynamic — but the public-facing charm and private-facing edit are the inversion most narcissistic fathers run.

8. the rewrite. the family memory is his to update. you will hear, in your thirties, a version of your tenth birthday in which he was the hero, your mother was difficult, and you were ungrateful. you will be in the room. you will be eating his food. you will not have the energy to issue a correction. this is the seventh time this version has been told. it is now, by force of repetition, the official record.

5. closing pulpit, the father is quoted, the characteristics are inherited

the practical version, offered with no credentials, is short. notice the tone before the content. notice when you start editing yourself before he speaks. notice which of the eight items above you’ve already begun to perform in his absence. the inheritance is real. it is, however, returnable, with effort, over years.

if any of this rang familiar, you might want the wider context — i wrote a longer piece on the broader idiot condition over at my essay on what an idiot actually is, because the only honest narrator i trust right now is the one who can call himself an idiot in print.

carla is back from upstairs. she is at her desk. she has not looked over. i will close the document in three minutes and pretend to stretch. that is the system.

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