narcissistic families characteristics explained — 1 brief investigation

families, as a category, is something i thought meant a thing it does not mean for everyone. that took me a while to learn. it took me a christmas in 2017 and a phone call in 2019 and roughly six dollars in long distance charges.

i’m in the doctor’s office at 9:18am on a monday. carla is upstairs in an annual planning meeting on the third floor and i told her, with my regular face, that i had a thing. the thing is a check-up. i am writing this on my phone, in the waiting room, on a chair that has the structural integrity of a folded napkin. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the morning before the nurse calls my name. that is enough morning for one investigation.

this is a post about narcissistic families characteristics, which is a phrase i would never have typed at age twenty-three because at twenty-three i thought all families ran the same way and the only variable was the dog. there is a lot to learn between twenty-three and now. i have done some of the learning. some of it i am doing in this chair, listening to a man explain his rash to a receptionist who did not ask.

writing this from a plastic chair in a clinic, on company time, on a monday, with a magazine from 2022 on my left and a stranger’s cough on my right. my doctor is, as ever, running thirty minutes behind. what i am running behind on is, frankly, all of it. let’s get to the post.

most of the writing on this topic is about a single person — the parent, the partner, the boss who runs the team like a small monarchy. that’s useful. but it misses the thing i kept missing for years, which is that some families are not a collection of people who happen to share an oven. some families are a system, and the system has rules, and the rules outlive the people. that’s what we mean when we say it has gone past garden-variety gaslighting and into something with chairs and a seating chart.

1. narcissistic families characteristics, the disclaimer

i am not a doctor. i am sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, which is, in this country, the closest most people get. i am not going to give you a diagnostic checklist that comes from a manual i don’t own. what i am going to give you is the version i pieced together from a bar napkin, two phone calls with my mom, one shouted disagreement with dave at midnight, and a movie i watched twice on a sunday.

the movie is the royal tenenbaums, in case you are curious, which is not clinical evidence but is, on a tuesday, a perfectly serviceable case study in what happens when one parent runs the family like a press release and the children grow up as press releases of themselves. i’m fairly sure there is a study about this, possibly in a serious magazine, but i couldn’t find it on my phone before the receptionist gave me a look.

so: narcissistic families characteristics, in plain language, are the patterns the whole house runs on, not just the loudest person in it. a single villain story is easier to tell. it is also, frequently, wrong. the system has more than one chair.

2. the doctor’s office waiting room where this draft happened

i am in this office because the bank app i don’t open sent me a text that i, also, did not open, and i decided the most sensible response was to schedule a physical. that is the kind of logic that runs a man’s calendar when he has not, technically, looked at his accounts since february. the man across from me is reading a brochure about cholesterol. i envy him his focus.

i bring this up because the place where you first start noticing the pattern is rarely the family kitchen. it is the waiting room. it is the line at the post office. it is the moment you notice that you are calmer in a chair full of strangers than you were at the dinner table. that is data. narcissistic families characteristics are the kind of thing you only spot from the outside, and the doctor’s office is, for some of us, the first outside we sit still in.

i sat very still. i thought about my christmas in 2017. i thought about the phone call in 2019. i thought about how much was in long distance charges. then a nurse called a name that wasn’t mine and i went back to typing.

3. tom would have a tidy spreadsheet, dave just laughed

i described this post idea to dave on the phone last night. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. then he said, “are you writing about your own family or are you writing about, you know, families.” i said, “the second one.” dave said, “uh huh.” dave is generous like that.

tom — uni roommate, now a married man with two children and a volvo — would have approached this differently. tom would have a tidy spreadsheet. tom would have a column for “covert” and a column for “overt” and a column for “boundary, current status of.” tom does that with everything. i don’t have a spreadsheet. i have a chair in a clinic and a phone with twenty-three percent battery. tom owns a house. i rent. we are both, on this question, valid. mine has more naps.

here is the thing dave actually said, after the nine minutes: “the worst part isn’t the loud one. the worst part is that everyone else in the room knows their part.” that is, in one bar-napkin sentence, the entire post. dave isn’t a therapist. dave sells insurance and owes me three hundred dollars. but on this, dave was right.

4. characteristics 1 to 4, the assigned-roles ones

here are the first four. these are the ones about who-gets-which-chair. nobody hands them out. they are handed out anyway.

1. the chosen one. there is a child who is, for reasons nobody discusses out loud, the public victory. their grades are quoted at parties. their job is referenced in casserole recipes. their relationship is mentioned in the holiday card. when something goes wrong for them, the family treats it as a weather event. they are not, in fact, more capable. they are more useful to the story the family tells about itself.
2. the blamed one. there is a child who is, also for reasons nobody discusses out loud, the structural explanation for everything that has ever gone wrong. burnt casserole? somehow related. mom’s bad year? somehow related. the dog ran away in 2003? somehow related. they grow up apologizing for weather. they keep apologizing in their thirties, in their forties. it is the most dangerous chair in the room because it is the one that gets defended the most aggressively when an outsider tries to remove it.
3. the quiet one. there is a child who learned, by approximately age nine, that the safest thing in the room is the carpet. they got very good at being the carpet. they read books in the bathroom. they took up a hobby nobody asked about. they were, often, considered “the easy one,” which is not a compliment. it is a description of how little space they were allowed to take up.
4. the spokesperson. sometimes a child, sometimes an aunt, occasionally a cousin twice removed — there is a person whose job is to explain the family’s behavior to anyone who notices it. “that’s just how mom is.” “you have to know dad to get the joke.” “it sounds bad on paper but it’s actually fine.” the spokesperson believes their own version. that is, frankly, the heartbreaking part.

5. characteristics 5 to 8, the family-grade ones

these next four are not about which chair you got. they are about how the whole table runs when nobody outside is looking.

5. memory is a negotiation. you can’t trust a shared event because by the next holiday it has been edited. the christmas of 2017 i remember and the christmas of 2017 my aunt remembers are not the same christmas. they are, technically, two different movies. mine is shorter and has more shouting. hers does not exist.
6. silence is the product. you can tell a narcissistic family from a regular family by what is not said. there is one topic that does not come up. there is one person who does not come up. there is one year that does not come up. the silence has a shape. you learn the shape young, the way you learn the shape of a hot dog. and then you don’t put either one in the microwave.
7. the small things mean the most. someone takes the seat you wanted. someone serves the chosen one first. someone serves the blamed one last. someone takes a photograph and the chosen one is in front, every time, for thirty years, in every photograph, in every album. the small things are not small. the small things are the architecture. (if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. if a family meal has thirty years of seating charts, you cannot.)
8. outsiders are a threat, then a recruit. when you bring a new person home, the family is, at first, polite. then the family explains the family to them, slowly, in the language of someone teaching a tourist. by month six, the new person has a chair. by year two, the new person has a role. by year five, the new person is defending the family to its own children. the system does not break because you brought in a witness. the system absorbs the witness.

i wanted to write that bigger but the receptionist already looked at me twice. one of those looks was about my posture. the second one i can’t explain.

6. closing pulpit, the families are plural and the characteristics are inherited

my name has not been called. the man with the cholesterol brochure has been called. i am offended. i was here first.

if you grew up in a family like this, the first thing you have to do is stop looking for the villain. the second thing you have to do is figure out which chair you got handed. the third thing — and this took me a christmas, a phone call, and the better part of three hundred dollars in dave-related advice — is decide whether to keep the chair, or stand for a while. standing is hard. standing also, eventually, lets you walk out of the room.

my mom called yesterday, by the way. she knew. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated. she didn’t say anything about families. she asked if i was eating. i said yes. she said, “you’d say yes either way.” she’s right. that’s a separate post.

this whole post is, in some ways, the long version of the conversation i avoided having with myself for a christmas, a phone call, and a six-dollar phone bill. it is also, in some ways, related to the larger question of why we worship a particular kind of comic figure who shows up alone in every room. the fool, in literature and in family life, often shows up because nobody else is allowed to. that is for another tuesday.

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