traits of a narcissistic parent — 1 fairly sure investigation

a parent with these traits is, statistically, more common than dinner-party conversation suggests. dinner parties under-report. dinner parties have a wine selection and a polite smile to maintain. i am not a dinner party. i can be honest.

i’m typing this from the desk at 3:14pm on a thursday. carla is in a vendor walkthrough on the third floor. i have, optimistically, an hour before someone notices my screen is not the screen i’m paid to look at. that is enough time to be honest about a singular subject and not enough time to dress it up.

so. singular. one parent. not the constellation. not the family system. not the household. a parent. the kind you can describe in four short observations and still not exaggerate.

before we begin, the disclosure: this is part of a longer investigation into gaslighting and the people who do it on tuesdays. that investigation is the trunk. this post is one branch — the parental branch — and it is shorter on purpose. trunks are big. branches are micro.

the four traits of a narcissistic parent i can defend, by an unimpressive count

most internet pages on this subject promise eight signs, ten warning flags, twelve red banners. i’m offering four. four is what i can defend. four is what fits in an elevator. four is what doesn’t require a chart.

and the traits of a narcissistic parent i can defend are these — small, repeatable, the kind of thing you don’t notice until the thirtieth iteration:

1. the small-memory edit. you remember a sentence they said at a birthday. they remember a different sentence. their sentence is kinder. their sentence makes them look better. the photograph, if there were one, would side with you. there is no photograph. that is the design.
2. the kindness reversal. a thing they did for you, told back to you a year later, becomes a thing you should be grateful for, then a thing they sacrificed for you, then a thing you owe them, then a thing you have not yet repaid. it’s the same dinner, retold across four thanksgivings, becoming heavier each time.
3. the elevator-speech apology. if they ever apologize, it lasts exactly the time of an elevator ride. it begins on the ground floor and ends at the apartment door, and contains the phrase “if i ever made you feel” or “i’m sorry you took it that way”. the apology is the doors closing. nothing more.
4. the witness recruitment. you, the child in the room, are asked at twelve, and at twenty-two, and at thirty-four, to confirm that the version they’re describing is correct. you nod. you keep nodding. you become a small private notary for someone else’s draft of the past.

that’s four. i could do five if pressed. i won’t press. five would be greedy.

the elevator on tuesday and the dm i should not have sent

the reason i’m writing this on a thursday and not a tuesday is that a tuesday already happened, and the elevator already happened, and the dm regret already happened, and i needed two days to stop being annoyed at myself.

here is what occurred. i was in the elevator on the twelfth floor of a building that is not the building i work in. it is, in fact, a building i visit only when the doctor’s office requires it. the elevator is the slow kind, the kind that hums, the kind where strangers stand at correct distances and avoid each other’s shoes. between floors eight and four, i opened my phone and did a thing i’d been doing all weekend. i sent a dm to someone i shouldn’t have. the dm was about a parent. it was not my parent. it was theirs. i offered an opinion. i used the word “trait”. i used the phrase “what you described”. i hit send before floor two.

floor one was where i regretted it. by the lobby door i had already closed the app, and by the street i had already opened it again to check whether the dm had landed, and by the corner i had decided not to look at it for the rest of the day, and by the next corner i had looked.

they were online.

they had read it.

they had not replied.

DO. NOT. DM. ABOUT. SOMEONE’S. PARENT.

that is the rule. that is the entire rule. unsolicited diagnosis of a stranger’s mother or father, however carefully worded, is a hot stove. you can know all four micro-traits and still walk into a hot stove. i did. it took an elevator and a sidewalk to do it.

two of the four traits, demonstrated by my own afternoon

here’s the part that bothers me. when i sent that dm, i was, in real time, performing two of the four traits i’d just listed. specifically: the witness recruitment (i was asking the recipient to confirm my draft of someone else’s parent) and the elevator-speech apology (i wrote a follow-up dm that began with “i’m sorry if that came across” — between floors three and one, almost literally).

i am not the parent in question. i am, on a tuesday, in an elevator, capable of the elevator-speech apology. that is not a confession. that is a data point. traits of a narcissistic parent are not exclusive to parents. they are habits. habits live in elevators, in dms, in apologies that fit between two floors.

i don’t say this to soften the post. i say it because the four micro-traits, if i’m honest, are not a bestiary of monsters. they’re a checklist of small moves anyone can pull off on a wednesday afternoon. the thing that distinguishes a parent who does it from a person who slips is repetition. one elevator apology is a tuesday. four hundred elevator apologies, across thirty years, is the trait.

what the four traits look like in pop-culture, briefly

if you want a softer way in, the parental edge has been filmed. i have, on occasion, watched the long-take coming-of-age film boyhood with the lights low and the volume careful. boyhood is twelve years of small moments stacked end to end, and the parental figures in it edit memories at the kitchen table. it’s not loud. it’s not theatrical. it’s micro. it’s four traits at the dinner table, filmed in real time, across twelve thanksgivings. that’s the version. that’s why the film is two hours and forty minutes long. four traits take that long to demonstrate without exaggeration.

i mention this because i want to be clear: this post is not a clinical document. i’m not a doctor. i’m a man at a desk who once sent a regrettable dm in an elevator. but i can recognize a kindness reversal at fifty feet, and i suspect you can too.

the closing pulpit, the parent is portable, the traits stay

here is the part i want you to take with you, and you can take it for free, which is, after all, the price of most of my opinions — “savings accounts are a hobby, and the wealthy are the only ones with the time”, as i have said elsewhere and will keep saying. a free opinion fits any budget, even mine.

the four micro-traits don’t live in a person. they live in habits. the parent is portable. the apartment they raised you in is portable. the elevator is portable. the dm is portable. you can take a parent’s habit, accidentally, into a meeting at 2:14pm, into a phone call at 8:14pm, into a relationship in 2019, into a dm at the corner of a sidewalk between two coffee shops you don’t even like.

noticing the habit is the only move. noticing it in someone else is the easy version. noticing it in yourself, in an elevator, between floor three and floor one, is the harder version. i did the easier one for years. i did the harder one once, on a thursday, with the receipt of a dm still warm in my pocket. it cost me an afternoon and saved me, possibly, a month.

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