How I Broke Free from a Narcissistic Family System

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”~ Carl Jung

My mom had always been invested in real estate. I remember snacking on open house charcuterie years before we finally purchased a house to flip—the first of four. By the time I was eighteen, we’d moved five times.

I knew our family was falling apart by renovation number three.

I had spent the previous few years experiencing suicidal ideation and was now on a strict cocktail of seven or so psychiatric and neurological medications.

My brother was in his sophomore year of college, on academic probation, and coping by mixing alcohol with benzodiazepines.

My mother was expanding a highly ranked vocational services program while struggling with hyperthyroidism and unidentifiable gut health issues.

My father was often missing, either executing his latest scam (upcharging my friends’ parents on cases of local wine) or pursuing the buyer of our latest fixer-upper, who eventually became his second wife.

I couldn’t see the difference between a faulty house and my faulty family. There were constant leaks (tears), water damage (resentment), and cracks in the foundation (domestic violence), and yet there was character, familiarity, and history worth saving.

My family would have rather remained in denial of our structural instabilities, but the increasing severity of my suicidal ideations left me no choice. If I were to survive, I had to dig through the walls of our house and remove whatever was making me sick.

The Inspection

The first step in the renovation process is identifying the problem areas: what can be saved and what must be removed.

Growing up in a narcissistic family system leaves a child with no baseline to compare to. Narcissistic abuse often isolates physical violence to certain people or excludes it entirely, so traditional models of domestic abuse are not comparable.

Identifying narcissistic abuse is an act of decoding a series of games and behaviors that mimic that of an infant. Pathological narcissists are psychologically frozen in the primordial mind, exclusively concerned with getting their needs met without concern for their effect on others.

My father’s unpredictable conduct was like a mold that had spread into every room of the house: insidious, nearly undetectable. He was rarely physically violent but constantly psychologically toying with us.

Common behaviors included hiding necessities, like keys and wallets; ignoring calls, texts, or even our physical existence; triangulating arguments between family members; and harshly punishing mistakes while finding serious offences humorous. The effects of his volatility appeared in a variety of health issues amongst the rest of us. My brother developed a chronic stomach illness, my mom started losing circulation in her hands, and I began experiencing pseudoseizures.

For the sake of my health, I could not continue living in a mold-infested home; both my physical and psychological well-being were compromised. By the end of my inspection, it had become clear that exterminating my father from the home was integral to my recovery. Too much damage had been done. Gutting the house was the only chance I had at saving it.

Demolition Day

There is no clean or precious way to demolish a house. Ripping out vinyl flooring and knocking down drywall is a messy process. Dust scatters everywhere, glass breaks, and rodent feces are found within walls. If one wishes to undergo such a renovation, they must accept that a mess will be made and cleaned up later.

Identifying my father as a narcissistic abuser released me of the narrative that I was mystifyingly crazy, but it also made him crazier. He became firmly unapologetic, insults and neglect were more pointed, and the physical violence amplified. I was rebelling—as normal teenagers do—but my dad responded with harassment, physical intimidation, and complete emotional abandonment.

My compulsive self-loathing morphed into rage. The harm I had been inflicting inward began unfolding outward in bouts of verbal assault, criticism, and bullying. I remember once screaming profanities and threatening suicide to my ex-boyfriend after I had found out he had been hanging out with a group of our friends without telling me. No one was safe from my wrath.

The threads of my father’s personality that were embedded within me had to be explored in their entirety. They had to be acted out and mirrored back at him for the illusion to be shattered.

In defense of my autonomy, I weaponized his insecurities, verbally recognized him as an abuser, and learned to play his game. I was not the character he had made of me: the cowardly, mentally tortured weakling. I could be volatile, ferocious, and wicked. I could be like him.

By the last renovation, my father’s mental illness had become undeniable. The fighting was constant and precisely unveiled his intemperate nature. After we sold the house, my mom filed for divorce from my dad, and I cut all contact with him. This August, it will be ten years since I’ve spoken to him.

When I finally finished tearing through every wall, counter, and cabinet, I discovered the mold was not the only issue; the foundation was rotten too. Cutting contact with my father did not cure my depression or anxiety because he was only one cog in a faulty machine.

Weak Bones

To properly inspect the foundation of a house, one must calculate how each pillar supports the others. For a house to be stable, the materials must be solid, the architecture perfectly calculated, and the ground level.

In systems of abuse, the abuser is not simply a bug that infiltrates and poisons what would be a normally functioning software; the players within these systems are puzzle pieces, all equally contributing to a complete picture. Identifying the role each member plays is integral to deconstructing the family system and potentially saving it from collapse.

After four or five years of therapy and self-study, I accurately identified each family member’s role in the system: The Narcissist, The Enabler, The Golden Child, and The Scapegoat.

One of the burdens of the Scapegoat in the family system is they’re the only participant living in the shared reality yet surrounded by people motivated to remain in a delusion.

The Narcissist trains each member of the group to deny their reality in favor of his or her perception, which makes it difficult for all parties to differentiate reality from fantasy.

The Scapegoat’s ego strength is usually underdeveloped, making it difficult to maintain the position that they can see through the familial matrix. But the pain of abuse makes reality less deniable for them than, say, the Enabler, who believes they can escape the abuse by remaining in denial, or the Golden Child, who is championed and protected for validating the Narcissist’s perception.

Whether they adhere to the delusion or not, the Scapegoat is never rewarded by the Narcissist, nor allied by the other family members.

This is also the best part about being the Scapegoat. They are the most overtly abused and yet the most likely to recover. There is no value in pleasing or maintaining a connection to the Narcissist nor upholding the false narrative they’ve crafted.

There is no motivation to remain in the fantasy, therefore they have nothing to lose in destroying it. If the Scapegoat can deconstruct the self-loathing, victimized role they’ve been cast in, they can escape the system.

Removing the Narcissist does not necessarily unbind each character from their role. Just as my self-identification with mental illness had assisted my father in creating a Scapegoat of me, my mother’s martyrdom made an Enabler of her, and my brother’s mirroring of the behavior made a Golden Child of him. Once the Narcissist is excavated from the system, each member has to deconstruct their relational patterns and personal identity to properly engage in healthy relationships.

For years, my role as the Scapegoat exempted my family from embracing their own responsibility in fostering my father’s verbal and psychological abuses. Even after my father was ostracized, my identification with “mental illness” made me an easy patsy for my family member’s own dysfunction.

They didn’t need to look within themselves to find a leaky pipe; they could point to my hospitalizations, failing grades, and diagnoses. In order to save myself from the dysfunction, I had to become healthy, so undeniably healthy that the damage could not possibly be coming from me.

Starting from Scratch

Tearing down the residual structure is quicker but just as messy as the demolition process. Every trace of the familial programming within the child must be broken down and examined. Homogenous relationships coined by codependency and self-destruction must be excavated from their life.

The child has to accurately differentiate appropriate and inappropriate behavior from both themselves and those around them before walls can be built to protect them from compulsively engaging in more unhealthy behavior.

Building the frame of oneself is an act of identifying core values and beliefs: “What matters most to me? How do I expect to be treated? What will I not stand for?”

I had to swing to the other end of the pendulum to discover which bits of my upbringing were authentic. Every trace of my upbringing had to be removed from my sense of self: politics, humor, religious beliefs. I became artistic where my family was business-minded, empathetic towards those they would have laughed at, and honest when they would have lied.

I became unrecognizable; the preppy, conservative, private school girl morphed into an edgy leftist with a theater degree. I moved from coast to coast, desperate to escape any identification with my past self. I successfully removed an array of self-destructive habits: boundaryless friendships, hypersexuality, and self-identification with mental illness. The house I had built was sturdy and spotless.

In the end, I discovered that my family members and I don’t entirely share the same values, we do not follow the same moral code, and we are not driven by the same aims, but we are not total opposites. New builds are stable but sterile. I needed to sift through the parts of myself I had thrown away in order to feel complete.

Scavenging the Rubble 

After the construction is finalized, the few remaining remnants of the previous house are piled in the lawn, waiting to be sorted. Some of it is junk, but other bits are sentimental relics of the old home, too precious to leave behind. Beams of original hardwood, vintage furniture, and iron bookends are saved and repurposed as charming decor.

Children of narcissistic family systems grow up not as themselves but as a projection of the narcissist’s experience of the child. The child’s honest self isn’t just neglected; it is punished and suffocated. Even identifying preferences is a difficult task.

When I first began searching for my true self beneath the programming, I would have preferred to have found I have nothing in common with my family or the holographic self that had been projected onto me. It’s tempting to order everything new. It can feel clean and picturesque, but truthfully, I couldn’t decorate myself from scratch. If I were to live authentically, I would need to integrate the parts of myself I would have rather abandoned.

In order to determine which remains could be repurposed, I had to ask myself, “Is this piece mine or something that was instilled in me?”

It’s been almost a year since I moved back to my hometown, and I’ve found that these streets that contain my childhood are also beacons leading me back to my missing parts. My charm, my humor, and even my storytelling abilities are all traces of my family members. The timid, morose young girl formed by my upbringing is a character that contributes to my depth. To remove either from my personality would be a denial of my own complexity.

I am still in the process of completing my home, and there is comfort in knowing that it will never end. I may shut a door too hard, causing a frame to fall and need replacing. I may inherit silver from my grandmother that needs polishing. A house needs constant updating and maintenance; we are always renovating ourselves with new experiences, information, and outlooks.

What’s important now is that I have a place of my own. I am not a living projection created by my upbringing, and I can recognize what is mine and what has been given to me. I am a stable, individual structure with my own design and shape, all of which come from within me and nowhere else.

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