Backwards Blog
Narcissism & Society Series 1/4.
How Society Raises You Like A Narcissistic Parent Would.
Hello, dear reader. Today, I want to talk about one of the most insidious reasons you might feel lonely, isolated — and like you’re not good enough You might not know this, but those feelings are actually a typical outcome of a certain kind of upbringing. An upbringing by a narcissistic parent.
Wait wait! You might say “my parents were lovely people!”
And I believe you. However, whether you were raised by great parents, average ones, or off the scale psychos, it won’t prevent you experiencing the kind of formative influence that creates loneliness. And
That is because western culture is raising you exactly like a narcissistic parent would.
That societal, narcissistic parent is asking you to trade authenticity for belonging, Through them, you are learning that your needs are a burden, that your real self is unloveable and in need of constant fixing, and that connection is something to earn through performance.
Today, I want to show you how society gaslights you, triangulates you, and shifts blame. We’ll be covering what narcissism is, it’s overt and covert forms, and how their demands map onto those of western culture. We will also dive into the idea of a false self, and most importantly, the of all this on you.
Just a heads up that this will be the first in what is going to be a four-part series on narcissism — not just as a clinical diagnosis or personality disorder, but as something produced by society itself. In a culture that rewards hyper-individualism, control, image-management, and competition, narcissistic traits are not just encouraged— they are required. The issue is, psychology — the very field tasked with helping us understand this — often helps to conceal how western capitalist culture itself contributes. By reducing narcissism to a personal defect, it hides the fact that narcissism is also a cultural demand. It hides the fact that our culture, western capitalism, trains us, like a narcissistic parent would, to live lives of quiet misery and isolation. Like a narcissistic parent, western culture trains us to become transactional, to devalue feelings in ourselves and others, to see others as instrumental to our personal hero narrative, and to aim for control of that narrative, rather than opening to connection.
Narcissism IS a Growing Issue
Dr. Ramani, a psychologist and someone I deeply respect, says narcissistic behaviours are on the rise— not just the personality disorder, but in everyday patterns we all recognise. Grandiosity. Curated false selves. Manipulating others to buy things, do things or believe things, telling people who have had bad things happen to them, that it’s their own fault cos of negative thinking. In other words, blame-shifting, and a trend towards less empathy. What Dr. Ramani and others confirm is the rise in these behaviours is not just paranoia. And lets remember, a lot of people WITH those traits have a vested interest in shouting “oh, so everyone's a narcissist now are they!?” Ramani says it clearly “Yes. A lot of them are”. It’s real. Now, the place I diverge from psychology is it’s focus on bad apples. Psychology, having drunken the cool-aid of hyper individualism, refuses to look at ecosystems. It won’t look at the toxic air in that barrel of apples. Today I want to show why narcissism isn’t just an individual malfunction — it’s the product of a broader social gas leak, and if you fill a barrel with bad gas, none of those apples stay healthy. In terms of how this helps you - there is one known weapon against narcissism. Clarity. It might not sound like much, but it is our red pill, and it only comes when we look beyond the individual. Because narcissism isn’t just a disorder. It’s a symptom of disconnection-culture. It leaves behind a trail of loneliness — in our relationships, our institutions, and in how we see ourselves. The things our narcissistic parent teaches us to strive for, are the very things that serve to keep up separate, alone, and crippled by self doubt. They are also the very things that western culture itself would have us do.
The Structure of this Mini-Series
Now, a bit of a heads-up. The theme of narcissism so vast, I am breaking this into 4 parts.
Part One: Society as Narcissistic Parent — The Machinery of Disconnection
This episode explores how Western capitalist culture behaves like a narcissistic parent: demanding compliance, punishing dissent, rewarding image over authenticity, and reducing relationships to transactions. We examine the parallels between narcissistic parenting and how society itself raises and shapes us. We examine how power masquerades as care, how the values we are trained to internalise lead to disconnection, and we are gaslit us into believing we are always to blame.
Part Two: The Lonely Self — Formation of the Subject
Here we turn to the individual — not as a sealed-off, self-causing being, but as someone shaped by cultural pressure and trauma-adaptation. We look at what happens when narcissistic dynamics get internalized, fragmenting the self into roles: the people-pleaser, the scapegoat, the false self. Narcissism becomes less a pathology than a logical survival strategy in a system that rewards control, perfection, and hero narratives — while punishing vulnerability.
Part Three: The God Complex — Narcissism in Self-Help and Spiritualism
This part dives into the societal-level symptoms of narcissism. Specifically, how spiritual and self-help discourses that place the individual in the god seat. From “you manifest your own reality” to “everything that happens is a reflection of your vibration,” these ideologies offer grandiosity as a solution to disconnection. Disguised as empowerment, they remove structural critique and inflate individual blame. In other words, western spiritualism and self-help culture is narcissism rebranded: omnipotence without responsibility, connection replaced by cosmic exceptionalism. We’ll explore how these narratives mirror narcissistic psychology — and how they contribute to disconnection under the guise of enlightenment.
Part Four: Silencing Experience — When Institutions Mirror Narcissism
Finally, we look at how the institutions that claim to help us — psychology, philosophy, theory, and even the NGOs tasked with fixing the issue of loneliness — can replicate the very dynamics they critique. When pain is pathologised, intellectualised, or explained away, we lose our stories. This episode explores how to reclaim experience — not as isolated pathology, but as a response to systemic trauma and enforced performance. This four-part series looks at narcissism not just as a diagnosis, but as a cultural logic — a system of values and defences that fragments us from the inside out. From society’s demands, to the false self we build, to the god-like narratives of modern spirituality, and finally to the institutional silencing of pain, this is about naming what disconnects us — and beginning to stitch ourselves back together. This won’t just be an exploration of clinical narcissism, though that is in there. It’s a map of western culture’s highways to one convergent point: disconnection. Because it’s only by knowing what, exactly, is standing in the way, can we find the tiny paths back to connection.
Defining Our terms:
As usual with philosophy, we need to start by defining our terms. So what do I even mean when I say “society” or “narcissistic parent. We’ll start with society.
1. What Is Society?
We often speak of ‘society’ as if it’s out there, something we might react to, or ignore. But the truth is, society isn’t just what we live in — it comes to live in us. We are born into it. It pre-exists us. And since we come into it young, we can’t exist outside of it. We’re embedded in it. It shapes our values, our wounds, even our sense of self.
Pierre Bourdieu talks about this. He writes that society doesn’t just surround us — it produces us, shaping our dispositions before we’re even capable of reflection. Judith Butler expands on this brilliantly, saying our “selves” are shaped by the gaze and judgment of society, long before we’re conscious of it.
And yet, Western capitalist values encourage us to imagine we are beyond its influence — because we are the cause of everything that happens to us. Western spiritualism and self-help narratives parrot this too. “You get to choose what you think,” they say. We are trained to see ourselves as separate from society, even as it mirrors us and shapes the kind of mirror we look into.
Western culture — and the institutions that uphold it, like psychology and western spiritualism — would have us look at ourselves like apples that have never touched a tree. And really, a big part of understanding the kinds of apples a tree will sprout — Granny Smith, Red Delicious, or toxic spit-it-the-fuck-out-before-you-die flavour — means knowing the tree, and even the soil that tree is in. Otherwise, all we’re doing is wondering like idiots why there are so many knotted, malformed green apples — when knowing the tree was a Granny Smith growing in waterlogged soil would have really helped.
I’m not the first person to say society lives in us. Thinkers like Bourdieu, Foucault, Judith Butler, and even the Taoists have all, in different ways, pointed to the fact that we’re not free-floating individuals — we’re shaped by the soil we grow in. And if the soil’s poisoned, we can’t just call the fruit ‘bad’ and expect that the rest will grow fine.
And as much as I don’t want to do the same thing psychology does — splitting what is really a non-divisible system into meaningless parts — I do have to define my terms to be comprehensible here. Society is that whole system: soil, tree, and all that the tree produces. They are inseparable in terms of meaning. They are causally intertwined.
Zhuangzi talks about how we are not separate from the system; we are expressions of it. Distortions in the system ripple through us, because everything is interconnected — the self, society, nature. None of it stands alone. He pointed out, too, that the micro level reflects the macro level – an idea that is crucial for this episode. No, that micro level doesn’t mean reducing to an individual apple floating about in a vacuum, being red or green or narcissistic all on its own. No. A micro version of any DYNAMIC has to include similar causal and relational elements: people, rules, power structures, and power imbalances. We are therefore taking the family as the micro level system. The family tree, if you like, instead of the societal one. We are going to look at how the societal ecosystem is mirrored in narcissistic family dynamics, and vice versa.
2. Defining Narcissism and Narcissistic Behaviours
First, let’s briefly cover what the DSM says about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). The DSM characterizes NPD primarily through patterns of:
• Grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour)
• Need for admiration
• Lack of empathy
It lists a few other behaviours too, such as a sense of entitlement, exploitative tendencies, envy, and arrogance. All of these traits exist on a continuum, and to get an actual diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, you have to be way up there on multiple of these particular criteria laid out in the DSM. So, if you grow up in an invalidating environment and have hence, ended up craving the validation you never got, that alone is not enough to make you a narcissist, for example. Or, if you can be arrogant and selfish at times, and need attention, but do your best to be open, honest and non manipulating, you are likely not one either.
But as simple as it sounds to check off a list, the DSM has issues. There will doubtless be an episode on that alone, in the future. For now, suffice to say, there’s much discussion around how clinical definitions miss much of what narcissistic characters are like in their day-to-day – what their behaviour feels like and does to those around them in everyday life — especially in families.
Experts like Ramani Durvasula, Otto Kernberg, Hein Kohut, Elinor Greenberg. Sam Vaknin, and voices of those diagnosed with NPD themselves have expanded our understanding by naming additional, typical behaviours that paint a fuller picture. Their knowledge and research has also lead to us recognising two main types that operate quite differently. The overt (or classic) and covert narcissist. The difference is important in terms of how it mirrors power on the macro level. As I lay these behavioural descriptions out, you may be hit with deja vu. That’s cos a lot of these behaviours match what we’ve discussed on previous episodes that were actually about capitalist values – like how a love of individualism and the hero narrative ENCOURAGES us to treat people like props or wallpaper, as per episode 2. Like how forcing people into roles and refusing to see them as full human beings is also a tenet of our culture, as per episode 7. And, how being trained to blame ourselves is typical of both narcissistic parents and western culture’s reification of control and cognitive primacy, as per episode 3 and 4. Also, how triangulation, a favourite tool of narcissistic people which we will define in a minute, functions just like competition to pit us against each other, as per episode 5. Fleshing out these profiles should make it more clear in terms o the commonalities between being raised under western cultural values and being raised by narcissistic parents.
A Better Behavioural Portrait of Narcissism
I’m going to start with what overt and covert narcissists have in common. The growing body of information on narcissistic personality disorders shows a pattern of manipulation tactics common n to covert and overt types. These tactics are used to exert CONTROL. Yup, control is a huge aspect of both narcissism and western capitalism too. Go back to episode 5 if you want a refresher on capitalisms obsession with control. In narcissistic individuals (or entities) control trumps connection. There is no eye to eye here – there is only power over, or attempts at it.
Some of you will be well versed in the tactics used to gain that control, and others not, so I will briefly define them as I go. The tactics narcissistic people typically used to control others are as follows:
• Gaslighting — making you doubt your own reality or feelings,
• Blame shifting — dodging responsibility by blaming others, namely, YOU
• Triangulation — manipulating relationships by involving third parties to create conflict or loyalty divides,
• Lying — bending the truth to confuse or manipulate, and
• Silent treatment — using deliberate silence to punish or gain power.
Overts will often use intimidation as well — direct threats or aggressive behaviour — but covert tend to avoid this. As we will see, that difference becomes pivotal when it comes to power structures.
A narcissistic person is not interested in connection. Instead, they are all about control - over how others act, think and see them. The tactics, used over time, work to train others to behave in ways the narcissistic person likes. When they DON'T work, that person is discarded. Exiled. The training goes in a particular pattern – teaching others to ignore their own needs, internalise blame, and regulate their OWN behaviour so that it fits with what the narcissistic person desires. Deja vu about the panopticon effect, anyone? We mentioned it in episode 4 and this is just like that, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
The False Self
All of these behavioural adaptations are thought to stem from what is termed in psychology “the false self.” Researchers like Kohut, Masterson, Winnicot and Miller have all contributed to our understanding of the false self.
James Masterson argued that narcissistic individuals cannot access or live from the TRUE self because doing so would provoke overwhelming anxiety. So, they live through the false self. Masterson explains it like this. This false self acts as a manager — carefully curating external perception to ensure attachment and control. This means the covert narcisisists' life strategy becomes creating, and defending, a pleasing persona. They don’t opt for achieving this via BEING the good person – cos this is a FALSE self, remember, its not THEM. Instead of BEING that thing they want us to think they are, they use guilt-inducing, and emotionally manipulative tactics to make us BELIEVE that’s what they are. In other words, Masterson explains, they use these tactics to sustain the illusion that their public face is their core. And they actually think it IS.
If the mechanisms of this already remind of Karl Marx’s comments on idiology, I am not surprised. Marx says that ideology works to make the values of the ruling classes appear “good,” “neutral” or even “beneficial.” The false self is also a seriously Zizekian example of something containing it’s own contradiction: the narcissist BELIEVES their false self is the only self – their TRUE self – but they also know, on some semi-conscious level, that they have to constantly work to ensure others believe it. They simultaneously KNOW and DOUBT. Unsurprisingly, Masterson called narcissism the "personality disorder of the false self" — because the entire personality is organized around image control and affect suppression.
You could call it “image management.” Isn’t it interesting that this is now a commonly used phrase in our society. To be saleable, I.e. to have “value” we must also have an “image” that others “perceive” as valuable, even if it isn’t, in reality. There will be more on that, and on the idea of false selves in the next in this series. There are other kinds of false selves – with different motivations and behaviours – which become very relevant later on. For now I want to get to:
Overt vs. Covert Narcissists
When it comes to distinguishing between the two, I’ll begin with the Overt narcissists. Overt narcissists are like washed-up pop stars in neon spandex, screaming “You love me, Berlin!” at a sheep-shearing contest in rural New Zealand — and the sheep are leaving. They are also, despite what they would love to think, LESS relevant than their covert counterparts, and also less difficult to avoid. Mainly, as the example illustrates, cos they are often a total parody of themselves, and you may die laughing first, instead of at their hand.
Their grandiosity and desire for validation are on display. These are the ones you likely already recognise, and definitely seen – unless you have somehow done the impossible, and managed to miss out on the entire of US politics in the last ten years. They are the annoying posers, but actually quite scary behind the scenes, so maybe I shouldn’t laugh too much, lest one hunt me down to blow me up in a fanfare of self-righteousness. That’s one thing too, you KNOW when they’re mad, cos its explosive. You know what they think of you too – even if that changes randomly and suddenly - cos they are not that nuanced. Essentially: you are a “bad object, let me smash you” or you are a “good object, let me fuck or praise you. This good object bad object thing has to do with object permanence, which is beyond the scope of this already long podcast.
One weighty thing OVERT narcissist parents have, along with their covert cousins, is all a very particular set of rules and expectations - about how YOU are meant to act. These rules can be added to or altered on a dime, and you are meant to know via mind-reading. When you inevitably violate one of these rules – or when you didn’t but they think you did– boom. An explosion of rage and punitive measures ensues. And even though challenging them is generally met with explosive and terrifying retaliation, you can, at least in your mind, know they are fuckin' unreasonable pricks.
Now, my father was one of these, and the fact he was an unreasonable prick was the elephant in the room for most of my childhood. When I finally pointed out his unreasonable prickness, I was exiled from the family home. I had not yet finished school. This illustrates one habit they have that is relevant to power and how they use it – they over-punish. In that “I will crush you like an ant if you question me” type way.
Heinz Kohut has a quote I want to use here. It’s about what happens when you disrupt a narcissists self-image – which is what calling them unreasonable pricks is an example of.
"The narcissistically disturbed individual must maintain the illusion of the perfect self-image. When this image is threatened, the whole psychic structure trembles."
(Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, 1971)
When that structure trembled, so did our whole house. It was terrifying.
However, in terms of what such people don’t like hearing, this is what makes them LESS RELEVANT. I mean, less relevant to my statement about society acting lie a narcissistic parent. In terms of power, you can SEE the lack of fairness, you can SEE their failure to treat you with basic human dignity. It doesn’t really earn them much respect. Really, they’re a bit of an aside here, cos they mirror dictatorships, rather than western capitalism. Yes, they are openly terrifying – especially if you are a kid (read, one of their subjects or citizen, for the macro level). If you had one as a parent, then you suffered, big time, and got a dictatorship at home, nestled within the covert mindfuck of wider western society.
BUT, the very fact of their overtness is their downfall. At least, sometimes. Being an obvious prick inspires rebellion. Think Stalinist Russia — a terrifying regime so aggressively and visibly controlling that people risked death to resist it. That kind of raw, oppressive power eventually fuels underground movements, covert dissidence, and revolutionary thought. Their obvious shittitude is what CAN give you the strength to say, “fuck you're an unreasonable bastard,” even if it costs you a place to live – or your life, in some cases.
With the arguable exception of Germany, which is kinda a mixed bag, - it loves over-punishment, and you cannot avoid accidentally breaking one of its insane number of rules at some point, which makes you live in fear - modern Western capitalist cultures don’t usually run on that kind of power. Instead of brute force and fear, most western capitalist cultures run on something more invisible — what philosopher Michel Foucault called disciplinary power.
Foucault talks about how modern, capitalist societies don’t punish openly. Instead, the modes of SELF control kinda SEEP into you. You INTERNALISE societal rules, as we talked about in episode 4 with the panopticon. You come to monitor and regulate yourself, so that no dictator is needed.
Foucault points out that disciplinary power operates in cultures that seem safe enough for its values get internalized. Cos when no one IS pointing a gun at your head, you often feel you chose all these values for yourself. When we think that we chose to do something, we are far more likely to keep doing it, than when it has clearly been forced on us.
Covert Narcissists – the real Parallel to Western Capitalist Power Dynamics.
This is exactly the kind of power of the covert narcissist, who is also referred to as the “vulnerable” narcissist. THIS flavour of narcissist is the one I am referring to when I say that modern Western culture behaves like a narcissistic parent. No blow-ups. No raging. More of a mask of fake concern, practised sweetness, or wounded, guilt-inducing confusion…. They train you with that guilt, and with exclusion games – along with all the other tactics mentioned. They wield a more subtle mix of gaslighting, blame-shifting and triangulation. These are the narcissists that silently and steadily erode your selfhood, rather than openly hacking chunks off it.
Now, if you grow up with THIS kind of treatment on the micro level, you know. It hurts. We all want acceptance, love, positive reflection – as KIDS those things are vital for our development - but with a covert narcissist? These things either won't come at all, or they’ll have a massive price. Even our most basic needs will not be met, unless the narcissist gets some benefit from doing so.
The Illustrative Tale of Big Bertha
Now, I call the person that gave birth to me Bertha, not cos that is her name, but cos all she did was birth me. She was not my mother, or anyone else's. As a covert narcissist, she could not DO mothering, only resentment. And Bertha could not even feed us. Not because we were poor, or cos she didn’t have time – it was the 70s and it was still possible then for one member of a couple to stay at home without going bankrupt. It was because she did not want to have to bother. So, she used to buy those big bags full of little bags of crisps, along with biscuits and sweets, and tell us to take those to school with us.
Now, a lot of the other kids thought “wow, that is so cool. You always have sweets and crisps,” and for a while, I thought so too – being in primary school and not knowing a damn thing about nutrition. Bertha went along with this “cool” thing too, proud of her mothering skills and telling us “look how lucky you are, the other kids don’t get as many sweets as you.”
The thing was, that was ALL we got. Which, I dunno, may have been fine, but that kind of diet has its effects. Eventually, she would start calling us “fat,” go all silent in disgust for a while, then put us on diets. The first diet she put me on was at the age of 6. At that point, I almost got nothing, and begged for the cookies and sweets. It became a horrible, vicious circle.
By the age of 10 I realised that what was wanted of me was a. to not inconvenience her with any request for more nourishing food like other kids got and b. I should be thin, or she would hate me more than usual. So I stopped eating. She left me alone for a while, but eventually it became clear that I had anorexia. At 10. She did that seething silent anger thing again, hissing “for gods sake, what will people think!?” and forced me to eat… Even at that age, and cos there were some good teachers at that school, I knew I needed and wanted counselling. Bertha forbid it, saying “for gods’ sake, how hard is it to just eat? Why do you insist on shaming the family?”
Even so, she introduced a new food to the home. White bread became the most nutritious thing in the house, which was a little better than sweets. She also, occasionally, and with a lot of resentment and hate, cooked. It was done with such silent fuming that I’d end up telling her she did not need to cook if she
was doing it on my account. That I would fix myself something.
The point is, with a covert narcissist, you learn what gets you quilted, what gets you excluded, or ridiculed, or called “too needy” and “too much”. The panopticon effect kicks in real quick. You internalise their rules and make them your own. You even internalise their preferences and make them your own. If their preference is that you stay quiet and out of sight? You will give up your dreams of drumming in a rock band or being a physical education teacher (PE teachers shout ALL the time). You become the self-monitoring, self-regulating machine that we talks about in episode 3 with the panopticon. You do this to avoid shame or blame at all costs. You conclude that if you don’t need anything from them, and just behave as they want you to, you will finally get that love, that belonging. That acceptance that says “you’re OK.” Even if that means never ever being YOU.
Alice Miller discusses this dynamic in The Drama of the Gifted Child. She shows how children of narcissistic or emotionally immature parents become what their parents need them to be, suppressing their authentic emotions. Miller emphasizes that the child performs for love, building a certain kind of false self—one aimed at earning connection through carefully curated behaviour. (We will explore different kinds of false selves in the next episode.) By contrast, the narcissist’s false self is a performance for control. One seeks connection; the other avoids it. In the next episode we will go deeper into kinds of false selves, as narcissistic environments CAN lead to the control-seeking false self too.
For now, its important to note that the false self Miller describes often leads to depression or identity crises and frequently collapses into shame. Ronningstam explains that although both types of false-self harbour a shame-based core, the connection-seeking false self tends to collapse inward. The narcissistic false self tends to deflect shame onto everyone else.
Here is the hefty problem though: a covert narcissist, like their societal counterpart, wants YOU to develop a false self. One that never inconveniences them. One that is their definition of “good.” They train you to be a version of yourself that benefits THEM.
May I remind you of all those slogans like “Be your best self” and “become the best VERSION of you”? They are still on high rotate in coaching, marketing and fitness circles: this also pushes a message that there is a best version of your self, and what COUNTS as the “best” version is unlikely to be on your terms. We might think it is, but generally, it’s in accord with the values you have internalised – a best self that is more beautiful, higher earning, more independent and in control.
In both the parental case and the societal case, we have convinced ourselves that some external players needs are our needs. That is how they rule.
The jewel in the societal, or covert narcissists’ crown is this – once you’ve internalised their rules, you also believe any pain you experience at their hand is your fault. It’s simple, and particularly as a kid. YOU broke the rules, therefore, it’s your fault. YOU were too needy. YOUR loudness, quietness, enthusiasm, boredom, whatever is a wrong, or a massive massive burden, or a dreadful, fatal flaw. You were NOT being a good version of yourself. You were being a shit VERSION of what is expected of you. To be a better version, under NO circumstances be yourself.
Plausible Deniability - the Narcissists Cloak of Invisibility
Now we get to a KEY weapon in covert narcissistic rule – and the key weapon used in western capitalist societies. All that gaslighting, blame shifting, guilt tripping, lying, manipulation, triangulation, silent treatment and so on? Well, they are done behind a special kind of wall called plausible deniability. This is a sort of protective shield around their false self – to keep it in tact no matter what they do. If your your long-suffering saint of a parent does something dodgy, cruel or deliberate, plausible deniability is a mechanism that allows them to claim they are not, and shift the blame for their actions onto you.
Here is an example:
Yesterday, your mother did a long tirade about how Helen, next door, is not as beautiful as everyone makes out cos she has knock knees. She’s waxed lyrical and dismissive about how how anyone who thinks this “so called beauty” is beautiful has no clue.
You are visiting her, and wearing your new, knee-high boots, which you saved up for for months, and which you really dig. When you ask her if she likes how they look on you, she remarks “oh! They make you look just like Helen!”
Now, YOU know she means you look knock-kneed, and you say “are you trying to tell me I have knock knees?”. Her reply?
“God! I can’t say ANYTHING. You are so sensitive! Everyone knows Helen is beautiful! I give you a compliment, and you throw it in my face. What kind of a daughter are you?”
This was a real life example, courtesy of Bertha.
Plausible deniability is a way for a narcissistic individual to claim “I didn’t do anything, you’re imagining it. You’re too sensitive.” i.e. YOU are the problem, not me.
This trick is central to your training, and can serve to make that training almost imperceptible. Plausible deniability allows a covert narcissistic parent to disconnect you from your intuition—to say that what you felt and understood from their actions is all in your head. This is how they hollow you out gradually, silently, and invisibly. Because they can tell you that you are paranoid, oversensitive, imagining things, exaggerating, or making stuff up. Over time, you start to believe this, redefining yourself as “too much” or “overly emotional,” just as they portrayed you. You go along with their version of reality—accepting their interpretation of you, their wants, needs, and rules—unknowingly and willingly. In doing so, you reflect their self-image as the martyr they believe themselves to be.
Another lived example cos Bertha, did bless me in the end – when the upsetting memories finally became useful and illustrative insights. Bertha hated me. She hated me cos she hated herself, and I looked just like she did as a child, but worse. I had red hair. In New Zealand, that’s a ticket to lifelong bullying for being “horribly ugly.” Yeah, lets NOT reminisce that things were better in the 70s and 80s.
Bertha trained my siblings to ridicule me for being fat, ugly, laughable etc., cos that is how she saw me. I did not fit what she had wanted – a beautiful baby girl, to prove she had beauty in her. So, I became her scapegoat. I know from the comments on the very first episode that many of you were given this role too. For you, there is a special place in my heart, because I know what you went through. The doubly shitty thing is, you likely got it again from society.
At Christmas Bertha would buy my siblings normal presents. Among the few normal things she got me, there was always a “bomb”. I knew they were coming, and it was like roulette. I had to open in front of my siblings, so that they could watch and judge, and wait for the inevitable….. “presents” like pads to stop your feet stinking, pills to stop your farts stinking, books with advice about problems my siblings could guffaw at, and that I never knew I had. The message? Not just “you stink,” but “you are a problem” – and here, I have the solution.
Bertha was masterful, cos her tactics were actually CLEAR enough that my siblings laughed every time, like well trained monkeys. And yet, plausible deniability still functioned – when I called Bertha out, she said I was being ungrateful and too sensitive cos she was only trying to help. She would then get all depressed about being unappreciated, so my siblings would comfort her, and shut me out for “hurting” her.
That, by the way, is called “supply”. Bertha trained my siblings to be her caretakers, and still got to tell her scapegoat they were an embarrassment, and the root of all her problems. Win win win for her.
The point is, it is just like society telling us we have a problem, and that they know the solution. THAT is what marketing and consumerism is BASED on. When we insist that the problem is not us, rather their values and awful way of being, we are shamed and blamed and told we are terrible to be around.
What Narcissistic Parents Teach You (And So Does Society)
Let’s compare what covert narcissistic parents teach you with what growing up — and surviving — in Western capitalist society trains you to believe.
1. Relationships Are Transactional
Covert narcissistic parents teach you that love is conditional. It must be earned — by pleasing them, caring for them, or making them look good. Your value lies in your utility. As long as you meet their needs, you are “loved.” Stop performing, and the connection disappears — instantly, and completely. It’s like a factory-floor switch is flipped.
How society teaches you the same thing is something we discussed in episode 2. There, we unpacked the hero narrative — that cultural ideal which casts the individual as a solitary saviour on a grand personal quest. Within that myth, others become:
• Obstacles to be avoided,
• Tools to be used as the means to an end, or
• Scenery to be ignored.
This is not connection. This is transaction. And it mirrors the covert narcissistic parent dynamic: people are only valuable if they serve the central character. If you’re not enhancing the hero’s mission — you’re in the way. This is how a child becomes wallpaper in their parent’s story, and how we all become wallpaper in society’s narrative of success.
In terms of relationships: Both a covert narcissist parent and western capitalist society teach that relationships are about utility, not genuine connection.
2. You’re Cast in a Role — and Never Allowed Out
I know a few of you out there were assigned the scapegoat role too, so you already know this. Like any dysfunctional family, Covert narcissistic parents don’t relate to their children as full, evolving people. Instead, they assign rigid roles early on — and those roles stick. Psychologists like Dr. Karyl McBride, John Bradshaw, Shahida Arabi, and Christine Hammond have documented these roles in detail:
• The Golden Child — idealized and praised, but only for reflecting the narcissist’s self-image.
• The Scapegoat — blamed for everything that goes wrong in the system.
• The Lost Child — ignored and forgotten.
• The Caretaker/Helper — emotionally reidentified, serving the emotional needs of the adult.
When you’re slotted into one of these archetypes, the reality of your depth is ignored. Your resistance to the role is often taken as some twisted confirmation – with Bertha, pointing out her unjust treatment made her more convinced that I was oversensitive. To her, I always be laughable, ugly, and an embarrassment, and if I won a Nobel prize in physics, it would not change it one bit.
And society? In episode 7 we talked about how roles and archetypes are assigned in western capitalism. Fannon and Butlers work describes how, once those roles are assigned, you will be viewed SOLELY through the lens of that role. Just like with narcissistic parents, all evidence that you are NOT what they imagined will be ignored.
Comparing both: covert narcissist parents and society imprison identity, resist or punish change, and ignore evidence that contradicts assigned roles.
3. Divide and Rule: Competition as Control
Now I mentioned triangulation earlier on. This is one of the covert narcissists sharpest tools in terms of creating competition. As McBride and Hammond outline, this means pitting children against each other — through comparison, favouritism, and subtle messages of worth. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” they say. Or: “At least Melanie appreciates the effort I go to.”
The purpose? To:
1. Create rivalry instead of solidarity,
2. Prevent alliance-building that could challenge the narcissist’s control, and
3. Reinforce compliance by making love and approval scarce.
Western capitalist culture does this on the macro level. As we saw in episode 5, it institutionalizes competition — rewarding those who play the game and perform best by it’s standards. Those who fall behind are left behind, in the name of a total misunderstanding of Darwin. Individual success becomes the currency of worth, and collective care becomes dangerous.
Both foster rivalry and distrust instead of connection and collective power. We are taught to compare rather than connect — because a connected collective could resist. And that, for both the narcissistic parent and neo-liberal capitalism, is a threat.
4. The Blame is Always Yours
In the narcissistic family, everything that goes wrong is your fault cos you are flawed. NO MATTER WHAT THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU ARE DOING. YOU are too sensitive, too emotional, too needy. YOUR pain is a tiresome burden. THEIR values, their behaviour? These are seen as neutral, or even benevolent. If you’re not fine with that is going on, it’s cos you are defective.
This is not just dysfunctional parenting. It’s gaslighting.
And it’s not limited to the home. As explored in episodes 3 and 4, this mindset is the very backbone of CBT-based pop psychology and Western spiritualism. “Your thoughts shape your reality.” If something isn’t working, it’s because you’re not aligned, not grateful, not manifesting properly. Again, NO MATTER WHAT THE SYSTEM AROUND YOU IS DOING. Again, if you are not happy, it’s cos you are defective.
This is, obviously, a spiritualized version of the same narcissistic gaslighting: a system that injures you — and then tells you, you are the problem.
Both the covert narcissistic parent, and western culture engage in gaslighting. They insist on self-blame, regardless of circumstances, and warp your sense of yourself, and of reality. You are trained to doubt your own perception, to override your instincts – we talked about this in the episode on cognitive primacy: how western culture decouples us from our instincts and labels them irrational – just like a narcissistic parent would.
5. Internalized Control: You Silence Yourself
By the time you’ve internalized these dynamics, you no longer need the narcissist to police you. You monitor yourself. You silence your own needs before they can be punished. You anticipate disapproval. You adjust in advance. You censor joy, desire, anger — anything that might “cost” you connection.
In terms of society, this is what Michel Foucault called disciplinary power. In episode 4, we discussed how this is modelled in the panopticon — a prison where no guard needs to be present, because the prisoner assumes they are always being watched. The result? Self-policing. Internalized shame. Quiet compliance.
Both covert narcissistic parents and western capitalism create internalized disciplinary power where you police and silence yourself constantly. Where you perform, or fear the consequences. Where you do what is expected, or be exiled.
6. You’re Isolated — and Taught to Fear Connection
This one is perhaps the most relevant when it comes to loneliness. Covert narcissistic parents isolate you from siblings, from your friends, and, as we said, from your intuition. They themselves become your only frame of reference. They must be your only point of reference — because if you saw what healthy looked like, their game would be up. I remember both my parents doing parodies of one of our neighbour families. My parents called them “sickening” and encouraged us to laugh at their “fake” affection and “stupid lovely-doveyness.” They literally taught us to equate affection with stupidity, and life as some kind of competition as to who was the smartest. Looking back, I now know that that family were healthy, caring, warm. Things that not only made no sense to two narcissists, but were a threat to their way of operating.
Society: Society does this too. It tells you others are competition, not allies. It calls vulnerability weakness, and shames you for having needs. It asks you to show only your polished, superior “brand.” Authentic connection becomes dangerous, or seen as something inferior people need. We talked in episode 6 about how western culture pathologises that which is opposite to it’s ideals. And with individualism as an ideal, relying on each other gets pathologised – as co-dependence. Loneliness, therefore, is not an accident. It’s a design feature.
Both narcissistic parents and western culture create loneliness as deliberate design, blocking healthy relationships and pathologizing mutual support.
7. Ideology Shapes You — and Makes It Feel Like Choice
Covert narcissistic parents don’t just control you — they teach you to believe that their control is care. That their needs are your needs. That shrinking yourself to fit their standards is what being “a good person” means. Over time, their rules get inside you. And once you internalize them, you start performing them willingly. You think you chose them.
That’s ideology.
If we recall from earlier, Marx said ideology exists to make the rule of the powerful appear good — not just acceptable, but natural, even virtuous. It frames domination as wanting what is best for you. Foucault took that further. He argued that in modern societies, power doesn’t need to shout — it whispers. And its biggest trick? Making us believe we chose it. That we’re free.
When a covert narcissist teaches you to monitor yourself, to perform what they want without being asked, you stop noticing the control. You think it’s your own idea. You internalize the rules so deeply, you stop seeing them as rules at all.
And Althusser? He shows us that ideology doesn’t just live in our heads — it lives in our actions. It’s what we do, often without thinking. It’s the curated persona. The obsession with being seen the “right” way. The constant self-editing, the self-discipline, the polished surface. We call it “self-improvement.” But it’s actually submission — disguised as empowerment.
This is why narcissistic family systems aren’t just damaging — they’re instructive. They model how ideology works. On the micro level, they show us what happens when a dominant figure reshapes reality, enforces invisible rules, punishes resistance through guilt or exclusion, and then trains others to uphold that system — even when the authority figure isn’t present. It’s a self-sustaining loop. Just like ideology on the macro level, the narcissistic family teaches its members to perform a reality that benefits the one in power — and to call that performance love, growth, or success.
In both the narcissistic home and capitalist culture, control doesn’t just happen through force — it happens through participation. And the more we participate, the more we believe it was our idea all along.
That’s the final layer of the mindfuck. Not just obedience — but complicity that feels like freedom.
And what does that complicity produce? Usually, some sort false self. A version of you shaped by power, dressed up as choice.
Bringing This Together, so far
So let’s take a moment to really feel what we’ve covered.
We began by uncovering how narcissism is not just a label for a type of person — but a relational dynamic built on power, control, and invisible rules.
It’s a system that thrives on emotional manipulation — where love is conditional, connection is transactional, and your reality is constantly tested.
In these spaces — whether a family, a workplace, or society at large — survival means learning to perform.
You learn to shrink yourself, hide what’s true, and mirror what others expect.
Not because you lack strength, but because the system demands your compliance to maintain the illusion of care.
And this system?
It’s bigger than any one person.
It extends beyond your home.
It becomes ideology.
Ideology that whispers, “This is your choice. This is your freedom,” while quietly reshaping who you think you are, what you feel, and how you see the world.
We aren’t just meant to survive these dynamics — we are meant to internalize them.
Yet, what happens when we do?
Our nervous system rewires.
Our sense of self fragments.
You may find yourself becoming hyper-vigilant, people-pleasing, emotionally numb, or endlessly self-critical.
You may find yourself drawn back to patterns that repeat the very harm you escaped.
And that hurts. If it doesn’t — then you’ve successfully killed off your inner world, as instructed, and you wouldn’t have made it this far through the blog.
Chances are, dear reader, the fact that you are still reading is because it still sometimes feels like a war inside.
That pain is a signal.
It means you still feel.
You still remember who you are, or at least, that there is a you beneath the performance.
And that means — they didn’t win.
Not yet.
But what happens next?
In the next episode, we’ll dive deeper.
We’ll explore how these dynamics don’t just shape your feelings or your actions, but the very core of who you become.
We will talk about how power works at the macro level — through culture, ideology, and social norms — mirroring the same patterns of a covert narcissistic family.
We’ll look at the kinds of false selves we have to build to survive — the masks we think we need to protect us. Those same masks that trap us and isolate us, even as we hope they give us shelter.
We will explore how even the most damaging survival strategies — such as narcissism itself — come to be logical responses to internalizing the values that Western capitalism enshrines.
With that, it should become easier to understand why those who notice and log the rise in narcissism are correct — and why we need to deeply question what Western capitalism demands we value if we want any hope of rebuilding connection.
Finally, we will look at the outcome of a culture whose values demand narcissistic adaptations: disconnection and loneliness — for both the compliantly narcissistic and the less compliant alike.
Loneliness. That deeply human longing — one that still alerts us to the fragmentation inside ourselves and in society as a whole.