Survival Traits You May Learn Growing Up in a Narcissistic Household
When I look back at growing up in an authoritarian, abusive home with a highly narcissistic parent, one of the things I remember most clearly is how much the atmosphere of our house depended on one person's mood.
We learned to pay attention.
Who was coming down the hallway? What kind of mood were they in? Was today a day to stay out of the way, be helpful, be agreeable, or make ourselves scarce?
We weren't consciously deciding to develop “survival traits.” We were children learning how to function inside the environment we had.
The Roles We Learn to Play
People often use labels like scapegoat, golden child, or forgotten child to describe roles children can occupy in dysfunctional families. What matters to me now is understanding that these weren't fixed identities. They were ways of adapting to what was happening around us.
Research supports the broader idea that childhood maltreatment can shape the ways children learn to cope with stress and regulate emotion, including greater reliance on avoidance and emotional suppression (Gruhn & Compas, 2020).
And this can change at times, too — sometimes it might be easier to run and hide, other times it might be easier to play nice and be agreeable.
Sometimes I felt like the golden child for a moment, because I was getting good grades and finishing my chores, babysitting my siblings and not getting into trouble. Sometimes it felt more like I was the forgotten child, slipping under the radar by staying in man room and reading books. Later, when I was able to formulate stronger opinions and argue my case, it was much easier for me to become the scapegoat… but none of these identities were ever actual concrete truths. They could shift and change, just as quickly as the narcissist’s mood.
That was one of the hardest parts for me: I didn't feel like I got to simply exist as my own person. So much of my attention was directed toward what the adults around me needed, wanted, or might react to.
Whatever mood my dad was in, that’s what we would be waiting for. We would see how he acted when he got home, to know how the rest of the day was going to progress.
There were moments when my step-mom would weaponize my dad: when we would be “too much” for her that day or did things that meant big trouble, she would send us to our room and have us wait there for him to get home to deal with it. Sometimes that meant sitting on my bed for a couple of hours, then being lectured for another few hours when he got there. So of course, if he came home from a long day at work and immediately had to “deal with” children, you could guess how the rest of the day would pretty much be on eggshells.
If we had a good day with our step-mom: if we didn’t ask her too many questions, ask for too many snacks, arm interrupt her phone calls too often, then the day was pretty smooth sailing and we would just be waiting until he got home to see how it was gonna go.
If he came home and seemed pissy already, we had options, based on his actions: if he just wanted to get on his video game and work off steam that way, we knew to stay out of his way so he wouldn’t see us and be upset by something we did. If he was more “active” in his prissiness, like walking around the house looking at the mess or finding things to clean up, slamming things down on the counter, etc., then we knew to jump up and immediately start doing some kind of chore. It was almost as if he didn’t want to be the only one doing housework: if he was gonna have to clean stuff, so were we. He didn’t really like it when we sat down to play or relax. He would always ask, “Did you get your chores done?” And then go behind us to double check it was good enough.
Years later, my brother told me that he HATED it when he would sit down and play video games on the weekends and his wife would be up cleaning. He felt like he had to get off the game and help her clean. He said he really wished she would just sit down and relax too, because he felt guilty any time she was up cleaning and he wasn’t. It’s always been fascinating to me, how we pick up on these things and integrate them into our own mannerisms and triggers.
Trait #1: Constantly Reading the Room
I started to notice there are many traits people could pick up, by living in these narcissistic homes.
For me, it was “normal” to know which parent was coming down the hallway — and what kind of mood they were in — by their footsteps. Literally the sound of footsteps could send my heart racing and my hands sweating in an instant.
I learned to “read the room” because noticing small changes gave me information about what might happen next.
I had integrated the belief that, somehow, there must be something I could do to prevent the lashing out or the anger or annoyance of my parents.
It felt like constantly running around trying to put out fires, even though I wasn’t the one who started the fire. His moods were NOT my fault, and as a parent he was faced with many situations that were just part of raising a child and helping them learn how to function in the world. But his anger and stress always seemed to be directed at us kids and something we hadn’t done, or had done wrong. So I really believed after a while that it must mean I just wasn’t doing enough stuff right.
It often felt like us children were just not something my dad or my step-mom really wanted to be dealing with. I often felt like an inconvenience or a roadblock. And, even if I hadn’t done anything wrong, it always felt like I *could* be doing more, according tot he feedback I would get from them. This left me with a constant guard being put up, because if I DID relax, someone would be coming in there to bark at me: DID YOU GET YOUR CHORES DONE? And if I had… they weren’t done well enough.
As an adult, I can understand that I wasn't responsible for another adult's moods or reactions. As a child, I didn't have that perspective. I knew some of what was happening felt unfair, but I still kept looking for the thing I could do differently to prevent it.
So I kept trying so hard to prevent him from being upset. This led to the constant belief that no matter what I did, I would be the problem. I was doing something badly, or wrong, or I was going to get in trouble. i couldn’t relax, I always had to be cleaning, and everything had to be perfect.
I don't think there was one moment when I consciously decided, I have to be perfect or something bad will happen. It accumulated over time until it started feeling less like something I'd learned and more like who I was.
Trait #2: Constantly Monitoring How Other People See You
Another pattern I noticed was how much mental energy I spent thinking about how other people perceived me.
I always had this passion for figuring out how the brain works, and why people do what they do. Especially my own brain — I really wanted to deeply understand myself and have a relationship with this person who I was walking around becoming. I remember noticing at one point that, when I interacted with people, my brain would relate that situation back to myself.
For instance if I said something dumb or embarrassed myself, or just had a conversation on a random topic, I would go back over it later and question what I said, wondering how they felt about me instead of what it must have felt like to them. It’s like I was unaware that other people processed things in their own way and instead expected everyone to be using that information to judge me, to form an opinion of me, to know more about me… presumably to use it against me later. It felt very, “Me me me.”
What I eventually began to understand was that I was stuck in hyper-awareness of how I was being perceived. From the outside looking in, that can look egotistical. But it’s actually an acute, constant self-criticism — a fear lens that kept me from being able to see others’ point of view. I was so busy projecting my fears onto their perspective, because I was so certain they were mad at me or hated me.
I wasn't thinking about myself so much because I didn't care about other people. I was constantly scanning for signs that I'd done something wrong, upset someone, or put myself at risk of rejection or conflict.
If I changed my voice or my facial expression too much, I could be slapped in the face for cutting my eyes at my step-mom. That doesn’t exactly teach great communication skills, or self-confidence. So of course I was constantly in fear of how others would perceive me.
Learning to be super critical of myself cast a critical lens on life: I wonder if someone is going to take this wrong. I wonder if this will be a threat to me, too. There was no sense of safety to be found for me in those moments, no action was safe. So the world began to feel unsafe.
Trait #3: Defensiveness When You Feel Wrong
Another pattern that confused me for a long time was how defensive I could become when I felt criticized or corrected.
When I lived in a household that consistently taught me I was doing something wrong, no matter how hard I tried, or how good of a person I was (which was something I NEVER got mirrored back to me, but I still tried my best to believe), my value was dependent on what I was providing the narcissist or how well I had pleased them. Again, swinging wildly by the hour and how their mood was. This is a very mercurial judgment system. Because of that, my opinions and beliefs were cut down.
I would be told how wrong I was — if not in words, then in demeanor. My dad always had to step in and say something in response to my opinions: whether in smug validation (“I’ll allow that”), or in doubtful questioning (“I don’t know about all THAT…”), the things that I said out loud always had to be run past his system of approval. And a lot of times I didn’t pass. Many times it was just, “Well that’s just not true. The message I absorbed was that adulthood came with authority, while being a child meant my perspective carried less weight.
Even my opinions often felt like something I had to defend or prove.
But when you’re told you’re wrong all the time, you learn that’s how the world works: you are wrong until proven right. You are guilty until proven innocent. Children are not treasured and appreciated, they are bothersome and inconvenient, unless they do something really helpful or conducive to the adults’ fulfillment and happiness.
To me, it felt like my opinions and emotions were just one more thing that my dad had to micromanage and have control over.. like he had all these plates in the air, and he had to be ruling over my emotions and thoughts too, and that was even more of an inconvenience for him. I was a burden for even having them. Because his life was a lot easier when I just played and shut up and did what he said. Less to have to control that way, and he already had so much to do. So much weighing on him.
I learned that even my opinions were somehow damaging others, getting in the way of others, or exhausting others. This was a very lonely feeling, and it caused me to feel super defensive over my thoughts, my emotions, even my existence. Ay time i had a belief form, which is a normal process for children, they would form with this qualifier, “I have to prove it true, or I have to keep it to myself, because it could be wrong.”
That makes it so difficult to live al life where you’re open to the ideas or input of others… everything becomes a potential threat to your system. You’re already living in a state of confusion, where everything you believe about the world is apparently wrong. This makes your internal terrain scary, on top of the outer world being scary, and of course trusting others is scary…. So you just live your life in a constant state of fear. Like a terrified little kitten, who only knows how to hiss and swat at anything that approaches it.
Becoming an adult with this trait is crippling, because it’s nearly impossible to handle constructive criticism. You don’t know when someone is actually helping you or not. I quit so many jobs out of sheer terror and panic, because I couldn’t handle people teaching me how to do things. I constantly felt like I was stupid or a nuisance. I had NO confidence in myself at that point.
I’ve had to revisit this pattern more than once. I wrote about one of those moments in Why Making a Mistake Can Feel So Much Bigger Than the Mistake.
Trait #4: Sorting People Into “Safe” and “Unsafe”
I also became very quick to form conclusions about whether someone felt safe or unsafe based on what I observed.
This is something i was always so upset that my dad did to me, keeping me trapped in these boxes of who he said I was. But then I realized that i did it to people, too. I noticed specific behaviors or traits and i catalogued them, based on “safe” or “not safe.” If a person’s words, actions, or demeanor felt like a threat to my nervous system, I placed them into the category of being a threat, and it was really hard for my brain to trust that they weren’t one.
At the same time, I would decide that i trusted people based on the role my brain believed they were supposed to be playing, like parent, teacher, romantic partner, etc., and it seemed as if logic was turned off in my mind: I would overlook harmful actions by certain people, and it was difficult for me to set boundaries and move them into the “threat” box, because I valued being a loyal person.
Fear can narrow what you're able to see. Sometimes I decided someone was unsafe based on a small cue that reminded me of something familiar. Other times, I overlooked behavior that genuinely wasn't okay because the person's role in my life made me want to trust them. You can probably see where this starts to get muddled and confusing. But again, it’s the result of trying to control outcomes, so I could have the feeling of safety or at least feel like i could prevent total devastation and heartbreak.
These traits really kept me from having close, deep connections with people, because I would inadvertently judging their “safeness” based an initial reaction I had, which was often clouded by fear from prior experiences in the narcissistic home.
Trait #5: Trying to Control Everything Around You
One of the harder things I've had to recognize is that growing up around controlling behavior also taught me ways of trying to control the environment around me.
For me, in my quest to constantly be perfect and make sure everything was just right, I learned that I had to be aware of everything, at all times. If my dad came home and noticed something, *someone* had to pay for it. I often got, “You should know better.” And i really took that to heart. Even though none of it was true… we didn’t disappoint him. We were kids. He lived in a constant state of disappointment because he felt like HE was a disappointment. So he managed the environment around him… and I learned to do the same.
For me, that showed up around my household, cleaning, chores, and an almost constant inability to sit down and relax. But it also reached into much bigger parts of my life.
There was always something else I should be doing. Something I hadn’t finished. Some way I could be doing more.
And when your attention is constantly on what still needs to be done, it becomes really difficult to feel satisfied with what you’ve already done.
It affected my relationships too. Romantic partners, my kids, the people closest to me could feel the pressure of that constant monitoring.
People told me in different ways: You’re hard to please. Nothing ever feels good enough for you.
That was difficult to hear, especially when controlling behavior was one of the very things I had struggled with growing up around. But eventually I had to recognize that understanding where a pattern came from didn’t erase the impact it could have on other people.
For me, control had become one of the ways I tried to prevent the uncertainty I was so afraid of.
Understanding the Pattern Gives You Somewhere to Go
One of the most important things I’ve learned is that understanding where a pattern came from doesn’t require me to pretend the pattern is harmless.
I can understand why I learned to read every room and still work on letting other people have moods that aren't mine to manage.
I can understand why criticism once felt threatening and still practice hearing feedback without immediately defending myself.
I can understand why control made uncertainty feel more manageable and still recognize when my need for control starts affecting the people around me.
And I can understand why I learned to question myself without continuing to hand everyone else the authority to tell me who I am.
That’s the part I wish I’d understood much earlier.
These patterns weren’t proof of some terrible thing hiding inside me. They were things I had learned.
And learned patterns give us something to work with.
If you’re beginning to recognize some of your own experiences in this, I wrote more about what I wish I’d understood earlier in 12 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Sooner About Relational Trauma.
When You Understand the Pattern but Still Keep Doing It
Recognizing where a pattern came from can be incredibly validating. Eventually, though, you reach the part where you want to know what to actually do when it shows up.
That’s a big part of the work we do inside Journey to Self.
We work through self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-validation so you can understand the patterns you learned, relate to yourself differently because of what you understand, and start making choices that feel more like your own.
Sources + Further Reading
Gruhn, M. A., & Compas, B. E. (2020). Effects of maltreatment on coping and emotion regulation in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic review. Child Abuse & Neglect, 103, 104446.
Heleniak, C., Jenness, J. L., Vander Stoep, A., McCauley, E., & McLaughlin, K. A. (2016). Childhood maltreatment exposure and disruptions in emotion regulation: A transdiagnostic pathway to adolescent internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 40(3), 394–415.
Lavi, I., Katz, L. F., Ozer, E. J., & Gross, J. J. (2019). Emotion reactivity and regulation in maltreated children: A meta-analysis. Child Development, 90(5), 1503–1524.
