Parental envy: the silent thief of joy and fulfillment

Narcissistic parents often inflict attachment injuries on their children by hurting them emotionally. It is natural for these parents to view their children as extensions of themselves and neglect their emotional needs, thereby establishing what Daniel Shaw (2010) calls “controlled egocentric self-promotion.” They also impose additional emotional damage by pathologically envying children’s achievements and happiness. The combination of emotional deafness and envy, often expressed as rage (4), cultivates guilt and lack of self-confidence in these children in adult life.

Melanie Klein, an early pioneer of British psychoanalysis, suggested that what motivates parents’ envy is their own deprivation of good things during childhood. She posited that “envy is exacerbated by deprivation and, in fact, also fuels feelings of deprivation because of the way it prevents the subject from benefiting from what is available” (1). Parents, embittered by their children’s happier childhoods that they themselves did not have, remind the children how hard they had it – “I walked three kilometers to school, why not you ? parents drive them. In an attempt to retroactively improve their own childhood, they resort to identifying with their child to reclaim a life they never lived and the hopes, dreams, and possibilities they were deprived of but to which they feel entitled.

However, these attempts do little to help the parents themselves and are harmful to the children. Let’s look at the effects of parental envy on children and determine when it is useful to bring up the topic of parental envy in therapy.

1. Lack of nurturing relationships. Since narcissistic parents tend to psychologically merge with their children (2), they pose serious boundary problems for children. As the child is not perceived as a separate human being, worthy of his own desires, feelings, aspirations, motivations and above all relationships, the parent uses envy and inflicts criticism or prohibitions on personal relationships. and the social interactions of her children. As Shaw says, their relationship strategies result in the compulsion to control and dominate, and since envious parents view the child as their extension, the parent withholds fulfilling relationships from their child’s life in order to control and remain their center. The opposite of envy is generosity, like the generosity of love. Unfortunately, envious parents do not provide the opportunity to learn the generosity of love towards their children.

2. Unrealized ambitions. The narcissistic personality is not only accompanied by envy, as Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), but also by rage and boredom (4). D’Agostino et al. refers to Kernberg, who described that the experience of emptiness in a narcissistic personality occurs alongside feelings of boredom and restlessness (4). The child is forced to devote himself to filling the void of his parent. To have your own success here would risk encountering the wrath of parents. The more the child attempts to develop autonomy in the face of parental encroachment, the more the parent’s desire to possess and regain control surfaces. When there are several children, there may be one whose achievements are less accepted by the parent to counterbalance the successes of the other children. Thus, in the eyes of parental envy, it is extremely difficult for the child to maintain and hold his own property.

Peter Shabad describes how his child patient, struggling with parental envy, became angry when the therapist saw him buy a bag of Doritos before the session. The child demanded that the therapist look away, speaking as if the therapist “could omnipotently penetrate him and steal his private pleasures” (3). The consequences of parental envy are expected to create an obstacle in therapy, because unconsciously the client would be afraid to progress and achieve therapeutic results, as this forces him to neglect the parents’ needs to the good of his own.

3. Lack of joy in life. The subject of parental envy has penetrated the collective consciousness through fairy tales for centuries. Take Snow White, for example, where the evil stepmother poisons her daughter out of a desire for her to be “the fairest in the land.” In other fairy tales, such as Tangled, there is the motif of a childless stepmother or witch who kidnaps an only child, thereby stealing light from the family. In therapy, we can view parental envy as a way for parents to symbolically steal the joy from their child’s life. Let’s take the example of a child who stands up to a bully. The jealous parent would unconsciously want to take the joy of winning out of the hands of the child, so instead of sharing the jubilation that this child defended himself, the parent omits this part and only blames him for violating the rules of the ‘school.

Snow White’s motif also demonstrates the theft of the joy of maturity, which brings children autonomy and freedom to do what they want. This includes the experience of satisfaction with the adult body, its beauty and sexuality, and the admiration it arouses in others – not just of the body or its beauty itself, but of the miracle of maturation and change – the joy of becoming oneself, as opposed to being oneself. the extension of a parent.

Unfortunately, some fairy tales are based in reality, and children who become the recipients of their parents’ envy may suffer lasting psychological consequences that prevent them from living freely and happily. Being raised by narcissistic parents brings a lot of guilt and fear into the child’s life. Guilt of potentially living better than the parent(s) and fear of reliving the rage they witnessed from the parent(s). In therapy, these people may initially be afraid to speak against the parent(s) or even to analyze their behavior for fear of detecting something negative and worthy of criticism. It takes time, but ultimately, therapy can help them overcome guilt and fear and live a fulfilling life worthy of envy.

You might also be interested in reading The complexities of dating children of narcissists.

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