A Test To Measure How Narcissistic Your Parents Were

Imagine growing up with a parent who constantly made life revolve around them. They ignored what you needed, dismissed your attempts to speak up, and made you feel like the one at fault. That fits the picture of narcissism — and perhaps that was the case — but sometimes similar behavior comes from other sources: addiction, unresolved bitterness, or trauma. Some caregivers behave in ways that look narcissistic not out of calculated malice but because they’re overwhelmed. Why does this distinction matter? Because narcissists rarely change, whereas people who are struggling with addiction or pain might, if they confront their issues honestly. Knowing which you faced can help explain why you were treated the way you were and connect those past wounds to the patterns you wrestle with now. Our minds want that clarity, and it can be a key to understanding the link between past events and present struggles.
When you grow up with a parent like that, your instincts get rewired. You learn to walk on eggshells around moods, stop asking for what you need, and treat the thought of disappointing someone or being “too much” as dangerous. That reaction is common among those reared by caregivers who couldn’t be present — their behavior often mirrors narcissistic abuse. Some people truly had narcissistic parents, while many others were raised by adults who were simply self-centered, emotionally numb, or battling addiction. That distinction is important because there’s a growing tendency to brand every failing parent a “narcissist.” Not everyone who hurt you fits that label — and that doesn’t lessen the pain — but it does speak to intent.
Take my own experience: was my mother a narcissist? Much of her life did center on herself, and she sometimes behaved in ways that seemed designed to make her look noteworthy. But her case wasn’t a textbook example from a checklist — remember, my parents were hippies — and my mom worked on an Indian reservation where many people genuinely adored her. She was involved in setting up an early childhood program, and many locals, most of whom spoke Spanish or a mix of Spanish and English because we lived close to the Mexican border, befriended her. I and my siblings learned Spanish at school — I had four years of it — yet my mother didn’t speak a single word of Spanish. She’d attempt it, mixing in bits of French or Norwegian she’d once learned, and nothing she said made much sense. She would wave her hands and put on a kind of Spanglish, which made me feel alienated and sparked the familiar sting of neglect.
She began pronouncing our names with a Spanish inflection — I’m Anna, and she started saying it like “Ana,” and she did the same to my brothers and sister. That affectation didn’t bother the Spanish-speaking friends who adored her; they welcomed it. But for us children it felt like we were being used as props to validate a persona she wanted to present to others. People often gathered at our home to make green corn tamales in season, and I’m grateful for those experiences and the interesting people we met. When she died, our house overflowed with mourners. Yet it was painful to have strangers praise her in ways she never showed us at home. There was a kind of love and attention she gave to others that she withheld from her own children, and that stung deeply.
The way she altered our names felt like an erasure: she’d given us our names at birth only to change them for the approval of others, which made us feel less real and less important. We were minors, and it left an impression that she prized her social circle above her own kids. Later, after I moved away, she wrote to me and consistently spelled my name with one N — the Norwegian spelling from her family heritage — despite my correcting her. As a child she’d sometimes affect a Scandinavian persona and call me “Ana Maria,” and that ongoing misnaming over the years landed like another gut punch: she didn’t know me, didn’t want to know me.
As I learned more about narcissism, I recognized some of those patterns in her behavior. But there’s a complication: she was a heavy drinker, drinking daily and often even before work, and alcoholism can warp personality and relationships. Alcoholics often show narcissistic traits without necessarily meeting criteria for NPD. She was desperately seeking friendship and acceptance, and between the drinking and her hunger for validation, she behaved selfishly and neglected us. She died relatively young without changing; she never developed the kind of closeness that would have felt authentic to me. I was left wondering whether she was fundamentally incapable of caring for us or whether alcoholism distorted her capacity to love. That absence of caring is what caused deep wounds for me, contributing to complex PTSD, even while others with heavy trauma sometimes seemed “normal” by contrast.
If you’re trying to figure out whether you were affected by early trauma, there’s a quiz that can help identify common signs — it’s available in the description area below the video. It’s free and can be useful if you’re trying to sort out whether a parent was narcissistic or just deeply troubled. I wanted answers, so I did research and learned patterns to watch for, and here are the distinctions I found helpful.
A genuinely narcissistic parent often punished a child for simply being themselves: expressing beliefs, choosing a style, or asserting an opinion could be met not with conversation but with personal attacks, mockery, guilt-tripping, or accusations of ingratitude — as if your individuality were an assault on them. A troubled parent — meaning one acting out of pain rather than pure narcissism — might have disagreed or pressured you, but they didn’t treat your identity as something that had to be extinguished.
Narcissistic parents demand loyalty while offering none in return: you were expected to cater to them, take their side, fix their problems, yet when you needed support they were absent or punished you for asking. Troubled parents might have been unreliable or self-centered but typically didn’t convert love into a strict barter system.
Another hallmark of narcissistic parents is rewriting events to protect themselves: they deny that hurtful incidents occurred, blame you, or reframe things as jokes until you doubt your own memory. Troubled parents might avoid tough conversations or minimize harm, but they generally stop short of completely erasing the truth to cast themselves as victim or hero.
When it comes to emotional reactions, narcissistic parents often respond to your feelings with contempt or explosive anger — tears annoy them, anger gets punished, vulnerability is rejected — with the only acceptable emotion being admiration for them. A troubled parent may withdraw or go quiet, but they’re not actively trying to make you feel weak or ridiculous for having feelings.
Narcissists frequently weaponize love: compliance brings warmth, resistance results in emotional coldness accompanied by reminders of what they’ve “done” for you, creating a sense of indebtedness. Troubled parents can be inconsistent and guilt-inducing, but they don’t always manipulate affection like a tool to control you. Narcissistic caregivers may humiliate you to feel powerful, joke at your expense, expose secrets, or exploit your pain for attention. Troubled parents might be embarrassing, chaotic, or careless, yet they’re not necessarily aiming to dominate you with shame.
A narcissistic parent makes your achievements into their accolades and your struggles into your flaws: when you succeed they take credit; when you have difficulties, they blame your character rather than circumstances or their own conduct. You end up a trophy at best, a scapegoat at worst. A troubled parent may occasionally make things about themselves but also show genuine moments of pride in your accomplishments that aren’t solely self-serving.
It’s natural to want to label what went wrong, but you may never get a definitive answer — not from the parent, not from professionals, and perhaps not even from exhaustive lists. Chasing a diagnostic label can keep you stuck, missing the real work right in front of you. In my mother’s case, I think her longing for friendship and the numbing effects of alcoholism led her to neglect her children; she displayed narcissistic traits but calling her “a narcissist” didn’t capture the whole person. She’s been gone for decades, so certainty isn’t possible. Regardless, the harm was real and so was the effect on me — and likely on you if you were raised by a self-centered caregiver.
Healing requires turning attention inward instead of remaining fixated on diagnosing others. Whether your parent was narcissistic or simply deeply troubled, you do not need to delay your recovery until they change. Healing focuses on the parts of you that still react in relationships: wanting to hide your feelings, fighting to be seen, or repeatedly choosing friends and partners who don’t understand you. That is where the work belongs, and it’s possible to heal.
There are resources that helped me — I developed a course titled Healing Childhood PTSD that lays out a direct, sometimes radical, but straightforward path to recovery; it’s been taken by many thousands of people. Links to that program and other materials — some free, some paid — are available in the video description; click “more” under the video to find them.
Whether the parent in your life was never going to change or was simply caught in struggles that kept them from changing, you don’t have to put your healing on hold. You are free now, and with that freedom comes responsibility — it will be tempting to keep looking outward, asking what was wrong with them, but the most fruitful focus is on yourself in the present, where you have everything required to become whole, happy, and authentic. If you enjoyed this, there’s another related video you might appreciate, and the pattern to watch now is your own behavior: the deeper the wounds from the past, the more likely you are to repeat patterns that continue to hurt you today. [Music]