Narcissistic wounding, like other emotional wounding, often occurs early on in childhood. These wounds usually affect a person’s behaviour and personality throughout her/his life unless healing of these wounds is taking place.
Without going too deep into the theoretical specifics, a child receives a narcissistic wound when the parent(s) are too self-absorbed to meet the child’s emotional needs for love, care, support, respect, appreciation, and age appropriate challenge. A typical scenario is that the child only receives caring attention when it meets the parent’s needs or performs to the parent(s) expectations. The non-verbal message is “you are not important – what I want is important!”
The tragedy is that this evokes a ‘Catch 22’ dynamic. The child grows up with an overwhelming sense of emptiness and lack of emotional connection to any specific person. On the outside it might look like the person is OK because s/he might be the eagerly helpful individual in lots of groups. Having learned from early on that attention is coming when you are meeting other peoples’ needs, this easily becomes a life-position. However, deep emotional connections are not or rarely developing.
Later on in life narcissistic wounds are ‘played out’ by looking desperately to others (partners, children, friends, therapists) for meeting the unmet childhood needs. Thus history is repeated in a vicious circle. If you had a parent that acted “Me, me, me, it’s all about me”, you are in danger of repeating that in your adult relationships. The unmet childhood needs prompt you to walk through life with the emotional mindset “What about me?”
Multiples have the advantage that all the different feelings or needs are more or less divvied up amongst their personality parts. Several parts may hold narcissistic wound to varying degrees. When you discover a part that feels superior to other parts and is very set on being distinguished from the rest of you, it may be based on a narcissistic wound.
How does that affect co-consciousness? A part that feels superior and is pushing for being the leader: e.g. what I want has to be done, my plans are to be followed, I need to be in control, I can’t let other parts out, I am the ‘one’ and the other parts are just a nuisance and need to be integrated so that I can be whole and function better etc. will get in the way of achieving co-consciousness.
To achieve integration, healing, and co-consciousness the narcissistic wounding in that part needs to be addressed and emotional healing needs to take place. Again, as I said before, this processes of healing is the same whether you are a Multiple or not. Indeed, narcissistic wounding is very, very common. Simply because nobody gets out of childhood unharmed. It’s the nature of the beast that parents will fail the child. Not necessarily because they want to harm the child or hate the child. Parents struggle with their narcissistic wounding simply because they come from parents who failed them.
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