Nobody’s upbringing is perfect, and no parents come out of a factory with every answer and every right behavior. 

But some parents are certainly better suited to raising kids than others. 

And if you grew up with parents who didn’t do a great job or had deeply-set personal issues, it leaves a mark. 

That’s why it’s crucial to take a look at the psychological symptoms of growing up with narcissistic, self-obsessed parents. 

Let’s dive in and take a look at the signs. 

1) You doubt your own value

Beliefs and narratives that are instilled in early childhood can be extremely difficult to shed later in life. 

If you were raised by narcissistic parents, this often leaves scars surrounding self-worth:

Because your parents used you as a prop to validate and accommodate their needs and wants, you don’t have a strong sense of value apart from pleasing others. As a result, you often doubt whether you have any innate or real value. 

As psychologist Heather Hayes points out: 

“Individuals raised by a narcissistic parent often doubt their own worth, talents, and successes due to consistent belittlement and manipulation during childhood. This fosters imposter syndrome even in adulthood.”

2) You frequently feel ashamed and guilty but don’t know why

This relates to the previous point, because narcissistic parents tend to leave deep issues with self-worth. 

When you don’t feel you’re a very high-value person, this consequently causes many feelings of shame and guilt. 

At its core, the saddest part of this is that your parents’ narcissistic imbalance has embedded itself into your psyche with a simple and devastating message:

You are a burden. You are bad. You are worthless. 

That inner sense of being a burden or low-value continues to haunt you. 

3) You often seek external approval

When you grew up with self-obsessed parents, you were generally raised with a feeling that you need to get a stamp of approval.

Frequent criticism and monitoring of what you do, along with gaslighting, tends to make it very difficult for you to captain your own ship later in life. 

You often ask for advice, outsource decisions and seek external approval. Even as an adult, the gaslighting you grew up with makes you doubt whether your own choices and judgments are valid. 

“Narcissists are often skilled at narcissistic gaslighting, which is the abusive tactic of twisting and distorting the truth in ways that can make a person question and doubt reality,” psychologist Hailey Shafir LCMHCS writes. 

“Over time, this causes children to doubt themselves and their reality, even making them wonder if they are imagining things or going crazy.”

4) You find it very hard to say no

The fear of saying no lives strongly within you. 

Even just small instances of saying no like declining an extra helping when invited for dinner or saying no to a date, tend to fill you with unreasonable anxiety. 

They also lead to you feeling a reamplification of those earlier feelings of shame and unworthiness mentioned earlier in the article. 

“Who am I to say no?” you wonder, feeling like a terrible, selfish person. 

As Hayes says:

“Children of narcissistic parents often find it difficult to develop healthy relationships, set boundaries, and express their own needs and emotions.”

Speaking of a fear of saying no… 

5) You’re prone to extreme people-pleasing

People-pleasing is the habit of deriving one’s well-being and sense of self from making others happy. 

It goes beyond enjoyment of seeing people be happy and is, instead, the complete inability to tolerate disapproval, rejection or letting people down. 

This comes from being brought up by parents who made you feel that your value was entirely contingent on pleasing them. 

“The world,” and society writ large are now stand-ins for your parents, and that same crushing fear of not being liked or wanted, leaving you desperate to please at any cost, often to your own detriment.

“Narcissistic parents expect their children to make sacrifices so that they can do or have whatever they want,” explains psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula.

6) You’re hypersensitive to criticism

As the child of narcissistic parents, you learned never to criticize them and always to seek approval and be “good.” 

When you grew up with parents who were narcissistic, your mission was to please them and ensure they approved of you. 

You became accustomed to them taking out their problems on you and using you as a platform to boost their own ego and vent their own frustrations. 

This puts you in a very vulnerable spot, because any criticism of you means you aren’t being “good,” and hits at your most sensitive core.

You go into meltdown, often becoming deeply depressed and convinced it’s true that you’re a terrible person. 

7) You lock your emotions inside

When you grew up with self-absorbed, selfish parents, your own emotions meant zilch. 

As a result, you learned from a young age to pretend to be fine when you’re not and to downplay your own suffering. 

Admitting that you’re not OK or that you’re struggling is immensely hard for you.

You feel intense shame at even the thought of opening up that you’re not OK and you’re not sure what to do about it. You run from this vulnerability, pushing down your painful feelings. 

This ties into the next point as well:

8) You have a lot of trouble trusting people 

Growing up in a narcissistic household makes you extremely self-critical:

You spend your childhood and teen years walking on eggshells and surrounded by intensely insecure people who only care about themselves. 

You are used to being praised one day and then torn down as a terrible person the next, because your parents were emotional toddlers who couldn’t handle their own sh*t.

As a result, you have a lot of trouble trusting people you meet in your life. 

You feel an instinctive fear that they will also be undependable and that they will also manipulate your emotions and be unreliable like your own parents were. 

This then feeds into the approval-seeking behaviors, as you seek to gain more certainty and emotional stability from people around you by pleasing them… 

9) You feel you have to ‘earn’ being liked and valued

You have a lot of difficulty accepting compliments for their own sake. 

You grew up with constantly shifting (but ever-present) conditions around being loved, and you have the inner sense that love is something that is “earned.”

You try to boost people’s egos and never disagree with them in any way so that they’ll like you and be a stable and loving presence in your life. 

As Shafir writes:

“When the parent is narcissistic, the conditions for love usually revolve around the emotional needs and self-esteem of the parent. 

“When the child makes the parent feel good about themselves, important, or special, narcissistic parents will often show love and affection towards their child.”

10) You tend to have issues with intimacy 

Intimacy, sex and relationships are difficult for children of narcissists. 

When you grew up with somebody who made you “earn” their approval and constantly used you for their own validation, you not only have trouble trusting, you also have trouble loving in a secure, healthy way. 

You tend to seek constant reassurance that you’re truly “good enough” and wanted by your partner, and you often fall into the anxious attachment style whereby you chase more time and affection from your partner and those you date. 

But however much you get it still feels lacking. 

“As adults, they may grapple with insecure attachment styles and potentially avoid intimacy or seek excessive attention. Without intervention, some may emulate their narcissistic parents, perpetuating a damaging cycle in future generations,” notes Hayes.

11) You fall into enabling narcissists and manipulators

Perhaps the most challenging part of being raised by narcissists is that it makes you much more susceptible to falling in love with and enabling narcissists. 

As you grow into an adult, unless the trauma of your narcissistic upbringing is fully faced and integrated, it can carry over into a pattern of enabling emotional manipulators and narcissists.

The reason why is simple: early imprints and experiences led you to find narcissism normal and to learn to love in an unhealthy way. If left to run its course, this tends to lead to associating love with narcissistic, harmful behaviors and allowing it.

As the Awareness Center notes:

“They will likely feel guilt for trying to step away or input boundaries, and may even enter into relationships with partners who show narcissistic traits. 

“A love that is based on manipulations and conditions is something that is known to them, whereas a love that is unconditional might seem quite terrifying.”