Therapy for adult children of narcissists
Release the spell of survival. Remember who you are.
Growing up with a narcissistic parent leaves an imprint that lives under the skin.
Your nervous system shaped itself around people who could not love you without taking something from you.
If your parent needed your light to see themselves, you became an object, a mirror, something to extract from.
You know the terrain: the vigilance, the shrinking, the loneliness even in their presence.
You grew up learning the emotional weather of others long before you learned your own. You became fluent in reading moods, navigating silence, avoiding explosions, and stitching together moments of peace that always unraveled in your hands. You learned to soothe the adult instead of being soothed. You learned to hide your needs, feelings, and desires so that the environment could stay intact.
These were brilliant survival strategies. They kept you alive. But they cost you pieces of yourself you’re only now realizing you deserve to claim.
How this childhood lives in your adult body:
Even as a competent, perceptive adult, a part of you still drops back into childhood around your parent — or people that remind you of them. You may find yourself freezing, fawning, apologizing for simply existing, or confusing empathy with obligation.
You might still carry:
the grief of never being mirrored
the ache of being the “strong one” in a family that never let you be soft
the resentment of being cast as the difficult one when you were only the honest one
You were trained to stay small, stay close, and afraid of your power.
Your intuition didn’t vanish — it was buried under years of gaslighting, shame, and the unspoken family commandments:
Don’t tell the truth. Don’t upset the illusion. Don’t outgrow us.
But something in you is done obeying these rules. The cost to your relationships, nervous system and emotional life has been high. A deeper truth is calling you forward.
Midlife is the sacred doorway between who you had to be and who you came here to become.
This is not the part of the journey where you keep the family peace. This is the part where you keep your soul.
In our work together, you begin to:
reclaim your inner voice — the one you had long before their projections drowned it out
unhook from the fantasy of who your parent could be and see the truth without collapsing
release the roles — the caretaker, peacekeeper, golden child, mirror
let your anger thaw so that your power can return to your system
feel your grief without being pulled back into a fantasy
build boundaries that protect your internal sovereignty
re-root yourself in intuition, the compass you were taught to doubt
create chosen family — even if just a close friend, a cat, and a plant to start. More is coming.
Your nervous system learns a new language. Your inner child becomes someone you protect, not someone you sacrifice. Your clarity becomes louder than the guilt.
You begin to discover a new world of relationships with people who are not toxic to your soul, because you’ve recalibrated your compass.
How IFS helps you come home to yourself:
IFS gives you something your parent never could: a trustworthy inner adult who shows up consistently, compassionately, and without an agenda.
We gently meet the parts of you that learned to survive narcissistic conditioning — the empathic caretaker, the mediator, the one who disappears. We understand them, honor them, and help them shed the burdens that keep them stuck. They are free to change roles inside of your system to express their authentic gifts.
We turn towards the exiled parts of you —the small, quiet ones inside who were shamed, ignored, or emotionally abandoned. When they finally feel a grounded adult protecting them, everything shifts:
Boundaries stop feeling dangerous. Confusion clears. Your soul can step forward into the driver’s seat. Your body releases layers of tension so deep that you didn’t even know they were there.
Finding your adult Self is like locating your spiritual center of gravity — something steady enough to anchor you through any storm, especially the ones your family taught you to fear.
This work is for the midlife woman who is done repeating the script.
Who refuses to inherit her family’s denial. Who is ready to tell the truth, even if her voice shakes. Who is ready for freedom, not merely survival.
If you feel the old roles loosening… if the grief is finally becoming an invitation, instead of a threat… if you’re ready to meet the women beneath all of the conditioning — I’d be honored to walk with you.
I’ll leave you with a poem that best describes the journey we are about to take. I hope to meet you there.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
~Mary Oliver
