How Parental Addiction Can Feel Like Narcissism to a Grieving Child скачать в хорошем качестве

How Parental Addiction Can Feel Like Narcissism to a Grieving Child

When a parent is caught in addiction, their emotional availability often narrows in ways that can feel narcissistic to a child—without the parent necessarily being a narcissist. For the child, the experience is one of chronic emotional misattunement, unpredictability, and having to orient around the parent’s needs in order to preserve connection. In this video, Dr. Tian Dayton explores how parental addiction can require a child to place concern for their parent ahead of concern for themselves. Over time, this reversal of care leaves many children with a deep, often unspoken grief, a lifelong longing for attunement, and a profound mistrust in relationships—especially when closeness begins to matter. At the same time, children are remarkably adaptive. Many develop ingenious ways of surviving and even thriving in spite of the odds—through hyper-attunement, competence, caretaking, creativity, or emotional self-reliance. These strategies once protected the child, but can later shape adult relationships, attachment patterns, and vulnerability to trauma or cPTSD. But they can also become superpowers, talents and unusual strengths! This video looks compassionately at what children of addiction adapted to, what they lost, what they gained and learned and how relational and experiential healing can help restore trust, self-concern, and connection.