A narcissistic injury is caused by overwhelming feelings of loss, shame, abandonment and other powerful feelings, which are all trauma related responses to abuse in childhood. Whilst narcissistic injury is not on the same scale as narcissistic personality disorder, someone with a narcissistic injury or wound, will find criticism unbearable in the same way as those with NPD, often to the point where their defences are breached, causing lashing out behaviour, attempts to shame and blame and sometimes false allegations to be made. People with narcissistic injury have a fragile ego or sense of self and will seek to control narratives with exaggerated emotional descriptions of the harm that others do to them.
Grievances both real and imagined, are a dominant feature of narcissistic injury and this is where truth becomes mutable, as reality is whatever those with narcissistic injury feel it to be. Narcissistic injury is seen every day in the family courts, where children in the middle of divorcing parents are the conduits through which, unresolved grievance plays out against a background of traumatic losses.
The family courts are where a small group of parents go to seek assistance in the resolution of disputes around relationships with children after family separation. Depending upon who you read/believe, the family courts are either a tool of ‘the patriarchy’ or a place where ‘misandry’ rules. In reality the family courts themselves are neither of these, they are a system which is managed by people and wherever people are making decisions about the lives of others with unresolved issues, there is a risk of triggering narcissistic injury.
Systemic bias however is present in all systems. Systemic bias, is the tendency for a process to drive particular outcomes because it is infused with constructed bias in the form of beliefs which shape the delivery of the system. Personal unconscious bias is the manner in which someone allows their own drivers to influence the way that they operate within a system. Therefore, because all systems are simply a group of people operating policies and practice which are constructed and influenced by those who shaped them, when personal conscious or unconscious bias meets systemic bias, the outcomes for anyone entering therein becomes predictably unpredictable.
No-one is ever happy with the family court system, which is heavily influenced by the policies and practices both within it and around it. Unfortunately the family courts are not only the place where parents with narcissistic wounds air their grievances, it has now become the central arena in which campaigners with grievances about equality are fighting it out. This means that it is incredibly difficult to hear what is really going on in situations where children align and reject (the key behaviours seen when children are trauma bonded to abusive parents) because the noise from the narcissistic wounds of people who believe that their reality is being ignored drowns out everything else. As this pendulum of imagined realities, driven by unresolved personal wounding, swings back and forth relentlessly, judges in the middle are trying to protect children of divorce and separation who are seriously harmed when parents get it badly wrong.
The family court is often accused of being a ‘patriarchal’ system which is used by abusive parents to continue their control behaviours but this is both unfair AND untrue. The family courts can be used for good or ill through the actions of those who interact with the system, meaning parents and the campaign groups who support them, but they are not in and of themselves, intrinsically formed or controlled by something called ‘the patriarchy’, which is a construct of an imagined world in which all men are advantaged over all women. The world doesn’t work like that in real life, as homeless men and the cabinet of the new Labour Government in the UK effectively demonstrate.
A more sophisticated analysis of the family court lies in the way the way in which it can be weaponised by an abusive parent who seeks to maintain control over the other parent, or the way in which it can be used to try and protect children from being weaponised by a parent who already has that control. Either way however, it is the parent with a narcissistic wound who weaponises and the parent who is victim who tries to protect and the family court which is a system which interacts with those psychological dynamics which has to decide which of those dynamics is at play. For trauma bonded children who are being abused by a parent who is holding them hostage to their own need to control others including the children’s other parent, a strong family court will be able to differentiate who is victim and who is perpetrator, fortunately the courts in the UK at least appear to be increasingly willing and able to do just that.
Which is a good and very necessary thing because the risk to families and the family court in the current climate, is that the narcissistic wounds which drive abusive parents, are becoming interwoven into the kind of research which is used to try and influence the system of the family courts. It is certainly the case in the USA for example, that these self reports have become the driving force behind the drive in the US to stop children from being removed from abusive parents (usually, but not always) mothers. One of the biggest concerns about such research is the reliance upon self reports from parents whose narcissistic injury drives their unsubstantiated claims of injustice and unfairness in the family courts. From claims that mothers are dying because children are being handed to abusers to lurid claims of satanism, the experiences of those who have been found to have caused children serious harm are embedded into research and campaign narratives and then presented as if they are facts when they are not. In the meantime, mothers who have been accused of heinous crimes they have been found in court not to have committed, find themselves questioned, villified and ignored.
Narcissistic injury is present in most of us in our early years but, as we grow older we learn to mourn our losses and overcome our grievances and find ways of living with a more mature acceptance that sometimes people do bad things. For some parents who enter into the family court however, narcissistic injury is often a core driver in the attempt to control, manipulate and exact revenge as a defence against overwhelming feelings of anger which is triggered by the shame which cannot be borne within. For the victims of a parent with a narcissistic wound, the traumatic loss of a normal healthy relationship with a child, is often an echo of the loss of a normal healthy relationship with the self and others suffered in the shadow of that injury. Untangling that from the projections, allegations, misrepresentations and claims without context, is a major task for anyone who presides over cases which involve such complex psychopathology. Protecting the child who becomes entangled into projections from adult narcissistic wounds and who as a result become triangulated, manipulated to air grievances for one parent, whilst the other suffers traumatic loss, is a serious and growing concern.
Upcoming Events from the Family Separation Clinic
Saturday Seminars
Ghosts of the unresolved and unremembered past
Saturday 20 July 2024
(For Asia-Pacific time zones)
This two-hour event will be delivered on Zoom between 09:00 and 11:00 UK Time.
To check your local start time, please click the link below, ensure ‘Date’ is selected, and enter 09:00 – 2024-07-20 – London in the right-hand boxes, here: https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter
Example start times:
- 18:00 Sydney, NSW
- 16:00 Perth, WA
- 20:00 Christchurch, NZ
- 16:00 Hong Kong
- 17:00 Tokyo, Japan
- 17:00 Seoul, South Korea
Cost £30
Saturday 20 July 2024
(For UK, USA and Canada and Europe time zones).
This two-hour event will be delivered on Zoom between 17:00 and 19:00 UK Time.
To check your local start time, please click the link below, ensure ‘Date’ is selected, and enter 17:00 – 2024-07-20 – London in the right-hand boxes, here: https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter
Example start times:
- 18:00 Berlin, Germany
- 19:00 Nicosia, Cyprus
- 12:00 New York, NY
- 11:00 Dallas, TX
- 09:00 Los Angeles, CA
- 12:00 Ottawa, Canada
A Zoom link for this event will be included in your order confirmation (please contact us, immediately, if you do not receive this).
Cost £30.00
About this seminar
This session will focus on the link between transgenerational trauma transmission, attachment, and alienation in children of divorce and separation.
The seminar will explore the way in which unresolved trauma, in the lives of parents who are separating, can manifest in the here-and-now as a child’s strong alignment with a parent with unresolved trauma and consequent rejection of a parent. Using case studies from practice, Karen Woodall will lead you through the way in which some children who are said to be alienated, are in reality, enacting an unremembered and unresolved traumatic event from the past.
This will be of interest to parents as well as practitioners and will utilise a psychoanalytic exploration of the problem of alienation in children as well as a structural therapy approach to thinking about how to address the problem.
Therapeutic parenting listening and learning circle
Tue 16 Jul 2024 18:00 – 20:00 BST
Online, Zoom
To check your local start time, please click the link below, ensure ‘Date’ is selected, and enter 18:00 – 2024-07-16 – London in the right-hand boxes, here: https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter
A Zoom link for this event will be included in your order confirmation.
The topic for this session will be:
Understanding trauma bonding
The restoration of health, for rejected parents, begins with an understanding of what has happened internally and how that has become entangled with the child’s own splitting reactions. When parents are able to map this splitting across the family system, their own reactive splitting can integrate and they can begin the work of developing the healthy mirror needed by the child.
Parents who have healed reactive splitting can then learn to apply the skills of therapeutic parenting. This is an approach to parenting children who are suffering from attachment disorder due to being emotionally and psychologically harmed. Alienated children with therapeutic parents are shown, in evaluation, to be able to recover quickly from the underlying harms which have caused their rejecting behaviours.
This is a bi monthly drop in group which can be attended regularly or just as a one-off. The circles will be facilitated by psychotherapist Karen Woodall. Each session will focus on a particular element of therapeutic parenting for children with attachment difficulties due to divorce and separation and will comprise of 45 minute input and then an hour and 15 minutes of group discussion. Participants can attend to listen and learn and to share and receive knowledge. The basic requirement is simply curiosity about helping alienated children.
The cost of this session is £40.00 (including sales tax)
Family members and friends can join for the cost of one place but please see terms and conditions.
You can find our terms and conditions here
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 
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