Your Narcissistic Family Doesn't Want You to Watch THIS

[00:00:00]Your narcissistic family doesn't want you watching this video because what I'm about to walk you through is the one thing they needed you to never understand about yourself. Hi, I'm Jerry Wise and for over 45 years of professional counseling and coaching, I've spoken to hundreds of thousands of people doing serious work on themselves and still carrying a quiet, constant assumption that something about them is fundamentally wrong. This voice that tells you you're the problem. It knows you. It knows you very well. It knows what to say and when to say it and it knows how to sound exactly like self-awareness.

[00:00:42]It shows up when something goes wrong and the first thing that moves through your head isn't just disappointment, it's a confirmation.

[00:00:52]A confirmation that you're the problem, not others. This message, it's about me.

[00:00:58]I'm the problem, aren't I? Those are the questions we ask ourselves when that begins to move inside of us and actually, that's part of the family super self that's moving underneath your nervous system, your emotional system and your thinking system. It shows up in the way you explain yourself before anyone has questioned you.

[00:01:19]In the way you brace before someone responds and how quickly you assume you're at fault when someone near you is upset. And this voice shows up in the exhaustion and weariness underneath all of it. The tiredness of someone who has been managing a verdict and an indictment they never agreed to in the first place. We had a verdict and an indictment of us way when we were very young and that was a part of our role.

[00:01:45]That verdict didn't start with you. Your narcissistic family had a problem. Just to be clear, when I use the term narcissistic family, I need to clarify and I need to say this doesn't mean I believe everyone in the family has a diagnosis or a personality disorder of narcissism.

[00:02:03]And some people think, "Oh, are you calling everyone a narcissist?" No, no, I'm not. But when you have those strong, toxic, anxious, intense parents or family members in your family, the family tends to get organized around those problems. Much like, let's say, an alcoholic family. What do you think if you have a an alcoholic father, classic kind of thing, uh a mother uh who's kind of codependent and an enabler, and then you have five children. The mother and five children organize their whole life around dad's drinking and alcoholism.

[00:02:36]And that's one of the problems that makes alcoholism so difficult to treat.

[00:02:40]And also, the alcoholic organizes his or her own life all around the drinking and alcoholism. So, that's what I mean, that not everyone has this disorder, but we all dance to its tune. It means there may only be one person who has narcissism or who is a narcissist or maybe has narcissistic traits, but the rest of the family organizes themselves around the narcissist.

[00:03:04]The family system has its own anxiety, its own unresolved dysfunction, and unhealthy needs. The weight of feelings and patterns they had no capacity to hold. In the narcissistic family system, that weight needed somewhere to go. It needed a carrier, someone who is a baggage handler for these emotional baggages and problems that have been left over many times from generations.

[00:03:30]In some circles, this is called the family baggage handler, as I mentioned.

[00:03:34]Something about where you sat in the family, how much you absorbed, how sensitive you were to the emotional temperament in every room, and made you the one who held it.

[00:03:46]You didn't choose that position, and it didn't arrive through one defining moment. It came through years of accumulated signals, patterns, and systems dynamics. The way silence fell when you spoke up. The way your emotional responses were treated as the problem. And the behavior that provoked them was treated as a reaction to you.

[00:04:10]Over time, beliefs, feelings, and patterns formed because a child inside a system that consistently frames them as the source of the difficulty has no framework for stepping outside of it.

[00:04:22]The belief settles in. It becomes the assumption underneath everything. And that assumption is so insidious that this becomes the family trance. The belief system your narcissistic family installed through years of conditioning until it settled in so deeply that it stopped feeling like something they taught you and felt like something from the outside. But it became something you then knew about yourself. You thought all of that was who you were. That you are the difficult one, the reason things go wrong. That belief doesn't announce itself as a belief or something that has come from outside of you. It is the built-in normalcy of the thoughts and feelings that just seems organic to you.

[00:05:10]That's why the work of self-differentiation is so important because it addresses these problems.

[00:05:17]That's what makes it so resistant and stubborn to disconnect from. The family trance doesn't operate the way a thought does. Something you can examine, weigh, push back against. By the time you were old enough to think critically, it wasn't a belief you could look at. It was the ground you were standing on. The lens through which everything that happened to you got interpreted. You can read every book written on narcissistic families. You can understand every dynamic, every role, and name every pattern. And the morning after your most insightful session with your therapist or coach, that voice is still there sounding like truth. Because insight is processed at the level of the mind or the brain and the emotional system. And the trance runs beneath it in the automatic assumptions, in the reflex that fires before you've engaged any conscious thought at all. The trance is what you believed on a conscious and unconscious level. The family super self fuels this trance and taking on a pseudo self is what you became because of it.

[00:06:25]You became what that trance and what those system dynamics believed and needed for you to be. You absorbed that belief and adapted to it. You built a version of yourself designed to manage it even, to reduce the friction, to keep the reactions lower, to navigate a system that had already decided what you were and who you were. You learned to justify yourself before anyone questioned you, to fix things quietly before the tension became visible.

[00:06:53]Imagine you're in a conversation that has nothing to do with your family and someone's tone shifts slightly, maybe more irritable or more upset or troubled, maybe just because they're tired. And immediately you're scanning, "What did I say? What did I do?" The other person has no idea this is even happening and what's going on in your head. But you've already started managing something that isn't even a problem.

[00:07:19]That's the family super self of the family, the trance running in the room and it was never designed to be who you are. That is the performance version you built for the family that built it.

[00:07:32]Inside that environment, you worked, it kept the heat lower, it kept you safer inside a system that required your compliance with a version of who you were.

[00:07:43]But the super self came with you into every relationship, every workplace environment, every room, every school, every sport you walked into since you were a child, with people who have no interest in making you the problem, and the programming still runs, still justifying, still bracing, because it was built for a role, and it doesn't stop performing when the audience leaves.

[00:08:10]And again, when we leave home, we leave the audience. But the home and the audience goes with us inside us. But there's something else the super self was doing. The family super self is the unconscious enmeshed role-based identity of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which is connected to the way a family is organized, the family system. By performing the role, by absorbing the blame, by holding the position of the problematic one, the guilty one, the oversensitive one, the golden child, you function as a pressure valve for the family's dysfunction. The system stayed intact because you maintained your part in it. And you had to as a child, you really didn't have too much of a choice.

[00:08:59]The family didn't have to examine itself as long as the explanation for what was wrong had a name, and that name was you.

[00:09:08]Every time you tried to change that, to speak up, to show a different version of yourself, to push back against the verdict, the indictment, the system responded. Sometimes loudly, sometimes meanly, more often with quiet dismissal, or a redoubling of the original conclusion. New evidence for an old story. That wasn't confirmation you were wrong, that was the system closing ranks. The family needed that role filled and you filled it and you had to because you were inside a structure that couldn't hold its shape without someone in that position. They had to maintain that equilibrium, which is the balance in a family. And I think thinking in systems ways and balancing is a much better way to look at problems because I find that an easier way to exit them.

[00:10:00]And more on that in the Road to Self program. Understanding this and dismantling it are two different things.

[00:10:07]Most of the healing work people do, the therapy, the books, the naming of what happened, the grieving of what was lost, operates at the level of comprehension.

[00:10:16]And comprehension is important for those of us who are recovering, healing, had our own broken past. We need that comprehension. So, I'm not dismissing that as unimportant. It's just not all there is. It gives you language. It validates the experience, these comprehensions. And yet most people who've done that work seriously will tell you something still remains. They can map the family system and articulate exactly what was done to them.

[00:10:45]And still, when something goes wrong, the voices, the reactivity, the pinging is all still there. The assumption keeps firing. Our connection to the super self runs on and on because comprehension is not the same as belief and most healing work reaches one without touching the other. This is why serious committed work so often leaves something untouched at the root. So, where does the work actually go? Most people, at some point, try to resolve this by getting the family to finally see them correctly. I understand that pull very much, having done that for decades, but that pursuit is the super self still performing, still seeing resolution from the audience that installed the role in the first place, still working on the family's terms.

[00:11:37]And again, if we're playing on the family's ball field or basketball court, if we're playing on their field, we have to play by their rules. As adults, we don't have to play on their field. But that's a whole longer story and that's what self-differentiation helps you to realize more and more. The family isn't capable of offering what that pursuit is looking for. The trance doesn't lift when contact ends. The super self doesn't dissolve when you stop returning the calls. The voice lives in you now, not in them, but in you. That's where the work has to go and that's where the focus has to be, into the beliefs you still are operating from, into the self you still are performing in rooms where no one is asking you to.

[00:12:24]Self-differentiation, the foundation of everything I teach, is an internal work. Physical distance can be a part of some people's process and should be, but the separation that matters or happens inside of you is what's most important. Having internal detachment and learning system sight, being able to see systems, is so important. Recognizing the trance when it speaks in your own voice, catching the super self when it starts to run and understanding that the impulse isn't a character flaw. It is an old program built for a system that needed you in that role, running in a life that was no longer and is no longer requiring it.

[00:13:09]Your narcissistic family built a verdict about you, but something brought you here and people who have fully accepted the verdict don't go on looking for another explanation. Often they have been taught and programmed that there is no other version and there is no other perspective possible. I certainly believe there is and that change has happened in me and in many thousands of other people through the work of self-differentiation. The work is not on them and not on your family. That's not the work where it's at. It is on us.

[00:13:40]It's on you. The work is not on them.

[00:13:42]Your real self is what remains when you finally get the family out of you, going on within you, and then you have a small part of you that's kind of maybe your true self. If what I've described resonates with you, the Road to Self Program was built for exactly this work.

[00:13:58]In my videos, I talk about the problems and the stuckness and the experience. In the program and workshops and live podcasts that I do, I'm able to spend more time talking about the solutions and way to break out of the family super self. It's the internal work of separating who you actually are from the belief system and narcissistic family system that got installed in you.

[00:14:23]Getting the family out of you so you can finally live with clarity, peace, and a grounded connection to your real self.

[00:14:31]If you're not sure if you're ready for the Road to Self Program, then start with my free, absolutely free, 84-minute self-differentiation training. Over 50,000 people have joined the free training as their first step. All the links are in the description below. If you ever wonder, just type in Jerry Wise and go to my website, and you can get all the program, the free training, et cetera. Please subscribe if you haven't.

[00:14:56]I post new content nearly every day. I also want to let you know I read your comments, so please comment. I want to thank you for watching. Have a great day, and be wise.