Was Your Other Parent Narcissistic Too? - 10 Signs of a Safer Parent

When childhood trauma survivors tell their story in therapy, they usually talk about one parent — the loud, clearly abusive one — and barely mention the other. In this video, Patrick Teahan, LICSW turns the attention to that other parent, the 'safer' one, and walks through ten signs that this idealized co-parent may not have been as safe as the family story made them out to be.

Patrick explains why children instinctively elevate one parent in an abusive household: for survival, little people cannot tolerate the idea that both parents are unsafe, so one gets designated as the ally. As adults, survivors often carry that protective idealization into their healing work and overlook the ways the safer parent had power they chose not to use. He is careful to distinguish narcissistic personality disorder from what he calls a narcissistic injury — a trauma-driven self-focus that keeps the parent from doing right by their children — and notes that two things can be true at once: the safer parent may genuinely have been kinder, and still have failed to protect.

The ten points walk through concrete behaviors and patterns that signal this kind of complicated co-parent, offering viewers a framework for the deeper, often harder, therapy work that the safer parent requires.