When the realisation first hit me, it was as if the clouds parted and the sun bathed me in light.

After nearly 50 years of torturing myself about my dysfunctional relationship with my mother, I acknowledged that it wasn’t my fault.

It wasn’t my fault that she gave me away for the first year of my life – to a maternity nurse for the first six weeks, then to her cleaner’s sister for the next ten months. It wasn’t my fault that she never touched me, never hugged me, never evinced any affection.

And it wasn’t that there was something so wrong with me that even my own mother thought me too worthless to love. A very wise therapist friend had enlightened me. My mother was almost certainly a sufferer of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) – ‘almost certainly’ because narcissists don’t tend to seek diagnosis as they don’t think there’s anything wrong with them.

As such, I should stop waiting for her to apologise for my childhood, acknowledge the pain she had caused or concede that she had loved me, a little. As a narcissistic parent, my mother just wasn’t capable of apologising for something she would never be able to acknowledge. The fact was she couldn’t love me and she never would.

This was back in 2016 and it was then that I grieved for her – and the relationship we would never have. She was very much still alive at that point but her power to hurt me any more had died. 

This realisation, while painful, freed me from the vicious cycle of guilt, anger and worthlessness. Or so I thought. Enlightened, I saw her less frequently because I no longer felt guilty about not making the long journey from London to Yorkshire. On the phone, I found I no longer dreaded the sound of her voice.

But then, early this summer, my mother, Juliet, did die, aged 84. And I was struck by the strangeness of the grieving process – not at any point did I feel actual grief or loss.

As a narcissistic parent, my mother just wasn’t capable of apologising for something she would never be able to acknowledge, writes Susannah Jowitt

Susannah with Kathleen Saxton, a business entrepreneur turned acclaimed psychotherapist, who has written a new book: My Parent The Peacock: Discovery And Recovery From Narcissistic Parenting

Instead, there was so much rage – mainly because of the fact that her friends and even other family members lionised her despite her treatment of my older brother and me.

It made me realise our relationship was still having a profound effect on me. And that I needed more help to escape the toxic legacy of my childhood once and for all.

Enter Kathleen Saxton, a business entrepreneur turned acclaimed psychotherapist, and her new book, My Parent The Peacock: Discovery And Recovery From Narcissistic Parenting.

Kathleen believes the scars inflicted by a parent with narcissistic tendencies are lasting – but they don’t have to define your future. Her book seeks to validate your own personal experience while ‘offering practical steps towards healing and freedom’.

She also decodes the true meaning of the word narcissism; a term that’s bandied around these days, applied to celebrities and politicians almost daily.

It turns out there is more to it than self-obsession. Kathleen explains there is also a constant need for admiration, a lack of empathy for others, a tendency towards exploitative behaviour, using their nearest and dearest for their own ends.

Instead of loving and supporting their child, a narcissistic parent prioritises their own needs, makes their love entirely conditional, uses guilt and fear to manipulate and control, and dismisses the child’s emotions or experiences.

And there are surprising numbers of children affected by narcissistic parents. While reliable statistics are hard to establish, Kathleen says in a crowd of 100 people, 12 are likely to have narcissistic traits and a handful could have NPD.

Susannah aged nine with her mother and brother

While reading her book, I make notes in the margin – ‘Yes! This!’ – on almost every page. By the middle, I have concluded that my mother did indeed have NPD and my father was almost certainly narcissistic, too.

For both of them, my brother and I were extensions of themselves. When I published a novel aged 24, my mother’s reaction was to tell me that she’d been writing stories for years by the time she was my age and that it was only because of my expensive education that I had been published, not her.

When my brother got a scholarship to Cambridge University, my father told me that of course he did, because he had all the Jowitt brains and that it was about time too because he himself had been forbidden to take up his own Cambridge place by my grandmother.

In neither case did they show the slightest interest in our lives, except to chalk up the successes. They shied away from actual parenting when the going got tougher – for example, when my brother was then sent down from Cambridge for being deeply unhappy with his subject and not doing any work.

To be honest, they should probably never have even had children.

But they did and the clues were there right from the beginning. At Mum’s funeral this year, my brother read a eulogy in which he said she had told him she hated him from the moment he was born. ‘The only compensation,’ he said, ‘was that she told me she hated my sister more.’

That she did. Hence, as I have written on these pages before, her sending me away for the first year of my life. A fact she kept from me until, startlingly, she told me – calmly and impersonally – on the night of my father’s funeral in 2020.

She presented it as a good decision, saying that I was much happier as a result, she was certainly happier – and if she was happy, my father was happy.

Since I already knew her to be a narcissist by this point, this revelation wasn’t as shocking as it might have been: it felt like the last piece in the puzzle of why she and I had no bond. I also realised that I might have my ‘in loco parentis’ mother – our cleaner’s sister – to thank for the fact that I had always been so tactile and loving, unlike her.

I was eventually returned to our home in Yorkshire and we lived in a comfortable house on the edge of a village, paid for by my father’s inherited position as boss of the family wool firm in Bradford. We were well-off without being rich.

My mother, a farmer’s daughter, was obsessed with horses. She was also a time-starved career woman – both a hotel interior designer and a busy magistrate – so she employed a series of ‘girl grooms’ who lived with us, looked after her two horses and, on the side, me – and my brother when he was home from boarding school.

When I was seven, my parents delivered me to my own boarding school on a sunlit afternoon. For the first half hour, we children all ran around the grounds like excited puppies while the grown-ups chatted together. Then a bell rang, signalling for parents to leave.

To my amazement, all the adults dropped to their knees and held their arms out to their suddenly-sobbing children to say goodbye.

‘Ohhhh,’ I thought to myself, ‘so that’s what hugging looks like.’

I looked up at my own parents, the only ones still standing. ‘Well,’ said my mother. ‘Bye then. Off you go.’

And I did: boarding school for me was so much more fun than living at home.

Not that we were beaten or starved at home – except of love. But we all marched to our mother’s beat. Her mood set the temperature of our family life. Very occasionally she appeared to enjoy our company but most of the time we could feel her finding us wanting.

My brother’s response was to keep his head down and keep out of trouble; mine was to tap-dance for approval, something I did until the day she died.

Look at me, publishing novels, aren’t you proud of me? Look at my beautiful children, aren’t I clever for making them? Look at me, I’ve lost lots of weight, isn’t that what you always wanted me to do?

When Kathleen Saxton and I discuss this, she explains that children of narcissistic parents tend to fall into three categories: the Golden Child, the Scapegoat and the Lost Child. Kathleen reckons my brother and I oscillated between Golden Child and Lost Child.

My mother loved to pit us against each other but only one of us ever had her approval at any given time.

When I was the Golden Child, for example, with a good career and charming children, my brother was the Lost Child, beneath my mother’s contempt for not having a proper job and a son who didn’t get into the right school.

But then the seesaw would tip and my brother would be the one who had at least visited her, whereas I was the uncaring daughter who had abandoned the family for London and never trekked up to Yorkshire to pay homage to her.

‘Keeping you both on that seesaw is a core trait in narcissistic parents,’ says Kathleen. ‘This is a control mechanism, a trauma bond that keeps you both in a state of anxiety and seeking approval from her, which was just the way she would want it and in a way that she would have described as perfectly reasonable parenting.’

It’s true, my mother died honestly believing that she had been a good mother. But why was she a narcissist in the first place?

I am fascinated by Kathleen’s chapter on the why and how someone develops NPD. Especially suggestive is the section on epigenetics: the idea that NPD can start from stress in the womb and in the very early years of childhood, before real sentience.

My mother was born in 1940 when our grandmother was under the cumulative stress of a world war, husband away, her two much older children evacuated to relatives in America. For her first two years, my mother was the indulged baby. Then in 1942, my aunt and uncle returned and her world suddenly distorted.

Kathleen says: ‘Early life experience – even back into the womb – does have a huge part to play in the development of narcissism because it is fundamentally a disease of deficiency: something was wrong. So I think this could have been the case with your mother.’

My father too had a childhood blighted by war, evacuation, the early death of his father, polio when he was seven and an abusive stepfather: all details my brother and I found out much later in life.

He was charming and always the life and soul of the party and I adored him, but the more I talk to Kathleen and study her book, the more I realise that he followed the narcissistic pattern of intermittent reinforcement: keeping us dangling on the rope of his approval. He held us up as trophies of Jowitt brilliance when we did well, but was savage when we – in his eyes – let him down.

I had been nervous about turning out like her – or indeed my dad – when I had my own children in my mid-30s, but what I’ve read reassures me this is not the case.

My 22-year-old son, who’s back living with us after university, tells me: ‘You’re the opposite of a narcissist with us. Even I could see that Granny was only interested in how we all reflected on her.’

But recognising that narcissistic parenting has a lasting effect, even beyond the death of both my parents, is key to recovery: ‘Acknowledging that you lacked the basic childhood structure of love, support, encouragement and interest,’ says Kathleen, ‘is the first step to undoing the damage that has been done to you.’

The next step is to uncover my true self – not the Golden Child who was always trying to get my parents’ approval or the Lost Child who felt worthless and invisible – but the Susannah at the heart of me.

‘Who are you without your mother?’ she asks.

I think about this. In her book, Kathleen explains various methods to help you unearth your true self. There’s her Russian Dolls approach (unwrapping all the people you have inside you), the Two Chairs method of then sitting them down and having a good old chinwag with each of them, and then exploring the theory that sometimes you just have to accept that bad stuff can simply sit alongside good stuff and that’s OK.

I realise I no longer need to live by my mother’s values: her insistence that only worldly success is success, her scoffing at my insistence that, actually, my family’s happiness is my first priority.

Forget Golden Susannah, or Lost Susannah: the self I find myself ending up with – and look forward to getting to know – is Happy Susannah, which is the Susannah I think I am, and always have been, at heart. This is the part that my mother, I think, was always jealous of and maybe even tried to quash, because it wasn’t a trait that ever developed in her.

Best of all, at the age of 56, I am finally free. Not as a result of my mother’s death but because her death allowed me to take a good long look at myself without her filter of critique, curtail and correct. And that feels really wonderful.

• My Parent The Peacock by Kathleen Saxton (John Murray Press, £15.99), to be published on September 25. © Kathleen Saxton 2025.
• To order a copy for £14.39 (offer valid until September 27, 2025; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

Telltale signs of a self-obsessed parent 

1. Lack of emotional validation and support – as the parent’s focus is typically on their own needs, this can cause feelings from worthlessness and inadequacy to a fear of intimacy or abandonment in their child.

2. Conditional love, shown only when children meet certain expectations, such as achieving success or behaving in ways that reflect well on the parent.

3. Lack of empathy. The narcissist parent sees children not as beings with their own lived experience but merely as an opportunity to provide fuel for their ego in the form of attention, validation, admiration and sometimes sympathy.

4. Control and manipulation, resulting in an emotional roller coaster as they create a cycle of idealisation and devaluation because of their need for control and dominance. Intermittent reinforcement can be their weapon of choice.

5. Gaslighting if they are ever confronted with evidence of their harmful behaviour.

6. Projection and blame, when the parent projects their insecurities on to their children, blaming them for their own failures or shortcomings.

How to recover

1. Recognise narcissistic parenting and ignore naysayers who say it wasn’t bad.

2. Accept you are not responsible for – and cannot change – the narcissistic parent’s behaviour.

3. Realise that your priority should be your own mental and emotional health and establishing clear boundaries with those who threaten that.

4. Build your own support network of family members and friends, not as a rival ‘camp’ but to protect you against gaslighting and the cycle of criticism.

5. Work on yourself to discover your true self: start with a mindfulness practice of breathing, meditating or sitting quietly, then imagine meeting your younger self, nurturing, comforting, acknowledging the unmet needs of young you’s childhood and offering to fulfil them now as an adult.

6. Work out who you are – your values, creative vision, goals – without the filter of what has always been expected of you and build your adult identity.

7. Reframe your story. See yourself not as a victim but as a survivor and thriver. While accepting what has happened, use those experiences to build resilience and independence.

8. Accept that you might need therapy, whether trauma-informed psychotherapy, EMDR, somatic healing, CBT, DBT, or peer support groups. Make sure that the practitioner is well- versed in the perniciousness of narcissistic parenting.