Dear Prudence,
My partner and I have been together for almost five years, and we’re talking about having a child soon. We’re both in our late 30s, and work and instability have prevented us from really considering it until now. My partner comes from a home that had a lot of narcissistic and emotional abuse (both narcissistic personality disorder), and physical abuse between her parents. She’s done a lot of work over the years trying to heal, grow, and find ways out of these learned patterns but it still pops up occasionally. I feel I’ve supported her in her healing journey, but now we’re at, what has come to seem, a more serious crossroad. We got into a silly argument recently that escalated very quickly and she went into a kind of trauma loop, becoming fixated on the notion that what I had said in passing was extremely hurtful (I casually said I didn’t get a meme she shared, didn’t find it that funny). This loop reminded me of past arguments and made me worried about the plans we are making to have a child. I brought this up later with an earnest desire to be able to talk about how we envision parenting given her past, and echoes of experiences that we’ve both had to navigate throughout our relationship.
Naturally, this wasn’t taken well and I was accused of calling her a (potentially) bad mother. I’ve noticed I’ve developed my own coping strategies to deal with my partner’s outbursts, but I worry about our potential child, and how their experience navigating a parent with narcissistic tendencies might be much more damaging than my own experience of being in a relationship that has prioritized healing and growth but is still subject to the occasional calamity. Am I deluding myself or is it possible for this potential child to have the kind of happy and healthy home I grew up in?
— Hope Beyond Narcissism