How Children of a Self-Absorbed Parent Often Struggle to Find a Strong Sense of Self

An animated essay by the very insightful School of Life explains how children who grow up with at least one self-absorbed parent are often left without a strong sense of self. This lack of self allows the person to fit in with any crowd by shifting their identity to go along with anything and everything.

The self-less child will have had to cope with an egotist who simply coerced them to follow an already predetermined agenda. ...Their manner can be exquisitely polite and mellifluous. They are built to work out what we like and to reflect it back to us. They aren't merely pretending to go along with what we think for a few minutes; they genuinely seek out our worldview and lose themselves in it.

A lack of a strong of self can also cause a person to be unpredictable and perhaps, even dangerous.

But these people also pose grave dangers, for no one forgoes their sense of self without storing up a significant degree of rage and dissatisfaction. Yet this can never emerge cleanly because the candid expression of their needs was never something that these self-less people were allowed to practice.

There is a fix for these self-less people who have never learned to love.

The best we can do for people who have been denied a self is to signal that we aren't, as their parents once were, only there to foist yet another set of views on them. ...We want to be curious about someone they have never yet been allowed to discover; we are keen to do a very eerie and unparalleled thing: get to know them properly.

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