Abandoned by a Narcissistic Father with Dr. Lily Dunn

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Having a narcissistic parent can be incredibly damaging, destabilizing, and
have lifelong effects. In fact, it's one of the dynamics
I'm asked about most. What happens when someone you rely
on for love, safety, and attachment also invalidates, manipulates, and

(00:21):
discards you. On this episode of Navigating Narcissism, I'm joined
by doctor Lilly Dunn, whose strikingly honest memoir Sins of
My Father unravels the mysteries of her delinquent and narcissistic dad.
Lily was just six years old when her father abandoned
the family and traveled thousands of miles to join the

(00:43):
Bugwan Rajniche Sanyasen cult seen in the Netflix series Wild
Wild Country. From that moment, he lived the life he
wanted without regard for Lily or her family safety, well being,
or financial stability. Lily's story reveals the harm caused by
an antagonistic father, the effects of yearning for his love,

(01:07):
approval and validation, and answers the quintessential question all children
of narcissists eventually ask, if I have a bad parent,
what does that make me? From Red Table Talk Podcasts
and iHeartMedia, I'm doctor Rominy, and this is Navigating Narcissism.

(01:29):
This podcast should not be used as a substitute for
medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek
independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy from a healthcare
professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue,
or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast. This

(01:53):
episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering to some people.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the
podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do
not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia,
or their employees. Doctor Lily Done, It is such an

(02:17):
honor to welcome you to Navigating Narcissism. Since writing your
brilliant memoir, you've actually earned your PhD. So I want
to acknowledge that because it's a tremendous accomplishment. Congratulations, Thank
you so much.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, I'm still getting used to it, but yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
Now your book Sins of My Father, They can't put
down book for me. It earned rave reviews and it
landed alongside Michelle Obama's The Light. We carry on the
Guardian's Memoirs of the year, so huge, huge deal, and
I want to read to you. One of the guests
we had on Navigating Narcissism, doctor Yanya Lalich, said about

(02:59):
your book unput Downable, a love story, a horror story,
the unmasking of an unfortunately still much beloved guru, a
soul searching that can teach us much about how to
analyze and escape from a cruel narcissist. It is horrifyingly
real and brilliantly written. So to fill in everyone who's

(03:23):
listening to our interview, who was that cruel narcissist that
you were escaping?

Speaker 2 (03:30):
This is my father. I probably didn't set out to
think that he was a cruel narcissist, even perhaps when
I started writing the book. I always knew that he
had narcissistic tendencies. But he followed me around like a ghost,
as these people do, in terms of the way that
his behavior, his betrayal of me, had embedded itself into
my behavior, my life, and I just couldn't really shake

(03:52):
him off. So my father, he was not famous, but
he was quite an extraordinary man, and that he was
quite adventurous, and he took risks, but he was incredibly
self centered, so he followed his own impulses and he
lived an extraordinary life.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Tell us a little bit about your dad. He left
your family when you were six years old. Can you
talk about the circumstances under how he left and how
it affected all of you who were left behind.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
So.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
My dad was born in a sort of small town
in the south of England. He was sent to boarding
school at a very young age at age seven. Met
my mother when he was nineteen, sort of lied his
way into their first date, but my mom was not
aware of it at the time, so he was already
sort of lying in his late teens, and then they

(04:44):
fell in love, deeply in love. They got married very quickly.
They had two children, me and my brother, and they
lived a very charmed life. They were seen from the outsiders,
quite a golden couple. They ran their own publishing business.
We lived in North London, lovely big house. Then one
day my dad woke up and he disappeared. He didn't

(05:05):
tell us where he was going, and he didn't tell
us when he was going to come back. And I
was six, my brother was eight. He had met a
woman at a strip club in Soho and she had
introduced him to her guru. So he got a one
way ticket to India to meet Bagwan Sheri Rajhnish, who
later became Osho, who was the notorious Guru, a very

(05:28):
controversial guru who was the star of world wide country fame,
which brought that onto the international map. It was an
increasingly popular cult, which of course they didn't see as
a cult at the time. My dad went to India
and he was gone for six months and we really
thought that he had died. And then when he came back,

(05:50):
he told us that he had been reborn, and so
the man that we knew before was no longer and
that was a huge severance for us and a.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Shock when he was gone. Would he attempt to call
you to inquire on how you were doing, your mother, you,
your sibling?

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Well, he called once, so my mum received a phone
call reverse charges, and of course he had gone and
left us with no money. And yes, she did recall
a very sort of poignant conversation with him where she said,
you know, have you thought about your children? Your children
are suffering. They want to see you, and he said

(06:35):
that is their responsibility, that if they feel sad, that's
their responsibility. It has nothing to do with me. And
this was very much the culture of the Sinacin movement.
People were drawn to it, and it appealed to people
who wanted to give up that sense of responsibility. They
wanted to give up their secure family home or what

(06:58):
they saw as the tie of nuclear family, of mortgage,
of job, of conventional life and absolutely just wash their
hands of any kind of responsibility. And coming back and
saying that he had been reborn was basically a get
out card from being our father.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Oh is that what it was? He's reborn? I have
to tell you when I hear this bugwan raginiche kind
of you know, cold stuff. It was a cult of
literally codified selfishness. They had taken the construct of absolute
selfishness and organized it into a cultic structure. In this way,
you have no responsibility and sort of sense the conventional

(07:38):
life means you're trapped and imprisoned. And this idea at
six years old that your feelings were your responsibility and
that he held no responsibility for the pain that he
had issued upon a child at a very very exquisite
and significant developmental juncture six years old. It's a very
very delicate time for any child, and it's it seems

(08:00):
like he came back to tell you he was reborn,
with absolutely no inquiry on how you were doing, either
emotionally or financially.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Yeah. Absolutely, And I mean that really was the kind
of trail that he left in his way. Really from
that moment on, it's extraordinary when I think back to
that time, how little he asked about me, you know,
how little he knew me actually, because he was so
kind of wrapped up in his own stuff and his
own complex.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Stuff, Doctor Lily. When he left, did he have a job?
Could you explain to us sort of financially, yes, he
walked out, but what did he really walk out of
in terms of the financial responsibilities he left behind and
the burden he had shouldered your mother with.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, I mean he was a very good businessman and
continue to be a good businessman throughout his whole life.
He had a good instinct about business, and he earned
a lot of money. But at the time that he
left to go to India, he had overstretched himself. He
was very extravage so you know, at the first whiff
of money, he would be spending more than he was
taking in. So they were in trouble at that point

(09:09):
financially with the publishing house. So when he left, he
left an entire business. He left people waiting for their checks,
he left people not getting paid, he left his staff.
He also was in debt and we almost lost our house.
So my poor mom, she had to take the company

(09:31):
through bankruptcy and she was threatened with losing her car
and having to give over all her assets. He put
us in a lot of danger.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
And he felt entitled to go do what he wanted,
no sense of consequence. There was absolutely no even allowance
for that. And this cult had allowed a way to
even handle that issue of personal responsibility by basically telling
people the only thing that matters is how you feel.
But what was troubling it was he returns home to

(10:02):
your family home in London, six months away in India,
and he had a proposal for your mother when he
walked in the door with his girlfriend.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah. So he came back with the same girlfriend that
he had met in the peep show in Soo and
my mom had never met her, but they came round
to the house and they sat together and he proposed
to my mother that he moved back into the house
and he moved back into the marital bed, and that
his girlfriend should move into the basement, and that he

(10:32):
would basically pirouette between my mom and this woman. Perhaps
this felt justified because he had just come from the
Rashnish cult, which you know, people know about it. It
was all about free love and free sex and let's
all kind of share couples and share our partners and
everything's fine. But you know, my mom was not having
any of that. She stood up and told him he

(10:53):
was bonkers. He was just like, no, that's not going
to happen.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
It's just the entitlement to a point of absurdity, such
asks could be made. There was absolutely no filter for
this man of how does my behavior affect others, how
would it be received, what might someone else be feeling.
It was a literal almost absence of empathy.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, absolutely, And that had been going on for some
time before he made his escape from us, with the
affairs that he was having. He was emotionally absent from
us even before I was born, because he was playing
the field, you know, with multiple different people behind my
mom's back. So yeah, the lack of empathy and lack

(11:34):
of engagement emotionally was pretty chronic.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
After he abandons the family and then comes back. What
was your relationship like with your father after that?

Speaker 2 (11:45):
I mean I was very young, I was very hurt.
I was very confused. I loved him enormously. Even talking
about it now, I can feel that love despite everything,
and I felt really, deeply, deeply hurt. It sort of
started this sort of horrible sense of longing in me

(12:08):
that I never really had enough of him. And so
he moved to a commune in Suffolk in England called Medina,
and my brother and I would go and spend our
weekends with him, but we never saw him. We basically
spent our time sitting on the sofas outside the meditation room,
playing Donkey Kong on our consoles, and he'd occasionally come

(12:29):
over and give us a pound note or something and say,
you know, go often, get yourself some sweets, or find
yourself a drink or whatever. And I remember seeing different
women with him. So after breaking up with this lady
that he had met when he left us for India,
he met a very young woman who was at university.
She was eighteen, and they got together and got married

(12:53):
very quickly. So in a way he sort of repeated
that pattern that he had had with my mother, you know,
marrying someone for young and very quickly. And she was
absolutely beautiful, very stylish, and I adored her. She was
like a sister. But in our ages being so close,
I found it very difficult because I felt that I

(13:14):
had been usurped by her, and his attention was always
on her because he was slightly insecure about her. But
I think the most damaging thing for me was that
I was exposed to his sort of sexual virility or
his sexual performance at such a young age, and I
was put in this slight sort of place of competition

(13:36):
with these women, which I didn't understand. I was exposed
to too much sex at Medina. The whole kind of
cult was based around sex. I started to sort of
understand my dad and he had been behaving like that
since before I was born. It was all about sort
of sexual conquest and his sexual sort of power. He

(13:56):
was much more interested in himself as a sexual being
other than a sort of loving beer. That was very
damaging for me. And my mum had a friend who
was a psychotherapist at the time, and she suggested that
because my dad hadn't ever really been a parent to me.
I hadn't had the opportunity to grow as a daughter.
I was sort of stuck in that place from when

(14:16):
he left, you know, which was a place of longing
and a place of heartbreak. Actually I was heartbroken. You know.
He is so narcissistic and so kind of hard to
love in many ways, but he was also incredibly charismatic
and actually quite a pathetic man. He was a needy man,
and he was weak. So there's this awful kind of

(14:38):
conflict in me and the people who love him, where
we want to protect him, we want to care for him,
we want to be there for him, but also we're
being betrayed, we're being hurt. We're dealing with someone who
just doesn't have the emotional capacity to care for us.
And that's what's so damaging about it.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
A can call these relationships trauma bonded relationships, because you
do feel a love. He is your father. There had
to have been moments there that were meaningful to you,
and that hanging in there because of the need for attachment,
because of the love and holding on in those terrible moments,
of which there were a lot, and then trying to

(15:19):
ride them out for these possible good moments creates this
very unique kind of connection with another human being that
is a signature of almost every narcissistic relationship. You were
a child, you didn't even have the intellect to know
that this is not okay. Adults get into relationships like
this too, and even armed with that intellect say they
find it. It's almost physically impossible to think about pulling

(15:43):
themselves out of this kind of a loop. With parents,
it literally as physically felt like, I can't imagine walking
away from this person. I love them, Yeah, And I.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Think it's made worse when they are so unavailable. You
never ever feel that you fully get them. You can't
hold them, you don't even know them, so they're slippery.
That makes it even worse because there's always that sense
of grasping at something that's just out of reach.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Correct. And I think at some level, the only person
that would really get a glimpse at him, if you would,
is somebody he needed for narcissistic supply. His young, beautiful
wife would be a great example of that. She was young,
she was beautiful. Of course he was going to marry her,
and there was always that sense of an insecurity that
she could slip away that kind of person would receive

(16:32):
his attention and it might be fleeting until the next
sexual partner whomever rolled around. Was your mother aware of
what the circumstances were like at this Medina place? Who
was pushing for you to continue having contact with your father?
Was this something that your mother thought was important?

Speaker 2 (16:51):
This is a good question. I think my mom had
a very, very challenging situation on her hands. She came
from a very loving family with a very loving father.
She was completely in love with my dad, obviously when
all this kind of imploded on her, but I think
a small part of her was always retained that innocence.

(17:15):
That's not making an excuse at all. My mom is
an incredibly strong, positive, trusting person. But she was not
happy about Medina. She came to Medina once and she
cried when she was there. She didn't like it. The
dilemma that she had was that we wanted to see
our father. I think I particularly needed to see my father.

(17:39):
She said that I was like a clockwork toy that
when he left, I would start to wind down until
I just sort of slowed down and I became very
quiet and very introspective and very sad. And then as
I was building up to seeing him again, I would
build up again she was coming back. I was excited.

(18:01):
I wanted to be with him, and then I would
go through that process again on leaving. So she knew
that it was important for me to develop a relationship
with him. The biggest dilemma for her was that she
was worried that if she said no, it would build
his image into an even greater force. You know, he
would be this huge sort of enigma, you know, who

(18:22):
she had stopped us from seeing. And I respect her
for that, and I think she also felt when we
were growing up as adults that actually we needed to
experience our father for who he was, and even if
that was a painful process, it was better that we
came to that rather than feeling that we weren't able

(18:44):
to meet him and actually really try and understand him.
And I really respect her for that. But it was
not easy for her.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
I understand that as a mother, as a psychologist, I
fully understand where that painful and conflicted drive must have
been coming for her. What was I mean, especially in
your early year six seven, eight, nine tens, what was
so compelling about your father that was drawing you to
want to spend so much time with him.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
I loved him. He was very affectionate, he was very funny.
When I look back on my memories of before he left,
he kind of comes across as the archetypal dad come
home from trips abroad, and he'd bring us all these
special suites and toys from America and Christmas. He would
pretend to be Father Christmas, and he'd put talconpowder on

(19:32):
the bottom of his shoes, and there'd be a trail
of sort of fake snow coming through from the attic door,
and we'd have all these amazing stuff in our stockings.
He was funny, he was entertaining, he was really affectionate.
He had lovely big hands, and he was warm, and
he was cuddly and was my dad.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
Thank you for showing that, because what you describe here
is the father who would bring the gifts from his travels,
and there were the sort of playful holiday memories, and
he was entertaining and affectionate. And then you'd go for
these weekends and time in Medina or other places he
was living, and you couldn't get access to what you

(20:15):
knew was going to be fun and loving. It's very
very frustrating if you were always on the edge of
your seat because you knew once you could get him,
you would have a very pleasant circumstance, and then they'd
sort of be these big periods of time waiting for
him to come around. So to me, that's the paradox
of any narcissistic relationship.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
It's interesting you saying it in those terms because I've
not really thought of it like that before. But I
think you're absolutely right. I think it's almost like a drug,
isn't it. It's like that first hit. You know, you're
searching for that first hit. You're searching for that sort
of ultimate moment of connection, and you know when he
moves to Italy, I would sort of go in search

(20:56):
of him and he'd give me a hug and that
became my medicine and it would fill me up again,
you know, just to have that contact with him. I mean,
he was holding all the cards and he had an
incredible amount of power because of my need.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
We will be right back with this conversation. Scarcity makes
anybody the most interesting person in the room, right. I
might even argue a little differently to you, doctor Lilly,
that was it a drug? I actually think that that

(21:31):
almost undersells what it was to you. I think it
was so much more profound than that. It was joy,
it was connection, it was safety in the world. It
was happiness. I don't think it was just a quick hit.
I think what you wanted is what every human being
wants most of all from a parent. It was love,
and you knew how much love could be there at

(21:52):
that moment if you could actually get him to sit
down long enough. So you were forever on this chase.
But the thing you were chasing wasn't all superficial. It
was incredibly deep, and that is a very very confusing
place for a child to be sort of stuck. Yeah,
I have to say. Something you wrote here is on
page one hundred and four of your book. I read it.
It's right before I was going to sleep. I closed

(22:14):
the book, I turned back on the light. I read
it again because it dawned on me that what you
had written here in a very short paragraph, captured not
only this incredibly powerful dynamic in your relationship with him,
it would inform anybody going through one of these relationships.
And let me just give some contact you're now talking
about when you were spending summers in Italy. He had

(22:36):
moved to a house in Tuscany. You paint this gorgeous
picture of what Italy was like, the smells, the sensations,
the heat, the rain. I mean, it was absolutely beautiful,
but against this backdrop still of this very inaccessible father.
At this time, your father's married, and you're talking about
the complexity of noticing how he was so adoring of

(22:58):
his wife, who was only about seven years older than you,
and you were left with this yearning. But there's something
you right here. And my father did not want or
need this kind of enslavement, but he needed my puppy
like devotion so he could continue to behave as he wanted,
the indulged man accountable to no one. But I was

(23:18):
also a nuisance to him, hanging on his sleeve so often,
unable to contain my noisy grief, and it reminded him
of what he had done. Can you share what that
passage meant to you? And I'd love to share with
you why it had such a profound impact on me.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
I remember writing that when he got married to his wife,
I went along to the wedding, but I spent the
whole time hanging on to my dad, and I wouldn't
even let them have any photos of themselves on their
own because there was me hanging on to him and crying.
And I must have been a real pain in the
ass for my dad. Must have been really awful on

(23:58):
one side, just to have your daughter a kind of
hanging there crying, But also I was reminding him of
the pain that he had put me through because I
couldn't contain it myself. For years and years, every time
I saw him, I would cry, and I did sort
of walk around as a slight mirror to him.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
What you said in that last sentence here was the
I was a nuisance to him, right, And I don't
know that a child should ever conceptualize themselves as a nuisance.
But I was a nuisance to him, hanging on his
sleeve so often, unable to contain my grief, and it
reminded him of what he had done. That's the piece.
It had reminded him of what he had done. That

(24:37):
jumped out at me, doctor Lilly, because I think that
line is all about the narcissistic shame, which is the
core dynamic, especially in a narcissistic parent, that the presence
of the child in perpetuity evokes that shame right, which
is the manifestation of that ego getting injured in that

(24:58):
narcissistic parent, and sh is the most uncomfortable space the
narcissistic person can live. And so what do they do?
They try to eradicate that source of shame. Parents do
that in different ways. Some people rage at their child,
some people ignore their child. And in this way, you

(25:18):
simply trying to get your attachment needs met was evoking
shame in him. That was a toxic dance that you
were never going to get right. And I think when
I read that part of the book, I was so
devastated for the girl and the young woman that you
were becoming at that point, because you captured what you were.
You were literally a stimulus for this man's shame.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
It's interesting that you pick up that extract because there
is that thing that he says to me in Italy.
He is high on ecstasy and I've fallen off my
motorbike and I'd hurt my leg and I couldn't sleep.
And he turned to his wife and said, Lily is
the only person who knows me. And I took this

(26:02):
on board as truth. You know that I was the
only person who knew him, and that that made me special,
And I carried that with me. But it's interesting that
you pick up on that passage because in a way
he was right, because actually I was reminding him of
his shame. I was that truth. I was the walking, talking,

(26:23):
crying product of his betrayal. So in a way I
did know him as much as he was able to
allow anybody to know him. But he also used that
statement to me that night as a manipulation. He used
it to make me think that I was special in
order to keep me hanging on. So you know, it's

(26:45):
a double edged sword, isn't it. It's a double bind.
It's not a simple, straightforward kind of relationship in any way.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
But it was also an acknowledgment that you were dangerous
because you actually did see him, you paid an enough
attention to see him. You had not sort of knitted
that together. And I guess that goes to my next question,
when did you connect the dart in your life and
your relationship with your father that his behavior was a

(27:14):
manifestation of narcissism.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
I started to realize that something wasn't quite right with him.
I mean, you know, obviously I knew that there was
quite a lot that wasn't right with him, but I
started to kind of think, maybe this is sort of
slightly more sociopathic. When there were a couple of times
when I confronted him and he would turn on me

(27:38):
and he would be really cruel. He would either tell
me that he never wanted to see me again or
say something really nasty. I'd see a side of him
that I'd never seen before, and I realized he did
not want to be crossed, he did not want to
be challenged, and that that was incredibly wounding for him,

(28:00):
to the point that he would be irrational to tell
your daughter that they never want to see you again.
You're the adult here, and you're telling me when I'm
nineteen and I'm asking you to take some responsibility for
what you've done to me, that you never want to
see me again. I was just like, what, that is
not right. I think at that point I started to
recognize actually that his behavior was not okay, and it

(28:23):
was not normal and you know, slightly frightening. But I
think that the real dawning came really when I started
to write this book and do my research and even
looking at the myth of Narcissus. I thought was fascinating
because it just felt like, Oh my god, that's my dad.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
So interesting you bring up the myth of narcissus. For
how long we've been doing this podcast, I don't know
that we've ever fully talked about it. The myth of
narcissus is an interesting one because it's been written and
rewritten by different poets in different myths. What part of
the myth of narcissus explained your father?

Speaker 2 (28:58):
It was the need for someone to reflect or something
to reflect your beauty, and that that's only skin deep.
To kind of go beyond the surface is dangerous for
that person. I think also that I was very struck
by echo and that relationship and questioned what my part
of this dynamic was. Clearly, people who are narcissistic need

(29:22):
to have that adoration, They need to have the echo,
They need to have the person who is going to
keep bolstering them, you know, and keep making them feel
that they are this beautiful soul, that they don't need
to go beyond. They don't need to face the truth,
they don't need to see themselves for who they really are.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
What is so interesting about the myth of Narcissus is
that everyone in that myth was being punished, both Echo
and Narcissus. Narcissus's fate, his punishment was that he could
not love another right, and it wasn't even love. It
was about admiration, reflection of the physical image, and ultimately,
in the pain of all of that, he ends his life.
But Echo was cursed too, and Echo's curse was to

(30:04):
only be able to repeat and not say something new.
And so Echo, in that way was sort of stuck
in a relationship with no identity except sort of repeating
and pingponging off of Narcissus. They were both cursed, and
I think it's a reminder that not only is the
narcissistic person cursed, the people who get drawn into these

(30:27):
relationships are as well.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yes, that absolutely resonates. It is like a poison. And
I mean, I didn't want to end up like my father,
and at times I was worried that I would, you know,
if I didn't face it.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Well, it's the curse of these relationships that we do have,
that fear that will will happen. I want to talk
a little bit about your father did go into a
cultic system? Could you just sort of give us an
overview of the Bagwan raj Niche cult. I think it's
called the Sonyasen movement.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
Yeah, so on. Shri Rajnish was an intelligent, well educated
man in India who started a spiritual movement and had
a local following of Indians who came to him when
he was a young man. He was quite clever because
he combined the Indian spiritualism with Western psychoanalysis and different

(31:24):
ways of looking at psychology, and this hadn't really been
done before. So this appealed to a generation of young
people who were growing up in the sixties and seventies
and there was the Summer of Love and you know,
sexual liberation and a sense of kind of radicalism in

(31:45):
the youth. You know that they wanted to get away
from the influence of their parents, which they saw as claustrophobic,
and you know that there was a bigger world out there,
there was more life, there was international travel, They could
learn from other cultures. The Beatles were doing it with
their maharishi. So his spiritual movement, it grew and developed

(32:05):
and word got round and the Europeans started to join
and at that point, you know, it was a utopian place.
You know, it was beautiful, and it was warm and loving,
and everybody worked for a common good. People were doing
therapies and meditation, and it was all about developing the self.
A lot of people who came from Catholic upbringing or

(32:27):
had been to boarding school or you know where they'd
felt restricted and they'd been told what to do. It
was letting go of all of that and getting in
touch with yourself. And I think it was a good
way for lots of people to live in those early stages.
But there was also a dark side, which was that
Baguan was mischievous and some of the therapies were quite provocative.

(32:48):
People who came in as couples were encouraged to split
up and try new partners. Some of the therapies in
the early days were quite violent. And then it grew
Puna and they moved into America, which is when he
had a secretary called Sheila who kind of took command.
And she found this ranch in Oregon where they basically

(33:10):
built a city, and they did all the plumbing and
the infrastructure and the electricity, and they built this from scratch.
They started to behave in secretive ways and suspicious ways.
There was a whole salmonella attack. The FBI got involved,
and bug one then got confiscated from America and he

(33:32):
got sent back to India.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
You astutely pointed out in your book this seminella attack
was the only bioterror attack that ever occurred on American soil.
I had no idea but your dad. I think your
dad was somewhat suggestible and impressionable, but really gets into
that sort of harmful, tyrannical, self sacrificing, subjugated system. Did

(33:56):
your father have that experience within this cult? It seems
like he managed to harness the cult in a way
that worked for him.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. So, no, he wasn't
really like the other disciples, and he would not have
liked to have aligned himself with the other disciples in
that way. He was naturally a leader, and he went
in with a kind of business mind, so he would
go in and advise people on running their own businesses.

(34:26):
People admired him and they looked up to him, and
that suited him well. So in a way, he sort
of took on a guru persona as a disciple. I
think you're absolutely right that he harnessed it to fit
in with the way that he wanted to live. So
it enabled him to behave in the way that he
wanted to behave without having to pay any consequences for that.
So my dad didn't really fall for all the therapies.

(34:49):
He didn't really meditate, he didn't really take all that
that seriously. I think he was in it because he
could have multiple lovers. He was revered within that community.
They didn't really know him like we knew him.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
I want to give listeners some other context because I
think this is a really important piece of your father's puzzle.
Here he is in occultic system, feel some power in it.
Something that was very compelling about your father's history was that,
at a relatively young age, his parents sent him to
a boarding school, and that boarding school was a very

(35:29):
harsh and cold and cruel and abusive place. His parents
seemed to send him there so they would improve his
station and maybe even the family's station in life, but
it was a horrific experience for him.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
My dad was sent to boarding school at the age
of seven, and he was very devastated by that from
day one. He never really talked about it, but he
did tell me about the day that he was left
on the step outside the school for the first time,
and that he cried and cried out to his mum
and dad and they just walked away. They didn't even

(36:04):
turn around back to him. And he swore from that
day that he would never ever love his parents again.
So the betrayal was very, very deep for him. He
was a very pretty boy, He was a very dreamy boy.
He was a creative boy, and I think it was
seen as a victim and he was bullied and abused.
He did say that he was raped. They have this

(36:26):
whole sort of ritual in boarding schools where they treat
certain younger, weaker boys as servants, and my dad had
to sort of go through all of that, I think,
probably over years, so very undermining experience and very alienating.

(36:46):
I imagine it probably felt that he had been evicted
from the center of his family. His mother was very
adoring of him, She was his golden child. She favored
him over his sister, even though his sisters got to
stay at home because she was a girl, and he
was from that moment almost split, you know, between the

(37:08):
person he had to be at school and then the
person he had to be at home, and I think
it's possibly where he cultivated that sort of persona of lying,
of cheating, of not really being fully himself, because that's
probably how you have to survive when you're in an
unhappy situation like that.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
Can I call you out on an interesting Freudian slip
you made because e when you were speaking about his mother,
you said she was his golden child, you know, really,
as Freud would say, there are no mistakes. The slip
was so telling to me because it seemed like your
father there was a real adoration between them. He was
her golden child, for sure, but I do wonder how

(37:48):
much she was what to the degree a parent could
be that that idealized figure, and he was being rested away,
you know from that space, the disruption and attachment that
that creates, and that your father in a way was
sort of chasing that attachment that he had lost, and
it's very difficult to go back and get obviously, if

(38:10):
not impossible, that actual attachment. Your father was horribly abused
in that boarding school situation where he had very little power.
When we hear about him in this cult, in the
bugwont Reginie cult, what we hear is a man who
now actually is sauntering through there and taking that power
back to me. The boarding school felt like a cultic

(38:33):
system where he was abused, and the adult cult was
a place where he actually got to hold that power. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
And also he took the power into his hands by
leaving us as well. So he was evicted as a
seven year old, and then when my brother was eight
and I was six, he left us. He evicted himself
in a very similar way. You know, it was very
sudden and very it was a severance, It was a trauma,

(39:05):
and I think, I mean, what's interesting about the cult
is that, on the face of it, how could you
compare a free loving, free sex kind of liberal radical
cult with a very stuffy British boarding school. But actually
what started to happen, particularly in the Oregon days when
it did become very cultish, was that it was totally

(39:29):
rule bound and it had a very strong hierarchical structure.
People had to behave or they were pushed out. You know,
everyone wore the same clothes or similar clothes, so it
became very institutionalized actually, and I think that was possibly
quite familiar to my.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
Dad, absolutely familiar to him. Also probably One of the
biggest questions I get as somebody who's so focused on
work on narcissism is why do they bec this way?
Why does a person become narcissistic? But I always tell
people I answer this with an asterisk, and by that

(40:07):
I mean this does not lift responsibility for their behavior,
does not obviate that what they did was harmful. None
of that is taken away. We know that narcissism is
often a byproduct of a disruption and attachment of that
kind of loss. So that sort of violent pulling away
not only from what felt like a securely attached family system,

(40:28):
but then being thrown into a system that abused him,
to not be rescued from that system, and then have
to keep a foot in the two systems, it steals
all of that sense of safety, and it plays on
that idea of nothing is safe. And so this fragile ego,
then is all kinds of defenses grow up around that,

(40:51):
entitlement and grandiosity and validation, seeking anything to find some
sense of safety in the world. As your father came
up into adolescence and was revealed and made him attractive,
he now I'm sure found that's regulating through that through admiration,
through validation, and then ultimately through sexual gratification he could get,

(41:12):
especially given the Golden child mother, shall we say it,
It really speaks to where this comes from. All of
that set. We can psychoanalyze this twenty different ways. There
was no responsibility taking. I mean, if we were to
go back in time and give him proper trauma therapy,
there might have been a shot at some normalization. But

(41:32):
these are patterns that are really really resistant to change.
And so yeah, I absolutely agree that what happened and
getting pulled into another system and having a different kind
of power within it, especially as it became more rule bound,
it was very telling. But interestingly enough too, it also
feels like this cult system he was in almost emboldened

(41:54):
his existing narcissistic qualities because there was no call for accountability.
There is no call for responsibility. So it was a
bit of a disaster that him and that cult coming
together took away any shred of hope that he would
be able to ever step up as a present father.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's amazing. You've summed it up brilliantly there.
It's interesting that he didn't take part in the therapies
because he would have to start to untangle some of
that stuff, which would have been really frightening for him.
And so cherry picked, he took those things that he
wanted that were helpful to him. The other thing I

(42:34):
wanted to say was that people involved in that cult
are made to believe that they are special, that they
are different from your run of the mill ordinary person
from outside. And of course that is one of the
main fueling narcissistic parts of the temperament, isn't it that
you know, you, as an artissist, have to feel special,

(42:56):
and boarding schools do the same. You know, our country
and the UK is run by entitled men who went
to boarding school who still don't have to see themselves
as ordinary, who were primed to go to Eton and
then to Oxford Cambridge and to then rule the country.

(43:16):
And they never ever come down to the normal kind
of level of the people that they are supposedly protecting.
And you know, I'd say that my dad was the same.
He would have learnt that sense of entitlement at school
and then he continued to have it in the cult.
And it's incredibly difficult to break through that because it

(43:37):
is this kind of protective armor isn't it.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
I mean absolutely, and it's the new age narcissistic kind
of pick a new age thing. It very much does
play into that sort of that idea of specialness, of
cherry picking what works and really only cherry picking the
pieces of various therapeutic models or selected Eastern philosophies that

(44:01):
are just being put out there that will allow a
person to maintain that sense of specialness of no accountability.
I mean, that's really all that does at some point.
It's a self destruction that ultimately that destroys other people because,
as you pointed out, these people in these boarding school systems,
which really seems like a standardized bullying curriculum, then go

(44:24):
on to take that mindset into how they run governments
and companies and things that do harm to people because
they still continue to bring that deeply entitled mindset to
all of it. With your father, he also did drink.
Was his drinking always an issue?

Speaker 2 (44:40):
Well, no, he wasn't a drinker. He didn't drink until
he moved to America. This was around the time when
he renounced the whole spiritual movement, which you know was
not like a big dramatic renouncement at all. He was
involved with the cults inadvertently about twenty years, but he
wasn't living in a communal sense. In the later years,

(45:02):
he moved to Mill Valley in California with his wife,
and I think he started drinking wine and it was
never a worry. We didn't realize that it was as
bad as it was until only a couple of years
before he died. So his wife left him. That was
quite a big shock for him, and he also got
embroiled in a scam, which we were very surprised by.

(45:25):
But I think by that point he was quite deluded
because he fell for this scam, which was just unbelievably ridiculous.
You know. It was kind of one of those scams
that we've all had, you know, those emails saying that
you've got a long lost relative who's died in a
car crash and we've tracked you down as the next
of kin, you know, which my dad would have known

(45:47):
was a scam in his right mind. But he fell
for it and he lost a lot of money to that,
and I think that that, combined with his separation from
his wife, he kind of fell into free at that
point and then had a very very kind of dramatic,
catastrophic last couple of years of his life where he

(46:09):
was in and out of hospital and lost everything. He
lost his business, he lost his home, he was deported
back to the UK, and he basically died homeless on
his own in a B and B.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
I mean, it was a catastrophic fall. Wife leaves him.
That's a huge narcissistic injury for him, that rejection, the abandonment,
more drinking on top of that. But the scam part
was interesting. I think your father was so caught up
in the loop of grandiosity and magical thinking that it was, Oh,
I need money, and look how convenient, and it's coming

(46:40):
to me because I'm special. Of course money's coming to me.
And I think that we often think of narcissistic people
as the scammers, which they often are, but we forget
how vulnerable this personality style could make someone to a scam.
There's a certain suggestibility he went into the cult and
fell for that hook line and sinker. But when you
take that suggestibility and you mix it up with entitlement

(47:02):
and a perception of specialness and delusional grandiosity, you actually
have a bit of a disaster there, because there's literally
a willingness to say, oh, well, then look at this.
Of course everything worked out because I deserve it too.
And then you add to that that he's drinking, and
so his judgment was off. You could see how he
was really a prime candidate for that kind of a scam.

(47:22):
My conversation will continue after this.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Break, magical thinking, absolutely, that's exactly what it was. And
he also, for as long as I can remember, he
wanted to be a millionaire, and so yeah, suddenly this
kind of supposed thing lands in his lap and he thinks, oh, yeah,

(47:47):
of course this is my destiny. I'm going to be
a millionaire.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
The other thing your father did, because whole idea with
your dad was from a very young age, his power
was keeping you in his orbit and in essence keeping
you from fully individuating, you know, fully becoming your whole
for self. There was this gravitational pull. Well, one thing
you talk about is yes idea of your father dangling

(48:12):
carrots to keep you around. Can you explain and talk
about what some of those carrots were.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Yeah, I mean he never paid my mom maintenance for us.
He only ever gave us gestures, so you know, he
would buy us really fancy designer clothes. When he came
to London, he take us to Selfridges and splurge hundreds
of pounds on us, take us out for fancy meals,
and he'd drop bits of money into our bank account.

(48:39):
But he also always withheld his promises. So he made
promises and we would then be on the end of
the phone or the end of an email and promises
wouldn't happen, and so it'd be like, Dad, you said
you'd send me that money for this important thing I
have to buy. Oh yeah, yeah, darling, ya, I'll do it.
I'll do I just to wait for some money to

(49:01):
come in. And then you know, five days later, Dad,
it's still not in the bank. You know, I'm back
in contact with him. Yeah, yeah, it'll be there. I'm
just waiting, you know, honey, just wait, wait, you know,
just be patient. And then you know, a week later,
two weeks later, just trying to get his attention again
and again just waiting. And this happened all around my

(49:21):
wedding as well, where he'd promise to pay for certain things,
and right up to the wire we were waiting and
not even aware, you know, whether we were even going
to be able to follow through because we were still
waiting for that money. He also would do those sort
of manipulative things where I would phone him and he'd
pick up. I'd be like, hey, Lily, honey, I was

(49:43):
just thinking about you. You must be psychic. We're psychic,
We're connected, And so there was that sort of manipulation
as well that we were special, we had a special bond,
we had a special connection, and yeah, I mean that
just kind of kept me there to side feeling like
we had a special relationship despite repeated abuses really and

(50:07):
neglect and pretty bad behavior.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
That carrot dangling behavior you talk about, Lily, is something
in narcissistic relationships we call future faking. It's coming. Yeah,
I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this
thing you ask for, especially when it can be quite grandiose.
I'm going to pay for all this. I'm going to
take care of that. But what it does is it
keeps people on the chain, right, so they keep getting
the ongoing contact, and they just keep moving those goalposts

(50:33):
and people just sort of keep marching along in a
much like a slot machine. Every so often they do deliver,
the money does show up, the thing does get paid for,
so you're thinking, well, it does happen, you know, hearing
the magical things like we're psychic, there's still the little
girl inside of you that wanted those things to be true,
and that is powerful, and that future faking dynamic is
a very classical narcissistic dynamic that will sometimes people say,

(50:57):
you know, I stayed in this much longer that it
was help for me because there was always this idea
that around the next corner would be something promised, some
form of change, something would be different.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah, and there was always a wish in me that
I would eventually have my dad. However naive that was,
I think I always secretly wished even when he was
dying and I had just got married and I went
out to America to try and save him and get
him into rehab. There was a little voice in my

(51:32):
head that was like, he's on his own, He's going
to need me. Finally he needs me, you know, his
wife's not there. Finally I can step up. I can
be that person for him. And I was willing to
leave my husband, I was willing to leave my life
in order to look after him. It was my brother
who kind of kept on trying to wake me up.
But then, interestingly, in the end, our dad didn't want

(51:54):
us to stay because he couldn't carry on doing what
he wanted to do, which was drink himself to death.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
I'm so glad you shared that, doctor Lilly, because I
think that's what so many people experience when they have
a complicated, narcissistic parent. Some people say, what the heck
was I holding on for? I said, because that child
in you, that thing you quested for, that doesn't go
away from us. That's all you ever wanted. You simply

(52:21):
wanted his presence. So how did having a father like this.
We've understood how it affected you as a child, but
then you came up into adolescence and adulthood. How did
it affect the relationships, especially with men, that you had.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
I think it dramatically affected the relationships I had with men.
There was an incident in Italy when I was thirteen
where one of my dad's friends groomed me, and he
was my dad's age. He made me think that I
loved him, even though I knew I didn't love him,
but he basically wanted to have sex with me. I
was a virgin, I was a child, and my dad

(52:57):
knew about it and didn't stop it, and I think
that was, you know, a big betrayal for me. I
wasn't aware at the time that this was quite common
practice within the Snelson group, that you know, older men
sort of initiated young girls first sexual experience. Thank god
it didn't happen for me, but I think it set

(53:19):
me off on a trail of finding older men attractive,
wanting to be with someone who was like a father figure,
you know, wanting to be protected, that kind of imbalance
in the relationship. I would kind of absorb myself in
the presence of this person, you know, whether they be

(53:40):
older or more dominant. I chose men like that for
most of my teens and sort of twenties, and then
I finally met a really lovely man and got married.
He was my age, a very sort of equal good relationship.
But unfortunately that relationship didn't last because I was still
so much in the shadow of my dad and he

(54:00):
got really ill with alcoholism around the time I got married,
and that kind of took me over in a way.
But now I went through Jungian therapy for years and
that was massively helpful. It was a combination of having
babies getting to know myself and then going through therapy
which really really helped me bring all aspects of myself

(54:21):
together because I think I also I was very scared
of the parts of me that were like my father
to let those parts out, and I think the Jungian
psychoanalysis really helped me do that. So now I'm in
a very happy relationship with a wonderful man, thank God.
But you know, it wasn't actually just my father, It

(54:42):
was also my mother. My mother was a big influence
on me because of my father being so destructive. I
think I leaned more into her and needed her guidance
a lot as I was growing up, and I had
a very close relationship with her, So actually I had
to find myself apart from her as well as my father,

(55:05):
and that, Yeah, it was definitely triggered by having both
my children, feeling that sense of deep, deep love and
responsibility for two little humans and not wanting them to
be affected by the things you have been affected by.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Did having your own children watching them cross those developmental stages,
be those ages? How did that affect you in terms
of where it placed his behavior and what it actually
would do to a child.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
Well, I gave birth to my daughter very soon before
my father died, and I did not want him anywhere
near her. I mean, the sense of anger actually and
fury and protectiveness of this little child, this baby was profound.
But the shocking thing for me was that me and

(55:57):
my husband their dad separated at exactly the same ages
that my dad left. So we separated when my son
was six and my daughter was eight, and that felt
like a very sad repeat of my past. My dad's
trauma was the seven year old on the step, and
then he left us around that time, and then I

(56:20):
was doing the same. And I know that there are
those sorts of patterns, and even if you're aware of it,
you're still victim.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
To it, absolutely, And yet in your experience shows us
that there is a process here, and it's a process
of healing, and it's a process of grief, and that
you do get to another side, but there's a lot
that happens in between, and these cycles are intergenerational in
ways that are so close that can it feel eerie
and unsettling. And then I'd imagine writing about it must

(56:49):
have been an extraordinary revelation.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
The writing was very healing, actually, I mean, at times
it was painful, but in the end it became a
way of me understand standing him more than I did
when he was alive, which I found really interesting. It
was almost like his death kind of liberated him from
me so that I could really properly get to know him.

(57:14):
It's ethically problematic to write about somebody when they're dead
in the way that I've written about him, Yeah, but
I justify that because of the dynamic of our relationship,
and I think it was necessary for me to do
that in order to liberate myself from him.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
It's not easy to do, doctor Lily. A lot of
people say he's gone, let the stories go with them,
but it could very well be that ultimately freeing yourself
from that subjugation required you to actually peer all the
way in and see what it was all about, so
you could finally understand it, to see it, to release it.
Towards the end of your book, you write, one night,

(57:53):
in a fitful sleep, two words bubbled up from my consciousness,
bad dad, oh go up, asking myself, how does a
man drop so rapidly from such heights? Bad Dad is
what he was? The realization of this set solemnly in
my stomach, My parent is a bad person is not

(58:15):
an easy thought because where does that leave me? That
to me was an extraordinarily powerful part of your book.
Could you share more about that, because in that you
captured what so many people I've worked with clinically share
and struggle with.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
A really odd experience. Because when I sold the book
it had a different title. It was called Starman, and
I had come to the realization that because my dad
had had that experience at boarding school, he was traumatized,
and that was kind of my answer. That was why

(58:54):
his life had been such a disaster, and why he
couldn't love us, and why he left us. All the
puzzle pieces fell into place. But when my editor, who's
very perceptive, took on the book, she said, look, you
know you're going to find this quite tricky to hear,
but I think you need to readdress this. It's not

(59:14):
simply that your dad went to boarding school and then
that led to him doing all those things. You know,
I think your readership is going to feel slightly kind
of put out by this because you're making excuses for him,
You're still keeping him on that pedestal. I was taken aback,
but I was also really struck by her perception. I
just thought it was extraordinary that she had seen something

(59:35):
that I had not been able to see. And that's
when I had the dream, and it was so clear
to me that, you know, my father could potentially be
a bad man. And actually, when he died, he had
a couple of notebooks on him, you know, his poems
and his reflections. In amongst all this kind of drunk
stuff was this key text, which was I'm a bad person,

(01:00:03):
and you know, I'm frightened that people are going to
see how bad I am. And I just realized actually
that that was the crux of it for him, was
that he was masking his fear of being bad, or
that he really believed that he was bad, or that
actually he was bad. You know, that's a difficult thing
to acknowledge in a parent. It's a difficult thing to

(01:00:25):
acknowledge in a loved one or someone that you've invested
all this time loving, because it's sort of, yeah, I mean,
where does it leave you? You know, it sort of throws
you back on yourself for loving that person, but also
as a daughter, being part of that person and inheriting
that who am I as his daughter?

Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
It is a complicated one. I think it is the
absolute struggle of working through significant narcissistic relationships. And a
technique I use with clients all the time is this
concept of the multiple truths stacked up like so many pancakes,
you know, higher and higher, which was, he did so
many bad things. He abandoned a family, he abandoned his

(01:01:09):
own children, he put them in harm's way. He left
a young wife, your mother, to fend for herself with
her family, and he gave you moments of fun and joy,
and you felt connected with him, and he made you
laugh on Christmas morning. And I think that the multiple
truths is that all of those things are true. And
he did have a terrible experience in a boarding school

(01:01:32):
and that explains it, and that's not an excuse. And
it becomes so many jagged edges when we try to
tell these stories. But that idea when it's a parent
is who does that make me? Because I come from this,
and the work I've always done with people who have
gone through this is it's made you a survivor. It's
made your experience more difficult. It's not destiny. If he

(01:01:55):
had only been a bad man, doctor Lily, this would
have been easy much more than that, and the seeing
of that is what's so painful.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
But I also think when you've held someone on a
pedestal all that time, it can be quite a relief
as well to actually just say, okay, maybe he was
just a bit of a shit, right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:21):
And not only that, but I actually think, doctor Lily,
in a strange way, when you have a healthy parent
with whom there's a secure attachment, you don't put them
on a pedestal. You sit right with them at the table.
It's when the parent is unavailable invalidating, narcissistic, toxic, that's
when we put them on the pedestal. And the only

(01:02:41):
way to take them off the pedestal is to call
a thing what it is, which was he had no
place being a father. But mercifully it gave us to you,
doctor Lily, and your story, which is going to do
so much and is doing so much good in the world.
I mean, at the end of the day, the world
needed Lily done, and this is the way we got
Lily done. And there's a grace in that so and

(01:03:02):
I think that there's a certain acceptance we have to
have around that too.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
Well, that's lovely, Thank you. So much. That's such a
sweet way to end an amazing conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
My goodness, thank you so much, doctor Lilly. I mean,
your book is extraordinary. I want every clinician, graduate student
psychology to read it and anyone out there who's had
the experience of a narcissistic parent of any kind. This
is a must read book. It hit every bit of
the nuance of this experience. And I can't thank you
enough for your time.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Well, thank you, and it's just been such a pleasure.
What an amazing show that you have here. I can
see how hell thank you this is to all your listeners.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
Thank you. Here are my takeaways from my conversation with
doctor Lily. First, the cult which her father belonged to,
the Bugwan Shri Rajnich Sinyasen cult, is yet another example
of a cult just being a narcissism social club. The
stance they took that your feelings are your response, which

(01:04:01):
basically allowed her father to abdicate any responsibility for his
children or family, is a prime example of the codified
selfishness that many cultic organizations exhibit, as well as pathologizing
emotion and feeling in other human beings to subjugate them.

(01:04:21):
For our next takeaway, Doctor Lily is not the first
and will not be the last guest who will reflect
on the fun of a narcissistic parent, the sort of
care free, engaged, and even childlike spirit that some people
look back on with their parents during childhood. And obviously

(01:04:41):
this is not all narcissistic parents. Most don't do that,
but in this episode, Doctor Lily holds on to some
of that, and even as her father repeatedly lets her down,
makes poor financial decisions, future fakes her with money, and
then position himself in a way that compels her to

(01:05:03):
have to step away from her adult life to clean
up the messes he made to his very dying day.
Speaks to how tight these trauma bonds can be wound,
and how the complexity and confusion of these relationships, our
ability to hold on to the small handful of good
memories and the eternal hope that it could be different,

(01:05:25):
can keep us stuck in a poisonous space. In this
next takeaway, a dynamic that often unfolds in a narcissistic
relationship of any kind, and a dynamic that doctor Lily
shared in her story, is that the narcissistic person makes
themselves psychologically scarce enough so that we are always craving

(01:05:47):
a little more. And for a child, this is an
almost impossible situation, because every child wants as much of
their parents as they can get. She shares the poignant line,
I didn't have enough of him. And because narcissistic parents
are not attuned to their children, the child is forever

(01:06:07):
left with a longing that they carry into adulthood and
can be an unfortunate yearning that drives children of narcissistic
parents into unhealthy relationships in which these cycles are perpetuated.
At the end of her story, you can see that
she still hoped that he would come around, and for
any child of a narcissistic parent, in most cases, the

(01:06:30):
wish that the narcissistic parent will come around never goes away.
For this next takeaway, the intergenerational losses and pivots in
families so often repeat on a schedule. It's almost eerie
how it happens. Doctor Lily's dad being abandoned to an
abusive boarding school at the age of seven, her dad

(01:06:53):
abandoning his children when they were the same age. Doctor
Lily got divorced when her child was around that age too.
Whether it is doing what we know, learning from observation,
or some deep, unprocessed psychodynamic issue, then it's likely a
combination of all of the above. Many of us can
resonate with this and the grief it raises when we

(01:07:16):
look back on it, it can all feel somewhat tragically predestined.
And lastly, it was interesting to hear doctor Lilly Schaer
that when she originally titled her book Starman and tied
it to the narrative she had long held about her
father's behavior, all tracking back to his abandonment and the

(01:07:38):
boarding school, and that her editor's more objective eye pulled
her back and reminded her that it wasn't quite that simple.
We can often get stuck in these origin stories, and
we tell them to ourselves so often that they become real.
The problem with these origin stories is that we can
forget that the harmful behave behavior that these mythologies hide,

(01:08:02):
harmed us and irrevocably affected our lives.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Abandoned by a Narcissistic Father with Dr. Lily Dunn

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Dateline NBC

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

Abandoned by a Narcissistic Father with Dr. Lily Dunn

Dateline NBC