Healing from Narcissistic Parenting: Susannah Jowitt's path to freedom

Susannah Jowitt spent nearly five decades wondering why her mother never loved her. This year, she says a life-changing revelation and a guiding book helped her acknowledge a painful truth: it wasn’t her fault. The realization began in 2016, after a therapist friend helped her name the possibility that her mother suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a diagnosis many narcissists do not seek. What followed was a gradual disassembly of guilt, anger and self-doubt, culminating this summer in a shift in how she sees her past and herself.

The turning point, Jowitt says, came not from the death of her mother but from the moment she began to see the family history through a new lens. "As a narcissistic parent, my mother just wasn’t capable of apologising for something she would never be able to acknowledge," she wrote in recounting the years of distance, blame and missed affection. Her mother, Juliet, died aged 84 earlier this summer, leaving Jowitt to confront the lasting impact of the relationship without the filter of her mother’s critique. This summer’s grief was complicated by a lingering sense of rage, driven not by loss but by the knowledge that others continued to lionize a parent who, in Jowitt’s view, wielded control through conditional love and manipulation.

To understand what happened and how to heal, Jowitt turned to Kathleen Saxton, a business entrepreneur who became a renowned psychotherapist and wrote My Parent The Peacock: Discovery And Recovery From Narcissistic Parenting. Saxton’s book, released by John Murray Press, aims to validate survivors’ experiences while offering practical steps toward healing and freedom. Saxton explains that narcissism extends beyond self-absorption to a broader pattern: a constant need for admiration, a lack of empathy, and a tendency toward exploitative behavior that uses loved ones as fuel for the ego. Her work emphasizes that narcissistic parents often make love conditional, prioritize their own needs, and use guilt or fear to control their children.

Saxton’s framework includes a striking epidemiological note: while reliable statistics are elusive, she says that in a crowd of 100 people, about 12 may show narcissistic traits and a handful could meet the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. That context helped Jowitt place her family story within a broader pattern rather than viewing it as an isolated tragedy. In Saxton’s view, the scars from narcissistic parenting persist long after the parent is gone, but they do not have to define the survivor’s future.

Jowitt’s personal history reads like a case study in the dynamics of narcissistic households. Her parents kept a tense balance of praise and withdrawal, using the classic wins-and-losses regime that Saxton describes as part of intermittent reinforcement. She recalls being sent away to boarding school at seven, an experience that she notes helped detach her from the parent’s mood, even as it underscored the absence of genuine affectionate connection. The family’s emotional weather, she writes, was controlled by her mother’s mood, and the brothers and sisters navigated a system designed to pit them against each other for the parent’s approval.

In Saxton’s analysis, children of narcissistic parents often fall into one of three roles: the Golden Child, the Scapegoat, and the Lost Child. Jowitt and her brother oscillated between those roles, with the parent’s need to compare and reward creating a perpetual line of anxiety and longing for approval. The book describes how narcissistic parents manipulate bonds to keep children on edge, a pattern that can echo for decades in how survivors form relationships, trust themselves and set boundaries.

The healing path outlined by Saxton includes a mix of self-recognition and practical exercises designed to help survivors recover their authentic identities. Among the tools are the Russian Dolls approach, which helps readers unwrap the various selves housed within them, and the Two Chairs method, which invites a dialogue between those selves to resolve internal conflicts. Saxton also encourages survivors to accept that difficult experiences can sit alongside positive ones and to begin reframing their stories not as victims but as survivors and thrivers who can build resilience and independence.

For Jowitt, the process has meant confronting a hard truth about her mother’s capacity to love. "Who are you without your mother?" Saxton asks, guiding readers toward a self that is not defined by parental validation. The journey also involves recognizing that healing is not about erasing the past but about restoring a sense of self that was eroded by years of conditional love and emotional neglect. The end goal is a person who can prioritize personal well-being, establish healthy boundaries, and cultivate a chosen family and support network.

The book also delves into the deeper question of why narcissistic traits emerge, including a consideration of epigenetics. Saxton suggests that early life experiences, possibly even events in the womb, can influence the development of narcissistic patterns, particularly in environments shaped by chronic stress and intergenerational trauma. She points to the historical backdrop of the parents’ own upbringings—wars, evacuations, and disrupted attachments—as factors that may have contributed to their behavior. Saxton’s analysis does not excuse harmful acts but offers a framework for understanding and healing from them.

The health implications of narcissistic parenting are a central focus for practitioners and survivors alike. Jowitt’s account emphasizes the long shadow such parenting can cast on mental health, self-esteem and the capacity to form secure attachments. By outlining clear steps toward self-discovery, Saxton’s book provides a blueprint for those who feel stuck in patterns of guilt, anger or self-doubt. For readers, the work offers a validation that their experiences are real and worthy of attention, and it presents concrete strategies to break the cycle.

My Parent The Peacock is set to be published September 25. It is priced at £15.99, with a pre-publication offer available through certain retailers. The publication adds a new voice to the growing discourse on narcissistic parenting and its implications for health and well-being, inviting readers to consider how early family dynamics shape emotional health and how lifelong healing can begin with acknowledgement, boundaries and targeted therapy.

For those seeking professional support, Saxton recommends trauma-informed psychotherapy, EMDR, somatic healing, CBT, DBT or peer support groups, and cautions that the practitioner should be well-versed in the perniciousness of narcissistic parenting. The path to recovery, she writes, starts with recognizing the impact of the parent’s behavior, accepting that one cannot change the narcissistic parent, and prioritizing one’s own mental and emotional health as the foundation for rebuilding life after years of unspoken pain.

In reflecting on her own journey, Jowitt emphasizes the transformation that can occur when survivors reclaim their worth and begin to trust their own experiences. "Best of all, at the age of 56, I am finally free," she wrote, not through her mother’s death but through the moment she allowed herself to look at her life without the parent’s filter of critique. The narrative she shares with Saxton’s guidance is one of resilience: from the three-role dynamic of Golden Child, Scapegoat, and Lost Child to a self that can live with autonomy, happiness and a sense of belonging.