How to Understand and Recover from Narcissistic and Toxic Family Dynamics

Meg Haworth, PhD recalls, "I grew up with a narcissistic parent in a toxic family system, and I also had all kinds of abuse growing up and spent a lot of time in my childhood being very sick."

The image above is from one of her articles. She notes:

“As women entrepreneurs, we already face the many challenges of running a business—balancing strategy, execution, sales, marketing, accounting, and leadership.

“But for some of us, there’s an additional, often invisible, hurdle: the inner wound of self-worth.

“If you’ve been raised in a family with narcissistic or toxic parents or siblings, where criticism, belittlement, and constant invalidation were the norm, this wound can be particularly deep and pervasive."

From article Healing the Self-Worth Wound for Women Entrepreneurs with Narcissistic or Toxic Family Dynamics, by Meg Haworth, Jan 30, 2025 on meghaworth.com.

This audio is an excerpt from a longer video interview, talking about her adverse childhood experiences that led to her own healing and developing a “mind body process that has helped many people gain clarity, health, and recovery.”

Register free to view the ongoing interview by The Shift Network (and learn about her related course): How to Heal Yourself From Toxic & Narcissistic Family Dynamics.

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Dr. Haworth notes "Sexual, physical, and emotional violation is debilitating. It can lead to unhealthy choices, poor personal boundaries and self-defeating patterns.

"All these things get stored in your body as memories that create pain and difficulties."

She adds, "I also drowned and had a near-death experience, and I was highly intuitive.

"I was so sensitive and psychic and empathic that I really just took on a lot of the abuse and a lot of the emotions that were coming my way, and really took it on as a part of me.

"And that led to illness. But it took me many many years to unwind this..."

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Video version of interview excerpt:

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A movie about a narcissistic relationship:

Anna Kendrick has commented about starring in the movie ‘Alice, Darling’ (which she helped get made as an executive producer):

“I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse.”

Describing her former relationship, Kendrick says,

“I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself.

“So when that person is telling you that you have a distorted sense of reality and that you are impossible and that all the stuff that you think is going on is not going on, your life gets really confusing really quickly…”

See ABC News video with her, plus related material from trauma and relationship experts, in article How attachment styles and trauma impact our lives and relationships.

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