Very well put, that's exactly what I think. And it can be very hard to stand up to that. It's like going against the current. I mean it's like someone's mother and the mother's mother, and all the way back.

Sometimes I'm surprised when I have a conversation with an old person from an old culture, raised in invalidating and just horrible environment, who does not come across as a narcissist. Like this one person telling me that back in the day there were no human rights the way there are these days. Kids were not treated as real people. Many children worked, either on the farm or in the family business. But they didn't do it to buy a computer game obviously, they did it cause they had to, cause everybody did it. And girls did not have a real say in whom they married. It was like a business transaction between families. She had to look pretty and then marry some rich guy and then have a whole bunch of kids. Be a baby-making machine, not a real person.

Actually it reminds me of the movie "Titanic" and Ruth, Rose's narcissistic mother trying to force her to marry the rich guy. Would Rose not have become a narcissist herself had she actually gone through with that? Yet some people - can't be that many, I imagine - go through that experience and yet not become narcissists. How do they do it? How can one break this cycle? These are questions I sometimes think about.