Gwyneth Paltrow And Goop Are Leading The Fight Against Narcissistic Parents

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Gwyneth Paltrow is many things. Actress. Singer. Lifestyle expert. “Common woman.” But she’s also a parent. And she’s presumably perfect at that, too. So, to perfect the rest of us, she’s enlisted Dr. Robin Berman, a psychiatrist who works with kids, but she can’t work with kids without fixing their parents. And if someone needs fixing, Ole Goopy can hear that from a thousand miles away. She straps on her $3,000 hand-sewn satchel, grabs her artisanally carved walking stick and begins the journey to find the person who can do the fixing, via her website of course.

Here is Dr. Berman describing an example of a narcissistic parent. Or, an anecdote where she publicly shames and judges another woman. One of those!

I was in the grocery store when a three-year-old girl burst into tears in line after her mom said that she could not have candy. Looking agitated, her mom barked, “I have no time for this nonsense right now!” Then came the clincher: “Why do you always do this to me when I am in a hurry? You sure know how to ruin my day.”

Ugh. My heart sank. I felt badly for this little girl, not because her mom said no to her candy request, but because her mom was so blinded by her own feelings that she could not have empathy for her daughter. A less narcissistic mother would have taken her daughter’s hand, looked her in the eye and calmly said: “I get how much you want this candy, but we don’t have candy before lunch.” If the mom had shown she understood her daughter’s feelings, instead of dumping her own, the girl would have felt heard and the tantrum could have subsided.

OK. Look. I have an almost-3-year-old and yes this mom’s reaction was pretty sh*tty, but maybe this mom had a really, really sh*tty day. Also, have you ever tried to reason with a 3-year-old? That “the girl would have felt heard and the tantrum could have subsided” thing is not how life works. How life works is the 3-year-old cries and cries until she sees something shiny and forgets what she was upset about, or she gets the damn candy.

But one thing is for sure. If you got a problem, yo, Goop’ll solve it.

Source: Goop

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