Drowned in Stories
Guilt, truth and covert narcissism in the parent–child relationship

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

I was two years old when I nearly drowned. At least, that is how I always knew it: as a story, told by my mother. In her version, she was the one who saved me. She jumped—pregnant, still in her regular clothes—into the deep pool in panic, pulled me like a lifeless doll from the water, and lost her unborn child from the impact of her belly hitting the surface. My life was saved — but at a heavy price. That is how she told it, year after year, to me and to anyone willing to listen.

 

It wasn’t until thirty years later that I discovered none of it was true — my mother had not been pregnant, and she hadn’t been the one who saved me. It was the lifeguard who pulled me from the bottom and brought me back to life. His hands, not hers, held me as I gasped for air and regained consciousness.

 

What this realization did to me is hard to capture in words. It felt as though I had not only once literally almost drowned, but had been held underwater for a lifetime in stories that were never mine. I carried a guilt that wasn’t mine — the belief that my existence had caused the loss of another life — and I was raised in a reality that was not the reality.

 

Years later, in adulthood, I recognized the same patterns again. At first only as a vague echo, a feeling. In my relationship with my ex I felt a strange familiarity: the lying, the twisting of facts, the belittling of my emotions, the imposition of guilt. Gradually I began to understand why. I recognized my mother in her. What felt familiar turned out to be the repetition of an old script.

 

That script left deep traces. At sixteen I became depressed and had suicidal thoughts. It led to family therapy. For a moment, there seemed to be space to name the patterns. But after a few sessions my mother pulled the plug. “It’s not good for the children,” she said. In hindsight I understand it became too dangerous for her. Any psychologist with half an eye could have seen where the real problem lay.

 

Today I am in schema focused therapy. Not by coincidence. The beliefs I inherited about myself, others and the world find their roots in my upbringing. My relationship with my ex reactivated them. Only then did I begin, with help, to see the connections: how my childhood and my adult love life intertwined, bound together by the same undercurrent of covert narcissism.

 

Writing is one of my ways to come up for air — to find my own breath, where it was so often taken from me. In this essay, I try to reclaim the stories in which I drowned, not to center my mother or my ex, but to rediscover my own voice and truth.

 

 

 

The heroine and the guilt

The swimming pool story is more than just a childhood memory for me. It is a mirror of how my mother dealt with reality. What actually happened — a lifeguard pulling me from the bottom — was overwritten by a story in which she took center stage. I became a supporting character in my own life story, while she cast herself as the heroine who had made a sacrifice.

 

The story was carefully constructed: her intuition that made her turn around and see me go under in the deep end, the leap into the water fully clothed, the lifeguard who wanted to reprimand her for it, the miscarriage that followed. Everything revolved around her courage and her suffering. For me, there was only one role left: that of the cause. My existence, I learned, had come at a price.

 

In this way, not only a lie was told, but a burden was placed. In my mother’s version, my rescue was inseparably tied to loss. I grew up with a guilt I could never repay: the idea that my life had damaged hers. Whenever I named this, I always got the same response: “Well, it just happened that way, otherwise your sister would never have been born.”

 

Those words sounded as if they were meant to comfort, but in reality they cast my guilt in concrete. They confirmed the logic of sacrifice: my existence had excluded another existence. My sense of gratitude and my sense of guilt became intertwined. I could not grieve the sorrow attached to my story, because I was supposed to be grateful that something good had come from it.

 

Thus my own pain was constantly smoothed over, while my mother’s story remained unchanged. It became a familiar tale, repeated again and again. For her, it was a way to place herself at the center of drama and recognition. For me, it was an immersion in shame and confusion.

 

 

 

The father as shadow figure

Alongside rewriting the story of my near-drowning, my mother also rewrote the image of my father. Throughout my childhood he stood in the shadow of her stories. He was portrayed as someone who hoarded his money, never gave without serving his own interests, someone not to be trusted. Time and again the same message sounded: “Don’t tell your father, you know how he is.” A veil of distrust was woven, shaping my view of him long before I had the chance to know him for myself.

 

Only when I became an adult, and especially after I had children of my own, did this image begin to shift. I came to know my father as someone who, however flawed and awkward at times, could offer support. Not a perfect man, but a father who could indeed be present. The cognitive dissonance this provoked was immense: the man I encountered stood in stark contrast to the caricature I had taken for reality all those years.

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At the same time, my father was also the great absentee of my youth. He provided bread on the table, but emotionally he remained unreachable. After a twenty five year relationship with my mother, he entered with her into a cycle of leaving and returning for fifteen years — caught in a trauma bond that I would later recognize in my own love life.

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Only when he finally left for good did he truly begin to live. In hindsight, he says it would have been better to go earlier, but back then he believed he was doing the right thing by staying. For the children.

 

That choice remains painful, but also double-edged. Perhaps his staying kept us trapped in an unhappy dynamic; perhaps it protected us from something even worse. We will never know. What I do know is that he too was surviving. And that, in the end — however paradoxical — in recent years I have received more support and recognition from him than I ever did from my mother.

 

 

 

The scapegoat child

In our family my place was determined early on. Where my sister, and later also my brother, were cherished, I ended up in the role of the one who always fell short. They could do little wrong, while I was constantly the lightning rod. The smallest misstep was magnified, my choices ridiculed and my presence burdened with criticism.

 

The most painful moments were when my mother projected her shame directly onto me. As a teenager I dressed like a skater, in wide pants that made me feel safe. My mother would literally say she wouldn't walk beside me in the street. My clothing became a reason to distance herself from me — as if it wasn’t only what I wore that was wrong, but who I was.

 

That shame took root. It taught me not only that I was “different,” but that my being different was something I had to apologize for. While my brother and sister were wrapped in admiration, I was continually pushed back into a place of lack and failure. I learned to see myself through my mother’s eyes: as someone who never quite measured up — always too much or too little.

 

In hindsight I can see how this fit within the dynamic of covert narcissism. By making one child the scapegoat, the illusion of perfection could be preserved elsewhere. The scapegoat is used to discharge tension and to reinforce control. For me it meant that I spent most of my childhood in survival mode — always alert to the next attack, never truly free to discover who I was.

 

 

 

The Repetition in Love

What I learned as a child repeated itself later in my adult life. At first not as a clear insight, but as a strange familiarity. In my relationship with my ex, from the very beginning I sensed something recognizable in her way of being: the lying, the twisting of facts, the lack of empathy, the subtle imposition of guilt that wasn’t mine. These behaviors cut me deeply, yet at the same time they did not feel unfamiliar.

 

Only later, when the confusion gave way to reflection, did I begin to understand why. I recognized my mother in her. The patterns I had unconsciously learned to carry as a child came alive again in the intimacy of a love relationship. First as a gnawing sense — the feeling that I had lived this before — and later with increasing clarity, as I began to see the patterns.

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That recognition was both painful and revealing. Painful, because I became entangled once more in the same dynamic that had marked my childhood. Revealing, because it forced me to look back. I saw that my relationship was not an isolated drama, but the repetition of a script that had been written long ago.

 

Through my ex I began to understand that my childhood was not a loose series of incidents, but a system of covert narcissism. And that I, without realizing it, had spent years learning to speak its language fluently. What to an outsider might have seemed strange or incomprehensible, felt familiar to me. It was the echo of my past — disguised as love.

 

 

 

Naming the patterns

The label didn’t fall from the sky. Early on I felt that something was fundamentally off with my mother. She sometimes sought help, began treatments, but always ended them prematurely. Later, when I was working in mental health care myself, for a long time I leaned toward thinking in terms of borderline. Many features fit: intensity, instability, unpredictability, the whirlpool of closeness and rejection. The same confusion played out in my adult relationship. My ex was later said to have “borderline traits,” something only explicitly named much later. And yet something didn’t add up; there remained a gap in the explanation, as if a gear was missing that truly drove it all.

 

When I came across the concept of covert narcissism, the gears clicked into place. It’s not that I believe any label can fully capture a person, but it can make the logic of patterns visible: the appropriation of stories, the structural distortion of facts, the shifting of blame, the lack of mirroring empathy.

 

Since then, in moments of doubt, I can return to the facts and line them up against those criteria one by one. Not as a condemnation, but as a way of reclaiming my reality. Naming patterns is, for me, an act of de-blaming: I learn to distinguish what is mine from what was projected onto me.

 

 

 

Psychological Working-Through

The undercurrent had consequences early on. At sixteen I became depressed and had suicidal thoughts. It brought our family into systemic therapy; for a brief moment it felt as if there was breathing space to name the unspoken. But after only a few sessions it was over. “Not good for the children.” My mother pulled the plug precisely at the moment the mirror became too clear.

 

Today I am in schema focused therapy. I examine the beliefs my childhood anchored in me about myself, the other and the world: that my truth doesn’t matter, that love is conditional, that I carry guilt that isn’t mine. I learn to recognize my modes — the vulnerable child who goes under, the pleaser who will do anything to avoid conflict and keep the peace, the detached protector who feels nothing to avoid drowning again and that ruthless inner critic who, with my mother’s voice, keeps repeating the story of shame. Step by step I practice another movement: reality checks, setting and guarding boundaries, self-compassion, re-mirroring, giving attention to my feelings and no longer ignoring my pain.

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Writing, among other things, helps with this. With every sentence I come a little further above water — not to unmask someone else, but to reclaim my own breath.

 

 

 

Philosophical Grounding

Perhaps it's no coincidence that themes such as truth, empathy, connection, recognition and love have preoccupied me all my life. What I lacked as a child became my deepest longing. Without knowing why, these concepts became my inner compass.

 

At a young age I was captivated by philosophy. The book Sophie’s World opened a door to another reality — one in which questions mattered more than masks and searching mattered more than fixed stories. Reading became my escape, my way of finding air in an environment that often felt suffocating.

 

Now, at forty, I understand better why these themes struck me so deeply. They were not abstractions, but existential answers. They gave language to what I had so often missed in my own life: a love that is not conditional, a truth that is not distorted, a connection that does not come at the expense of yourself and a recognition that is not dismissed.

 

Through my experiences I have been shaped not only in my pain, but also in my quest. And out of that quest a personal philosophical vision has emerged — a vision I now dare to articulate. It is a vision that says love is the connective principle, that truth can be an act of love and that empathy is the key to a humane world. Perhaps that is the ultimate paradox: that it's precisely my scars that have become the source of my thinking.

 

 

 

Conclusion

I was two years old when I nearly drowned. For years I believed my mother had saved me, but it was someone else’s hands that pulled me from the water. It took me a long time to understand that this was not only a childhood memory but also a blueprint. I did not drown just once, but over and over again: in stories that were not mine, in guilt that did not belong to me and in loyalties that suffocated me.

 

And yet I am here. Writing, I come to the surface, again and again. Gasping for breath — but this time, my own breath. Where my childhood taught me that love was conditional and truth distorted, I now learn that love and truth need one another in order to heal.

 

Perhaps that is my greatest victory: that I am no longer trapped in the lie, but have rediscovered my own voice. What began as survival has now become a philosophical quest. And in that quest lies a promise — that connection is possible, that empathy can be a moral compass, and that truth can be an act of love.

 

I was not only saved by a lifeguard who pulled me from the water as a child — I have also saved myself, by learning to breathe again in reality. And that story is now, finally, mine.