Were You Parented By A Narcissist? Kathleen Saxton Helps You Identify The Traits
On The Mend
High Performance
4.9 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week’s guest is Kathleen Saxton, who dives deep into the complexities of narcissism, family dynamics, and the painful journey of healing from childhood wounds.
Kathleen breaks down the three types of narcissists, ‘grandiose’, ‘covert’, and ‘malignant’, offering an eye-opening framework, particularly highlighting covert narcissists who use pity and victimhood for supply. She explores how children of narcissists often stop loving themselves, losing their sense of identity in the process, and how family roles like the golden child, scapegoat, and lost child perpetuate unhealthy patterns. Kathleen also explains why those raised by narcissistic parents tend to attract similar partners, as dysfunction feels like home.
Through practical tools like the "empty chair technique" and her three-step recovery roadmap: accept, have compassion for yourself, and design your future, Kathleen offers actionable steps to begin healing.
This episode covers the following themes: narcissism, family dynamics, identity, healing, boundaries, and self-compassion.
Need Support?
Samaritans: Call 116 123 or visit samaritans.org
Narcotics Anonymous: na.org
Alcoholics Anonymous: alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk
Mental Health Mates: mentalhealthmates.co.uk
Shout: https: giveusashout.org
IAPT: https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/adults/nhs-talking-therapies/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Want to know who's coming up next? Hit follow wherever you get your podcast and you'll be the first to find out. |
| 0:06.5 | Today's guest is Kathleen Saxton. If you had a very critical parent, you've never felt that you could actually say, do you know what? You terrorise me as a child or you made me feel so frightened as a child or I never felt I could stand up to you and I'm going to stand up to you |
| 0:21.7 | now and I'm going to tell you what I really think about you. What does narcissistic parenting look |
| 0:26.1 | like? Hi everyone, welcome back to On the Men. Now this is the podcast where we look back at life's |
| 0:33.5 | toughest moments to figure out how to move forward. I watched today's guest on this morning |
| 0:38.5 | probably a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, and I was blown away. Kathleen, thank you so much |
| 0:44.8 | for being here. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for asking me. Well, I mean, we've all been |
| 0:48.6 | very excited you're coming on because they've been kind of swapping videos off you and kind of |
| 0:52.8 | getting very excited because I think |
| 0:54.2 | everyone I speak to about this subject about the subject of narcissism like has a story |
| 1:01.1 | or has something. And it's like one of those things, very similar to addiction. I know there's a |
| 1:05.6 | crossover between narcissism and addiction, which I'm going to talk to you about later on, but I think |
| 1:10.0 | everyone knows someone who's had a problem with addiction, and everyone seems to know someone who's had a problem with narcissism or knows a narcissist. Completely. And it's very misunderstood. But once we begin to understand it, you then can spot it a lot quicker. And obviously there's lots of ways of then learning to cope with what that looks like and how you can overcome and be with people that have either the traits or the full disorder. |
| 1:30.8 | Can you break down exactly what narcissism means? |
| 1:33.3 | So it is a classified personality disorder. |
| 1:36.0 | It's listed in the DSM-5. |
| 1:37.7 | It sits alongside other personality disorders like borderline, etc. |
| 1:41.5 | So it is diagnosable, but like most things, it sits on a spectrum. |
| 1:46.3 | So we've got narcissistic traits, narcissistic personality, and then narcissistic personality |
| 1:51.2 | disorder. And I would wager, the reason why we're also very interested in it right now is that |
| 1:56.2 | we all wonder whether or not we might have the odd trait within ourselves. And I think most of us do |
| 2:01.4 | have the odd narcissistic trait or tendency under certain amounts of pressure. But that's not the |
... |
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