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Narc Narc, Who’s There? The Question That Took Me More Than Forty Years to Answer

  • 2 hours ago
  • 4 min read

By Victoria Cuore



The most dangerous thing about my childhood was how normal it looked from the outside. The lawn was cut. The house was clean. Nothing looked broken. That was the problem. When a family is built on image, appearances become evidence.


If the family appears happy, everyone must be happy. If nobody is talking about a problem, there must not be one. Children raised in those environments learn something very early. The truth matters less than the appearance of the truth.


It took me more than forty years to understand how dangerous that lesson really was. Not because it taught me to lie. Because it taught me to distrust myself. I learned to question my feelings, my instincts, my memories, my reactions, and even my worth. Most of all, I learned to assume that if something felt wrong, the problem was probably me.


That belief followed me for decades. It followed me into relationships, friendships, and into opportunities I talked myself out of. Into rooms where I felt I had to prove I belonged. For years, I thought I was struggling with confidence. 


Looking back, I can see something much more painful. I was struggling under the weight of a verdict I never deserved. I had been assigned a role. The black sheep. 


The difficult one. The emotional one. The problem. And once a child accepts that role, they spend a lifetime trying to escape it.


I know because I did. I became an expert at proving myself. I worked harder. Gave more. Forgave more. Endured more. Achieved more. I collected accomplishments the way other people collect memories. Each one silently asking the same question: Am I enough now?


What breaks my heart today is realizing how long I believed that answer lived somewhere outside of me. I thought if I became successful enough, resilient enough, useful enough, eventually someone would look at me and say: "We were wrong about you."


But those words never came. Not because I failed. Because the people I spent my life trying to convince were never the jury. They were the authors of the accusation. That realization changed everything. Not overnight. Not dramatically. It arrived slowly, carrying grief with it.


Because when you finally see the truth, you don't just grieve what happened. You grieve what it cost. I grieved the years spent doubting myself. I grieved the relationships I accepted because they felt familiar. I grieved the opportunities I walked away from because I didn't trust my own instincts. 


I have survived adversity that should have broken me. I have survived losses that changed me. I have survived battles I would never wish on another human being. Yet the wound that took the longest to heal was believing I was difficult to love.


That is the hidden cost of growing up in a family where image matters more than intimacy. 


You don't just lose safety. You lose your reflection. You stop seeing yourself clearly because you've spent so many years looking at yourself through the eyes of people who never truly saw you.


The hardest part wasn't realizing my parents were narcissistic. The hardest part was realizing they knew how to make me spend my adulthood trying to recover from my childhood. What shattered me was understanding that the same level of care that was given to the perception of what others outside those four walls thought was not extended to the emotional safety of the children living behind that door of masks.


Some families raise children. Others raise reputations. It took me more than forty years to understand the difference. By the time I did, I was no longer just a daughter. I was a mother, and I knew from the day Faith was born that I was going to break the cycle of this generational trauma. 



Children do not become what we tell them. They become what we show them. I could not teach her self-worth while questioning my own. I could not instill courage in her while remaining silent. I could not teach her to trust herself while continuing to distrust myself. The cycle had already taken enough. It would not take her too.


That became the reason I wrote Narc Narc, Who's There? Not because I wanted revenge. Not because I wanted sympathy. Because family secrets become family legacies unless someone is willing to tell the truth. 


For most of my life, I asked the wrong question. What's wrong with me? Today I know the answer. Nothing. Nothing was wrong with me. The problem was growing up in a system that asked me to carry their burdens, lies, and secrets, all of which belonged to the adults around me.


The problem was learning to earn what should have been given freely.

The problem was confusing self-abandonment with love.


That is the lie I wrote this book to expose.


Because somewhere there is a little girl standing in a beautiful house, wondering why she feels invisible.


I spent more than forty years trying to become someone worthy of love.


What a tragedy.


To spend a lifetime earning something that should have been given to you as a child.



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