Ene of the earliest memories Katja Schäfer has is of a day at kindergarten. Her mother had agreed to support the teachers, so she accompanied the group that day. “A child cried and was allowed to sit on her lap,” says Schäfer, “and I wanted to sit on her lap too, but she sent me away.” She was so sad at the time that she still remembers it today, more than 40 years later reminded of this incident. And it continued in that style. Her mother had not a kind word for her, she never took her daughter in her arms. “Even when I cried from grief or hurt, nothing loving came from her. It was always my own fault, if I had to do something differently, it wouldn’t have happened.” When Schäfer was raped as a young woman and told her mother about it the morning after, she only said: “Anyone who walks into the fire dies in it .”
If a parent is extremely unloving or self-centered, then the suspicion is that that father or mother has a narcissistic personality disorder, says Silke Wiegand-Grefe. She is a professor of psychology and works with the children of mentally ill parents at the Eppendorf University Hospital. “These people can hardly live satisfying, give-and-take relationships because their self-esteem is impaired.” They see everything through their own glasses and do not realize that others feel and think differently than they do.