Please don’t create a false equivalency between someone who was spoiled and doted on in childhood and someone who had a childhood filled with chronic verbal abuse and psychological torment. Being spoiled may be very unhealthy, but it’s not the same thing.

And people always do this whenever I bring up the fact that research has shown being overvalued, doted upon, spoiled can lead to narcissistic traits. “Oh well that’s not a loving good childhood at all!” That’s a matter of opinion, actually. Because —

— to someone who did undergo chronic bullying and abuse in childhood, I am sure they would’ve loved to have been doted upon and spoiled instead. So it’s kind of insulting to survivors of adverse childhood experiences to continue to justify a narcissist’s behavior and say—

— their childhood was also abusive like ours when they were spoiled. Sure, it was unhealthy. Maybe it taught them an excessive sense of entitlement yes. But it wasn’t toxic like the way chronic childhood maltreatment is.

That’s why I never agreed with that part of Harry Potter books where Dumbledore claimed, “What you did to Dudley (spoiling) was worse than what you did to Harry” to the Dursleys. Pretty sure locking him in a closet as a young child and verbally abusing him was far worse, fam.

Adverse childhood experiences lead to addiction, suicidal ideation, depression, chronic anxiety, a pattern of getting into abusive relationships and many health problems. Being spoiled and then choosing to abuse someone in adulthood is a result of someone’s own choices.

Just like being abused in childhood and then treating people well is a choice too. We can all make those choices. But claiming being spoiled is worse or equal to chronic childhood maltreatment is false and insulting to those who have been chronically terrorized. It simply is not.

Verbal/emotional/psychological/sexual/physical abuse leads to a lifelong inner critic that you have to do a great deal of therapy and inner work to dismantle. It causes self-sabotage and self-harm in soooo many ways.

People who were abused in childhood might think to themselves, “I would have preferred to have been spoiled as a child than outright hated, terrorized to the point where I self-harmed or wanted to die.” It’s not about trading places with the spoiled child’s adult character or—

— abusive life choices. It’s about how insulting it is for people to think being spoiled is somehow equivalent to the type of maltreatment empathic survivors have gone through yet these survivors chose to treat others well while narcissists who had a decent enough childhood —

— made the choice to abuse.

People who are justifying abusers being spoiled — do you actually see the point in this post or are you just an enabler? You are literally missing the points in this thread and it’s actually frankly gross. Childhood upbringing is irrelevant. Abuse is a choice.

Go on defending weirdos who are spoiled AF though and then choose to terrorize others while ignoring those who are ACTUALLY abused and victims their whole lives as a result of these monsters. But you’re not getting space on my platforms.