Home / Narcissistic Families / Reparenting

Improving Your Life Skills

Purpose:

To help you identify and start practicing the life skills you may not have learned growing up.

Instructions:

Step 1: Create a Life Skills List

You can use Google, YouTube, books, or even AI tools to do this.

The goal here is to collect as many life skills as you can find.

Here are five examples to get you started:

– Time management
– Emotional regulation
– Budgeting
– Boundary setting
– Decision making

Step 2: Which Ones Do You Struggle With?

Go through the list and highlight the ones you didn’t learn or struggle to use consistently.

This step is a judgment-free zone, so please be kind to yourself.

The goal here is understanding where your foundation has cracks, so you can begin to fill them.

Step 3: Select a Skill, Start Practicing

You can choose whichever skill you’d like.

But we recommend selecting the one that’s having the biggest negative impact on your life, and

looking for small ways to practice it each day in low-stakes situations.

For example:

– If you choose budgeting, try creating a budget.
– If you choose time management, try planning out your evening.
– If you choose boundary setting, try saying no to something small.

After each practice, take some time to reflect:

How did it go? Is there anything you could improve for next time?

Keep doing this until the skill starts to come naturally, then move on to the next one.

Final Thoughts:

It’s common for children of narcissistic parents to struggle in this area of development.

Because narcissistic parents are so self-absorbed, they often don’t teach or model them.

It might feel slow, frustrating, or even embarrassing at times, but just keep going, you got this.