How to Talk to an Abusive Parent

The negative inner parent distorts the client's reality and forces the individual to believe that he or she cannot handle the real world. As the clinician, we must help the client identify the inner child's need to satiate the narcissistic parent. So thinking about that super ego, how do we talk to that internal critic? Do we tell the survivor what we see? Well, it depends. If we're not treating the abuser, can we ethically identify the disorder? No, we can't say that their parent had NPD, but we can say they had narcissistic behavioral patterns.