Infantilization: How Narcissistic Parents Use Undermining as Coercive Control
Sometimes a moment in a video game stops you cold. Not because of the gameplay. Because something a character says sounds exactly like someone you grew up with.
In Dying Light: The Beast, there’s a character who won’t stop undermining Kyle Crane. Before Crane even tries anything, this person is already at it: “The turbines are in that building — but I doubt you can get them going.” “You’re going to get yourself killed.” “Didn’t I just tell you that a moment ago?”
Crane barely reacts. He says “just point me in the right direction” and gets on with it. He does things his own way. The doubting becomes background noise.
If you grew up with a father who talked to you like that — relentless, a comment landing before every move you made — watching that scene hits differently. Because you didn’t get to be Crane. You were a child. And the person doing the undermining wasn’t a stranger. He was the one you depended on for everything.
What that scene is actually showing — without naming it — is infantilization. And understanding what that word means can reframe a lot of what you experienced growing up.
What Infantilization Actually Means
Infantilization is when someone treats you as less capable than you are — not occasionally, but as a consistent pattern. It’s being spoken to as though your judgment can’t be trusted. As though you need guidance before every decision. As though your attempts are probably going to fail and someone wiser needs to be nearby to witness it.
In narcissistic abuse, infantilization is one of the most common and least recognized tools. It doesn’t look like aggression. It can even sound like concern. “I’m just worried about you.” “I’m only saying this because I know better.” But the effect — repeated, over years — is the systematic erosion of your confidence in your own mind.
Why does my father undermine me? That’s a question a lot of people carry for years without a clean answer. Infantilization is often that answer. The undermining isn’t accidental, and it isn’t really about your competence. It’s about maintaining a dynamic where you stay small and they stay in charge.
How It Works as Coercive Control
Coercive control is a pattern of behavior that strips away a person’s autonomy — not through a single act but through accumulated pressure over time. Infantilization is one of its core mechanisms.
The comments themselves might seem small in isolation. “I doubt you can do it.” “You’ll get yourself hurt.” “Didn’t I already tell you?” Taken one at a time, each one is dismissible. Strung together, day after day, year after year, they do something specific to a developing nervous system.
They create anticipatory anxiety — you start doubting yourself before you’ve even begun. They build self-distrust. You hesitate where you used to move forward. You second-guess decisions you would have made easily. And gradually, the internal critic starts to sound a lot like the external one.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s what sustained coercive control through infantilization produces — an internalized voice that keeps doing the work even when the original source isn’t in the room.
The Learned Helplessness It Creates
There’s a term in psychology called learned helplessness. It describes what happens when a person is exposed to repeated situations where their actions don’t seem to change the outcome — where trying and not trying produce the same result. Eventually, they stop trying. Not because they’ve given up in a dramatic way. Because their nervous system has genuinely learned that effort doesn’t matter.
The trap your father built had this structure built in. He would undermine you before you tried. You’d become uncertain. Something would go imperfectly — as it does for everyone learning anything. He’d step in to tell you he was right all along. Your confidence would drop a little more. And the cycle would repeat.
There was no winning move.
Succeed, and the success gets minimized.
Fail, and it’s proof of his point. Try to be independent, and that gets punished.
Express doubt, and that gets encouraged — because doubt keeps you coming back to him.
Over enough time, the child caught in that loop absorbs a core belief: I cannot trust my own judgment.
That belief doesn’t stay in childhood. It follows you into every decision, every relationship, every moment where you have to act and someone nearby has a strong opinion about what you should do.
Why You Couldn’t Just Ignore It the Way Crane Does
Kyle Crane is an adult in a peer relationship. The other character has no real power over him. He can hear the doubt, let it go, and keep walking. Nothing is actually at stake.
You were a child in a dependent relationship with a parent who controlled your emotional safety, your sense of belonging, and the consequences of resistance. Ignoring the comments wasn’t a neutral act — it came with a cost. Push back and connection disappears. Resist and something escalates.
Your nervous system learned that quickly. And it made the only rational choice available to it: don’t resist. Accommodate.
Give in when the pressure gets high enough. Not because you were weak. Because your survival system was working exactly as it should — trying to keep you as safe as possible inside a situation that was never safe to begin with.
You didn’t surrender to the infantilization. You adapted to it. That’s an important distinction, and it’s one that narcissistic abuse recovery often hinges on.
What Watching Crane Actually Does to Your Nervous System
It’s not just entertainment. When you watch Crane hear the doubt and not internalize it — when you see him keep going anyway, unbothered — your nervous system is registering something it was never shown growing up.
A person can hear criticism and not be changed by it. Doubt from someone else doesn’t have to become doubt about yourself.
This was always an option. Just not one that was available to you at the time, in that relationship, at that age.
That recognition can feel strange. A little like grief. Because if it really is that dismissible — if it really is just noise — then what does that mean about all the years it wasn’t?
It means you were a dependent child under coercive control, not a peer in a balanced relationship. The comparison was never fair to you. It still isn’t.
The Belief Infantilization Installs
When someone speaks with absolute certainty, it doesn’t mean they’re correct. These are two completely different things.
But in a household built on narcissistic abuse, certainty and correctness get fused together. The authority figure is always certain. Being wrong in front of them comes with consequences. So the nervous system learns to treat confident doubt — from anyone — as a signal that something is wrong with you.
That wiring doesn’t switch off when you leave the house. When someone expresses doubt about you now, the old response can still fire. Explain more. Justify yourself. Give them something to work with. Or just back down entirely. Not because you’ve assessed the situation and decided that’s the right call — because your body remembers the cost of doing otherwise.
This is the long reach of infantilization. It doesn’t just affect you while it’s happening. It shapes how you relate to your own judgment for years afterward.
What Recovery From Infantilization Actually Looks Like
It doesn’t mean becoming Kyle Crane. He’s a game character without a nervous system shaped by childhood trauma. That level of effortless dismissal isn’t the goal, and chasing it can become its own form of self-criticism.
What recovery from infantilization looks like is quieter and slower. It’s learning to hear doubt from someone and pause before treating it as verdict. Noticing the old reflex — the urge to justify, explain, or back down — and recognizing it as a learned response rather than an accurate read of the situation.
A grounded response to being undermined doesn’t need to be dramatic. It can sound like: “I hear your concern. I’m going to try it anyway.” Or simply: “I’ve decided to do this.” No argument. No detailed defence. No need to win their approval before you’re allowed to act.
Just ownership of your own decision. Quiet and firm.
The core shift happening underneath that is this: slowly separating someone’s certainty from their correctness. Slowly recognizing that someone doubting you is not the same as danger arriving. Those two things got fused together under real pressure, in real childhood circumstances. Pulling them apart again is real work — but it’s work that can be done.
If you recognize these patterns — difficulty trusting your own judgment, automatic self-doubt when someone expresses criticism, the long-term effects of growing up with a parent who undermined your confidence — these are common responses to narcissistic abuse and infantilization in childhood. A trauma-informed therapist can help identify where these responses came from and how to begin updating them. EMDR and somatic approaches are particularly effective for patterns that feel more like body responses than conscious choices.
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