A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren.
Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law.
That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no.
How a boundary becomes a theft.
In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted.
Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary.
Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance.
This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.
What the estrangement research actually shows.
The grandmother at the rally is operating from a narrative that most Americans have been raised to accept without question: family is family, and children owe their parents access. But the research on family estrangement tells a completely different story.
Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer conducted the first large-scale national survey of family estrangement in the United States. His findings were staggering. Twenty-seven percent of Americans aged 18 and older had cut off contact with a family member. This isn’t a fringe behavior. It’s more than one in four.
Psychologist Joshua Coleman, author of Rules of Estrangement, has spent decades studying why adult children cut ties with their parents. His consistent finding is that adult children rarely cut off contact without years of distress and failed attempts to repair the relationship. The cutoff is almost never impulsive. It’s the final step in a long process of trying everything else first.
Lindsay Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, puts it more directly. Persistent boundary violations force adult children to choose between constant conflict and walking away. When every conversation becomes a negotiation, when every visit comes with conditions, when every boundary is treated as an attack, the adult child eventually runs out of strategies. Walking away isn’t the first resort. It’s the last one.
The research also reveals something important about who these adult children are. They are, overwhelmingly, the calm ones. The reflective ones. The ones who went to therapy, did the work, and arrived at the painful conclusion that no version of the relationship was going to work. They are not the dramatic ones throwing tantrums. They are the ones who quietly reduced contact after decades of exhaustion.
Which means the grandmother at the rally almost certainly isn’t a victim of a sudden, unexplained cutoff. She’s the end product of years of behavior that her daughter tried to address, tried to work around, and eventually could no longer tolerate. The daughter didn’t abandon her mother. She survived her.
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Why she went to a rally instead of a therapist.
This is where Baumeister’s narcissistic reactance meets the broader psychology of MAGA. A narcissist who has been told no needs two things. They need the boundary to be overruled, and they need to be told that the boundary was wrong in the first place. A therapist would give them neither of those things. A therapist would ask what they did to contribute to the estrangement. A therapist would ask them to consider their daughter’s perspective. A therapist would tell them that their grandchildren are not their property and that access to them is a privilege that has to be earned through safe behavior.
A political rally does the opposite.
A political rally tells her she’s right. That her daughter is the problem. That the world has gone soft. That kids today have no respect. That family values are under attack. That someone in power should step in and restore what was taken from her.
The rally doesn’t challenge her narcissism. It validates it. It gives her a room full of people who will clap when she frames her daughter’s healthy boundary as an injustice. And it gives her a politician who will nod along because her pain is useful to him. Not because he cares about her grandkids. Because her grievance is fuel for his movement.
This is what MAGA provides for people like this grandmother. Not policy. Not governance. Permission to never look inward. Permission to frame every consequence of their own behavior as someone else’s fault. Permission to feel righteous about the exact patterns that drove their children away.
The grandparent rights movement as narcissistic reactance at scale.
The push for grandparent rights legislation is not new. Organizations have lobbied for it for decades. And some cases involve genuinely heartbroken grandparents caught in custody disputes or divorce fallout. Those cases are real and painful.
But mixed into that legitimate pain is something else entirely. A growing cohort of estranged grandparents who don’t want to repair relationships. They want to bypass them. They don’t want to understand why their children set boundaries. They want the government to override those boundaries by force.
This is narcissistic reactance scaled up into policy advocacy. The same psychological mechanism Baumeister identified in individual behavior, the narcissist’s inability to accept a boundary and their drive to restore access through force, expressed as a legislative demand. The narcissist can’t overpower their adult child alone. So they appeal to a higher authority. First it’s the family. Then it’s the church. Then it’s a politician at a rally. The target changes but the mechanism stays the same. Someone make my child obey me.
And MAGA is the perfect vehicle for this because MAGA runs on exactly the same fuel. The belief that your pain is someone else’s fault. The belief that accountability is oppression. The belief that the people who set boundaries against your behavior are the real aggressors. The grandmother at the rally and the movement she’s begging for help are psychologically identical. Both are built on the refusal to look inward and the demand that the world rearrange itself around their wound.
What she’s actually asking for.
Strip away the political framing and what this grandmother is requesting is chilling. She wants the state to compel her adult daughter to give her access to her daughter’s children, against her daughter’s judgment, overriding whatever reasons her daughter has for protecting those children from her.
She doesn’t know those reasons, or won’t acknowledge them. She hasn’t asked. And in front of a crowd of strangers and cameras, she isn’t performing grief. She’s performing entitlement. The tears are real, but they aren’t tears of loss. They’re tears of narcissistic injury. The unbearable feeling of being told no by someone who used to have no choice.
Because that’s what changed. Her daughter grew up. Her daughter got out. Her daughter probably went to therapy, processed the damage, and made the hardest decision a person can make: that the parent who raised them is not safe to be around their children.
That decision cost her daughter more than this grandmother will ever understand. Because the daughter didn’t just lose a mother. She lost the possibility of ever having the mother she needed. And she made that sacrifice to protect her children from the same patterns she endured.
The grandmother’s response to all of that pain, all of that courage, all of that growth was to go to a rally and ask a politician to undo it with a law.
She doesn’t miss her grandkids. She misses the control. And until she can tell the difference between the two, no law, no rally, and no politician will give her what she actually needs. Which was never access. It was always accountability.
Sources
Baumeister, R.F., Catanese, K.R., & Wallace, H.M. (2002). Conquest by Force: A Narcissistic Reactance Theory of Rape and Sexual Coercion. Review of General Psychology, 6(1), 92-135.
Baumeister, R.F., Bushman, B.J., & Campbell, W.K. (2000). Self-Esteem, Narcissism, and Aggression: Does Violence Result from Low Self-Esteem or from Threatened Egotism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(1), 26-29.
Brehm, J.W. (1966). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. Academic Press.
Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. Avery/Penguin Random House.
Coleman, J. (2021). Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. Harmony Books.
Gibson, L.C. (2015). Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. New Harbinger Publications.
Campbell, S. (2022). Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members. HarperCollins.
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