Anastasia, I TOTALLY get what you're saying. When I was in my teens, I knew that my mother was mean to me. I was confused, and I didn't understand why she treated me the way she did. But I just sort of lived with it because it was my "normal." That's the world that I had grown up in. Yes, life was hard for me, but at that age, I wasn't able to grasp just how bad it really was. I too, just coped.
Now that I'm older, and educated on what NPD is, I do realize that things were MUCH worse than I thought they were. A few years ago I started writing down some of the things that my NM had done to me, thinking that I may one day write a memoir, and I started remembering things that she did to me at a very young age that were simply heinous. When I relay these things back to my therapist, I'm shocked by my own words, that I actually managed to live through all that.
What I wonder, is if THEY know how badly they treated us. I wonder if my NM knows how cruel and abusive she was, or if it was HER normal. Are Ns mentally ill, and able to justify their behavior, or are they fully cognizant of their abuse? My T thinks that in the N's mind, the child was simply being punished for bad behavior - it was deserved, therefore there is no remorse. Guess no one will ever know for sure what goes on in an N's mind, but I think about it a lot.