Shibboleths and Virtue Signaling and Gaslighting Lies "Pick Me" and Vulnerable Narcissists tell themselves

Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic abuse, I'm exploring gaslighting tactics narcissists use to make people feel excluded. These include shibboleths and gatekeeping and virtue-signaling.  The worst offenders are the "Pick Me" or vulnerable narcissists who try to get people to side with or like them, by slandering or humiliating others. 

The Funny Handshake Club shibboleth

A shibboleth, in case you're unfamiliar like I was, is a code word or gesture that identifies group members. Only those who past the test are admitted. This is also called in-group signaling, in which by knowing the secret handshake, proves loyalty. But more often, these gatekeeping games are ways to keep people out rather than in. Vulnerable or covert narcissists love making people feel left out. My narcissistic mother prides herself upon being in some sort of "in crowd" that no one else is. But it's just narcissistic fantasy because she never actually leaves the house and lives Facebook virtual reality. There are about three people who have not gone no contact with her. 

The Posturing Imposter

The virtue-signaling Pick Me is most often seen in religious and political groups as well as social media. But like my Facebook warrior mother, it's an empty echo chamber. They're busy preaching to everyone and listening only to themselves. So there is not group but a collection of random finger waggers. They think they're saying what others are thinking but since no one is listening, no one hears anything but their own rants. They're just a club of isolated people wearing team colors. 

In-group signaling in the Imaginary In Crowd

My grandiose narcissist parents have never actually lived in reality. They exist in an auto-gaslit world of  imagined power, domination and control. In this fantasy cult, they reign supreme and other people hang on their every word. Their off behavior has elements of delusion but it's not delusional. They are not schizophrenic or sociopathic. They just act that way. But they aren't team players. I've always said my parents are soloists, not choir members. And they are also ordained to "preach to the choir" exhorting and calling out sin only they can see, in disturbingly attention-seeking ways. But it is all babble. Because I can see on people's faces that they have no idea what either of them are talking about. And that reinforces the idea that they speak a special ex cathedra language. 

Exhibitionism 

Both my mom and dad fancied themselves "cool kids" and brave renegades. But they acted like irresponsible, immature goofballs doing all kinds of erratic, illegal, immoral, unprincipled acts. They believe other people admire and are jealous of them when really it was pity or disapproval. They said and did strange things they thought made them sound tough or awesome, but made them look foolish. My mother, at 60,  threw a pie in my face at her work picnic, thinking it would make other people laugh. It didn't and she was censured. It took me a lot of work to heal trauma bonding and betrayal blindness to be able to admit that without FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) that I was betraying them. 

"Not Like Other Girls" and Gang Symbols 

So the irony is that while the "pick me" wants to be seen as special and superior "not like other girls" they also want to be part of a clique. They like ganging up on vulnerable people to assuage their own ineptitude. They need people to score off and their children present perfect targets, being naturally attached to their parents. They use the scapegoat or Broken Vending Machine Child as I, like a voodoo doll, poking pins in her. They humiliate and ridicule her to make themselves feel big and important. Yes, this is disturbing for normal people. But these dark tetrads get off on emotional BDSM. 

The Self-Gaslighting Shame Spiral 

And the more audacious behavior they get away with the worse they get. I as their Scapegoat Child certainly never spoke up because to do so would incur their narcissistic rage. No one must question and any disagreement is taken as narcissistic insult. And yet they are outrageously insulting. My exhibitionist mother brags that she loves to shock people and that God has given her special entitlement to publicly humiliate people to call them out of sin (!) But narcissists don't age well and as they get older, they become more vulnerable and malignant narcissists. Decades of narcissistic injury and increasing need for narcissistic supply have embittered them. All they know is coercive control so they have no real friends.  They've also experienced shame which they can't tolerate. So they blame-shift and play more DARVO. 

 

The Ultimate End Game Game End

All their backstabbing, mobbing, smear campaigns, exploitation, destabilizing and narcissistic abuse come back to bite them with a vengeance. They burn through people they've exploited like grill gas. Ultimately most everyone has to go no contact with them because the relationship is so toxic. They die alone, feeble, frail and furious. And this might lead you to feel sorry for them. But don't. You couldn't stop these logical consequences any more than you can hold back a tsunami. 

Resisting the Childhood Trauma Response of Fawning and Fixing

Hello my friends. Today in my CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm writing in real time experience with my trauma response of fawning. I'm sitting here in the hospital waiting for my husband who is having an MRI. And the man sitting next to me is triggering that people pleasing urge. And I have the option to do what I've always done an give him his way, or resist it. I chose resistance. 

FOG of fear, obligation and guilt

It began when the man came in reeking of cigarettes and making me feel physically nauseous. I wanted to get up and move but fear of upsetting someone, the sense of obligation to humor them and the chronic guilt over not being good enough, kept me stuck there. I realized that this is a byproduct of narcissistic parent enmeshment and gaslighting. I was groomed to humor and put up with unpleasantness, no matter how much it cost me. My role was to be my parents source of narcissistic supply and anyone else's who demanded it. 

Rigid rules for scapegoat, special exemptions for everyone else

My narcissistic father said that it doesn't matter what anyone did to me, I had to always do the "right thing." What that meant he never said and he certainly never modeled, being a grandiose narcissist. Which set me up for a lifetime of rolling over for abuse. And he himself, being an arrogant narcissist never kept quiet about his opinion or what he believed he was owed. He took narcissistic injury everywhere. So did my narcissistic mother who never once took my part against anyone and will loudly criticize and humiliate me for doing things she herself does, even if I have not done them. She sets up "gotcha" stings to make me look bad then plays DARVO. This causes me extreme cognitive dissonance in which I don't know right from wrong. How do you know if you're told you're always wrong? If I said he stunk, she'd tut-tut her finger at me. Yet she would be the first to complain if was her or her Golden Child dealing with it. But for the scapegoat child, DIMMER (diminish, invalidate, minimize, marginalize, Erase, Reduce) is her M.O. 

The Mandatory Answer Trauma Response

I tolerated the obnoxious smell because I was taught to silence my own needs. But then the man began loudly complaining about why my husband was called in first before him. He asked me when his appointment was, when we got there, etc. This is where the fawning really kicks in. My hypervigilant anxiety tells me I have to answer someone's questions, no matter how rudely it is asked or whether it's any of the person's business or not. I have been groomed to cater to arrogant people like a Broken Vending Machine Child, a term I coined to explain the endless compulsion we feel to pay, from our own pockets, with no reciprocity. The thought of not answering questions, even if I don't know the answer, causes me intense anxiety. But then I realized that I don't have to answer questions just because they ask. I don't owe them a response. Especially not to foolish, rhetorical questions. 

Parentified Child Trauma Response

I especially don't owe a grown man, an answer that is patently obvious. We had the earlier appointment, end of. But parentification at a young age, taught me to endlessly soothe and humor petulant, immature adults as if I were the adult and they were the child. And if I didn't have an answer for them, well I better find one quick or there would be narcissistic rage hell to pay. Normal people see someone getting more dysregulated and they roll their eyes and ignore it. Or they sell popcorn and enjoy the shitshow. Well Adult Children of Narcissists don't have that luxury. All my childhood trauma goes into overdrive and I will give the person anything to keep the peace. I found myself patiently explaining to him when my husband's appointment was and how we had had to wait as well. Like this senior citizen was a whiny child. Then he said, "Oh, so it's HIS fault that I HAVE to wait?" And suddenly the light bulb went on. 

💡💡"I'm not the Shell Answer Lady nor the complaint department. I don't owe explanations to petulant people who just want it their way."

The Fixing Trauma Response

He didn't want an answer. He wanted me to fix it so that he got what he wanted. Just like my narcissistic parents never wanted explanations. They demanded rigid unquestioning hoop-hopping. In fact, if I did explain anything, I was told "you're just defending yourself. You're making excuses." Which was what this man was saying. I don't want reasons, I want my way. It didn't matter that everyone else was telling him he had to wait his turn. Just like when I was young and my morbidly obese narcissistic stepmother would throw an adult temper tantrum over something she didn't want to do. She would give me the passive-aggressive side eye, while whispering some smear campaign nonsense against me, to my dad. My dad would get upset with her but take it out on me. 

Narcissists can never be wrong

So they were angry with each other. But instead of acting like a parent and protecting me from her rage, my dad would triangulate and pit her against me as the problem. Narcissists are lazy and they can never admit to fault. He would look at her and hint, in my hearing, "maybe Mary could fix it." I would beg to be told what I'd done wrong and how I could make it right. Which would soothe her wounded pride and she's lick her pencil and make a list of all the things for me to do. Bearing in mind, I was already doing all her work. And they had me right where they wanted me: feeling guilty, ashamed, destabilized and compliant. That's the trauma response that MRI man triggered in me, the urge to pacify. 

Going no contact is the only path to peace

I realized, as I was attempting to soothe yet another narcissistic injury, the futility of of it all. He was a hot mess and it wasn't my job to fix that. So I did what I should have done when he first sat down in his cloud of smoke. I got up and moved out of his sites. Because that's literally where I was. Adult Children of Narcissists have targets on our backs that tell arrogant people that here is someone to take their anger out on. Narcissists know who to victimize. They can smell toxic shame on us like cigarette smoke. They treat us in disrespectful ways they would never treat a more confident person. So I went no contact and moved. Just as I have had to go no contact with my parents. And he was left sputtering and looking like the fool he was acting. 

"The only way a punching bag can stop being punched is to not be there to punch."

CPTSD recovery hacks: Antidotes to narcissistic parent abuse and gaslighting

Hello my friends. Today on this blog dedicated to healing CPTSD from narcissistic parent abuse, I'll share some recovery hacks that helped me. So much of narcissistic abuse centers on gaslighting and lies So I'm presenting childhood trauma healing tips as antidotes to the poisoning of toxic parents' gaslighting. We will repair the dysfunctional family system fails we were raised in, with healthier newer individuation and differentiation.  

Narcissistic Parent Enmeshment Antidote

Parent enmeshment is the sick narcissistic fantasy cult that we were raised in. We were brainwashed in the Narcissist's Prayer Litany. It was never their fault, always ours. We were owned and owing with no reciprocity. We were taught to function only as extensions of our parents who ruthlessly violated our boundaries, sabotaged our autonomy and parentified us to serve them. We were not people but possessions, the Broken Vending Machine Child giving at our own expense, to our self-centered Black Hole Parents. 

• Examples of parent enmeshment versus genuine parental concern. My narcissistic mother and her malignant dark tetrad boyfriend were all kinds sexually inappropriate, illegal, immoral and reckless. Yet my mother styled herself as a preacher, "leading people to Jesus" by engaging in adultery. Whenever she faced consequences, she would DARVO and blame me. They kept me on a tight leash and ultimately kicked me out at 16 because I came in 15 minutes late. They said their Draconian rules were for my own good. Actually they were for their own good, designed to trigger my trauma responses of fawning and overcompliance and to get them narcissistic supply and keep my desperate for basic necessities. 
• For the longest time she had me thinking I, at 11, was negligent with a baby whom she had left, along with three other special needs foster care kids, in my care for a week. I wasn't even 12 yet. Her abusive boyfriend lied and blamed me because he had flown into a narcissistic rage, after being awakened by the baby. Caring parents would never make a preteen co-sleep with babies and yet all four of them, including my narcissistic father and his vulnerable narcissist wife, made me carry the mental load of family like they were kids and I was the adult. 

• Antidote: Start to recognize any places where enmeshed parents have encroached on your space. Have they made you do unfair heavy housework too young? Have they scapegoated you? How much of yourself have you ceded to them? How much, if any, of you is left? Look past the betrayal blindness to see what they are really doing. Hear past the gaslighting to what they are actually saying. Are their rules reasonable or boundary crashing? Is it actually helping or teaching you anything useful, or is just hypervigilant surveillance and coercive control?  Do you feel  more like your parent's confidante, surrogate parent or spouse, and pacifier than his child? Do you feel responsible for them? If any of this resonates, explore Adult Children of Narcissists and the work of YouTube psychologists Jerry Wise and Patrick Teahan. These wise men are apothecarists of antidotes for narcissistic abuse. 

The Trauma Bonding Deprivation Game

 Adult Children of Narcissists don't make do with what we have. We learn to do without essentials. Necessities were stolen from us. Needs were shamed. Self-care was sabotaged. Our selves were sacrificed on the God-complex parent's altar. It was unsafe to think for ourselves and our attempts at autonomy were smashed. Then they would play a little bread-crumbing game where, like Hansel and Gretel, we got just enough not to die. If we distanced ourselves, they hoovered us back in with blame-shifting and guilt trips and pity parties. Their sporadic Love-bombing was always followed with Devalue and Discard in which we were randomly given the silent treatment and cold shoulder. This terrified and confused us into desperate people pleasing to win them back. We were always pretzeling ourselves to meet their demands while they deprived us. Then we started depriving ourselves because the cost of serving them was so high that there was nothing left for us. And still they shamed us with FOG (fear, obligation and guilt). They had us thinking we'd racked up so many debts to them that we could never pay them off. And that's the cement of Trauma Bonding that kept us welded to them. 

Examples: My narcissistic father would swan in and out of  my life on a whim. There was no warning. He'd be gone for weeks doing God knows what, but not taking care of me, that's for sure.  Abuse and neglect were daily bread. He'd leave me to the mercy of my equally abusive neglectful mother and her boyfriend du jour. Then he'd swoop back in with some new woman (once it was a girl only 8 years older than me). And I was expected to dutifully obey this new person that he'd set me in service too. After my parents' divorce when I was 6, I never called any the 40+ places I lived (or couch-surfed) "my home." It was theirs, whoever they'd hooked up with, even when the hookup was the live-in sponging off us. I was just their subject. I had to strictly adhere to their two sets of rules, no one else followed. I had to pretend all was fine or face the narcissistic injury rage. It took me till 60 y/o to start asking why my parents had so many enablers and why my extended family turned blind eyes. You could say they were victims of narcissistic abuse too. But that's no excuse for leaving a vulnerable child unprotected. 

Walking on eggshells was all I could do because there was no eggshell-free space. 

Antidotes:  Start heeding the red flags like traffic signs, that toxic parents wave. When they show you the abuse they are capable of, please, believe them the first time. Don't make excuses for them like I did. Go no contact with arrogant, entitled, remorseless people. If you get pushback from flying monkeys, go no contact with them too. You are better off alone than with unsafe malignant narcissists. 

The Divorced Child and the Black Hole Parent Hack

Black Hole Parents are one bottomless well of demand that you can never fill. They issue you a divorce decree, cutting themselves free from responsibility to you WITH a contract of obligations to them into perpetuity. But neither of those are real contracts and you aren't bound to them. So stop trying to.  Start filling your own little cup. Stop believing their fake versions of reality over your own experiences. This isn't a family and they aren't real parents. They only come around when they want something. They gaslight you into believing their future faking and narrative shifting lies. But they were never family. They just us and made us think we owed them. We don't. We've been making bricks without straw and family out of nothing at all. So I started over, making a family with reciprocity and mutual respect, where love was transactional with all of us benefitting. That's the antidote. 

Dissociative Split Hack

Adult Children of Narcissists don't just not know what we need to know, we don't know that we need to know it. We don't just lack what we need we don't know that we need it. Not because we're ignorant. Because everything for us was flip-flopped by selfish, self-serving hypocrites with double standards. We were PUNISHED for things normal kids were encouraged in and praised for. Things like independence, school success and achievement. But narcissists are pathologically jealous, especially of their kids. This alternate reality really does our head in. 

• Antidote: I always say "you don't know what you don't know until you know it." And nowhere is that more true than when understanding CPTSD from narcissistic abuse. We had betrayal blindness. We didn't know that our parents weren't parents but raging control freak psychopaths. Why should we? In order to wrap our head around it, we have to do some damage level dissociation and cognitive splitting. Or, we can accept that they, not us, were wrong. They were the problem. So as soon as you become radically aware, whenever that aha moment happens, start shifting your perspective to one of self-care and self-protection. Start evicting their voices in your head from living rent-free. Start stopping them from co-opting your script. 

The Thrival Antidote

Traumatized children survive in spite of not because of our narcissistic parents. And it was bare minimum survival at best. They thwarted our success at every step. They took narcissistic injury when we excelled or outshone them. We tried to live at peace. We were kids with normal attachment to them which they both resented and also weaponized against us. Adult Children of Narcissists function far better than they should be given their circumstances. Everything is about 5 times more complicated for us. They damage simple things like walking and homework and sleep. Life is constant cognitive dissonance and emotional abuse. They don't give us what we need. They sabotage what little we have. They steal our birthright to be children. They make us act and think like adults when we are children. They make us parent them instead of them taking care of us. 

Antidote: Nothing succeeds like success. And nothing survives like thriving. After going no contact, I felt a freedom I have never had. Because I set myself free with the help of loving family and my higher power. Radical acceptance taught me that yes, the chaos and abuse happened. Yes it has harmed me. But it doesn't have to define or limit me. And my healing, my recovery is a success that they cannot dim.  

Cheat Codes to understand narcissistic abuse and CPTSD trauma responses to it

 

Hello my friends. In my childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm writing a series on cheat codes to help us understand narcissistic abuse and how to break free from it. Why do we worry so much about arrogant people who care so little about us? Why do we feed them narcissistic supply at our own expense? Why do we cut ourselves short to meet their Black Hole of demands? Why are we so concerned with forgiving and maintaining relationships with abusers? Why don't we just go no contact with narcissistic parents or other relationships characterized by narcissism?  Yesterday we looked at the potency of abuser gaslighting and today we're exploring how childhood trauma responses perpetuate cycles of abuse. 

Parent Enmeshment Cheat Codes

Parent enmeshment creates a false, self-serving narcissistic fantasy in which parents claim ownership of the child as nothing more than a useful too to get what they want. Child autonomy and individuation are sabotaged. Differentiation is seen as narcissistic injury (not real threat, just ego insult).  Needs are shamed. Self-care is selfish. The child's boundaries are destroyed. Privacy is violated by the narcissistic mother or father. With Machiavellian level role reversal, the child is parentified (made to take on the role of parent while the parent behaves like an immature, bossy child). She is expected to devote herself to service to the Black Hole Parent who is never satisfied. She is the Broken Vending Machine Child freely dispensing all the narcissistic parents expect, covering the cost, paying out of her own pocket, pretzeling herself to meet their needs while having her own needs shamed and ignored. There is no reciprocity; what goes around doesn't come around. And the child's cup is drained while the Black Hole Parent is never filled. 

Cheat codes to recognize enmeshment: 

• Did you have a bedroom or were you made to share, even if there was enough room for you to have your space? 
• Did you have to sleep with younger siblings and and babies and care for them at night (this is a major red flag for parentification)
• Did your parent respect your privacy or walk right into your room without knocking? Did she read texts or listen in on conversations? 
• Did he feel entitled comment on things that were none of his business, especially private things?
• Did you feel safe or just monitored?
• Do you worry more about taking care of yourself or pleasing your parent, even in things they have no buy-in on? 
• Did you feel like a person or just "so and so's child"?
• Did you ever feel uncomfortable about how "close" you and your parent were? 
• Did he tell you inappropriate sexual things?
• Did she seem to act more like a sister or girlfriend than a mother? 
• Did rules seem reasonable or unnaturally harsh? (corporal punishment even in the teen years, coercive control with bullying and intimidation)
• Do you feel responsible for everyone else?

Childhood Trauma Responses 

As a result of narcissistic abuse, Adult Children of Narcissists developed odd trauma responses that kept us sort of safe as kids but which are dysfunctional and reactive in adulthood. We are hypervigilant and we overreact to benign stimuli. We are jumpy, nervous, anxious people pleasers. Our trauma reactions include freezing, fight or flight and my personal demon, fawning. It's humiliating how I knee-jerk grovel. I wear this conciliatory, self-deprecating perma-grin. I default to auto-shaming. I laugh anxiously at my narcissistic father's stupid jokes, just to soothe the ego injury he always felt  and avoid his acid narcissistic rage. I would laugh along when my mother's sociopath boyfriend mockingly called me "Blisters." (a jibe at my small breasts). My malignant mother crowed at this and smiled benevolently at her husband publicly humiliating her 11 y/o old. She actually played DARVO when he attacked me and threatened to unalive me, blame-shifting responsibility for his unhinged verbal abuse, onto me. There was so much gaslighting that I developed betrayal blindness and never once talked back or held them accountable. 

Defogging FOG

Narcissistic and enmeshed parents trigger the very trauma responses they bred in us with their gaslighting of FOG. FOG stands for fear, obligation and guilt which they conditioned us to feel toward them. But this FOG was a two-way mirror held up only to us They could see through but we couldn't. While setting us up to impossible tasks and inappropriate demands, they "went no contact" with us, neglecting responsibility to us and claiming they had no obligation. It was all lies.  

FOG cheat code: Parents owe children care and love. Children owe parents nothing. We CAN be obedient and respectful. But respect is a two-way street earned and shown first by the adult. Any parent who reiterates a litany of debt he's places on his child, with a track record of neglect, is almost always an entitled, enmeshed narcissist. 

Narcissistic gaslighting

My narcissistic mother abandoned me several times, once leaving me alone at 11 with her live-in, to care for her four special needs foster care children under five. Then she blamed me when her abusive boyfriend came unglued because I woke him up being unable to calm the baby. It was so bad that my friend's mom stepped in to help me. Then she was prosecuted on abuse charges. She has lied about this all her life, saying I was at fault. I almost unalived myself. Then when I confronted her a few years ago, she said she never left. That didn't happen. This has caused me untold cognitive dissonance and toxic shame. Yet she denied ever doing anything that there was actual legal proof she did. This is how malignant narcissists create false worlds with their gaslighting. 

Cheat code for gaslighting: If someone shows you once that they are capable of abusing you, believe that they will again. Read the red flags they are waving. If someone with a history of abusive behavior, does something that feels wrong, believe that it is abuse. Do not take their word over the evidence of your own experience. 

Trauma bonding

Understanding the childhood trauma bonding and the betrayal blindness that caused, is crucial. And the sooner we see past the fog and lies, the better. Once I observed my parents' trauma bonding patterns, I saw the light. I recognized the bread-crumbing ("letting me" move in with them) and love-bombing (getting me a cat, only to give it away), future-faking (making and breaking  promises then lying about having made them), followed by the random Devalue and Discard behaviors. I saw how out of the blue I would be ambushed with accusations of disobedience and failure to please. My dad once beat me for no reason. I went into a kind of shock response. And then I would cower and beg to be told what I could do to make it right. And my stepmom would show this smug narcissistic smirk when I did. Then I saw that these were just strategic undermining power plays designed to destabilize and terrorize me into hopping through their ever-moving hoops. 

Cheat codes to reveal trauma bonding games

• Does your parents' have angry outbursts? Did they deal with your behavior or attack you? (don't always trust yourself to determine if they were justified because narcissists excel at DARVO, making you the problem. And frequent outbursts at someone are never justified.) 
• Do you know what they are angry about? 
• Do you feel "stuck" to your parents and trapped?
• Do you auto-defer to them on all things?
• Are you afraid or nervous a lot of the time?
• Do you have PTSD like nightmares with chaos and guilt?
• Do you jump at little noises like a balloon popping?
• Do you have autoimmune diseases like psoriasis or arthritis? (autoimmune diseases are linked to childhood trauma and narcissistic abuse). 
• Do you have gastrointestinal issues like ulcers? 
• Do you struggle with fear of abandonment, fear or failure or Imposter Syndrome?
• Do you hate yourself?

My dear friends, if any of this resonates, even just parts, please, seek help. If you can't afford therapy, there are excellent YouTube resources like 

• Dr. Ramani

• Jerry Wise

• Patrick Teahan

• Danish Bashir

They've helped me find the cheat codes I need to start my CPTSD recovery. 

Cheat codes for CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent gaslighting

Hello my friends. Today in my CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm starting a series exploring why we put so much energy into preserving relationships with narcissists. Why do we as victims of their narcissistic abuse worry so much about them, what they want, need, feel and so little about ourselves? Why do we not go not contact and be done with it? There are many factors but one that seems to encompass them all and that is narcissistic gaslighting. Here are cheat codes to degas gaslighting and find healing. 

What exactly is gaslighting? 

Let's unpack this commonly used but often misunderstood term. At the heart of gaslighting is willful and self-serving lying in all its forms. This umbrella concept includes distortion, distraction, deception, evasion and manipulation. Like an artist, a gaslighter uses these untruths as paints to create an entirely false picture which he presents to the person he is gaslighting, as reality. Usually it is someone who wields some kind of power differential over another and so is able to rewrite the script so the person believes it. This psychological brainwashing is emotional abuse which uses insidious, destabilizing, undermining and second-guessing to make the person doubt her own perception of reality, memory, sanity, or judgment.

The Gaslighting Enmeshed Parent Narcissist Trifecta

People who gaslight are usually also narcissistic and enmeshed. Arrogant people believe they are above rules and have the right to use people as tools. When you add parent enmeshment to the mix, you get a really nasty Dark Tetrad cocktail of arrogant, selfish, ruthless, cruel, control freak bully. The enmeshed parent believes he owns his child. His arrogance tells him he has no obligation to her while she owes him everything. My narcissistic father thought he was perfectly justified, as the parent, to use me, the Broken Vending Machine Child ™(a term I coined and will explain later) as as servant, surrogate and to get narcissistic supply. He felt no duty of care or need for reciprocity.  And that's why narcissistic parents can so easily gaslight their children, because the child has a natural attachment to and trust of them, plus the parent has authority over them. 

All for One and None For the Scapegoat

My Machiavellian and narcissistic mother and father were willing to exploit me, my love, devotion, sense of obligation to them, to get what they wanted. All's fair to these lawless hypocrites, who hold themselves above censure while rigidly censuring other people. And the Broken Vending Machine Child ™ gets the brunt. She's all the family system roles in one. She's the Golden Child in terms of parentified expectations (but without the exemption from rules of the golden), the glass child whose individuality is seen right through, Cheerleader Enabler who must always prop up the narcissistic parent and the Savior or Scapegoat Child who must take on herself all consequences for the parents foolish, dangerous actions. This false teaching that I was responsible to and for them, is the gaslighting of parentification. 

Trauma Bonding and Betrayal Blindness

Trauma bonding is a sticky net that enmeshed parents crochet for their child to keep her wrapped up in them. my four narcissistic stepparents and parents wrote the training manual on trauma bonding. They played the game like pros with

• Love-bombing ( a type of grooming-gaslighting which singles the child out and makes the feel special but which is just to give the child a false sense of security which is then exploited)
• Future-faking (another type of gaslighting which paints a future full of promises that are all routinely broken, and then the parents blame-shift fault onto the child for their broken promises so she feels responsible for it)
• Bread-crumbing (the child is consistently deprived, then fed just enough to keep her compliant and coming back for more. This ultimately leads to a betrayal blindness and cognitive dissonance in which the child believes that because they provided something, they must be good parents. 
• Devalue and Discard (the parent pushes the child away for no reason and then blames and shames her for "causing it." This is where the DARVO distortion comes in, too. The parent Denies, Attacks, Reverse Victim and Offender roles. She set up the child as the villain and herself as the martyr. 
• Hoovering. Then the malicious parent "sucks" the rejected child back in with self-pitying lies about FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) that the child is supposed to feel toward this parent who has devalued and discarded her. And the trauma cycle begins again. 
• Gassing The fuel for gaslighting is gas, toxic hot air. Over time, these noxious fumes brain damage the child, causing self-destructive trauma responses like fawning. And like carbon monoxide, this mind gas is odorless, colorless and tasteless. It causes betrayal blindness which makes the child unable to recognize it. 

Why Gaslighting Is Effective

Gaslighting is rarely overt; it usually happens incrementally over time. My parents chipped away at my sense of self and self-confidence causing self-abandonment by a 1,000 cuts. They used chaos, backstabbing, isolation, coercive control, little digs, subtle mocking, second-guessing, humiliation, DIMMER, triangulation, gotcha set-ups, toxic shaming for normal behavior and a host of other destabilizing actions. They painted me as a liar. Because the manipulation is subtle and often delivered with absolute confidence by someone the victim trusts, the victim gradually stops trusting their own internal compass, relying instead on the manipulator to define reality. Over the long term, this erodes self-esteem, creates intense self-distrust, and can lead to chronic anxiety or trauma responses.

Cheat Sheet for Recognizing Gaslighting

It's only in retrospect that most Adult Children of Narcissists are able to see their parents' lies clearly. It took me reading some Reddit AITA posts, at 60, to understand what my parents had done.  But hopefully these realizations can help younger generations spot it earlier. Here are some cheat codes to spot parent gaslighting. 

• Denial and Distortion: Denying events happened, insisting conversations you clearly recall, occurred differently, or flatly saying "that never happened" ("You're making things up").

• Trivializing Feelings: Minimizing the victim's emotional response or concerns to make them feel overly sensitive ("You're blowing this out of proportion" or "You're too sensitive").

• Double standards. My narcissistic father used the "too sensitive" accusation against  me all the time along with "you can't take criticism" when he was in an narcissistic rage and attacking me. Then if caught out, he'd take narcissistic insult, quickly backpedal and say I was too critical of him. Narcissists have a comeback for everything. They are always right and you are always wrong. And my betrayal blindness made me think he just cared about me, and made me miss the insults and humiliation he was heaping on me. 

• Countering: Questioning the victim's memory of events, even when the victim remembers them accurately ("Your memory is terrible," or "That's not how it went at all" "You're making this up." "You're just showing off for attention).

• Evasions and backpedaling. Pretending to forget something which they clearly recall. Purposely confusing order of events. She only tells the part that the child did, not what she did to provoke it. My mother lied and said I hit her without telling how she routinely slapped me. She told it in such a way that ignored that fact that I raised my hand to protect myself, not against her. Then she lied and said she never slapped me. 

• Half-truths, exaggeration and sanitizing. The parent cherry-picks parts of stories that make herself look good and the child look bad. She exaggerates the child's behavior into capital offenses while euphemizing her own words and actions to sound innocent and calm while neglecting to tell how she herself overreacted, cursed and screamed abuse. 

• Spinning. Rushing to get their spun version in pre-emptively, before anyone has a chance to question them. Then any other version will look suspect. 

• Withholding and Blocking: Pretending not to understand ("What do you mean?" when you're speaking clearly) or refusing to listen ("I'm not talking about this again" or giving the silent treatment and cold shoulder, to create self-doubt).

• Rewriting the Narrative: Blaming the victim for the abuser's actions or twisting situations to make the victim appear at fault ("If you didn't provoke me, I wouldn't have to act this way").

In short, if something sounds or feels off, that someone with a history of invalidating you, says or does, believe that it is gaslighting. 

Talking back to narcissistic parent abuse to heal CPTSD: rewiring the gaslighting

 

Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery, I'm talking back narcissistic parent abuse voices in my head. I'm telling the correct version of me that their gaslighting reframed as "the problem." I'm encouraging you to talk back to the voices in your head and if you can't well, I'm more than happy to do it for you! Time to silence their DARVO and crybullying nonsense once and for all. 

Surprise ways to talk back to parent bullies

So this might sound contradictory, but along with this blog, I maintain several others on poetry, food and cooking and lesson plans for kids. And I have found radical acceptance and CPTSD recovery in such diverse outlets. I unpack a lot of childhood trauma issues of trauma bonding, toxic shame, narcissistic abuse and parent enmeshment in my poetry blog called The Writers Garden. I find myself "talking back" or "sassing" as my narcissistic mother loved to call it. I can her and my narcissistic father out, in verse, for the child abuse and neglect, with child abandonment and endangerment, plus coercive control they subjected me to.  To name a few of the atrocities. And you know what, finally, I have the last word. No more fawning and people pleasing and being nothing more than narcissistic supply. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it. Like I just wrote in a recent blog post called "My Poem, My Rules" I'll decide what to say, not my abusive gaslighting parents. 

Squeak Up! 

Anyone recall the adorable kids' book "Hooway for Wodney Wat"? In this story a timid hypervigilant little rat with speaking difficulties,  finds his voice and learns to "squeak up" for himself. Let's all be like Wodney, and stop silencing ourselves. Let's cease humoring and soothing arrogant bullying parents who use us like cat's paws to get what they want at our expense. See, we Adult Children of Narcissists have been beaten down by the double-edged sword of infantilization plus parentification. Enmeshed parents taught us we were possessions, not people. Our one job was to serve them. And we need to mouth off to that dreck here and now. 

Defog the FOG

FOG stands for Fear, Obligation and Guilt which our malignant parents force-fed us on. They groomed us to think that we are forever bound to whatever ridiculous demands they set for us. They use words like "respect" and "duty" and "family loyalty" and "debts you owe us."  Yet they never give us those same things. Only the Broken Vending Machine Child must give out with no reciprocity from parents. We're taught to give without counting the cost to people who only take from us and always count the cost of the little bread-crumbing they give us. Life with narcissist parents is one-sided transactional and business-like when they do the littlest thing for you and it's "family does for family" in the enormous, unreasonable expectations they put on you as scapegoat child. You are only family when it suits their narcissistic fantasy. The rest of the time, you are a live-in unpaid nanny, cook, housekeeper, pacifier and caregiver. It's time now to take off the betrayal blindness glasses and see the dysfunctional mess behind the facade of Happy Families. Then you can start to talk back to that unbalanced power differential and reclaim your long-overdue differentiation from your family of origin. 

Let the locked door stay shut. 

Narcissistic Parents go no contact first, beginning when you're a child. They play the Devalue and Discard game from birth, pushing away and then clinging tight when you want freedom and they want control. So if you go no contact with them, expect a barrage of narcissistic rage fueled by petulance, pouting and retaliation. This is not because they want to stay in contact with you. They only contact you when they want something. What they crave is power, domination and control. THEY dictate who cuts off whom, not you. The very people who didn't have the time of day for me, when I sought them, EVEN if it was to do for them, like it usually was, went into narcissistic injury mode when I stopped pursuing and went grey rock. But I beat them to the punch. I let the door they locked on me, stay shut. And oooh, they did not like that. They tried all the control freak tricks like hoovering and love-bombing but it always ended in devaluing and discarding of me. Till I "spoke my mind" by cutting ties to them. This is the Teflon moment, when they can't touch you anymore. They can play their games and you can stand your ground. 

🔒 The Tables Have Turned: Freedom Outside the Cage ⛓️

Narcissists don't like it when you leave shut the doors they slammed on you, and don't beg to be let in. Because now THEY are the ones locked in and helpless and you are outside the cage they created, and free!

Speak in your words whether they understand or not. 

And my language is action. I let my deeds speak for me. I don't answer calls or respond to "phishing" texts. My mother repeats all the estranged parent inanities, about how she doesn't understand, what has she done to cause this, has she "offended me" in any way? Yada yada. She never cared when I was still under her thumb. So all this is just fishing. She knows what she's done. She was there. I don't bother to JADE (justify, argue, defend, explain) why I don't respond. The few things I reminded her of, just met with DARVO and gaslighting. "That didn't  happen. I don't remember (kicking me out of the house at 16 and making me homeless).  I wouldn't do that" (leaving me alone at 11 with her four special needs foster kids under five and a violently abusive boyfriend. Which at the time she lied and said was my fault.) You get the picture. Then when I still stood firm, she played the victim card and then the blame-shifting one. It's just Narcissist Prayer UNO reversing, bait and switch and story-changing, trying to get me to back down so she can claim that moral high horse she thinks she rides. Never once has she sincerely apologized or even admitted wrong. She just evades, lies, cons and scams. And I'm tired of trying to make her understand. That's the definition of insanity, doing what you've always done and expecting a different result. My dad did the same things till he died. Never once admitting any fault, still expecting carte blanche forgiveness for sins he never confessed while extending no mercy to me, ever. 

Let the insane speak for itself. 

So heres' where we speak our truth by saying nothing. When the narcissist rages and acts crazy and dysregulated, we step back and let it happen. We don't rush to excuse, defend or clean up after them. We get our loved in our care out of their path. We let people see them at their worst, instead of lying to cover for them. When their scams blow up, when they run out of money, when they get called out, we do nothing to help. If CPS or the authorities get called in, we do not bail them out. We do not hire attorneys. We let them suffer the consequences of their actions, for once, instead of body-blocking them. This is the only way flying monkeys and enablers will get it, too, by the way. They have to see the narcissist implode in upon himself before they understand that this insanity and chaos was your life. 

Radical acceptance is the goal post in the field of recovery. 

Surprising Ways to Heal CPTSD from Narcissistic Parent Abuse

Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm going to share to ways to heal CPTSD that might surprise you. We will take on narcissistic parent gaslighting, parent enmeshment, trauma bonding, childhood trauma responses and other hurtful impacts of child abuse, in ways that may seem odd or even counterintuitive. But from my experience living with four narcissistic parents, I can say that they work.  

Turn off the gaslighting gas. 

Probably one of the worst things that narcissistic entitled, cruel, selfish parents do to kids is to gaslight them. This isn't just lying, it's deceiving and rewriting reality on an epic novel scale. Narcissists distort everything to fit their main character syndrome and to get narcissistic supply. They lie as easily as breathing. So we Adult Children of Narcissists (ACON, if you need a support group) kids grew up in a bewildering and bespoke wilderness of false FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) where our parents' hypocrisy, double standards, scapegoating, backstabbing, smear campaigns, role reversal, exploitation, future-faking, triangulation and DARVO, ruled the roost. What we as child abuse survivors need to do is to start seeing through the fog of gaslighting to the true, clean fresh air of real reality. It wasn't our fault. We were kids. It was their arrogant narcissistic fantasy. And what do we know about fantasies? They are fake. 

Cut the ties that bind

Parent enmeshment weaponizes the child's natural attachment and the parent power differential to coercively control and dominate her. The enmeshed parent who is almost always also narcissistic and Machiavellian (determined to get her way whatever the cost) absorbs the helpless child into her enormous greedy egomania. The child must have no needs, wants or voice. All must funnel into this energy vampire parent. The narcissistic mother or father (in my case, both) with the hypervigilance of KGB agents, monitor and control the child over things that aren't their business then blatantly, abusively neglect basic care. They sabotage any individuation which they take as narcissistic injury. If the child so much as looks crosswise or seems to show any independence the narcissistic rage venom sprays. My malignant parents crocheted a blanket of demands and expectations to trap me, not to protect me. All this creates insane cognitive dissonance. We have to sever those ties by going no contact with enslavement and coercive control. We owe this to our little inner child who couldn't break free because it wasn't safe.  

🚩 Breaking Free from Enmeshment 🚩

To get out of the enmeshment web, we first have to see it. So breaking free means seeing past betrayal blindness to the parents actively sabotaging our growth and development. Once we see it, we can begin to understand that this net isn't real. It's woven of FOG and gaslighting.

🚩 🚩 🚩

Dissolve the Trauma Bonding glue

One of the biggest aha moments I had in my narcissistic abuse recovery was to see clearly how trauma bonding had caused my betrayal blindness. The enmeshed parents cement the child to them in a one-sided trauma bond. Using their famous gaslighting, they convince the child that they own her and owe her nothing while she is merely a possession who she owes them everything. It's the ultimate power play with parentification and infantilization plus coercive control and DIMMER They use love-bombing with manufactured FOG and hoovering followed by Devaluation and Discard. And then they repeat these insidious cruelties until the child is Ferberized, desperate for love and compliant.  

💡 ☀️ Breaking Through the Toxicity ☀️ 💡

Narcissistic parents use toxicity and cruelty to dominate and control their kids. We as adults have to dissolve that toxicity. Happily we don't need more chemicals. Simple radical acceptance and awareness are the "wire cutters" that destroy our prison.

💡 ☀️ 💡

Deny DARVO its power

Here's where we break free, or stay stuck, where the radical acceptance and awareness either lose or gain their power. Because narcissistic parents do not like autonomy in their children. They consider them possessions and how dare a spoon talk back to the cook?? If you grey rock or go no contact or just stop being so compliant and people pleasing, be prepared. If you start using your words where before you were trauma responding with fawning, groveling and soothing, plan on them taking major narcissistic insult over it. Despite bullying me all my life and me taking it with a smile, my narcissistic father and his vulnerable narcissist wife, were quick to start the crybullying and DARVO if ever I even hinted at any independence from his cloying control freak iron grip. I made the mistake of not being that prepared Boy Scout and expecting his narcissistic rage. I won't make that mistake again if ever I have to encounter my narcissistic stepfather and mother. I will stand my ground and engage only on my terms instead of letting bullies call the shots. 

🛡️ ⚔️ Always Prepared & Protected 🛡️ 🪖

Dealing with narcissistic parent vengeance requires Eagle Scout levels of "always prepared." You must gird your loins for the ambushes and rages that are sure to come. But you can do it. You've done harder things than this all your life, just by surviving their abuse.

🛡️ 🪖 ⚔️

Don't JADE but also don't "forgive and forget." 

There's a reason for bygones and why we shouldn't just let them be. What happened, happened. All the gaslighting in the world can't erase the scars that narcissistic parent abuse left on us. So when I finally decided to let the doors they slammed on me stay shut, I did so quietly. I won't be confronting them, having heart to hearts or forgiving them. Any "apology" I've ever gotten and they are scant, were just backhanded and not admissions of guilt. They were blame-shifting guilt traps to trick me into confessing to things I'd never done, to taking the blame and the brunt for my parents bad actions, as I'd always done. So now, I will not justify, argue or answer questions, defend or explain why I've gone no contact (or accepted that they went no contact with me). And the only regrets I have is that I was deprived of a healthy childhood and that didn't cut ties sooner.