Hi friends. I started a blog post which is becoming a series about how I'm unmasking abusive parental gaslighting by flipping the script. I'm rewriting their narrative by defining words correctly. The worst way my narcissistic parents gaslit me was with a false portrayal of God and lies about what they were doing and what He expected of me in response to them. This has been devastatingly destructive to me, a category 5 hurricane to the brain.
My parents got divorced for no good reason when I was 6. They gave me no help processing and made it all about themselves. Prior to this they had been systematically endangering, neglecting and even abandoning me. They failed in basic care, parenting and love. At least one had been cheating on the other and forcing me to watch. The other took off for months, to years at a time. They were always homeless and jobless. Immediately after divorcing (which they blamed me for), they found other self-centered people to foist on me as "parents" to be served.
So all of this was disturbing enough. But factor in that they both believed themselves good Christians. They quoted the Bible and went to church. Sort of. They changed churches and denominations frequently always finding fault with the previous one. It was like they thought themselves Bible detectives tasked with ferreting out and exposing hypocrisy. They even believed that they were preachers, teachers and missionaries. Despite the fact that no church supported this and when informed, they left that church to find another, hopefully more gullible. We were a cult of three. And that was before the divorce.
Afterwards, there was a lot of adultery and affairs. My dad, at 34, started dating a 17-year-old. My mother hooked up with a married man. Then she moved her new, very abusive, boyfriend into our home. She'd quit her job to open a foster care home, leaving most of the care to me. She made an apartment for she and her boyfriend in the basement, kicked me out of my room to sleep with four special needs kids under 5 and gave my room to her brother and his girlfriend. And trooped us all to church where she sat, sanctimoniously fault-finding others, under the guise of "ministering."
My dad moved me into his home with his new wife, so that I could wait on her. Most of the childcare and all the housework fell to me. I became surrogate parent, spouse, servant and scapegoat. I co-slept with all their babies and did all the work in their foster care home. They were passive-aggressively and just aggressively violent towards me. I don't recall when my dad wasn't angry with me. I feel sick remembering all the shaming and scorn. And I was gaslit to think that all this was God's will for me and to fail in any of their demands was to fail God.
The gaslighting is many-fold. They proclaimed to be Christians and to be serving God when in reality, they believed they were God and I was serving them. Can you see the hypocrisy in all this?? You probably can. It's just me that's late to the party.
They were willfully going against God's laws, breaking every command routinely. But spinning it all as God's will. I'm aghast at how they were able to convince me that adultery was somehow obeying God? How I was at fault for their divorce. How abusing me was in God's plan for me? They were thumbing their noses at him while claiming to follow Him.
I will be working for the rest of my life, to process all this wickedness and overcome its evil effects.
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