Surprising and scary ways dark tetrad parents damage their kids

 Good morning my friends. In my quest to heal CPTSD from abusive parents, I'm looking at surprising and scary ways dark tetrad parents damage their kids. And they way the do it, is, like everything else they do: twisted, manipulative and self-serving. Dark tetrads are arrogant, entitled, exploitative, mercenary, psychopathic and cruel. But they are also deceptive. It sometimes take the kid decades to see just how extensive the childhood trauma went. 

Dark tetrad parents break their child's trust. But not in the way you might be thinking. We don't trust too little but too much. We trust everyone, blindly, implicitly and dangerously. Everyone but one person that is. We don't trust ourselves. We believe everyone else knows better than us and we let them exploit our unhealthy trust and take advantage of us. Demented right? You ain't seen nuttin yet. 

Because the way they sabotage our trust mechanism is even more deranged. And the way they do this can be found in the paradox between "dark tetrad" and "parent." They behave in untrustworthy ways, breaking promise, backstabbing, lying, future faking, scamming and shamming their child. BUT they do it under the guise of "parent." Because they hold the title of parent, the child believes that this IS how genuine parents are supposed to act. What we don't know is that any resemblance to normal caring parents is skin deep. 

The dark tetrads have their child so conditioned that she sees dangerous behavior as appropriate and unsafe people as perfectly reliable. What we don't know is that the only thing they can be relied on to do is the most selfish, hurtful and humiliating things possible to us. And then laugh at us for being ashamed and get pissed at us for being hurt. 

They gaslight us it's what we deserve because we're such burdens. Or that we're just too sensitive. They tell us God wants us to lie down for any and all abuse that anyone wants to subject us to. And we just absorb all that into our poor broken little hearts and feel more and more self-loathing. 

They throw up all kinds of red flags and then tell us to ignore them. They do shady, scary, hypocritical, immoral and illegal things and then lie and say we did them. Or that mommy and daddy (and their new people when they remarry) are right to do them. They hold us up to endless double standards. And we just believe that our parents must be special exceptions. Or we don't question at all. 

They destroy our confidence and discernment. They ruin any chance we have at living healthy lives. Any time they see us demonstrate the simplest of self-care skills they squash it like a bug. They tenderize us so we're good and malleable. They break us so that we are in constant pain and can barely move let alone resist them.  

Why would they do this? For the same reasons dark tetrads do everything. They aren't just self-centered, they are malicious. It's not enough for them to get their way. It  has to come at someone else's expense. And that is their child,