Hi friends. Yesterday I wrote about healing CPTSD by debunking lies our narcissistic parents told us about what we owed them. I said that basically we owed no one anything that we hadn't voluntarily and contractually agreed to. And I realized that I missed a big piece of the puzzle. So today I'm exploring what we do owe and who we owe it to vs what and who we don't.
Traumatized children are taught by narcissistic parents that we owe anyone and everyone anything and everything they demand of us. That we came into this world with a huge debt hung rough our necks that we will never pay off no matter how much we put into. AND hypocritically (because everything selfish parents say is hypocritical) they owe us nothing. We have to earn everything. It's all conditional on our being perfect. Which we aren't and so we never meet the conditions and go without necessities.
So that's a lot of generalizations: everything, nothing, never, always. And my use of them is intentional. Because dark tetrad (arrogant, selfish, psychopathic, manipulative, cruel) parents deal only in generalizations. They allow no margin for error in other people. It's all and nothing: they expect all from others and give nothing themselves. They tolerate no gray area in their kids while their lives are 5,555 shades of muddy, dirty, messed up gray. They excuse nothing in their kids and everything in themselves.
And when I say they demand everything of us kids, I mean everything. Dogged loyalty, unwavering respect, endless service, allegiance, devotion, adoration, worship, obedience, enslavement, perfection and all kinds of other unattainable bullshit. AND conversely they give none of those. It's a one-sided transaction, which is no transaction at all. Because we're receiving nothing good in return. The thanks we get for working our asses off to meet their demands are more demands.
We will never be able to please dark tetrads because they won't allow it. Seriously. Because they speak with forked tongues: they demand the moon but don't want us to actually get it for them because then they'd have no excuse to keep demanding. They would be satisfied. If we actually reached the bar they set for us, what would they have to browbeat us with? So they keep moving the target higher. Sometimes they just toss the damn thing out, set new tasks and don't tell us. This way they keep us in that blind fog of FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) hopping through hoops that are constantly shifting.
The operative word being OBLIGATION. And oh do they weaponize it. They bullshit us into believing that we are obliged to them because we had the misfortune to be born to them. They use an arsenal of carefully crafted lies, distortions, deceptions, blame shifting and manipulations plus those constantly moving hoops to exhaust, confuse and wear us down so that we don't have the energy to think clearly let alone resist. Because they've taught us that resistance to them is sinful and wicked. They groom us to believe that self-care is SELFISH. And that care of them is our sole job. They put us into a tiny cages, on display for all to laugh at from which there is no escape nor corner to hide in.
They steal our identity, our self, our being and feed it into the juggernaut of their own greed. They strip us bare. They pressgang us into their little cultish army whose entire work is to ever expand their control. And boom, we are well and truly fubared. We are nothing, just little empty spirits, used up and worn out. BUT still expected to serve. Oh, the endless expectations and obligations...
And the church, psychology, society, most of the rest of the world participates in gaslighting us. They remind us that it's our duty to serve, obey, be loyal to, our parents. They take our parents' part. They make excuses for our parents' evil behavior. They shame us on the rare occasions we might actually speak up. They cherry pick Bible verses, taken completely out of context, to perpetuate the fear-obligation-guilt cycle. They, who don't live in a dark tetrad's regime, who don't understand how abused we are, place their normal expectations on our abnormal. And we are well and try destroyed.
So why the long explanation? I'm trying to answer pre-emptively, your question "why do you feel such fear, obligation and guilt? Why don't you just step out of the corner?" And let me just say, that if you are asking that, thank you. You get what's wrong with it. What you don't get is that we could no more stop these feelings than we could our own heartbeat. They were implanted in us and are as much a part of us as our DNA. The fear, obligation and guilt are circular and there is no way out.
The best thing we can do is fake it and hope to some day sort of make it. AND (we're actually now getting to the point of this article, yay!) as soon as we recognize this, we can begin to sort out who and what we owe and who we don't. We can start to reteach ourselves correctly. That we do not now and never did owe them anything. That we could choose to be obedient to reasonable rules, loving to people who loved us and respectful to people who were first respectful of us. But we are under no obligation to do so. AND the love, respect, care and obedience, begins with them, not us. They, as our parents did owe us love, care, support, nurturing. The only thing we had to do to earn it was to be born to them.
Now, what we do owe is all this to ourselves. And to all our younger selves too. We owe ourselves respect, love, care, nurturing, support, affirmation, validation, encouragement, loyalty, allegiance, and all the good stuff we never got nor learned. We need to serve ourselves first. So, you might be wondering, doesn't all this self-focus make you a bit of narcissist yourself? No because narcissists don't just serve themselves, they expect everyone else to serve them to the exclusion and deprivation of themselves. They demand what they want at others' expense. Someone has to suffer to meet their unquenchable thirst for control. They don't do for themselves they force others to. They don't meet their own needs. That's what they have kids for.
So the next step is to take away their power. And we do that by setting boundaries around ourselves that when crossed have negative consequences to the narcissists. And that's material for the next post.
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