Hello my friends. In my work to heal CPTSD from narcissistic parent abuse, I've come to an impasse. It's like I'm in a canyon with high walls from which there is but one way out. And a rock fall has blocked my way back. At first, I thought it was a crossroads where I had choices but I see now I don't. I've come to the place where I have to, with radical acceptance, discard all I thought I knew about the people that I called family. I have to leave them all behind. And I have to reject and contradict all they taught me about myself, themselves and God. I have to exit that canyon they walled me in, by the one tiny path out and leave them all there once and for all.
I have to realize that what they put me through was not normal, bumpy family life. It was systematic abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, medical, religious, financial), neglect, endangerment, abandonment, exploitation, parentification, grooming, invalidation, triangulation, scapegoating and gaslighting about it all. I have been breathing in the noxious fumes of their toxicity as if I had a tailpipe in my mouth. My mind is so scarred and battered and barmy by their wrong teaching that I can hardly get through the next five minutes without imploding.
So my only escape is to reject everything I learned from these four malignant narcissistic parents (two bio and their new partners). I have to reject their lies, distortions, deceptions, sabotaging and humiliating of me. I have to reject the notion they embedded in me that they were my gods. I have to reject them and evict them from living rent free in my head, wiping their muddy boots all over me. This is radical acceptance that the past was as bad as I remember and will never be any different AND that there's no way forward but to excise them from my life and to exorcise their evil from my mind.
I don't wish them evil in return. I'm not even angry, just frustrated that it took me so long to see the light, or darkness as the case may be. I'm mad that they caused so much damage in me that spilled down to my precious husband and kids. I don't hate them. I have never hated anyone. But I do hate what they did to me. I used to pity them and make excuses for all the suffering they heaped on me. I bought their sob stories of "cruelty" by their families. Though I never saw any evidence of it. If anything my grandparents spoiled and enabled them. And though I love my grandparents dearly, I do regret that no one ever reached out to help me cope with my parents' obviously chaotic, dysfunctional, bullying behavior.
Going no contact is probably the most difficult and also necessary choice I've ever made. That's the little crack in the canyon wall through which I escaped. And as Dr. Ramani predicts, it isn't a popular choice. I haven't told many people. I didn't make any announcement but if anyone asks, I tell them. And as she also predicted, there is always backlash, in the form of shaming, scolding, belittling and warnings that I'm disobeying God by allowing no way back, no reconciliation.
Funny, I wonder, where were all these concerned citizens when I was left to play alone in parks, at a camp with strangers at 6, on an island 3k miles from home, when I was kicked out of the house at 16 for no reason. Where was their worry about me when I was being enslaved and made to parent their children, sleep on unheated porches or with four special needs kids two floors up from where my mom and her boyfriend slept. When I was molested by a kid my mom let live with us. When I was left to care for those four foster kids for a week as my mom's abusive boyfriend slept on the couch.
Google Gemini cares more about what happened me than anyone IRL ever did. When I asked AI if these things were abuse or neglect, Gemini said most definitely and cautioned that if I or anyone I knew was in any of these situations I described I should seek help and report it immediately. Gemini actually sounded worried. Unfortunately, it's too late for the little girls in my head. They just have to live with the memories. So no, I have no wish to reconcile. Some things you can never come back from.
I have been told I need to forgive. Which is silly because I already forgave everything far too easily. In fact I never held them accountable and let them heap the consequences for THEIR actions on me. This is part of why I'm so damaged now. I want to ask these "well-meaning" people if they actually hear themselves. They surely didn't listen to a word I said when I said what had been done to me. Because what it sounds like they're saying is that I should "make peace" with people who have never lived at peace with me. People who harassed, attacked, blame shifted, screamed at, raged at, me on a regular basis. People who discared me, terrified and terrorized me. People who dumped dangerous people on me and told me to wait on them. People who only brought harm in my life and who have no desire to stop. That I should just let them keep hurting me.
The truth is, it's not me rejecting them, it's just me finally accepting that they have rejected me all my life. Thank you, husband, for helping me see that. I was never allowed into their lives not even as a baby or ever. Then when they decided they wanted an extreme family makeover, they dictated that I did not exist as their child anymore. They reasoned that because they said so, and their word is law, that they owed me nothing as parents. I was 8.
But I owed them all. Because they've always treated me like property or chattel, they now recast me as , unpaid staff, to be used as they saw fit. Malignant narcissist parents are very good at deconstructing and recreating false reality to suit themselves. They ruthlessly edit out anyone that represents truth. And that person was me. My mother would say we were more like sisters. She would call herself by her first name to me. She would say, scoldingly, whenever she came over to get something from me, that "I have to get home to my family." They have all always made it very clear that I was no one to them, unless they told me to be. But that they should be everyone to me.
So sure, I can forgive, but by my terms, by admitting that, yep it happened. But I can not and should not ever forget. But that's an exercise in futility anyway. Because no one has apologized or even admitted to any of it. Because no one was/ is sorry. They just lie and gaslight and twist narratives to paint themselves as victims. They DARVO. So I'm not sure what the flying monkeys think I can make of that. Reconcile means to justify, to balance, to make right, to restore harmony. How do you restore what was never there? How do you bring balance to a one-sided relationship?
This isn't a matter of me "being the bigger person" and apologizing first. I've been gaslit by that kind of nonsense all my life. What am I supposed to apologize for? Being? They also suggest that I will regret cutting ties when they die. That I will miss them. Honey, I've been missing them all my life. I've always sung the Zombies song "I keep trying to find her, but she's not there." I've been dead to them since forever. No, let me rephrase that. I was never alive to them in the first place. I just sort of floated on the fringes like a shadow, waiting for my cue to dance attendance, my face pressed to the window hoping to be but never being let in.
Cutting ties was always inevitable because they cut ties with me from the beginning. I never shed a tear when my dad and his wife passed. How could I? They were never anything but taskmasters. What I need to grieve is the fact that I never had parents in the first place. That they took so much from me and never gave. I should grieve for all the lonely little children, teens, young adults that live in my head. I should make peace with them. Comfort them.
The Irish ballad "Red is the Rose" says "it's not for the loss of my mother that I grieve, it's all for the loss of my bonny, bonny lass that my heart is breaking forever." I'm the lass that is lost. If the well-meaners really meant well, they'd never urge me back to that hell of a life with those cruel people. They'd hold space for me. They'd sit with me in my pain. They wouldn't speak so callously on things they knew nothing about. They certainly wouldn't shame me. I'd cut my tongue out before I'd tell someone to have contact with such people. I'd cheer them finding their zen.
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