Hello my friends. Today in my quest to heal CPTSD from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm reflecting on some vlogs by my favorite Youtube therapist/psychologist, Dr. Ramani. She shares a great deal of insight on narcissism. And based off that and my own experiences at the hands of four narcissistic parents (two bio and their partners), I'm going to explain how to expose a narcissist parent to avoid their cruelty.
First let me make a disclaimer. I'm not talking about publicly exposing them. Or even exposing them to themselves. I don't have near the experience or fabulous for that. I'm running on fumes, emotionally, and confidence is not in my toolbox. And furthermore, it's not advisable, as per the experts and my own experiences, to do that. Malignant narcissist parents, with their dark tetrad exploitative, arrogant, entitled, manipulative, nasty, spiteful behavior are FAAAARRRR too good at the this game for me to safely unmask them.
What I'm talking about is exposing, to myself and my trauma brain, what they did and how it affects me now. I'm taking my own side, for a change. I'm taking myself out of the scapegoat seat they stuck me in putting responsibility back on them. And I'm doing this by showing myself (and you if you need to hear it) just how they operate, so we can avoid their cruelty.
Look past the gaslighting fog. So we use this term gaslighting to mean a con job in which they deny reality and paint a false new one for us. But I think gassing is a more accurate description. They pollute our minds and damage our brains with sick, twisted lies, poisonous fabrications and evil spun narratives. Narcissist parents reinvent our reality and implant wrong ideas which we grow up thinking are true. And I know, you're thinking, oooohkay but how do we do this? Good question.
Hear the lie for what it is. Catch them in one lie. It just takes one. And their entire narcissistic fantasy starts to unravel before your eyes. You may have to orchestrate by asking them about something you know for a fact happened. Pretend you don't remember and are just asking for clarification. Make it something tame but beware. Nothing is simple for narcissists, especially vulnerable ones, who are always looking for insults to personalize. They most innocent question can set them off. But that in itself is revealing.
Stop auto-gaslighting. I've always defended, shielded and took responsibility and did damage control for my mom's chaos. It's like I had hands on eyes and fingers in ears so I couldn't see or hear accurately. Over the years, I took her gaslighting of me on myself. My memory is very patchy as a result (gaslighting rewrites not only history but your memories of it). But some things, by their egregiously bizarre nature, stand out. What opened my eyes to my mother's lies was, when at her doc appt, she was asked to list all her surgeries. I reminded her of one she had in Alaska. My dad was on some kind of mission trip and she had left him and moved us to a remote island. After we were there for a few weeks, she left me with strangers for a week, to go to Seattle to have surgery for a bladder infection, she said. (This is how it was presented to me). When I brought it up, she irritably shut me down and denied ever having surgery or going to Seattle at all. Which I know by the trauma nightmares of that experience happened.
Stop making excuses for them to yourself. I realized that she was lying then and is still lying. I don't know why she lied, but it wasn't to protect me, just herself. I have no idea where she went or what happened. I just know she disappeared, just like my dad, and it terrified me. Now as an adult, I call it what it was. Abandonment.
Connect the dots. Looking back I recall they did that a lot, left little me alone, in unsafe, unfamiliar places. With dangerous people. And they did it and other neglectful, abusive things away from eyes who would have cared. I also see that my mom's lie at the doctor's office was more than just a lie. It is part of a lifetime pattern of gaslighting. So many disturbing she said and did, and made excuses, and hypocritically preached against, have now proved to be the unethical, illegal, immoral, unsafe things they always were but I didn't see. Things like telling 8 y/o me it was good she was sleeping with a married man because she was trying to win him over to Jesus. Yes, that is a true story.
Ask trusted people for feedback. Ask what their childhood experiences were. Ask objectively, without sharing personal experiences immediately, their opinion of things that happened to you. Ask how they would feel if thus and such happened to them. I'm not saying be cagey and if they ask, you can say this happened to you. If they knew your parents, ask what their impressions were/are. I've gotten incredible awareness from things friends have shared. My cousin met my mom for the first time and she did some weird thing which I had overlooked, as usual. He immediately identified what was wrong with it. He was able to help me who was too close to and too historically gaslit by her to see clearly what she was doing.
Ask AI. I'm serious. I have conversations with Gemini about things that happened to me to get perspective. Ask if this is narcissistic type behavior. Many of the things they did, that I've downplayed over the years, turn out to be actionable abuse, abandonment, endangerment, neglect, then and now. And Gemini has sound sources to prove it. In fact, AI will often say, if this is happening to you or someone you know, report it and here's where. One benefit of asking AI over real people is that AI does not have the capability of gaslighting, shaming or invalidating you. AI has no personal agenda to protect unlike flying monkeys do.
So let's recap. We're not looking to "out" anyone, except to ourselves. That's not our motive. And it wouldn't be safe anyway. A cornered malignant narcissist is deadly. We're not attacking. We're just trying to quit being attacked by them, by identifying that malignant narcissist parents are dangerous. We ARE blaming them and we need to. They have blamed us for their problems all our lives. They've scapegoated, manipulated, triangulated, exploited and abused us. And it's time to put responsibility for that back where it belongs and stop taking their issues on ourselves.
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