Hello my friends. I've just recently learned the term "mental load" but I realized I've carried it all my life. Before I knew the word or in fact there was a word. Before I understood how dangerous it was to carry it alone. And especially that it was NOT a child's responsibility to carry it for the adults called parents in her life. I'm also beginning to see how many of us traumatized kids of narcissist end up carrying everyone's load, all through our lives. Particularly the daughters, as we become wives and mothers.
It all began with what B.F. Skinner called "operant conditioning." In this model, behaviors are shaped by removal of positive or punishment for undesirable acts while good ones are encouraged with positive reinforcement. In healthy families, the desired behaviors are good for child and parents. In families ruled by narcissist parents, the behaviors desired are only good for the parents. Well, good in the sense of self-serving, at the child's expense. Narcissist parents are condition their kids to take care of them and NOT to take care of themselves. Self-care, self-advocacy, healthy, normal kid behaviors are punished.
They groom us from infancy to tend to them as if they were the children and we were the parents. They change positions with us. From childhood we act in loco parentis. Before we even know how, we are carrying what is rightfully their mental load as well as our own. We perform their duties, worry about things they should be concerned about and deal with all the things they don't want to. We cover for their irresponsible, immature, even unethical and immoral behavior. They guilt, shame and coerce us into feelings of obligation to them far beyond our years and well past anything we truly owe them.
In adulthood (or what passes for adulthood in children of narcissists) we just continue these patterns. We care for everyone, adult and child. We stress over things that aren't our worry. We feel responsible to and for everyone in our sphere. We're the ones setting and getting up with alarms while the adults sleep through them. We get everyone to church on time, remember the birthday present for the classmate's party, bake the cookies for the Boy Scout troop and make sure there's toilet paper. We ignore our own pain so we can listen to and shoulder someone else's (who never, by the way, listen to ours in return).
Our narcissist parents bread crumb us, stringing us along with tiny scraps of love, care and nurture, that barely sustain. If our self-centered parents deign to include us, or happen to say a not terrible thing, we bubble over, effusively pouring ourselves out for them, to feed their narcissistic supply. If they confide in us, no matter how icky or inappropriate the confidence (like my mother dumping her sex life woes on me), we rejoice that they've counted us worthy to share. We're grateful for the opportunity to "lighten poor dad's load." As they've taught us is our responsibility (it's not). And yet when we need them, for appropriate kid things, it's crickets from them.
We get so used to no reciprocity of good, that when if it happens, it feels like a feast. It's not. It's picking shit with the chickens. Meanwhile we're expected to "see to it" things get done that the adults are supposed to see to. We don't have the faintest idea how to do many of the things they demand. Like co-sleeping with babies so parents can "get their sleep." A 10 y/o has no idea how to navigate a crying child. So she just worries herself sick. Lays awake waiting, checks for breathing, trauma nightmares from disturbed sleep. While the child's parents snooze blissfully.
We delve into their interests as if they were our own. We take on their beliefs and echo their opinions. We dutifully attend their rants, even if it is causing us ulcer flare-ups. We get used to them shooting down our ideas if they happen to deviate in any way. We feel massive shame for even thinking differently. Even if we're bloody well thinking and saying the same damn thing! Just not in the way the narcissist insists we must say it.
We ignore and talk down our own ideas and pretty soon forget we ever had any. We support, encourage and fund their hobbies at our own expense. We listen to them drone on about whatever their pet thing is. We accept their insults about how they're "not interested" in what we are and "it's boring." (It took me till 61 to realize that my interests were no more boring than my dad's. We bow in humiliation when they shame us for our passions. We let them tell us that this is or that thing we like is "of the devil."
I once let a mom's group leader shame me for wanting my daughter to perform a ballet piece at the talent fair, saying "dance is evil because it shows the body." When I brought up her daughter playing basketball, she said "that's different because they do it for God." (!) Thanks Dad, for that toxic shame you planted in me, that made me keep quiet and not tell her just what I thought of her nasty comments about my daughter.
And then begins phase 2 operant conditioning. We are so used to being and doing for everyone that we set up expectations in others by being too reliable. We absorb all their expectations and teach them to demand from us. We never let anyone down, even people who routinely let us down. And by doing this we operantly condition them to demand too much of us and too little from themselves. We don't take care of ourselves when bullies like the homeschool mom, insult us. We peace keep when there's no peace to be kept. We auto-gaslight ourselves that things are our responsibility that aren't. That we have no choices. That whenever anyone tells us to do something we have to comply. We teach people to boss us around and walk on us.
And pretty soon the entire mental load is on our shoulders and we're crumbling under it. We have to come up with answers, suggestions and solutions for problems we didn't cause. Everyone texts us to get info on stuff we have no authority over and then blames us when we can't magically make it happen. We let ourselves be made the middle woman, Shell Answer Lady, complaints and fix-it department, social events coordinator, inventory monitor, on and on.
We defer to everyone and make excuses for them. Even though we're expected to plan something, we don't dare actually express a preference. Or do something without "running it by" someone else. Raise your hand if you've been in the invidious position of having to make something happen single-handedly, while still asking for input and THEN fielding complaints about the very thing you were left to plan alone?? They don't to do the work, just the bitching about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment