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 term or in fact that there was a term. Before I understood how dangerous it was to carry the mental load alone. And especially that it was NOT a child's responsibility to carry the mental load for the adults called parents in her life. I'm also beginning to see how many of us traumatized kids of narcissist parents end up carrying everyone's load, all through our lives. Particularly the daughters, as we become wives and mothers.
It all begins with what B.F. Skinner called "operant conditioning." In this model, behaviors are shaped by removal of positive things (negative reinforcement) or punishment (addition of negative) for undesirable acts while good ones are encouraged with positive reinforcement. In healthy families, the desired behaviors are good for children and parents. In families ruled by narcissist parents, the behaviors desired are only good for the parents and are hurtful to the child. Well, good in the sense of self-serving, at the child's expense. Narcissist parents operantly 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 as if they were bad behavior. So the child thinks they are wrong.
They groom us from infancy to tend to them as if they were the children and we were the parents. We learn as tiny tots to soothe, smooth over, fix and do for mommy and daddy. We DO NOT learn to do these things for ourselves. It's not just that they change positions with us. They steal our selves from us. We are both child and parent. Child, when they get things for having us in that role. Parent for everything else. 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. Narcissist parents play fast and loose with the term "chores" burdening us with all kinds of inappropriate tasks that are too many, too big and too dangerous for us. We 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. Because we did as kids. We're the ones whose sleep is disturbed by trauma and stress nightmares, while our traumatizing, stress-causing parents sleep blissfully. 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 (someone who never, by the way, listens to ours in return).
Our narcissist parents bread crumb us, stringing us along with tiny scraps that barely sustain. And they are fake and self-serving, at that. They give their 15-year-old daughter a race car set as her only Christmas gift, gaslighting her that she wanted it. But they only do this so she'll have to entertain their younger sons with it. 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 stories 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 things, it's crickets from them. Or shame for being "so selfish." I was made to pay for my own sanitary pads in high school while my mother was pocketing all my child support to fund her new family.
We get so used to no reciprocity of good, that 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 on and never even ask how she slept. They know. Like shit.
We delve into their interests as if they were our own. Because they force us to, while taking no interest in ours or even calling them "showing off" or "immoral." (theater and dance in my case).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. Sometimes they lure us into sharing our ideas just so they can humiliate and mock us. They rage bait us into angered defense of them. They lie, exaggerate and dump, to engage our sympathies. And then turn cold, cynical, nasty, jeering, belittling and invalidating over our very real, crucial concerns.
And so we start to 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 how "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." We let them make us feel awful about things we're good at, by telling us we're just showing off. I still cannot hear that I have a pretty singing voice (and I hear it a lot) without hearing my dad telling me I'm attention seeking or "fishing for compliments." He, who took his violin everywhere, expecting to be asked to play. And then playing, as I now see it, VERY showy-offy. I was always proud of his talents while he taught me to be ashamed of mine.
I once let a homeschool mom shame me for wanting my daughter to perform a ballet piece at the talent fair. That I was organizing and she was just using to grandstand (it was so awkward, more on that story later). She, who did nothing to help with the work, patronizingly instructed me (as if I was a child) that "you see, Marilisa, dance is evil because it shows the body." When I brought up her daughters bouncing around the court 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 and her idiotic double standard hypocrisy. And that we would be taking our talents and massive time spent organizing the event, elsewhere.
And then begins phase 2 of 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 reward their arrogant demanding by doing all they demand of us. Even if they never do for us even the humblest things we ask. We never let anyone down (except ourselves) 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.
I'll blog more on this in part two. Love you all.
No comments:
Post a Comment