Hello my friends. Today in my mission to heal from narcissist parent abuse, I'm looking at how church teaching gaslights and DARVOs (denies, attacks reverse victim offenders child victims of parent abuse. In some cases even the Bible seems to but usually it's due to preachers getting it wrong. Sometimes it's due to carelessness or failure to listen. And sometimes ministers (rabbis, priests, imams, etc.) purposely weaponize religious teaching to shelter parent abuse by blaming the child victim.
How does the church gaslight abused kids? In several ways. First, religious leaders will abuse their power to place themselves above rules. They preach to others and not themselves. They abuse their role to make themselves an authority over rather than shepherd of the people. They misrepresent scripture. And parishioners give them too much control and will listen to the word of the preacher over their own common sense. Religious leaders can be very arrogant, bossy, hypocritical and out of touch. They sometimes overemphasize the trivial and trivialize the monumental.
Take for example the commandment of children to respect their parents. This is often taught in isolation from fuller texts which command the parent not to lead their astray or cause them frustration. The instructions further imply and state that the parent has first been respectful to the child, has modeled obedience and has been worthy of respect. The Bible also says that a parent owes a child love and care first. But the narcissist parent only highlights what is owed to them and downplays their responsibility to God and their children. There are dire warnings against that.
All this is exactly what the narcissist parents are already doing to their children. They put burdens on their kids that they don't carry. And then both the church and the narcissist parents cherry pick bits of scripture to hyperfocus on to the exclusion of essentials. They select Bible passages that seem to support their agenda while conveniently ignoring and even twisting things that don't fit. Narcissist parents already twist everything to their purpose and blame their children for their own behavior. And then discipline her for things they themselves are doing, saying they're just obeying the command not to spare the rod. But the arrogant, entitled, manipulative parent is not in a fit state to discipline the child.
She herself is not repentant, respectful to her own parents, to her child. She is just using it as an excuse to punish. By targeting the child, she is keeping focus on herself as the victim, the righteous one while also shielding her own wicked ways. She is deflecting blame on the child and away from the fact that she actually caused the child to do these things. She never mentions her own hand in problems. She disobeys God and gaslights the child that it's perfectly okay for her to do so.
And the church furthers the problem by reiterating to kids ad nauseum on their responsibility to their parents. They just blindly and naively assume that parents are good and worthy of respect and trust. They preach the same message to abused, neglected and mistreated children as they do wo properly cared for kids without taking their circumstances into consideration. Because context matters. Some will even gaslight the child that it doesn't matter what the parent does. The child MUST obey. Which is exactly what the abusive parents say. They who are adults can behave as badly as they want but the still developing must always be perfect.
Because the parents also preach the scriptures as if they are only written to the child and not first to the parent. Or the fact that the parents themselves are also children. And the church seems to teach this too. No ever seems to check the parents and where a good parent doesn't need to be told this, a bad one will exploit it. The parents seems to hold all the cards and the child just assumes that these people are correct because they are adults. She figures it's all on her, that she owes without being owed.
But even a cursory reading shows so many scriptures that are weaponized by parents against kids are either completely mistaught or have vital parts omitted. 2 Corinthians 12:14 says "For children are not obligated to save up for their parents, but parents for their children." This includes providing care for their children, humbling themselves and being more accountable to rules instead of less. But my parents did the opposite. They expected and expect to be cared for while telling me I was owed nothing from them.
So when a child grows and ends up making the unenviable choice to cut contact with her abusive parents, very often church leaders and fellow Christians will shame that child for disrespecting and turning her back on her aging parent. But they never stop to find out why. They don't consider that the parent cut contact with the child when she was young. They disrespected and turned their backs on her all her life. And she only ultimately made this decision out of necessity. And she didn't actually cut ties, she just didn't hold open doors they kept slamming in her face. She let it stay closed.
The church needs to be a lot more careful with these abused children. It needs to stop holding them accountable to parents who were never held accountable to their children. It needs to understand that not all children were raised with love and expecting them to do things that are dangerous is unconscionable. It needs to stop holding her to things that she can't and shouldn't do. It needs to stop hiding its eyes against parental abuse.
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