Hello my followers. My dear friend recently asked my how I felt and thought about the abuse and neglect by my four narcissist parents. And her question left me absolutely dumbfounded. I realized that for all I've written about narcissist parent abuse, I have no idea what I think now, let alone what I thought or felt then. Looking back, I see in living color that what I experienced was a frightening series of dissociative splits from reality. I see too, that I developed DID (dissociative identity disorder). It's undiagnosed but that's part of the neglect and abuse and I'll explain why later. Here are disturbing ways I felt and thought about parental abuse along with a description of the frightening dissociative personality impacts.
First, some definitions. Dissociative splits are unconscious defensive mental breaks from a reality that is too dangerous to live in safely. They are self-protective trauma responses to a world made impossible to navigate by abusive parents, without fragmenting the self. So I did just that: dissociate from reality by shattering myself into tiny pieces with jagged edges.
Google AI explains my life to a T. "Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a process that creates "alters" (altered realities) or distinct self-states that hold incompatible emotional realities or memories. It is a response to childhood abuse, neglect, or extreme stress, where the personality divides because it cannot integrate traumatic experiences, resulting in "apparently normal parts" (ANP) managing daily life while "emotional parts" (EP) hold the trauma." I got really good at the ANP while the EP filled to overflowing. I managed to look normal in a world that was hellishly abnormal. And I used dissociation to achieve that.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is not something a traumatized child is born with. She's forced into it. DID is curated by abusive parents who strategically weaponize manufactured chaos, hypocritical double standards, religion, shame, cruelty and stress. They routinely intimidate, shock, terrorize, ambush, backstab, lie to and about, humiliate, invalidate, triangulate, manipulate and exploit her. They abandon, neglect, endanger as a matter of course. Then they demand and expect unreasonable things of her. They gaslight about it all to destabilize their child and keep her in a state of confused fear, obligation and guilt.
An operative word in the Google description is "incompatible." First incompatibility: My life was so very different from everything around me: other family, friends, kids at school. No one else's looked remotely like mine. Second incompatibility: notion of family. My parents and later their new partners and kids in no way resembled or acted like families around me. I was the surrogate parent and spouse, unpaid nanny and caregiver to them all, yet infantilized like a wayward child. They took the parts of parenting they liked (being able to boss me around, having a child possession, being able to demand respect and act like know-it-alls) while ignoring all the real work of parenting.
I faulted for doing, saying, even thinking things I don't recall doing, saying or thinking. I was called willful, spoiled, disobedient, disloyal, too sensitive, too critical, in the way, a stumbling block, the problem. And I have no memory of being anything but loving and too obedient. I was subjugated to strangers whom my parents said were parents. It was incredibly baffling. I was blamed for everyone's faults. No one ever took my part. Not one. They all just pitted me against each other and played me like a cue ball.
Yet no one outside this illusory "family" treated me this way. No one said bad things about me. They seemed to like and love me. They never expected odd things of me. BUT none of them said anything to the contrary about this disparate way I was being treated, either. No one spoke up for me, either for or against. Every single person outside just accepted it so I thought I was the problem. I was the reason nothing matched or fit. I somehow caused some bizarre paradigm shift and that was why my experiences and how I was treated were so completely incompatible with external reality.
And so the only thing for me was to splinter my reality to suit whomever I was with at the time. I played the happy normal role with grandparents, at school, at church and with friends. Within what passed for family, I wore many more hats: scapegoat, problem child, fixer, appeaser, human doing, performing fool, slave, whipping girl. Dissociation was my survival tool to navigate this personal hell. I had to compartmentalize all these contradictory and bewildering experiences into tiny little drawers. I had to shut off large portions of myself which inevitably, as oxygen-deprived things do, suffocated and died. Feelings, thoughts, opinions, fear, anger, needs, creativity, self all subverted under the oppressive weight of narcissist parents' insane demands.
So now, despite some awareness, I'm still riding the waves of dissociative splits. I've never known who I am because I existed only to please them. To be what they wanted me to be, to play whatever role they cast me in. And it changed from person to person at any given time. That's another incompatibility: I had to be diametrically opposed things for each of them at the same time. And boy did my dad weaponize the scripture about being all things to all people to his advantage. My life gave that passage a whole new meaning. I had to be dancing monkey, lion tamer, tightrope walker, high wire acrobat, clown and shit scooper all at one time, in their three-ring circus of a "family." And here's a snapshot of what that did to me.
1) Imposter syndrome. Despite fielding all they threw at me fairly well, I feel like a fraud. Both because they told me I was and because they made me play so many conflicting roles, simultaneously. I never have and possible never will feel any genuine success.
2) No understanding of self outside others. No boundaries. I don't know where others end and I begin. And since narcissist parents forced me to cave under and rode herd ruthlessly over any boundaries, I'm not likely to feel comfortable erecting any now. So I just dissociate, again.
3) No independent wants, needs, opinions, thoughts besides those I was told to have. And wants and needs were never allowed. So to answer my friend's question, I don't know how I feel about their abuse. There's no framework or precedent for it. I just have to pretend it wasn't happening, to play monkey "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." I smiled through tears and cried on the inside. I faked it was all good because doing anything else was too dangerous. And now my feel and think abilities are broken.
4) Living in constant confusion. My memories are patchy at best and always shrouded in a confusing mist of pain with a few less painful spots. Gaslighting fog has gassed my brain and left it shell shocked and damaged. Most happy memories got buried under painful ones. And I got desensitized to painful ones by their malignant, malicious strangeness and frequency. I have emotional leprosy and can't feel the pain I should be able to because of all the scarring. It's just a constant dull ache. I have a scary high pain tolerance as one counselor said.
5) Crippling neurotic shame. I said early on that I'd explain why my dissociative identity disorder was undiagnosed. I never took the obvious symptoms seriously because no one else did. Instead of seeking help for me, they just shamed and blamed me, calling me an attention-seeking show off FOR EXHIBITING ANY SYMPTOMS. And extended family just ignored and pretended it was all fine. And so I didn't get help. I shut it all down, to placate, humor and soothe my narcissist parents. And to shield my extended family from any responsibility for or to me. And I got VERY good at hiding in plain sight.
6) Endless, terrifying nightmares. I'm exhausted and wake more tired than when I went to bed. I can't find relief. That's the hidden result of too much dissociation from reality. Memories don't go away, they don't stay in their drawers. They escape, in dreams, making new frightening memories. I have more dream memories than memories.
7) Sick and tired. I have so many trauma-related illnesses and injuries. Everything hurts.
8) Trauma behaviors. I cringe, keep small, stay silent, trauma grimace. I wear my constant appeasing, humoring face. I'm hypervigilant to anger, disapproval and censure. I'm a sitting target for shame. I'd like not to be. I'd like to not care, to blow it off, pfft, it's nothing. I'd like to speak up more. But I'm afraid to. Upsetting people who were easily upset with me, has kept me small. My pursed lips in the photo aren't me disapproving. They're a knee-jerk trauma response from biting my tongue and clamping my jaws shut so as not to upset anyone.
9) Angry outbursts that seem to come from nowhere. Keep a lid on an actively boiling kettle, doesn't work for long. It boils over. Pressurized things explode if pressurized too long. And often, it's a small thing that does. All that poison they dumped on me and I absorbed into myself. There was nowhere to go with it. And what happens to an oversaturated sponge? It leaks out. I hate that it does. I try so hard to smash that lid down and it only makes it boil harder.
So that's pretty depressing. I wish I had a nice, neat plan to share about how I got free of all this. I don't. Maybe it will get better, maybe it won't. I do think that radical acceptance of what happened and that it really was that bad, is a start.
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