Hello my friends. I've been sharing how I lost 100 pounds, for the last 12 years or so. Only recently, I realized that I needed to work on healing CPTSD from narcissistic parent abuse. And then I began connecting the dots between weight gain, obesity, childhood trauma recovery and weight loss. Here's what I found.
It might seem like a stretch to say that obesity is linked to childhood trauma but consider this. Traumatized kids who are subjected to narcissistic parent abuse are exhausted. Our resources are zapped. We lived with endless selfish demands from our narcissistic parents. Our identities stolen. Nothing is easy or comfortable. Nothing is like it is for most normal kids. Life is dangerous and filled with anxiety. We don't possess selves, feelings, needs, wants, opinions, interests, normal things. We have been gaslit that we exist only to serve.
We are neglected, bullied, exploited, abandoned, endangered, parentified, terrorized, shocked, humiliated, invalidated, scapegoated and gaslit on the daily. This is boggling for children who are supposed to be able to expect care and nurturing from their parents but only get shite and shoved in it. Everything we do is twice as hard, takes twice as long with half or none of the resources. We build proverbial bricks without straw.
Where parents are usually the ones exhausted from caring for resources, we are burned out from caring for them. We are expected to be grownups in children's bodies by grown adults who conversely and unfairly scold and harass us over the smallest of normal child behaviors. We have all the work of adulthood and none of the perks.
And we were taught that self-care was selfish. So we don't care for ourselves because we don't know how. We survive at best and mostly just limp along getting sicker and more run down. We don't get medical treatment because they didn't care for our medical needs and taught us we didn't deserve it. We don't eat right because they didn't feed us right. They withheld, deprived and cut us short so they could have too much. We gave, they took.
I have gone hungry so often in my life. I ate the cheapest and lived off scraps. I learned to ignore hunger till I fainted. I deprived myself because I thought I couldn't afford it because they had stolen so much from me that I didn't have enough to live on. My narcissist mother will now play this little attention-seeking game by telling people "sometimes we (her and her family) don't get enough to eat."
My aunt called me to ask if this was true. And I told her it wasn't. But I didn't tell her that it WAS true of a lot of my childhood. I went without so they could have. And yet she denies any of it. Same with my dad. He made sure everyone but me had everything they wanted and more. So I grew up not really understanding my own needs.
I was hungry all the time. Tired all the time. I fell asleep everywhere. I was sick a lot. I lost too much weight because I didn't eat enough. It wasn't an anorexia kind of starving myself. It was a deprivation mode thing. I gained too much weight when I went on an antidepressant that took out my limit switches. I couldn't feel anything, joy, sorrow, nothing. I had random uncontrollable rage that seemed to come from nowhere.
So part of how I lost 100 pounds was by learning to feel in healthy ways. I'm learning to need, to be okay with it, to ask for things and expect to get them. Or to get them for myself. I'm learning to shed the accumulated shame of decades of narcissistic parent abuse. I'm learning that to care for myself is crucial. I'm learning to shut out the gaslighting voices by going no contact with the remaining gaslighting family.
It's not how I would have wanted things but it's what I got. Now I have to do what I can to heal myself f from the toxic influences.
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