Hello my friends. In my quest to heal childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm looking at why unconditional agape love is a dangerous thing to preach to an abused kid. Agape love is a chosen act of intentional goodwill toward all and unconditional positive regard (UPR) is a decision to love without any reward, expectation, reciprocity, even if the loved person is cruel. I'm using the metaphor of mountains which in my poems represent safety but in my trauma brain, danger.
Both of these are tricky for abused kids. UPR says love the sinner, not the sin. But that's a hair-splitting dichotomy that regularly abused kids don't have the luxury of separating out. We already unconditionally love our parents. And our narcissistic parents demand love which they don't give. But betrayal blindness and trauma bonding make us unable to acknowledge. To navigate this treacherous cognitive dissonance, we compartmentalize and dissociate. We stay silent about abuse and end up condoning their sin. They coerce compliance and then exploit it to abuse us further.
💡 Cognitive Dissonance & Condoning Abuse
A child does not have the cognitive or emotional development to separate a parent's identity from their abusive behavior, especially when that behavior determines the child's daily safety. When a child is told to unconditionally accept a cruel parent under the guise of "loving the sinner," the child is forced to resolve the intolerable friction of cognitive dissonance by minimizing the abuse. If the parent cannot be bad, then the child must be bad, or the abuse must not be that bad. This forces the child into the tragic position of silently approving the very behavior that is destroying them.
The Slippery Slopes of Agape Love
This mountain range of problems with unconditional agape love are multitudinous. Even the Bible can confused me because it read as slanted in the my narcissistic parents' favor and weaponized by them against me. They bound me to burdens they didn't carry. And micro-inspected the speck in my eye through eyes blinded by boards.
- Hypocrisy Hills: The Love Chapter 1 Corinthians 13 has a lot to say about love. It is the antithesis of narcissism. But narcissists read it as what they are OWED. And they taught me it was what I OWE. And boy, is this recipe for gaslighting the Broken Vending Machine child. I was expected to be all these things without being given a one of them.
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." (NIV)⚠️ The Polar Opposite Inversion"As I loved them with all my heard, my impatient, unkind, jealous, arrogant, boastful, dishonoring, disrespectful, self-serving, rageful, grudge-holding, score-keeping parents loved wickedness. They endangered, distrusted, broke my trust, set me up and let me down. And this is the definition of narcissism."
- Foothills of FOG: Narcissistic parents begin as they mean to continue. From birth, they indoctrinate the child into their narcissistic cult. She is born into indentured servitude to them. They drill her in fear, obligation and guilt. I had to be hypervigilant and prepared to jump through their constantly moving hoop field. I had to anticipate their demands. And I was continually shamed and humiliated over "failure" to please them.
Role Reversal & The "Broken Vending Machine"
I coined (wow just saw that irony) the term "Broken Vending Machine child" to show the broken transaction between a narcissistic parent and child. The child drops endless coins in but nothing drops down. Then she is treated like the reverse broken vending machine being kicked and shaken to dispense endless love, obedience, hypervigilance, care and goodies with no coins put in.
- Pointless Point: There's no need to tell a child to love. We are born loving our parents. It's how the species survives. Where it breaks down for kids of enmeshed narcissist parents is that they don't love us. They use and abuse us. Because narcissists believe we are obligated to them, and they are obligated to no one. Even their own parents.
- Preachin' to the Choir Peak: I sat through endless church sermons on how love is patient, kind, merciful, yada yada. I got it. I never didn't try to live that. But the preacher was pointing his finger in the wrong direction. It's my parents who needed Sunday school lesson on 1 Corinthians 13. Although trauma bonding, betrayal blindness and gaslighting made me unable to see how they were failing Love 101.
- Asymmetrical Ascent. So our journey up this mountain was unequally two-sided. On my side were all treacherous rocky, stumbling block "thou shalls and shall nots." While on the other side of the mountain my parents got a free pass on the ski lift to the top.
- Muddled Mountain: The problem with unconditional love is that love by nature is conditional. Even the Bible says so as per 1 Cor. 13. Love behaves a certain way. And by ignoring the unloving behavior we give it license. If God has conditions, so must we. This doesn't mean we hate people who hurt us. But must acknowledge abuse and protect ourselves. Because hurtful people only exploit forgiveness as that free lift ticket to keep on hurting us. So all our grand notions of love and mercy, effectively throw out the baby and leave us in the dirty bathwater.
- Slippery Slopes of Sin: We're told the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. And I think we've misunderstood when it comes to parent abuse. We say it means the kids imitate the sin. But in my experience the, child takes the consequences of their sins. And all that burden makes climbing already slippery slopes impossible.
- Pitfall Pass: This way looks safe but narcissistic parents have hidden booby trapped the trail. Everything is fraught with danger. They weaponize and manipulate simple things. Basic care is denied, just to make the child vulnerable and weak. Everything is is an unwritten transaction that they never pay up on. They bind the child to contracts she never even got to read let alone sign. Then they break them.
- Camo Cliff. Nothing is genuine and everything is deceptive in narcissistic families. No good deed goes unpunished. A kind word comes back to bite. Gifts have strings attached. Comments are loaded. Snide, passive-aggressive jibes are cloaked as compliments. Vicious, spiteful, punitive, malicious punishment is dressed as gentle Biblical reproof. Random things are exaggerated into federal crimes. Narcissistic rage blasts come without warning. Jeering is passed off as "just a joke." Insensitive cruelty is spun as the child being too sensitive. Blame shifting obscures the real perpetrator and wrongly accuses the innocent child.
- Bandit Gulch: Enmeshed parents blatantly steal from the child and gaslight her that it never happened. She imagined it. Everything from identity theft, to boyfriends, to security to privacy. My mother took my entire Canadian money collection (about $50 in 1972) and blamed my best friend. My dad "gave me" a little boy's race car set for my 15th birthday. So I'd be forced to play with it with his sons. Then he took it back when I left. These are two of many their highway robberies.
- Broken Bend: Whatever they can't steal, they break. They destroy family, her sense of self, relationships with God and other people. They flip everything topsy-turvy from normal. They erode her foundations by break trust and destabilizing her.
- The Range of Role Reversal: Narcissistic parents parentify the child making her responsible to and for them and anyone else they decide to enslave her to.
🔄 Parentification, infantilization and the Emotional Debt Narcissists believe they are permanently owed, but never owe anything in return. By forcing the child into role reversal, the parent abdicates their responsibility to provide safety and instead demands that the child regulate the parent's shifting emotional states. The child becomes an emotional caretaker for a debt they never signed up to pay. But then the parents switch around and infantilize the child when it suits them. They expect her to act like an adult as a child while they act like spoiled brats. Then they play the parent when someone is watching. But it's performative.
- Gaslighting Gorge: Narcissistic parents don't just lie. They twist, distort, deceive and DARVO (deny responsibility, attack, reverse victim offender roles). The way is choked with gas fumes that kill off healthy self-care and leave only trauma responses. 💔 The Interrupted Cycle
"Love is supposed to go out from parents to encircle children. In narcissistic broken circle families, love goes out from a child but never comes back around to her."
- Bizarre Butte: This is a narrow flat top traumatized children are forced onto with no resources and no place to go except over the edge. They're expected to work miracles on this tiny surface. And being put on a pedestal is not a good thing. There's no room to move. There's no winning only falling off. Nothing is normal and straight-forward for the child of narcissists. Everything is chaotic, needlessly stressful shaky, insubstantial and insecure.
- Cloudy Calamity Cliff. Trauma bonding, parent enmeshment and gaslighting have clouded out judgement and reason. We don't see the edge until we've stepped over it and plummeting. But it was no accident.
- Blind Man's Bluff: The problem is we kids don't see the edge that we're about to fall over. We were blindfolded, with a millstone placed around our neck and then led astray.
📌 Betrayal Blindness & The Survival Split To survive a hostile environment, a child must remain blind to the parent's betrayal. The brain handles this by compartmentalizing: it splits off the terrifying reality of the abuse (the Emotional Part) so that the child can continue to love, attach to, and depend on the caregiver (the Apparently Normal Part). Preaching unconditional love to a child in this state essentially demands that they deepen their own dissociation to keep the peace.
- "Can't see the Trees" Forest: The child is deprived of basic needs. She's neglected, abandoned and endangered. She's moved far from loving family where they can hide the abuse. It's not glaringly but it's visible if you look. And most people don't. They accept on face value that those who call themselves parents, actually parent. And it hides in plain sight because where do you hide a tree? In a forest. Where do you hide abuse? Inside a house that looks like every other house on the block. Except it isn't. My back story is pretty weird and someone should have seen but they didn't because my abusers called themselves parents and people believed them because what parent harms their child?
- Coercive Control Freak Canyon This is vast empty space with way too much room for abuse. Dysfunctional, dysregulated, enmeshed parents are control freaks who use no self-control. They trample boundaries, ride herd over privacy and hog all the oxygen. They will do anything to get what they want.
In a narcissistic family system, religious or moral texts are often used inverted. The child is gaslit into believing that being "patient, kind, and keeping no record of wrongs" means they must have no boundaries, no anger, and no memory of how they are being mistreated. This transforms a passage about love into a blueprint for enduring subjugation.
- Summit of Smug, Superior Self-Righteousness: Above it all is the parents' firm conviction of being above it all. They believe they are beyond reproach. Untouchable. They have been gifted a cloak of immunity that protects them and enables them to pass judgement while bypassing consequences. They have dispensation to dictate rules and mores they don't abide by.
- Valley of the Shadow of Death. But they can't escape those wages of sin forever. Because at the bottom of all these mountains is a death valley running through. No matter how the bandy about their "Christianity" or some other religiosity, narcissists will lose. They may scale the peaks of pride by as they say, it comes with a fall. All their entitlement leads to immorality, debauchery and moral bankruptcy. And those have price tag and it is damnation. That's not me, that's God.
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