Childhood trauma victims of narcissistic parent abuse are trapped in an inescapable haunted house

Hello my friends. Today on the road to childhood trauma recovery, I'll show how life for victims of narcissistic parent abuse are trapped in an inescapable haunted house. To the world, the houses looked normal. And the monstrous parents wore masks but they don't hide the viciousness underneath. 

Bespoke Spook House of parent abuse

Malignant narcissists turn homes into purpose built haunted houses. They are frightening fraught spaces, where fear, insecurity and destabilization are normal and safety, peace and nurturing are fairytales. The monster that jumps out and scare them isn't just a man in a mask. They are parents who are purposely terrorizing their child. The mask they wear is one of loving parent which hides the monster. To the outside world, these houses look like any other house on the block. What folks didn't see were the emotional bars on the windows. The locked rooms with kids' held hostage to devastation demands, coercive control and debilitating expectations. But then we had to live this double life of cognitive dissonance. Especially us scapegoats who were deprived of anything resembling normalcy. 

The "Normal" Double Bind

Our trap was made more difficult because we had to leave our tailor-made hell and go to normal places like grandma's and school. Places normal people had no inkling of the terror we were living in. So we  had to somehow act like everything was fine to sort of fit in. And our abusers made sure to preserve the illusion with family trauma special effects:

• gaslighting (you're making it up for attention, showing off, oversensitive, overreacting)
• hypocritical double standards (feigning the good Christian at church while living in basement with boyfriend but keeping one room reserved for CPS calls, to look like she was sleeping upstairs with foster care kids when it was me). 
• pre-emptive smear campaigns (painting a false version of the child as an untrustworthy liar before the child says anything so that anything she might report will be disregarded as untrue.)
  
  
  
• bonds of secrecy (whatever is said in the "family" stays here)
• triangulation (pitting people against the child with character defamation) 
• mythical flying monkeys (telling the child no one will believe them) 
• manipulation of facts and timelines
• DARVO and blame-shifting
• threats and intimidation 
• overreaction and minimization (innocent things the child does are blown out of proportion while truly awful parent behavior is down-played)

Oh what a tangled web they weave

Narcissistic and enmeshed parents entangle their children in sticky dirty webs of deceit. Because enmeshed parents see children as possessions to use and abuse as they wish. And we don't know this is wrong because it's all we know. Our entire existence is built on fabrications, lies, double standards, evasions, flipped scripts and revisionist history. Nothing is straight-forward or clean. Nothing is predictable except unpredictability. All we know is service to them, walking on eggshells, placating and humoring them. They do this specifically to wear us down, deplete our resources, undermine and sabotage our selves.

Role reversal and reversed again

They force us into all sorts of inappropriate roles and expectations. Then they change the rules again, w without telling us and expect we'll just know and dance to the next tune. Not one of the things they command of us, is appropriate or even moral or legal most of the time. This keeps us constantly off balance, hypervigilant and insecure. It destroys our health, coping skills and self-care abilities. It causes trauma bonding which causes betrayal blindness in us, which causes a completely broken down functioning. It took me till almost 60 years old to understand that any of this was wrong. 

The Shell Game of Isolation 

Malignant narcissist parents use an arsenal of dirty tricks to keep the child away from eyes who might help her. They play a devious two- handed game of double gaslighting, telling one false story to the child the opposite to authorities, extended family, neighbors, friends, schools. They tell pit the child against loved ones telling malicious lies about the other to both parties. They play both ends off each other for the middle. And because they are the child's parents they have special access to her that they can revoke. They move the child far ways to keep her destabilized with no support (mine moved me to Alaska from Michigan, for shits and giggles).  They also get in a kid's head and mess up her mind. They poison relationships with their pot-stirring and rumor-mongering. My mother told me my beloved grandfather, who was one of my few allies, had sexually molested her, so I'd feel sorry for her and turn on him. She sicced her bat guano boyfriend on these two elderly people and boyfriend terrorized them so badly that my grandfather had a heart attack. 

Chaos and confusion 

So actually when I say that traumatized kids' homes appear normal, many of mine didn't. Because that's another tactic they use. They make normal needs inaccessible. I was shuffled in and out of 40 different places before graduation. We were homeless for parts of my life. I slept in tents, on the floor, on unheated porches, with their babies' rooms, alone with four under-5 special needs foster kids, upstairs in the next room to a convicted child molester, squatted in other people's homes and with strangers. There was no scary, dangerous or chaotic that was too terrifying, unsafe or chaotic to dump me in.  

Singled out for austerity 

My parents subjected me to major deprivations no one else was. Not themselves, their new partners, their new children or anyone I knew, was. I'm talking things like stealing and withholding confidence, proper clothing, food, a bed, privacy, personal boundaries, respect, comfort, a stable home, a bedroom, time for myself. I was worked double shifts at two jobs before I was 12. I was yanked out of schools with no warning or say. I was shunted between them like shared car seat. I was waiting on four narcissistic parents all with their own unique forms of abuse. This left me drained, exhausted and used up. Kids like me are no more able to care for ourselves or navigate life, than tattered rag dolls.  

Where do we go from here? 

Well, the only place to go is up. I've been about as low as it can get. Right now, I'm working to de-gaslight myself and replace confusion with clarity and purpose. I'm working to reorient my disoriented sense of self. I'm calling the house of horrors what it was. I'm unmasking the "good Christian" people who called themselves my parents as the malignant narcissists they are.