Hello my friends. Today in my path to healing childhood trauma from narcissistic abuse, I'm going to explore the brain damage that it caused. That's the first step to trauma recovery is to being seeing, acknowledging it so you can understand it. Here are some causes and symptoms of narcissistic and enmeshed parent abuse
Methods of child abuse (including but not limited to physical abuse)
Enmeshment: violating privacy, twisting themselves into me, identity theft
Child Neglect: refusing to provide basic care only for me, the breed dog ate better than I did.
Emotional abuse: rages, attacks, ambushing, insults, set-ups
Medical abuse: pooh-poohing injuries, ignoring illness, refusing to get treatment
Financial abuse: stealing, extorting, charging for normal things, making me buy my own shoes, pads, food,
Child support fraud: using child support payments to fund new family at the expense of the child they're are meant for.
Religious abuse: using Christianity to get me to comply with immoral, illegal and unethical demands
Deprivation: keeping the child cold, hungry, alone, cut off from support.
Hidden Homelessness: the family is properly homed, but the "stepchild" isn't. She's bounced back and forth with no consistent care given.
Stepchild abuse: The child born into a family that breaks apart and then parents remarry, often goes from being a child to only a half-person. A possession plus burden, a nuisance that parents play hot potato with until they want something from her. Then they ruthlessly snatch her back and put her into service.
Isolation: keeping relatives from gaining access and helping me
Self-care sabotage: selfishly indulging themselves and calling my self-care selfish and showing off
Desensitization: ironically, labeling me too sensitive and overreacting, made me afraid to show any sensitivity or needs. A further twist is that my parents were chronically overreactive and oversensitive themselves and saw narcissistic injury everywhere.
Needless child: Needless as in treated like I was useless and also not allowed any normal needs. I learned to go without to make their lives easier and to avoid punishment and shame. Mind they whined about their own "unmet" needs constantly. Needs for scapegoat kids are selfish wants. Selfish wants are "needs" to antagonistic parents.
Endangerment: leaving me unsupervised in very dangerous, fraught situations starting at age 4. Being unavailable.
Abandonment: leaving me for years at a time, leaving me alone to care for four special needs children, leaving me home alone all day during the summer, latchkey kid after school
CSA: pestering me with sex talk, covert incest, using me as sex therapist, letting boyfriend sexually harass
Child Exploitation: using me to get what they wanted
Triangulation: pitting people against me with lies and character assassination
Scapegoating: every problem was blamed on me. Other kids used me as servant. Never taking my part.
Devaluing and Minimizing: blowing off major problems that another of the parents were doing, never protecting me.
Intimidation: threatening me with violence, effectively evicting me at 12 and 16.
Coercive Control: Controlling with rages, spitefulness and vindictiveness
Parentification: made to parent parents, be responsible too young, care for other children day and night
Role-Reversal: made to think parents were my responsibility but I wasn't theirs.
Over-reacting: making a huge deal out of normal childhood things (being sick, needing things)
Lies: Twisting their own horrible behavior, pedophilia, hookups, infidelity, physical abuse, into normal
Demonizing: making me feel like the bad guy, causing me to self-loathe and self-harm
Infantilization: treating me like a foolish, inept, overstepping where they didn't belong, while also expecting me to be the adult and care for them
Privacy invasion: stealing money, going through my few possessions. Things showing up missing when they were around. Entering my bedroom and when I was in the bathroom, without knocking.
Stealing space: no bedroom or sufficient bed, moved out of rooms on a whim, made to share cupboards with baby, locked in with baby, evicted at 17
Co-opting: stealing my successes and spinning them as their own
Mocking and invalidating: Undermining every success and insulting it.
Bullying: strong-arming, riding herd, ruthless ridiculous rules only for me, backstabbing
Double standards: do as we say not as we do
Gaslighting: rewriting history, saying it never happened, I imagined it, perverting real stories to their own ends
Humiliation: False, public accusations, screaming at me in front of family, pranking, jeering
FOG: exposing me to constant fear, obligation ang guilt to them and whomever they happened to press me into service to
DARVO: making themselves the perpetual victims and me the ever perpetrator
Smear campaigns: creating and spreading rumors about me
Family mobbing: ganging up and ambushing
Flying monkeys: lying so others would come after me
Destabilizing: shunting me back and forth, taking things, making home unsafe and treacherous
Homelessness: moving me 40 times before age 20, never providing a constant, reliable support
Illegal, forced labor: making me work unpaid in their foster care homes
Chaos as normal: constantly upended, shoved from pillar to post, seemed purposeful just to cause insecurity
Boundary Crashing: scolding me for basic self-defense against their attacks, not respecting any personal needs or rights
Sane-washing: dumbing down every bad thing they did and exaggerating everything I did
Hypocritical, shifting expectations: Forcing eggshell walking and hoop hopping then moving hoops)
Narcissistic cult indoctrination (being forced into a very disturbing, unreal world)
Grooming (made to do very icky things no one else I knew, was)
Fear: (parents used fear to control me)
Left to struggle alone (different reality in each different "family" that didn't match other kids' lives at all)
Devious, cunning, conniving: describes all four malignant narcissists' sabotage of me
Baffled, unstable, unsure
As a result, I pretty much exist in a frightening, confusing, gaslit world of
- Confused roles (no understanding of who I am)
- Confused responsibilities (all are mine, none are thine)
- Cognitive dissonance (nothing they did matched what normal people do)
- Parallel world (living in constant paradigm shift: outside world vs. my own polar opposite experience)
- Dissociation (fragmenting myself to be what four different fascist dictators demanded of me)
- Trauma bonding (they bonded themselves to me in unhealthy ways, now I can't get that obligation out of me)
- Codependence (as an adult, I feel unable to be without someone's approval)
- Unable to make decisions for fear of censure.
- Always looking over my shoulder.
- People pleasing always
- Hypervigilant
- Humoring, placating
- Subservient
- Frozen trauma grimace
- Groveling
- Childhood trauma responses (fawning, freezing, fighting, fleeing, fixing)
- Overwhelmed (too much confusion, attacking leave me permanently off-balance)
- Betrayal blindness (took me all my life to accept that this had actually happened)
- Mental and Emotional fracturing (inability to think and feel in cohesive way)
- CPTSD (complex and layered trauma issues)
- Trauma nightmares (every night)
- Stress cortisol bursts (constant acid spray causing brain damage)
- Afraid of my own shadow.
- Broken, at least that's how it feels
Childhood Trauma Recovery
- Radical awareness
- Radical acknowledgement
- Radical acceptance
- Permission to grieve including feeling angry
- Allowing feelings of resentment that it happened and now I still have to deal with it.
- Giving myself space and time to heal.
- Doing things I was shamed for:
- getting enough to eat
- resting when I'm tired
- doing what feels good
- doing what makes me happy
- allowing myself to feel exhausted by the sheer overwhelming pain of abuse
- Not doing what I used to, being a workaholic, Type A human doing, to distract myself. Even if others don't like me not doing them.
- Going no contact
- Setting and maintaining boundaries
- Making conscious choices instead of trauma responses.
- Leading my own life instead of being led around by the nose.
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