Hello my friends. Today on the path to
childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm exploring the hypocrisies of the backstabbing, competitive, jealous, judgmental "
pick me" parent. Both my parents and their second partners were narcissists. Mom is malignant, grandiose turning vulnerable as she ages. Dad and stepdad are grandiose with malignant narcissistic rage. Stepmom was covert, passive-aggressive vulnerable narcissist. Today we'll look at the jealous, vindictive "pick me" aspect of the narcissistic mother. The I'll connect how she uses religious gaslighting, "
Virtue signaling", triangulation, enmeshment and weaponized Christianity to maintain her perceived moral high ground while acting very immoral.
Why all the descriptors for narcissistic abuse?
There's a lot of jargon, because the narcissistic parent does so many audaciously nasty things. She's a mess of contradictions, sneaky tactics, control freak power plays and flip-flopping double standards. She has a complicated arsenal of weapons that she strategically employs like a general with a complicated battle plan. A narcissistic parent doesn't parent. She doesn't nurture. She does the opposite. She ambushes, deceives, gaslights, parentifies, bullies, harasses, terrorizes, invalidates, dehumanizes, manipulates, exploits, neglects, abandons, harms and endangers her child all as part of her grand scheme to destroy her.
Everything is reversed and weaponized
Upon hearing the insane chaos and abuse I lived with, people ask "how could a mother and father do this?" Listeners struggle to believe my stories because they don't fit anything like normal, healthy parent-child relationships. That's because they didn't parent and had no intention of parenting me. I was utile possession, not a child. Everything was backwards for me. I was parentified AND infantilized (a common double whammy kids of narcissists experience). There were two sets of rules. Wrong was right for them to do, and right was wrong for me. I had to split four ways to accommodate not only two narcissistic parents but their bullying narcissistic new spouses. The cognitive dissonance this caused me was unbearable and later led dissociative splits and dissociation.
The jealous, competitive, enmeshed narcissistic parent
I was trying to remember good times with my parents that didn't come back to bite me and I couldn't. I recall a few isolated happy times, always surrounded by so much chaos and hurt that it made those few times worse. Because life with a narcissist, especially a dark tetrad malignant narcissistic parent is like living in Mordor. Nothing is as it seems or should be. Each day is fraught with gratuitous peril, just because they are so bent on destruction. They lie, compete and extort from their child. They are jealous instead of proud of her. They one-up, fault-find and undermine her. Her goodness is something to attack and dismantle. They get off on seeing the child humiliated and set up smear campaigns to make that happen. They create an atmosphere of FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) then DARVO and make the child feel responsible and at fault for their sick, perverted actions.
Why?
That's a good question. And the answer differs depending on the type and at that period of time, the gender of the narcissistic parent. Women were assigned rigid roles of motherhood that my mother didn't want to follow. Fair enough. But she wanted her cake and to eat it too. She wanted the perks of motherhood without the work. She was needy-wanty, attention-seeking and self-pitying. It was always the Nancy Show. Current terminology (thank you Reddit) would call her a "not like other girls" "pick me" with "main character syndrome." She was also loose, easy and immoral and got around (those are the old terms for it). BUT she was also self-righteous and religious. My dad had a lot of these traits too. They made everything all about them and indoctrinated me in their narcissistic fantasy cult to do likewise. And I did.
Why did I let them hurt me?
Gaslighting is real, especially parental gaslighting. Enmeshed narcissists start as they mean to continue when a child comes along, grooming her to serve them. This abnormal-normal was all I knew. It was too dangerous not to give them what they wanted. My very life depended on keeping them full up on narcissistic supply which meant taking on myself the consequences of my actions and being their fall girl. You might well ask, wasn't this worse for you than just rebelling? My own history of depression, self-harm, anxiety, hypervigilance, dangerous people pleasing and fawning trauma responses, and self-abandonment would prove that true. But I didn't understand till I was nearly 60 because trauma bonded betrayal blindness is also real and very potent.
Fake "Christian" persona effs things up further
I used to say both my parents "fancied themselves" good Christians and even preachers and missionaries. Now I say they wanted us to fancy them as Christians. It was entirely performative virtue signaling. They got their story in first about what good Christians they were and how they were doing God's work when they were just pursuing selfish ends. By telling their version preemptively, anyone else, like me, who might tell the true version would be more likely disbelieved. The onus of proof would be on me. Because people have a bad habit of believing what they're told over the evidence of their own eyes.
More on virtue signaling and how it confuses people
Virtue signaling is the public expression of opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s own good character, moral correctness, or alignment with a particular social or political cause. Said simply, it is faking and portraying yourself as something you're not.
The term is often used critically to describe actions or statements that are perceived as being done more to gain social approval or "moral status" than to create genuine change.
Key Characteristics:
Performative Nature: The focus is on the act of being seen to care, rather than the impact of the action itself.
Social Currency: It is often used to signal belonging to a specific "in-group." By publicly stating a position, an individual reinforces their status within a community that holds those same values.
Low Personal Cost: Critics of virtue signaling often point out that it frequently involves actions with very little personal risk, effort, or sacrifice—such as changing a profile picture, sharing a hashtag, or making a quick statement—rather than engaging in deep, sustained, or private work for a cause.
Why it is controversial:
The Accusation of Insincerity: The primary criticism is that the person doing the "signaling" may not actually be committed to the values they are projecting. It suggests that they are using a serious issue as a prop to make themselves look like a "good person."
The "Holier-Than-Thou" Effect: Because it is often used to separate the "virtuous" from those who disagree, it can be viewed as judgmental, dismissive, or designed to shut down debate by moralizing an issue.
The real version
Both my "Christian" parents, and later their spouses routinely violated commandments and rules that they preached against. They told me adultery, scamming, stealing, lying, cheating, pedophilia, co-habiting, divorce, child abuse was wrong for everyone but them. Both of them illegally ran foster care homes under the Christian guise which they left me at 11 to manage. My "pro-life" mother took a girl to have an abortion with me in the car. My 36 year old dad dated a 17 year old. My mother's boyfriend's wife beat her up in front of me. They were both considered immoral, lascivious, debauched, homewreckers by family. But yet he preached and read his Bible and she played the organ in church. Blatantly and openly living in sin and still preaching morality. And no one ever addressed any of this with me. I coped by acting fine while being in extreme dissociative fugue. And my "normalcy" fooled a lot of people.
What now?
Another good question. My advice to myself is to keep seeing and hearing what was wrong with all of it. Name it and claim it. My advice to you who may be younger and still living in it, is the same plus these tips I wish I'd known then.
- Use social media, like Reddit. Especially #raisedbynarcissists and #AITA. Listen closely to the stories being shared and look for similarities to your own. That's what woke me up, reading how kids today are experiencing abuse patterns like mine. My response was to reach out and help them but I remembered that ya gotta put your own oxygen mask on first.
- Read up on narcissism. Listen to podcasts on Youtube. My favorites are
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