Hello my friends. Today in my quest to heal from dark tetrad, enmeshed parent abuse, I'm exploring how malignant narcissistic parent gaslighting lights the path to childhood trauma recovery, seriously! I know that sounds contradictory. So I'll show how their gaslit narrative flipping, and twisted, self-serving versions of reality, actually disprove themselves. They prove their own abusiveness by the very gaslighting lies they tell. Abusive parents catch themselves in the traps they set for their children.
The Parent Trap
As parents, they hold the power differential. Society, religion, family backs this up. Even the child affirms this. We wanted our parents to parent us--keep us safe, take responsibility for us, make decisions for us we were too young to make. But they did none of that. What no one called out but should have was that narcissistic parents are parents in name only and only when it suits them. They gobble up the perks while doing none of the work. Playing a sneaky game called Role Reversal and Reverse Again, they parentify and infantilize us. They assign us the heavy lifting and mental load. When it comes to benefits time, they switch back to the performative parent. They wield authority, crash boundaries, blame-shift, harangue, bully, attack, in the name of "discipline" which they call their God-given right.
Betrayal Blindness Blindman's Bluff
None of their parenting of us is appropriate in any iteration. It's all self-serving, entitled, manipulative chaos, designed to get them their narcissistic supply hit. Life for the child is a tangled net of abuse, neglect, coercive control, exploitation, abandonment, triangulation, invalidation, dehumanization, destabilization, backstabbing, endangerment and abandonment. But because they call themselves our parents, and because we are children, we trust them. They have trauma bonded us to them and this causes betrayal blindness. So they can play their sick games of blindman's bluff, using us as little pawns.
Abusive parent charades
Narcissistic parents play weird games of "bait and switch" "hide and seek" and "shell game." They run off and make the child chase them. They future fake that they'll actually show up for her, then bail. Then laugh at her when she cries. Then blame her for being too sensitive or too demanding (!) They make basic care conditional on her hopping through their impossible, ever-moving hoops. Using strategic bread crumbing, they trauma bond the child to them.
Illogical logical fallacies
Malignant narcissist talk in a strange double speak. It's a combo of virtue-signaling, gaslighting, DARVO and enforced FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) they use to coercively control the child. They say odd things that are obviously illogical fallacies but make them sound logical. No normal person talks this way, so they don't expect it. And the narcissistic parent knows this and plays on other people's normalness, especially an empath's. But it's not accidental. It's intentional and bespoke abuse, custom-built to create a cognitive dissonance that keeps the child enslaved to them.
- They "Straw Man" her, misrepresenting what she says to make her look unreliable.
- They "Slippery Slope" blowing small things the child did into catastrophes. They make her think the slightest deviation is willful disobedience that will lead to disaster. My father (who was an adulterer and pedophile) actually told me that he hoped I hadn't had premarital sex because that was the "unforgivable sin." This increased my self-harm, 10x.
- They rely on "Appeal to Ignorance" making false claims that can't be proved. They project blame for their bad behavior onto the child, to pre-emptively deflect attention from their actions. This way, any accusations she makes will just look retaliative.
- They use "False Dilemma" masterfully. They make it appear that there are only two options, theirs is the right and anything else is wrong.
Gaslighting lights the way
But all these gaslighting logical fallacies are where it breaks down. They implode on themselves. Once you unpick one lie, you begin looking for more. And you start to see the pattern of deceit. And that shows you that the diversions and deceptions are just smoke and mirrors, not reality. But gaslighting is also insidiously brain damaging. My mother had to actually admit to lying to me before I began to start seeing clearly. I believed all her trickery, every bizarre story she told. I trusted her version even over the evidence of my own experience. Until I didn't. Now I see that very little if anything was actually real. And that helped me see the light.
Power differential double bind
I'm going to be 62 tomorrow and it took me that long to realize that the twisted tales my parents told TO me and ABOUT me, couldn't be true. I was always told that and treated like I was their possession whom they owed no responsibility to AND that I was also responsible to them. I was both their child and their parent. I had no power but all the accountability. They were mutually exclusive and impossible. Not even a logical fallacy. This is as ridiculous as it gets. If they had all the power and control, they also have all the responsibility. If I had no autonomy nor choice, I bear no culpability.
Be careful what you wish for
Their own lies came back to bite them. They also trapped themselves in snares they set for me. Once I began to hear, I couldn't unhear that all the terrible things they accused me of, were true of them. And maybe only of them, not me. And the FOG began to lift. Unfortunately it took till my senior years to understand. By now two of my four narcissistic parents have passed. And you might think that their abuse dies with them. Nope, alas not. If anything their hurtful voices in my head have gotten louder. But so has my own voice. I'm talking back to them. I'm refusing to allow them free rent anymore. I'm evicting them. I'm realizing I'm not obligated to anyone that I didn't actually birth, least of all to parents who were never obligated to me.
Next generation
What's next? Well, sadly childhood trauma is the legacy that keeps on giving, through the generations. We carry it with us in our cells. So now I have the task of not just digging myself out but all the people I've hurt or allowed to be hurt by, my malignant parents. I've got a lot of truth to tell. A lot of stories to set straight. So this is my legacy, the posts in this blog, to my progeny. And to you, it if helps.
Love mar.
No comments:
Post a Comment