Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery, I'm talking back narcissistic parent abuse voices in my head. I'm telling the correct version of me that their gaslighting reframed as "the problem." I'm encouraging you to talk back to the voices in your head and if you can't well, I'm more than happy to do it for you! Time to silence their DARVO and crybullying nonsense once and for all.
Surprise ways to talk back to parent bullies
So this might sound contradictory, but along with this blog, I maintain several others on poetry, food and cooking and lesson plans for kids. And I have found radical acceptance and CPTSD recovery in such diverse outlets. I unpack a lot of childhood trauma issues of trauma bonding, toxic shame, narcissistic abuse and parent enmeshment in my poetry blog called The Writers Garden. I find myself "talking back" or "sassing" as my narcissistic mother loved to call it. I can her and my narcissistic father out, in verse, for the child abuse and neglect, with child abandonment and endangerment, plus coercive control they subjected me to. To name a few of the atrocities. And you know what, finally, I have the last word. No more fawning and people pleasing and being nothing more than narcissistic supply. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it. Like I just wrote in a recent blog post called "My Poem, My Rules" I'll decide what to say, not my abusive gaslighting parents.
Squeak Up!
Anyone recall the adorable kids' book "Hooway for Wodney Wat"? In this story a timid hypervigilant little rat with speaking difficulties, finds his voice and learns to "squeak up" for himself. Let's all be like Wodney, and stop silencing ourselves. Let's cease humoring and soothing arrogant bullying parents who use us like cat's paws to get what they want at our expense. See, we Adult Children of Narcissists have been beaten down by the double-edged sword of infantilization plus parentification. Enmeshed parents taught us we were possessions, not people. Our one job was to serve them. And we need to mouth off to that dreck here and now.
Defog the FOG
FOG stands for Fear, Obligation and Guilt which our malignant parents force-fed us on. They groomed us to think that we are forever bound to whatever ridiculous demands they set for us. They use words like "respect" and "duty" and "family loyalty" and "debts you owe us." Yet they never give us those same things. Only the Broken Vending Machine Child must give out with no reciprocity from parents. We're taught to give without counting the cost to people who only take from us and always count the cost of the little bread-crumbing they give us. Life with narcissist parents is one-sided transactional and business-like when they do the littlest thing for you and it's "family does for family" in the enormous, unreasonable expectations they put on you as scapegoat child. You are only family when it suits their narcissistic fantasy. The rest of the time, you are a live-in unpaid nanny, cook, housekeeper, pacifier and caregiver. It's time now to take off the betrayal blindness glasses and see the dysfunctional mess behind the facade of Happy Families. Then you can start to talk back to that unbalanced power differential and reclaim your long-overdue differentiation from your family of origin.
Let the locked door stay shut.
Narcissistic Parents go no contact first, beginning when you're a child. They play the Devalue and Discard game from birth, pushing away and then clinging tight when you want freedom and they want control. So if you go no contact with them, expect a barrage of narcissistic rage fueled by petulance, pouting and retaliation. This is not because they want to stay in contact with you. They only contact you when they want something. What they crave is power, domination and control. THEY dictate who cuts off whom, not you. The very people who didn't have the time of day for me, when I sought them, EVEN if it was to do for them, like it usually was, went into narcissistic injury mode when I stopped pursuing and went grey rock. But I beat them to the punch. I let the door they locked on me, stay shut. And oooh, they did not like that. They tried all the control freak tricks like hoovering and love-bombing but it always ended in devaluing and discarding of me. Till I "spoke my mind" by cutting ties to them. This is the Teflon moment, when they can't touch you anymore. They can play their games and you can stand your ground.
🔒 The Tables Have Turned: Freedom Outside the Cage ⛓️
Narcissists don't like it when you leave shut the doors they slammed on you, and don't beg to be let in. Because now THEY are the ones locked in and helpless and you are outside the cage they created, and free!
Speak in your words whether they understand or not.
And my language is action. I let my deeds speak for me. I don't answer calls or respond to "phishing" texts. My mother repeats all the estranged parent inanities, about how she doesn't understand, what has she done to cause this, has she "offended me" in any way? Yada yada. She never cared when I was still under her thumb. So all this is just fishing. She knows what she's done. She was there. I don't bother to JADE (justify, argue, defend, explain) why I don't respond. The few things I reminded her of, just met with DARVO and gaslighting. "That didn't happen. I don't remember (kicking me out of the house at 16 and making me homeless). I wouldn't do that" (leaving me alone at 11 with her four special needs foster kids under five and a violently abusive boyfriend. Which at the time she lied and said was my fault.) You get the picture. Then when I still stood firm, she played the victim card and then the blame-shifting one. It's just Narcissist Prayer UNO reversing, bait and switch and story-changing, trying to get me to back down so she can claim that moral high horse she thinks she rides. Never once has she sincerely apologized or even admitted wrong. She just evades, lies, cons and scams. And I'm tired of trying to make her understand. That's the definition of insanity, doing what you've always done and expecting a different result. My dad did the same things till he died. Never once admitting any fault, still expecting carte blanche forgiveness for sins he never confessed while extending no mercy to me, ever.
Let the insane speak for itself.
So heres' where we speak our truth by saying nothing. When the narcissist rages and acts crazy and dysregulated, we step back and let it happen. We don't rush to excuse, defend or clean up after them. We get our loved in our care out of their path. We let people see them at their worst, instead of lying to cover for them. When their scams blow up, when they run out of money, when they get called out, we do nothing to help. If CPS or the authorities get called in, we do not bail them out. We do not hire attorneys. We let them suffer the consequences of their actions, for once, instead of body-blocking them. This is the only way flying monkeys and enablers will get it, too, by the way. They have to see the narcissist implode in upon himself before they understand that this insanity and chaos was your life.
Radical acceptance is the goal post in the field of recovery.
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