CPTSD has made me ugly and crippled

I looked at myself in the mirror and an ugly, pinched, twisted hag of face  looking back. It is not crippled by viciousness, ruthlessness, self-pity or hatred. My face has been scarred and made ugly by others ruthlessness, self-pity, selfishness, toxic shaming and viciousness. My face has been twisted into a crumpled mask from trying to stay small, from hiding the abuse and trauma, from absorbing the shaming and criticism. From the constant bullying nightmares. My face is scarred by verbal and emotional abuse. And from trying to keep my head above water enough not to drown in the cruelty. To ward the constant mental assault that convinces me I'd be better off dead. And so would others without  me. Basically, as a therapist put it, I've spent my life trying to just stay alive. 

And all this CPTSD is taking its toll. I've even developed systemic rashes that won't heal from broken down auto-immune system. In short, my defenses have been so battered that they're shot. I've been let down, betrayed, exploited, manipulated by people who were supposed to love and care for me,  that I don't even know what it means to trust. I've been gaslit so often by people trying to convince me that I'm the perpetual problem that I believe them. I gaslight myself. 

And because there is no way out, no recourse, no hope for someone who doesn't just have problems but IS the problem, I'm at  my wits' end. I'm at the last station on the line and no one is waiting. No help has arrived. It's just the end. And I've run out of rope to tie knots in. I've let the gaslighters win. They're too powerful for me. I know, as I've always known, that they are right. I am the problem. Just by being. All the good things I thought I was doing are my imagination. The nightmares are reality and my life is a joke. 

I finally get why my parents treated me so badly

Hi again. Lots of waking up going on around here, about parental abuse, neglect, abandonment, endangerment, exploitation, parentification, scapegoating and gaslighting I experienced from four parent figures. And I finally get why they treated me so badly. It has to do with their dangerous combo of self-righteous, self-centered, selfish and self-delusional. I also get now why it took me so long to see it. 

For the last six decades, I believed that I lived in a loving family with loving people. I believed this because I was told it. I didn't see evidence of it, quite the contrary. What I saw was unloving behavior. My parents not only hurt and allowed others to hurt me but encouraged them to do so. Unrealistic, unsafe and unhealthy things were expected of me. I was expected to care for and parent my adult parents. I was made to raise their children. I was not given basic essentials. I was stolen from. I was exposed to sexual predators and very off sexual behavior by my mom. I was deprived of a bed, bedroom and finally kicked out of my home. My biological parents told me that their new spouses were my bosses, that whatever they said was law and that I had to care and provide for them. 

My parents scammed and cheated their way through life. They moved to Alaska to "convert the Indians" when I was six. They had no jobs, no home and no money. We squatted in various places and I'd have had nothing if it weren't for a caring native couple. They both left me to wander alone. My dad went no contact for over a year, doing such things as going to LA to witness to the Manson girls. They dumped me at a summer camp (how I don't know as 6  year olds are too young for camp). Then she left me behind in with strangers on an a remote island 1,000 miles up the Inland passage from Haines where we started out. 

My mother cheated on my dad and then had a series of affairs with married men. Then they got a divorce. When my dad finally came home, he (34) started dating a 17 year old. Then he married a lazy selfish woman who disliked me and used me as her servant. My dad scapegoated me for the rest of my life. While running a foster care home, my mother moved her unemployed, violent, pervert boyfriend into our house when I was 11. She lied about it, moved herself and her boyfriend as far from the children as possible and left me to care for four special needs children under four. She allowed boyfriend to whip the children. She threw me in the path of a dangerously sociopath foster kid who molested me and then got mad at me for reporting it. She took a girl to have an abortion (while claiming to be pro-life). 

So all this sounds like gutter trash behavior and it is. And it might be to some extent understandable if they didn't know better. But they were not raised like this. My grandparents on both side were good, kind, caring people. My parents went out of their way to do the most despicable things knowing full well what they were doing. They were warned not to. They got in legal trouble. But it was all someone else's fault, often mine. In short they did what they wanted when and where they wanted and expected no censure or repercussions. 

But for all the blatant immorality, the irony is that my parents considered themselves very moral upright people. They preached God and religion and told other people how to live their lives. Hell, they even called themselves missionaries and preachers. This is that dangerous combo I was referring to: self-centered and self-righteous. And they treated me so badly for the simple reason that I was the one roadblock in their fantasies. 

I was the "x" they couldn't factor out. Not by anything I did or said. Just because I existed. I was the reality that showed up all their unreal, irrational, delusions. I was the truth they couldn't ignore because I remembered all the crazy they had done. I lived it. I don't know if they have been afraid I'd bring it up or if they actually felt some conscience pricking. 

They needn't have worried about me. I never would have told. I was too empathetic and caring. I wanted to believe them. I defended and protected them. Regardless, they began launching very early, systematic gaslighting about every single thing that happened. They lied, covered, blamed, trauma dumped, weaponized, manipulated, exploited, twisted and shamed me into silence. Whatever self-care I might have exercised in telling someone and getting help was torched on the altar of their ruthless selfishness. 

There were only two times I confronted anything (and then only minor stuff none of the really bad stuff). That was a few years ago, I mentioned a few things to each parent. Their responses lying, self-pity, gaslighting, shaming, blaming, distorting, covering, trauma dumping and abusive anger all over again. Which was unpleasant but not as scary as I thought it would be. And it served to affirm that A) I was right, these things happened and they were that bad and B) they've been acting this way for years. I just couldn't see it. 

So finally, why did they treat me so badly? My parents don't like not getting their own way. What they want changes without warning as frequently as I change underwear.  They not only expect others keep up and not to question but to applaud every bad, hurtful, stupid thing they do. They expect their version of everything to be accepted. They have lived so long in their narcissistic fantasy that they believe their own lies. And woe to those who they believe to be thwarting them in what they want. Heads will roll.

So despite the fact that I did everything they expected, I was in the wrong for just being there. For surviving. Because they can twist and lie all they want, to others. But they can't lie to God. He knows. Now if they just confessed and admitted, He'd forgive. But they want it both ways, to do wrong things and but not to feel wrong about it. They want God to not only accept their wrongs but to say they are right. It's actually Him they are punishing for not letting them have their way. But Him in the person of me. 

How abuse and parental gaslighting destroyed my ability to understand right and wrong

 Hello my friends. I've been working for the past year or so, to recover from parental abuse, neglect, exploitation, endangerment, abandonment, parentification, scapegoating, toxic shaming and gaslighting about it all. Well I say recover. But really it's more like just beginning to wrap my mind around it. Today I'm going to explore further how abuse and gaslighting by my four parents (mom, dad and two stepparents) has destroyed my ability to understand right and wrong. 

Notice I didn't say know right from wrong. I "know" what is accepted as good vs. bad behavior. I know and understand that I'm supposed to treat others (loving, kind, helpful, etc.) What I don't know or understand is just what loving is supposed to look like for me or how other people are supposed to treat me. I speak everyone else's love language and no one, including me, even knows mine. 

All the abuse, neglect, endangerment, abandonment, exploitation, manipulation, toxic shaming, scapegoating and gaslighting I lived with has sabotaged my ability know that I should expect to be treated with common respect and to protect myself from disrespectful, hurtful behavior. With my head, I "know" what it should look like. But I have no idea what love is supposed to feel like. 

I have always confused hurt with love because I was gaslit into thinking that's what it was, for me. It's a Monsters Inc.,  "We Scare Because We Care" kind of thing. It didn't feel good or right or loving no matter how much they said it was. But not for others. They got what my head knew love to be: respect, care, availability, stability, safety, security, kindness. All the opposites from my experiences. So, like Eros in Sherlock, I ask "which one is pain?" What is love? 

I've said before that it's like I have emotional leprosy. I  have no protective layer. My life was  characterized by constant boundary smashing, inappropriate expectations, unrealistic demands, Draconian punishments, deprivation of basic resources, exposure to unsafe people and situations, parental exploitation for personal gain, scapegoating, weaponized religion, toxic shaming and then gaslighting about it all. Everything about normal childhood was knocked sidewise and ruined by parents, their spouses and kids. So my normal was very abnormal and unhealthy. 

How my bizarre and traumatic childhood experiences defy explanation

 Hi friends. Hope your Labor Day is what you need it to be. I am working off a hangover. I've been doing that more in the past few years. Drinking too much red wine is the only way I can reduce the CPTSD nightmares and get some semblance of sleep. It's not a solution but it's all I got for now. Today I'm going to try to explain what makes my childhood experiences so bizarre and hence so traumatic. But it's not going to be easy. Because my backstory is so weird and frankly unprecedented, it defies logic, comprehension and pretty much every example of loving parenting. 

First, I know my story is unprecedented because I've been told it is. To me it was just life. Albeit it a miserable one, but my normal. Because I was gaslit by four ridiculously self-centered people who called themselves my parents, into thinking that abuse (physical, emotional, social, sexual, medical, religious and financial), exploitation, manipulation, scapegoating, neglect, constant shaming, abandonment and endangerment, was not only perfectly fine, it was actually kinda cool of them. 

That's a lot to process, I know. You may be wondering how all that could be happening to one child. Or how it could be happening and no one know or care. Believe me, that is part of what kept me quietly confused and why the their gaslighting was so successful. But it's all true. Everything I've shared is what happened, verbatim. 

And what makes it even more disturbing is how strange it is. I have so little in common with other kids that it's as if I lived on Mars. At every turn, my "parents" behavior defied what parents do. This wasn't, so far as I can see, by accident. They had fairly normal childhoods and I know this because the of the trauma dumping they did to me. All four of them complained on a regular basis about how badly they were treated. They never held back or spared me details. From preschool age, they used me like a toxic waste dump. That's part of the parentification. But when they said what happened that so "traumatic" it was peanuts compared what they put me through. Things like "your grandparents were too critical of me" (dad) Which meant they told him he should get a job to support me. If there had been some really bad things, you can be sure I'd have heard it. But being so empathetic, I felt sorry for them and it distracted me from seeing how egregiously poorly they were treating. Which, I believe, was part of the plan.

And oh yes, it was intentional abuse. The things they did to me were no mistakes. They weren't overworked, tired, burned out. If anyone was, it was me. They had to go out of their way, to do the weird things they did. And much of it was so needlessly cruel as to be inhuman. And that's the core of why it is so hard to wrap my mind around.

If they were just doing their best, and making mistakes, I'd have easily understood. Hell, I've defended their crazy and made excuses for them all my life. They didn't need to justify anything. As if they would, anyway. They were above all the rules. So they could make it up as they went along and feed me any amount of bullshit they wanted. There was really no low they wouldn't go to. And telling others about these experiences, I continually second guess and gaslight myself. Because no parent would do these things. 

When I talk to my husband, we can't really comprehend why they have done these things because we, flawed as we are, love our kids. And virtually everyone around us, throughout our lives, does too. They may do things differently but you can tell there's love. And I do not remember ever feeling loved. Oh I told myself they loved me. They told me what they did was love (you know, the "for your own good" we traumatize because we care routine) But love, pfft, no. that was just so much hogwash because their behavior toward me, on a steady basis throughout my life as been unloving, uncaring, cold, calculating and hurtful. 

They do have the ability to love kids because their other children weren't treated this way. They were favored, pampered and exalted, even by me. I was made to worship the ground they all walked on. The abuse, neglect, abandonment, endangerment, exploitation, parentification and gaslighting was only for me. 

My conclusion (and mind this is just a working hypothesis at this point) is that they did not love, like or care for  me. I was a convenient inconvenience. I was kept around because I provided so much. Not because they felt any responsibility toward me. I had responsibilities to them. I was an obstacle in their narcissistic fantasies. My original bio parents had deluded themselves into thinking they could do what they wanted at every moment. They could divorce and just start over with their "real families." I think it was me they were trying to divorce themselves from. The extended families were not on board with this and were very much in reality. And because our extended family would not play along and exclude me too, this angered my parents and they took it out on me. 

My narcissistic parents were, are and always have been jealous and bitter that my grandparents still loved me. They determined to make my life as miserable as possible in revenge for not getting their way. And they encouraged their new spouses and kids to do likewise. If  they had to be saddled with this obstacle that they weren't allowed to erase from their lives, they were damned sure going to get everything they could out of me. And did they ever. It was made perfectly clear that their homes were not mine, my things were theirs, and I was only there on sufferance and had better be grateful and spend the rest of my time, dancing attendance. 

Which in itself further defies explanation because while making it clear I was in the way, they expected and got so much out of me. Which I see as I write this isn't that odd if you consider their self-centered personalities. I was only good for being exploited and so they did. It was such a black hole of expectation. What makes it bizarre is that this is the antithesis of what parents do. 

 

Examples of family scapegoating and parental gaslighting about abuse and exploitation in my life

 Hi friends. I've been writing a lot about how I was abused, neglected, abandoned, exploited, toxically shamed, manipulated, scapegoated and gaslit about it all by four parents, two bio and their two spouses and later their some of adult kids. Today I'm sharing some specific examples of how particularly the family scapegoating and parental gaslighting worked. These are in no specific order and reflect only the tip of the iceberg. 

Family scapegoating. My dad and his new wife did not like each other. But instead of admitting it, they pretended they were fine but I was the problem. This meant a lot of brittle tension and air so thick you could slice it. Her way was aggrieved huffiness, weaponized "exhaustion" and passive-aggressive anger and cool superiority (which I learned later was basically  just poutiness). My dad just angry all the time with a pasted on grimace he thought passed as a smile. She was obese, lazy and self-pitying. She was always quietly seething about something but never said what. Which pissed my dad off. But instead of dealing direct with each other, they triangulated and aimed it at me. They never said what the problem was, they just knew I was it. 

And I always believed that I was. It was insanely stressful and confusing. I couldn't see anything I had done. I thought by doing the majority of the work (vacuuming, mopping, dusting, dishes, laundry, cleaning) and childcare (including sleeping in their kids' rooms)  would surely be enough to keep them happy. I knew in this very transactional childhood, I'd never earn their love. That was way above my paygrade. But at least they would not be mad. Which was really all I ever hoped for was that others would be okay. 

And that empath nature of mine was as I now see it, the biggest weapon in their gaslighting arsenal. I just gave it to them free. They both knew just how to push my buttons to get what they wanted. Like a cigarette machine. They wouldn't yell, per se, just hint that I was letting down, that I wasn't doing my share. That's true. I was doing everyone else's share. I remember all my dad had to do was say "your stepmother (or worse yet "Mummy") is upset with you." And I'd jump to fix. He could have told me to get her the moon and I'd have done it. And it would have done about as much good because that woman was never happy or ever going to be. Neither was he. 

And my mom and her husband were no better. She would pit him against me and sit back and enjoy the show. Not only did she not protect from his venomous wrath and bullying, she egged him on. They all  had such a good thing going with me. I was that broken slot machine that just kept paying out. All they had to do was say jump and I'd say how high? Pretty soon they didn't even need to say and I knew just how far. They got more adept at getting more and more out of me. And they made sure their kids extorted from me too. I was so twisted up inside by the time I moved out that I could look out my own ass.

I still am. Decades later I have to keep telling myself that the problem may not  be all me. It's so ingrained that I nightly dream that I have angered or upset and done some terrible thing to one of them. I've dreamed it so much that I have dream memories. And I'm always sure what's dream and what's memory. I actually have more dream memories than actual ones. 

And why? Their lies, manipulation, exploitation, parentification, abuse and scapegoating are imbedded in me brain and they always will be. I will hopefully with practice, at least be able to say it was wrong. But whether I'll ever really believe it, I don't know. The single sickest way parents gaslight their child is into thinking they're the cause of family problems. Especially a kid like me who tried so hard to fit in, to be loved and wanted. As if...

Two things I've learned about being abused then gaslit and lied to by parents

 Hi guys. Me again with more things I'm learning about my childhood experiences with parental abuse, neglect, abandonment, endangerment, exploitation, scapegoating, manipulation, parentification and gaslighting about it all by four (count them) narcissistic parents. Here are two things I've learned about being gaslit and lied to by parents. One is to question everything. Every. Single. Thing. And the other is that a skunk smells it's own smell first. 

About questioning, once you catch someone in a lie (a hurtful one, not the kind a parent might tell a child to protect them), you have to wonder how many other lies were told. And I have caught both my mother and her  husband in a plethora of lies about and to me and gaslighting of me. And my dad and his wife in a ton of gaslighting. Now understand, that calling these things lies and gaslighting, is all new to me. For the first 58-ish years of my life, I believed they were always right. I believed their version even when it was hurtful to me. 

And it always was. The gaslighting was to make me believe that their narcissistic abuse didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not their fault. And if it was, they didn't mean it. And if they did, I deserved it. (the Narcissist prayer, which is really eerily accurate if you've ever experienced such abuse. It's very affirming, somehow, to hear this mantra of narcs, expressed so clearly. It helps this survivor see that these self-centered people are not as scary as I thought and that they are just rather pathetic and predictable.)

So, back to the lies. Once I understood them as such, I began to look more closely at other things they did and said that seemed odd to me at the time but which I never questioned because, (cue chorus) they were always right. And I began to see not just a few untruths but patterns of lying that are pathological. I see that there was more lie than truth. And worst of all, that these lies have formed the basis my thinking and damaged every part of my life and completely sabotaged my memory of things. 

Because their acts of neglect, abuse (physical, emotional, sexual, religious and medical), abandonment, endangerment, manipulation, parentification, exploitation, scapegoating and toxic shaming, are so weird (see pasts posts on that), they're almost unbelievable. And they counted on my not being believed if I told anyone. And they gaslit me into thinking no one would believe me and that I was the problem. And worst of all, they exploited my very caring, empath nature. 

For all of my life, I've believed terrible things about myself, things I see now were tube fed to me by people in whose interests it was to keep me thinking them. I believed I was bad, flawed, worthless, evil, selfish, greedy, lazy, a bad "family member", a nuisance, hurtful. But also that I was only there to do for others, to be the scapegoat, servant, surrogate parent and surrogate spouse. That I  had to earn love and that I never worked  hard enough. I still have trouble accepting that these things might not be true. They were very good at gaslighting. 

But once I allowed myself to consider things from another angle, all the pieces began to fall into place. All this bullshit was told to me to keep me in my place. I was told I was bad so I'd keep trying to please them. I was told I was a nuisance so I'd keep trying to earn my place. I was told God expected me to serve others so I would. I was told I was angry, bitter, selfish, too sensitive, a show off,  to cover their bad behavior. And I was told (and probably others were as well) that I was the problem to draw attention from what they were doing. 

Once I started looking for lies, I found them. Once I saw what all they got from me, how much of their abuse I accepted, how hard I was willing to work, how much of their shameful behavior I was willing to take on myself, it became perfectly clear. They were playing me. And being weaned on these lies, I never knew and just got more and more brain damaged as they got more audacious with the abuse. 

So now I question everything they ever did or said. That's one thing I learned. The other thing is that a skunk smells his own smell first. What I mean is that weirdly they always called out others' lies especially "mine." Also, cheaters, scammers and thieves. They are always accusing others of lying, cheating, scamming and stealing. My mom's husband actually proclaims to be one of those people who can "always spot a liar." Which is a really stupid because no one can "spot" a liar because they are deceptive. Unless he is one himself and knows the tricks. I mean, I never caught on that they were liars because I was truthful and believed the best of them. It would not occur to me for nearly 60 years that they had been routinely lying to, manipulating, exploiting, stealing from and cheating me. And all those people who were supposedly so deceitful,  had been scammed and lied to by my parents. 

So why would they be so preoccupied with tripping others up? Because they were and have been hiding their own dishonesty. As I now see it, they have spent their lives lying, cheating, scamming and stealing. And for being so good at spotting and calling out these things, they completely missed that every person in their small enclave, is also a cheater, liar, thief and scammer. Accident or design, I don't know. And most ironic of all, one set divorced because they found out each other was lying (cheating, stealing and scamming). And the others just wished they had and hated each other. It all comes full circle. 

It still doesn't fix the brain damage they've inflicted on me over the years. But I'm working on that. 

Weird side effects of parental neglect and abandonment

Hi friends. I am trying to sort out the ways that parental neglect and abandonment affect me today. I have a lot of brain damage also called CPTSD from growing up in very disturbing and confusing trauma I experienced with four very narcissistic adult authority figures. I do not call them parents anymore because they weren't. I received very little of the care that a child needs yet had a lot of inappropriate expectation to be the adult and parent them (meet their needs, fix their issues, support them). And then later I was expected to care for their children as well. I was excluded and not given basic things every kid needs. And then gaslit that this was all okay. In my youth, I was very confused, disoriented and dissociated a lot of the time, as I tried to navigate adult expectations without even the tools of childhood. 

So the weird side effects are that I don't know what it is I don't know. It's like like being put on a hockey field without equipment or knowing the rules of the game or even where you are, what you are doing or why you are there and then being expected to play the game correctly. Living in CPTSD is extra difficult because although you don't look different, my brain is damaged and you can't think or feel in any kind of normal way. So you do a lot of faking it, watching other people for cues and making a lot of mistakes. Which make you look and feel kind of ridiculous and incompetent. 

Which is I guess kind of what I am. And that incompetency, that ignorance of basic things, is one of the most awful side effects of parental abandonment, endangerment, abuse, neglect and especially parentification. And parental gaslighting. That dream-like sense that there are things I should know and feel and should be doing that I can't and don't because I don't know what they are. I say dream like because that's  how many of my dreams (nightmares, actually) play out. I'm plunked down in the middle of unfamiliar situations with unfamiliar people in which I'm expected to do things for people that I have no idea how to do let alone even what it is  that's expected of me.  It's a generalized feeling of constant failure. Only this is real life. 

It makes even basic things like right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, safe vs. unsafe, me vs. them, impossible to conceptualize. I've said before that I don't know, for example, where others stop and I begin. I was taught only to care for others. That they mattered and I didn't. So I didn't develop a sense of self, a protective skin so to speak, that I was unique and separate from others. To take care, to speak up for, to defend and protect myself all that was wrong. 

I was  exposed to so many frightening situations, and gaslit into thinking this was all normal and fine (for me, not for others), with no caring adult to help me let alone even care what was happening.  Adults who were creating the dangerous situations and allowing other adults to endanger me. Adults who were exploiting, manipulating and hurting me, egged on by my parents. Parents who pitted their spouses against me and leveraged my inability to protect myself against me. Adults who expected terrible things, set terrible examples and expected me to do as they said NOT as they did.  

All this has had disastrous consequences that dog me today. And it's made more difficult by the fact that it's all in my head and not visible to anyone. On the outside, I look pretty normal. On the inside, I'm a confused, scared kid constantly looking over my shoulder. If I was missing a leg, it would be clear that I would  need some accommodations. When you're missing a childhood, a sense of identity, self-defense mechanisms and adults who helped rather than hurt, that's not so clear. But it's just as difficult. Maybe even more so. Because there's no prosthetic, no crutch to help compensate for these disabilities.