Surprising tips to deal with perpetually irritated, irritating people without getting triggered

Hello my friends. Today in the childhood trauma recovery path, I'm exploring some surprise ways to to deal with irritated, irritating people without getting triggered into childhood trauma responses. These are surprising because they go against preconceived notions and social conventions. 

Don't tell them how you feel.

People who are perpetually p-o'd don't care about your feelings. They care about their "right" to be p-o'd. These often arrogant, narcissistic people who don't care about your right to peace of mind. They minimize what they do, tell you you're overreacting, then overreact to anything you may do in response with, wait for it, irritation. There's no winning, only tolerating or not. They don't care how you feel or if it triggers you. In fact, they'll make fun of you for using words like "trigger" calling it "pop psychology" or other nonsense. Which is ironic because she's always triggered and flying off the handle. She just dishes it out without taking it. She'll weaponize your childhood trauma to traumatize you further. It's like the Limu Emu--you can ask him to stop but he's not going to. 

No, you aren't failing to "communicate." 

I just shake my head at the times when, even psychologists will ask you, "have you tried communicating your feelings?" Really, Sherlock? I've been communicating with them since before you were born. And they aren't listening because, see above. The more I say, the more pissy they get. As I said before, there's no winning. They only stop when THEY get sick of it. Or when they've gotten their hit of narcissistic supply or adrenaline rush of venting on you. The only way I  know of to avoid the toxic spray is to get out of its path. Read the signs and when they look ready to blow, find another place to be. 

No, they don't have doctor's slip

It's also crazy the amount of excuse-making these unpaid flying monkeys will do to defend the problem. Maybe he is stressed? Yep so am I, with my own stressors plus having to deal with his uncontrolled behavior. Maybe she has some kind of medical condition that makes her act that way. Maybe. But she also has choices. She doesn't have to lash out. She chooses to. He doesn't have to pout or rant or sulk. He could try being kind and decent, like I do when I'm stressed or struggling with the multitude of health issues that his anger has caused me. 

Beware of medicine or psychology. 

I don't have good experiences with either of these. All psychologists want to talk about is what I'm doing about it. Which makes sense except when it doesn't. If you've tried every way possible and it's not improving, it's not a you thing it's an angry person thing. And, if you try to diagnose, you'll be told even by professionals that you can't diagnose a medical problem because you aren't qualified. Well, if living with it for 62 years isn't qualified I don't know what is. 

Don't "rise above" 

When you talk about coping skills for others' anger or irritation, you'll hear how important it is to "rise above" whatever that means, I don't know and neither does the person saying it. Anger begets angers. What goes around, comes around, sooner or later. No matter how calm you stay, sooner or later, you'll crack if you have to be around toxic anger or chronic irritation. Fact. There's no place you could rise to escape it. What you can do is "float." Imagine yourself riding a calm river past the shitshow the perpetually p-o'd one is creating. You can "observe, but not absorb." If you haven't caused the anger, it's not your problem. Even if you have said something that set them off, how they react is their choice. They don't live in this bubble-wrapped world where they get to unload on others with  no repercussions. 

Don't "be the bigger person." 

That's toxic victim-shaming horse manure. You already are the bigger person just by not doing those things. You couldn't be mature, broad-shouldered or thick-skinned enough to weather another person's constant anger. And your being the bigger person just incenses them and drags them even deeper into the shame cycle. Plus it's kind of self-righteous, condescending energy. What you can do is grey rock. Stay small and quiet. Don't say anything. Don't engage. Don't JADE (justify, answer, defend or explain) yourself. But I do warn you, this isn't sustainable over the long haul. It's for emergencies only. If you have to do this on a regular basis, you're going to resent it after awhile, as well you should. If God had wanted us to be silent rocks he wouldn't have made us of flesh with voices. 

Don't take the BAITTTTT

BAIT stands for Bullying, Antagonizing, Isolating and Targeting/Trapping/ Threatening/Terrorizing/Triggering. It's what abusively angry people do to corner you and provoke you into a fight. They're a hot mess dysregulating all over the place and they know it. So they set traps to snare you into their user-generated mess. Don't fall for it. You're not the problem nor do you  have to be the solution. Sitting alone, feeling their own discomfort, is the only way for them to maybe get down off this arrogant high horse they go around on and get their shit together. 

Respect goes both ways. 

We're told, wrongly as it happens, that we must always respect the other person. But respect is not an entitlement. It's earned. I was hounded as a child to "honor your parents" when all I ever did was to honor them while they did NOT honor me. I obeyed disobedient people. I respected disrespectful people. And then we're not told what respect is supposed to look like. So those of us with the fawning childhood trauma response, think it means tolerating abuse. Be careful of people who demand respect without earning it. They are usually arrogant narcissists. Normal don't talk it, they show it. 

Don't fall for euphemisms 

I find myself doing this all the time, calling anger, rage, fury and verbal assault, "irritation." That's one mind trick angry people use. Also, calling them anger issues, can be a minimizing tactic. Angry people have no issue with their problem. They feel loudly and proudly entitled to venom-spray. They're only "sorry" when their spleen is spent. Then they wave the "forgiveness" card in your face, like it's something they are owed. They talk a lot about changing but most of it is future faking. They make excuses like that exonerates them. But it doesn't heal they harm they've done to their victims. 

Stand your ground. 

Don't let them rewrite the narrative or DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim offender). Be rubber, not glue. Let their anger bounce off you and back to them. Or better yet, don't be in the way of the ball. Please, use me as an example of what not to do. All my life, I've been the glue for everyone else's anger. I let them angrily accuse me of being the angry one. I felt so much shame and guilt for things I didn't do. But that's how gaslighting works--by confusing memory, conflicting stories, undermining confidence and destabilizing you. 

Shun and banish shame

My own childhood trauma at the hands of abusive, malignant narcissistic parents put a target on my back for more abuse. Being an empath and very conscientious, I took criticism very seriously, too seriously in fact. When my mom said I should be ashamed of myself (for what she didn't says) I was. All the time. When my dad shamed me for being too sensitive and a show off attention seeker, I made sure to not show any emotion or self-confidence. I let a bullying passive-aggressive stepmom browbeat me into abject servitude with my dad looking on approvingly. I let an aggressive, bullying stepfather terrorize me with my mom looking on approvingly. Now all that malignancy lives rent-free in my memory. So I am working to evict that shame for good. 

Keep your own counsel. 

I also made the mistake of sharing too much of this with emotionally unstable people. And it was weaponized against me. I did too much JADE. I let them tell me how it was. I let them define and limit me. I'm learning now to just quietly know what I know. And be who I am. And own my feelings, thoughts, needs and wants. And reach a hand back to be for your inner child what nobody was for you, a loving hand to hold. 

Defogging gaslighting of narcissistic abuse by thinking out loud

Hello my friends. Today in childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm defogging gaslighting by thinking out loud. I'm owning and validating my feelings, thoughts, anger and frustration.  I'm boosting self-confidence and banishing parent-induced shame and confusion. 

Unmask the betrayal

Narcissistic and enmeshed parents aren't just "difficult" or "demanding." They betray us, particularly the scapegoat or "broken vending machine child."  We give good and get bad and they take good and give bad. Our trauma bonding causes betrayal blindness. We never saw how they've been stabbing us in the back and pulling the rug out from under us. This is intentional, not accidental. They do it to destabilize us so we are vulnerable and desperate for any bread crumbing they throw at us. They use DARVO, gaslighting, catfishing and devious confusing double standards. So our job is to see the Decepticon behind the innocent parent mask. And to do this we need to...

Fumigate

So what powers gaslighting? It's gas--lethal, toxic hot air that has no boundaries and seeps into every crack. Gas is a good metaphor for boundary crashing parents who use coercive control to terrorize into complying with their sick, twisted demands. And gassing is a good metaphor for how narcissistic and enmeshed parents poison their child's mind. These hypocrites preach but don't practice all kinds of convoluted rules and commands. They engage in nasty, immoral, unethical, illegal behavior. They gas on and on with their self-serving word salad two sets of rules. So to heal our childhood trauma responses of fawning, people pleasing, appeasing and groveling, we need to air out our brains and breath fresh air of reality.  

Defog FOG

A primary tool arrogant, malignant narcissists use is FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) that we owe them things we don't. They confuse us that we are responsible to and for them ((parentification). Then they who really are our parents, groom us to think they owe us nothing. That anything they do for us comes with unaffordable price tags. They frighten us into betrayal blind obedience. Yet they are disobedient to everyone. They demand respect they don't earn and don't give to others. Defogging means seeing past all the evasions, lies and spun narratives to clear, cold hard facts. These people are imposters. They do not have the power they wield. They just spin a good web of deceit. 

Lean on my own understanding

My dad used to preach-bully this Bible verse at me about how wrong I was by "leaning on my own understanding." I would feel so ashamed and awful, though  he  never said how I was. He just accused. The implication was that I wasn't relying on God. But what he was really saying was that it was him, not God I should be listening to. That he, not God, was the omniscient, omnipotent one. And for me as a bullied child, he and my other three parents were all powerful. They called the shots and dictated my reality even into adulthood. Because early training sticks, good or bad. It directs the way your brain grows. Now I'm starting to correct some of those falsehoods. But good Lord, it's back-breaking all uphill work. 

Talk back to the voices in my head

I hear shaming voices of my toxic parents in every breath I take. I can't take a step without their shaming harassment dogging it. And not hearing them is about as easy as holding back the tide. So now, I'm trying a different approach. I'm talking back to them. This was another thing that was punished: "sassing" "lipping off" back-talking. And everything I said that wasn't "yes ma'am" constituted backtalk. Any answer I gave was me just "defending myself" or making excuses. I never stopped to ask why I would need to defend myself against the people who were supposed to defend me. I never wondered why I had do speak up for myself in the first place. But now I am. And you can bet I'm backtalking their nonsense. And the more I "sass" them, the wronger I realize they were and are. 

Hold their feel to the fire

For all the nasty things they said to and about me, I'm holding them accountable for, instead of myself. For every time I (in my own head) confront them with something they accused me of doing, I find it was them doing it. They weren't just blaming me for their bad choices. They were lying and saying I made them. I was their problem. But as a wise child of whom I'm very proud, just said "he ruined my life." I didn't ruin theirs. This wise child sees, what it took me six decades to, who was the victim and who was the offender. He didn't fall for the DARVO bullshit. He got the order of operations correct. He assigned blame where it belonged. The sad thing is that any child has to do this. 

Think out loud

There's are two contrasting Alanon sayings that help me. 

"Act your way into right thinking, vs. think your way into right acting." 

"Don't just do something, sit there." 

The first, is a a call to affirmative, proactive action as opposed to simply ruminating about childhood trauma. The second is a call to pause and reflect before leaping into reactive trauma responses. This is doing something just to be doing something, rather than constructive action. Which I think should be called "trauma reactions" to show that they are knee-jerk not thought out responses. 

And rumination is just as destructive. As opposed to carefully considering alternative actions and responses, it's endlessly "chewing on" what happened without any end game in mind. It's asking the answerless "why?" instead of productive questions like "what can I do about this now?" 

I'm doing a two-prong plan. I'm thinking out loud and clearly to reorient myself after baffling parent abuse. I'm telling myself the real versions of their weaponized false narratives. I'm explaining to younger self that what happened, happened. I'm not wrong, crazy, or an attention seeking show off. My parents were. And I'm also concurrently, making better choices for myself. Choices like self-care, self-affirmation and trusting myself, that I've known all along were right but which I let them derail me from doing. 

 

Childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse informs on other narcissistic abuse

Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery journey, I'm walking through narcissistic abuse from another family source. I'm walking with a loved one in her abuse, the rest of the family and myself. I'm feeling the protective mother empath trauma viscerally. On top of my own childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse from which I've gone no contact, this is overwhelming. And I learned something from it. Childhood trauma bonding causes abuse and betrayal blindness that carries over into other abusive situations as well.  

Narcissistic abuse is "carbon monoxide mind gassing"

Narcissistic and enmeshed parent abuse is like carbon monoxide gassing of the mind. The narcissistic abuser drips poison into our ears, that causes actual brain damage. They insult, shame, dehumanize, vilify, DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim offender), crybully, mock, humiliate, belittle, batter, antagonize, manipulate, gaslight, launch smear campaigns, backstab and destabilize us. This "mustard gas" blinds us both to their abuse but other situations in which we are being harmed. 

Destabilization and sabotage

Make no mistake. That undermining sabotage you're feeling isn't accidental. It's not you overreacting, being too sensitive or imagining it.  They will tell you it's you attacking them. Because they take narcissistic injury everywhere. They do this to distract you from the very real injuries they are intentionally inflicting on you. It's not you. It's purpose built abuse designed to destroy us while maintaining their own sham "innocent victimhood." Malignant narcissist dark tetrads get high off from hurting people. They get narcissistic supply that feeds their entitlement, arrogance and remorseless Machiavellian cruelty. 

 They deprive you of resources and sabotage any efforts at self-care.   They like you weak and helpless so they can coercively control you with   their sick narcissistic fantasy. 

You can't win.  They will make sure of that. 

Malignant narcissists play by two sets of ever-shifting rules which they do not follow. They are two-faced, double-speaking liars who never practice what they preach. Ever. Just when you get it right, they turn on a dime, moving the hoops they expect you to hop through. It's one big twisted sociopathic game of "Whack-a-Mole." It wasn't till I stopped playing nice and left, that I saw how bad it really was. 

Gaslighting destroys everything. 

Remember what's fuels gaslighting: gas. Which has NO BOUNDARIES, no beginning nor end. That's a narcissist, an endless void of boundary crashing demands. They see themselves as everything and you as only new territory to invade. Which makes things doubly fraught for empath child trauma survivors who already don't know where others end and they begin. These "space invaders" know just how to push our trauma response buttons of fawning, groveling, humoring, people pleasing and appeasing. 

How antagonistic narcissists gain power over us

They demand it and we give it to them. We grant them entitled sinecure status. They didn't earn it nor do they deserve it. They're just really good at making us think they do. We let their gaslighting bullying live duty-free in our heads. We didn't mean to. They weaponized our childhood trauma responses and rode herd over our defenses. We believe and trust them. But we shouldn't because they are dangerously untrustworthy. You need to know that arrogant narcissists aren't entitled to anything, certainly not your loyalty, obedience and respect. You'd be better off trusting a cobra not to bite you. 

One simple trick to expose a narcissist

At least to yourself. Be wary of being the agent of exposing a narcissist to others. But just for your own peace of mind, here's a trick I just discovered by accident. When you're in the throes of narcissistic abuse, just stop a moment and hear the lunatic hypocrisy. As an empath, I'm always giving the benefit of the doubt at my own expense. I rationalize irrational behavior. I play fair with people who are playing foul. I excuse, exonerate and show mercy to merciless, haranguing liars. I take responsibility on myself for their abuse. So for once, I heard the insanity for what it is. Next, I contrasted what he said with what he does.  I listened to my own common sense speaking. I heard the narcissist raging at me for doing something that was utter fabrication and something he did hourly, himself. (This isn't my husband, btw.) He literally outed himself to me as the agent provocateur and I didn't have to say a word. All I  had to do was listen and stop playing by his rules. 

Get out of the sandbox and take loved ones with you.

Dark tetrads (malignant narcissists) will never play fair. They will use every dirty trick in the book because winning over others is all the matters to them. They care about getting their way and being "right" and they will kick anyone under the bus to achieve it. They will make the stupidest of decisions because their  unbridling arrogance deludes them. They will terrorize people you love. They will hurt their own children. They are immoral, self-righteous cowardly bullies. You can't fight fire with fire, playing as dirty as them  because you could never play that dirty. Your innate goodness won't let you. So the only way to survive is to stay away from them. They will only trigger, provoke, antagonize and attack till you get in the mud with them. Don't. 

No more JADE, in fact no more talk

Nothing works with a narcissist. Not even total surrender. It's unnatural, gross and counter-productive. The more you give the more they take. When you run out, they'll just walk over your dried out shell and on to the next victim. So no more J (justifying), A (answering), D (defending yourself) and E (explaining yourself) to the narcissist. But also no more excusing their bad behavior. This will only lead to you dysregulating and falling apart. No more keeping peace at your own expense. There is no peace with these people. They want total annihilation. Your efforts at peace will only increase their efforts at sabotage. Call their behavior what it is. Time to start grey-rocking, standing our ground and standing up for ourselves and going no contact when possible. 

Going no contact with narcissistic parents is the easy part

 Hello my friends. Today is my narcissistic mother's birthday. A day which in times past was a holy day of obligation for me.  And she wasn't the only one: all four parent figures, two bio and two stepparents were narcissistically abusive. And that's just part of my childhood trauma, being given FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) for my birthday. And it's why, when I finally saw through the trauma bonding and betrayal blindness, I went not contact with no contact with the ones that were still alive. But going no contact is the easy part. 

 Closing the door is easy. Leaving it closed harder.

A survivor of narcissistic parent abuse gets really used to being the scapegoat wedge in the door. We body block their attempts to slam it in our faces. We keep holding the door open and they keep slamming it on our hands. We excuse, exonerate, exempt them from consequences at our expense. Then they gaslight us with this weird convoluted DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim offender) about how we have to "forgive and forget" what they aren't sorry for and have no intention of changing. We're told we are the problem but also that we have to fix what they broke. So I did, until one day I stopped and cut ties. But leaving that door shut is harder because auto-gaslighting and self-blame-shaming nags me that leaving the door closed is disrespectful and disloyal. Let's just sit with the irony of that. 

But if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. 

Radical acceptance requires radically different behavior. And that means setting boundaries, detachment and not enabling them to abuse me by staying silent or remaining  in contact. I was was groomed to be the Broken Vending Machine Child who endlessly paid out goodies with no reciprocity. Childhood trauma responses made me into a fawning people pleaser who never expected anything but pain, humiliation, shame, parentification, invalidation and gaslighting in return. Abandonment, endangerment, chaos, neglect and mistreatment were a Tuesday, for me. So not groveling, rolling over for abuse, providing narcissistic supply at my own expense is very unfamiliar and uncomfortable. But then, narcissistic abuse is more uncomfortable. So I have to...

Anticipate pitfalls in going no contact.

• Mark the fraught days on the calendar. Birthdays, holidays, Mother's Day, Father's Day. 
• Be prepared for sneak attacks from your estranged narcissistic parents. They love to spin silly narratives and play victim. Stand your ground. Ignore calls and texts. 
• Be careful who you tell. Narcissistic parents have an incredible ability to recruit people. 
• Be prepared for enablers and flying monkey ambushes. But also don't let them break you down. If they can't respect your boundaries, cut ties with them too. 
  
• Don't fall for the "two sides to every story" nonsense. Yep there's the right one and the wrong one. You didn't sign up for any of this. 
• Hold onto your anger. What I mean is, remember what they did and why you had to cut ties. Don't be too quick to forgive and never forgive in the "wipe the slate clean" way.   Because they expect absolution with no contrition and take advantage of your forgiveness to hurt you more. These hypocritical grudge-holders play by two sets of rules, demanding carte blanche for themselves while being merciless with you.
• Beware of requests to talk about it. It will devolve into their
• pity parties
• blame and shame fests
• whine and dump sessions
• gaslighting
• future faking
• blindsiding
• entrapment
• projection
• Beware of fake offers of reconciliation. There's nothing to "reconcile" because abuse isn't a two-sided fair fight. It's a one-sided attack. There's only contrition and apologies. But those are usually fake too. Narcissists aren't sorry, they're setting you up. They expect you to cave. You'll end up apologizing for things you didn't do and which they did to you. If they want to apologize, they can write you a letter. Which you can read, or you don't have to. But watch out because these "confessions" are usually just more sneak attacks. 

They carved abuse on my heart and soul and it can never be erased, sadly for me.

Remember, that for self-protection against narcissistic abuse, there is no option but to keep yourself out of the abuser's path. I'm holding space for you as you do. 

Love, mar 

Where I'm at healing childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse, if I'm honest

 

Hello my friends. Dr. Ramani asked us today where we are in our childhood trauma from narcissistic abuse path. And I'd have to say that I'm at my lowest point. I'm in the throes, the deep end the darkest part. Because I'm also at a place of no-holds-barred radical acceptance (also radical awareness and acknowledgment which have to come before acceptance). But one good thing about being at the bottom: there's nowhere to go but up. 

What I do I mean by lowest point?

I'm in both a deep valley but also in an exposed arid space, like a bug on a tabletop. There is no shred of hope for the these relationship with my parents or siblings. Two are deceased with no one effort made to extend love, only taking from me to the end. Every bridge was burned, not by me. Every door slammed. Now it's not so much that I've gone no contact as that I've left the door slammed shut and and not held it open only to get my hand slammed too. 

Stark realities I can't unsee

Once the trauma bonding was broken and the betrayal blindness wore off, I'm now seeing things as they were and are. I'm seeing the cruel, arrogant, remorseless, Machiavellian narcissist behind the parent masks. I recognize all they put me through with with blazing sharp white-hot clarity, like you do on a summer day in the middle of the dessert. 

• false "family" illusions
• gaslighting
• future faking
• narcissistic lies
• enmeshment
• FOG
• DARVO
• DIMMER  (Dismissiveness, Invalidation, Minimization, Manipulation, Exploitative and Entitlement, and Rage) 
• All my E's for them (excusing, exonerating, exempting from consequence, enabling, extending help)
• All their D's (diminishment, discarding, devaluing, depravity, debauchery, deplorable behavior, denials) 

Recovery takes all my energy

All this awareness and radical acceptance doesn't come cheap. It's exhausting and all my resources are depleted. Just like they always were, only then, I was just hanging on to survive. I thought it was normal for kids to have autoimmune diseases from parent chaos. I thought everyone had constant trauma nightmares. Turns out they don't.  Now, while I know it's not normal, I still have all the work of processing it. I have nothing left even to have fun because trauma dogs me everywhere. But a good thing about that is that it also leaves me no energy to keep giving, hoping, caring about  hopeless situations. 

Why I can't just "let it go." 

I would love nothing more than to just forget it and put it behind me. Trouble is, it won't let me go. It hounds me and follows me everywhere. When I go on vacation, childhood trauma packs itself in my suitcase. Even if I find a way to detach from it, even if I'm having a wonderful time, it's always there waiting to attack me when I'm vulnerable, like through dreams in sleep. And in sleep deprivation. Sometimes I can't get to sleep and when I can, I bounce in and out of dreams like a surfer. There's no rest for childhood trauma survivor. 

No, they didn't mean well. 

You hear this from enablers if you happen to mention it. That's why you don't tell anyone because most people make it worse. No, my parents didn't mean well. They were not mistreated as kids, like they did to me because they'd have trauma dumped that on me, if so. They knew what they were doing and saying. You don't accidentally mock, humiliate, rage at for no reason, make your kid witness your deviant adultery first hand. You don't leave her behind to fend alone on the daily, by accident. You don't neglect her care to have your whims. You don't lie and gaslight about everything by mistake. You don't make up fictional accounts of stuff that happened, inadvertently. That takes some extra special effort. 

The abuse was intentional, purpose-built and bulletproof 

All four of my narcissistic enmeshed parents used a combination of weapons to destabilize me. They didn't agree on anything except to make me their scapegoat. They created fraught spaces, with two sets of ever-changing double standards, cognitive dissonance and ultimately a dissociation and brain damage in me. It was purposeful, I see now. And that evil juju that they hexed me with survives the grave and lives in me. This is the only way I can frame it. And that is just one hard part. 

What I'd tell someone else, but struggle to tell me

Of course I believe you. Of course your exhausted, who wouldn't be? Of course just brushing your teeth takes Herculean effort. You're busy rewiring your brain! You're prostrate with grief over things you thought were real that weren't. Over being betrayed by all the people who were supposed to take care of you. Be easy with yourself. Lay around after you finish one of these therapy sessions. You've done a hard day's work. Eat what tastes good and eat enough. Maybe not a lot of sweets, chips or alcohol because they have a nasty reverse effect. If you don't want to go downtown, well, you can say so. Or you can give it a try and say if you're too tired. You can trust that people love you. But trust is another thing they destroyed. And another thing that take so much energy to rebuild. 

Healing Childhood trauma brain damage from narcissistic parent abuse

 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)

Every abused child experiences his own "package" of abuse. Here are some things my four narcissistic parents (two bio, two stepparents) did to me. 

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. 

Childhood trauma victims of narcissistic parent abuse are trapped in an inescapable haunted house

Hello my friends. Today on the road to childhood trauma recovery, I'll show how life for victims of narcissistic parent abuse are trapped in an inescapable haunted house. To the world, the houses looked normal. And the monstrous parents wore masks but they don't hide the viciousness underneath. 

Bespoke Spook House of parent abuse

Malignant narcissists turn homes into purpose built haunted houses. They are frightening fraught spaces, where fear, insecurity and destabilization are normal and safety, peace and nurturing are fairytales. The monster that jumps out and scare them isn't just a man in a mask. They are parents who are purposely terrorizing their child. The mask they wear is one of loving parent which hides the monster. To the outside world, these houses look like any other house on the block. What folks didn't see were the emotional bars on the windows. The locked rooms with kids' held hostage to devastation demands, coercive control and debilitating expectations. But then we had to live this double life of cognitive dissonance. Especially us scapegoats who were deprived of anything resembling normalcy. 

The "Normal" Double Bind

Our trap was made more difficult because we had to leave our tailor-made hell and go to normal places like grandma's and school. Places normal people had no inkling of the terror we were living in. So we  had to somehow act like everything was fine to sort of fit in. And our abusers made sure to preserve the illusion with family trauma special effects:

• gaslighting (you're making it up for attention, showing off, oversensitive, overreacting)
• hypocritical double standards (feigning the good Christian at church while living in basement with boyfriend but keeping one room reserved for CPS calls, to look like she was sleeping upstairs with foster care kids when it was me). 
• pre-emptive smear campaigns (painting a false version of the child as an untrustworthy liar before the child says anything so that anything she might report will be disregarded as untrue.)
  
  
  
• bonds of secrecy (whatever is said in the "family" stays here)
• triangulation (pitting people against the child with character defamation) 
• mythical flying monkeys (telling the child no one will believe them) 
• manipulation of facts and timelines
• DARVO and blame-shifting
• threats and intimidation 
• overreaction and minimization (innocent things the child does are blown out of proportion while truly awful parent behavior is down-played)

Oh what a tangled web they weave

Narcissistic and enmeshed parents entangle their children in sticky dirty webs of deceit. Because enmeshed parents see children as possessions to use and abuse as they wish. And we don't know this is wrong because it's all we know. Our entire existence is built on fabrications, lies, double standards, evasions, flipped scripts and revisionist history. Nothing is straight-forward or clean. Nothing is predictable except unpredictability. All we know is service to them, walking on eggshells, placating and humoring them. They do this specifically to wear us down, deplete our resources, undermine and sabotage our selves.

Role reversal and reversed again

They force us into all sorts of inappropriate roles and expectations. Then they change the rules again, w without telling us and expect we'll just know and dance to the next tune. Not one of the things they command of us, is appropriate or even moral or legal most of the time. This keeps us constantly off balance, hypervigilant and insecure. It destroys our health, coping skills and self-care abilities. It causes trauma bonding which causes betrayal blindness in us, which causes a completely broken down functioning. It took me till almost 60 years old to understand that any of this was wrong. 

The Shell Game of Isolation 

Malignant narcissist parents use an arsenal of dirty tricks to keep the child away from eyes who might help her. They play a devious two- handed game of double gaslighting, telling one false story to the child the opposite to authorities, extended family, neighbors, friends, schools. They tell pit the child against loved ones telling malicious lies about the other to both parties. They play both ends off each other for the middle. And because they are the child's parents they have special access to her that they can revoke. They move the child far ways to keep her destabilized with no support (mine moved me to Alaska from Michigan, for shits and giggles).  They also get in a kid's head and mess up her mind. They poison relationships with their pot-stirring and rumor-mongering. My mother told me my beloved grandfather, who was one of my few allies, had sexually molested her, so I'd feel sorry for her and turn on him. She sicced her bat guano boyfriend on these two elderly people and boyfriend terrorized them so badly that my grandfather had a heart attack. 

Chaos and confusion 

So actually when I say that traumatized kids' homes appear normal, many of mine didn't. Because that's another tactic they use. They make normal needs inaccessible. I was shuffled in and out of 40 different places before graduation. We were homeless for parts of my life. I slept in tents, on the floor, on unheated porches, with their babies' rooms, alone with four under-5 special needs foster kids, upstairs in the next room to a convicted child molester, squatted in other people's homes and with strangers. There was no scary, dangerous or chaotic that was too terrifying, unsafe or chaotic to dump me in.  

Singled out for austerity 

My parents subjected me to major deprivations no one else was. Not themselves, their new partners, their new children or anyone I knew, was. I'm talking things like stealing and withholding confidence, proper clothing, food, a bed, privacy, personal boundaries, respect, comfort, a stable home, a bedroom, time for myself. I was worked double shifts at two jobs before I was 12. I was yanked out of schools with no warning or say. I was shunted between them like shared car seat. I was waiting on four narcissistic parents all with their own unique forms of abuse. This left me drained, exhausted and used up. Kids like me are no more able to care for ourselves or navigate life, than tattered rag dolls.  

Where do we go from here? 

Well, the only place to go is up. I've been about as low as it can get. Right now, I'm working to de-gaslight myself and replace confusion with clarity and purpose. I'm working to reorient my disoriented sense of self. I'm calling the house of horrors what it was. I'm unmasking the "good Christian" people who called themselves my parents as the malignant narcissists they are.