Hello friends. If you've been following this blog, I hope you've been properly buckled up over these last few weeks. March unMadness has been wild. I've been sharing about how I've developed codependent CPTSD from a lifetime of narcissistic abuse, exploitation, manipulation, neglect, parentification, abandonment and gaslighting about all that. I lived under a reign of terror from two parents and two stepparents with various forms of narcissism.
I'm telling my story now, at 59, because it won't keep quiet any longer. Since childhood, I've experienced nightly nightmares that have been louder. Think Stuka loud. It's so bad that I'm getting tinnitus from dream voices in my head! And as I write this they're screeching like furies that I'm just exaggerating, making it up, being TOO SENSITIVE (my dad's gaslighting of choice.). Guessing it may even sound fake or made up. I wish is was.
I wish this was just a story I wrote. For a long time, I did believe that I had somehow invented it because no one ever talked about or acknowledged the many, many bizarre and terrifying things I experienced. The times I was left to wander alone. Or left with strangers a country away. Or made to parent special needs foster kids. Or molested and made to feel ashamed of it. Or kicked out of my stepfather's house (operative words, HIS house, not mine) at age 16, the list goes on. As Youtuber Patrick Teahan calls it, "one endless gaslighting."
What developed was a form of PTSD called CPTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder) with codependency, self esteem in the negative numbers and toxic shame. Although codependency isn't even accurate because children are by nature dependent on their parents. Being parentified, or experiencing role reversal where the child takes care of the parent, it was a form of codependency.
The fact that there isn't even a word to describe what happened has made it seem less real. And finding words for it has helped make it real. So this post is about describing in words what CPTSD has felt like to me. Something I've never been able to do before and I'm not sure I'll be able to do now. But I need to try.
No comments:
Post a Comment