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.