Hello my friends. I've been thinking lately about the hidden physical abuse kids suffer from narcissistic dark tetrad parents. I listened to a Youtube video by Danish Bashir (he's amazing, you should listen and subscribe) in which he explored different kinds of physical abuse narcissist dark tetrad parents subject their kids to. I was glad to hear him address the issue that those of us in special education have wrestled with for decades, that abuse isn't just physical. It's mental, emotional, spiritual, medical, financial and more. So today, I'm starting to look at the many ways dark tetrad parents abused us kids.
I'm beginning with the most obvious type which is physical abuse and the most apparent example is hitting. But if you've been on the receiving end of hitting, you'll agree that it's not always obvious to us as kids of dark tetrads. Their punishment isn't clean. It's muddied with blame, shame, finger-pointing and self-serving gaslighting and sadism. It isn't about chastisement for correction of behavior. It isn't about discipline. It's about sick, devious, controlling, power mad love of cruelty for cruelty's sake. And their way of punishment is nothing short of rape of a child's mind.
They go so far as to distort the child's memory into believing they weren't abusing because they weren't hitting when actually, they were. They just had a lot of cutesy bullshit euphemisms, quack-psych machinated reasons and fake religious self-justifications for it. They made you believe it was your fault. You caused it. You made them hit you. They did it because they care. They were so proficient at gaslighting that I thought it was normal punishment, not vicious bullying and narcissistic rage.
But they don't do it in ways that other people who love child will see. When my grandparents witnessed my dad at a Christmas party rip me a new one for trying on the sweater they gave me, they checked. I wonder what they would have done if they'd seen the times he beat me. To the child they act all proud, haughty and self-righteous about it. They'll brag to fellow child beaters whom they know will approve and/or they'll twist it to be "Godly" discipline so it seems to comply with the Bible. But the dark tetrad is very careful to craft a version that is sounds very different form the vicious abuse it is.
For example, my mother started slapping me across the face, hard and frequently beginning when I was around 7. It hurt a lot, not only my skin but my jaw and neck in which I developed early onset arthritis from. This one's really tricky because I also slapped my daughter's face and will never stop regretting it. But the reasons were completely different. My mother was spitefully angry and I was sad, remorseful and shame-ridden and trauma responding. She was self-righteously on her high horse whereas I felt like shit.
She'd spin this yarn about how it hurt her more than me. Bullshit to that. I happened to look up once (I didn't make eye contact much and kept a low profile) Her eyes gleamed with malicious gloating. She had that sick smirk narcissists can't quite hide. She wasn't hurt she was loving it. She would verbally abuse me, calling me names, insulting and mocking, while hitting me. I have been a terrible mother at times but I NEVER got anything but self-disgust out of spanking my kids.
AND my mother did it to punish me for her mother supposedly slapping her while I did it BECAUSE my mother told me to. Oh how she weaponized her mother's "abuse." She'd tell me that she was the perfect mom and what she did to me was nothing compared to what she suffered. Interestingly, her mother didn't abandon, endanger, leave her with strange men, make her care for four foster care kids for a week, move her out of her room to sleep with the babies, play church lady while shacking up with her boyfriends, sleep around, kick her out of the house, allow her to be sexually abused and then publicly shame her. To name a few.
Mother was just always right. No matter how self-aggrandizing, deceitful, hypocritical and ungodly she was. She had indoctrinated me not to listen to my good judgement which was screaming not to spank my children. And I had a lot of fundamentalist Christian parenting BS floating in my head. I thought I'd fail my kids and God, because all my parents told me so, if I didn't hit them. We'll just let that marinate.
I've always repeatedly apologized and reassured the kids that it was me and not them. I was the problem. Whereas I was the problem with mom, too. My mother continues to blame me for her having to hit me. I was supposedly "mouthy" and "sassy." I have no idea to this day what I actually said to set her off. I was so biddable and empathic. I also can't recall what my daughter said to make me slap her so I think it was a case of gaslighting by proxy. My mom's voice was in my head haranguing me with the "spare the rod" crap. While both my daughter and I were just being normal kids.
Which is interesting too. On some level she knew she was wrong. But dark tetrads will never admit that. So someone else must take the blame so she can feel justified. Because down the road, she stabbed me in the back with it. When I checked myself into a mental hospital after losing twp stillborn daughters (which she was overjoyed to drive me to), she accused me behind my back to my children, of hitting my them. Which she'd basically said I'd go to hell if I didn't. She told the kids that she and her abusive-to-me-with-her-approval husband might have to take over custody of them. (yeah, fuck that noise. I was pretty far gone but not that far gone. I lay under a train before I'd let them screw up another generation of kids). But that's how entitled and arrogant these dark tetrads are. They want to not just screw you up but everyone you love, too.
My kids reminded her that she'd hit me and she back peddled, lied, said she never did. But she also forgets who she told which lie to. She proudly tells my husband how she smacked me around. But how she had to stop when I "hit her back." I felt so guilty over that and he has had to remind me repeatedly that if I did, I was defending myself from her attacks. I grew up thinking I was a terrible kid because my mom "had" to hit me. None of my friends experienced this. They were all disobedient and mouthy from time to time.
My dad got furious once and out of the blue, beat me too. He was sick of his wife whining about having to get up at night with the baby so he moved me out of my room and into the baby's room to shut her up. I was 14. He would send me to bed with the baby after I'd already done all the cooking and cleaning. I hadn't even had time to do my homework and I couldn't because there was no room and I couldn't wake the baby. I used to sneak and do my homework under the covers in our closet of a room. I don't know why he beat me. My fawn mask was pretty secure. I think now he was mad at her for being so bitchy and selfish and was too wimpy to deal with it so he took it out on the whipping girl. That happened a lot with the four of them.
So why do these dark tetrads hit their kids? You might say, well, you hit your kids, Mar. Wasn't it the same for them? Are they just following Bible guidelines? No it was not. If you've ever been hit by a dark tetrad you know the difference. They enjoy it. They are getting charged up whereas someone like me got depleted and exhausted. Their eyes get this disturbing gleam and you can till they're quietly getting high on hitting you. Or, like my dad, they just get more enraged. He was literally drooling and almost frothing at the mouth. Every narcissistic injury he'd ever felt was distilled into his arm and he couldn't hit hard enough. And when they were done, neither was sorry. They just told me to quit crying and go wash my face. They never apologized or even admit. Kind of like rape.
Dark tetrad parents don't hurt their children because they were hurt and don't know any better. They're not confused and shell shocked by a lifetime of gassing and gaslighting. That was me. I thought they were right to hurt me because they said I deserved it. I never felt my kids deserved it but I did think my parents were always right. So I should do likewise. I wish I'd cut my hand off before raising it to them. I wish even more that I'd cut my sick abusive parents out decades ago. Dark tetrads don't hurt because they're out of control. They are very much large and in charge. They know exactly what they are doing.
Dark tetrads hurt because they're dark tetrads--malicious, malignant, Machiavellian and manipulative. Hurting is their modus operandi. Blame and Shame are the names of their game. They never tell you why they're hitting you exactly. I've never known what I did. So learning anything but trauma responding was a bust. They don't say what you did because you did nothing. And they can't admit they're frigging demented sadistic control freaks who get off on hurting people. That it's their heroin fix.
But they are also good at DARVO--deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Once they've gotten the payoff, they turn on their victim (again like rape). They blame them for making them do it. Or they lie and say they never hit you, like Mommy dearest did to me. Which of course is completely contradictory. You can't not have done it but also have a good reason for doing. See, they manufacture mutually exclusive paradoxes like trees grow leaves. But their victim is so shell shocked that she can't defend herself or even think straight. They make it too dangerous, if she even had the energy to.
Dark tetrads also hit because they hate their children and we hate ourselves too. They resent and are jealous of our light, our sweetness, our charisma, our Zen. They hate how other people are attracted to us. They think they are the only ones entitled to attention. They hate how we make folks smile with our genuine authenticity. While just drain everyone. They keep grabbing all the good things and sucking up all the oxygen, trying to smother our fire. But they can't because they are dead and cold. They kill everything they touch.
And they hate that. So all they can do is douse, quench, put out. They isolate us and cut off our resources. They try to kill us. Sometimes they succeed. When I confided how miserable I was to my dad, he told me I should commit suicide. Thank God for my beautiful husband and kids cuz I almost took him at his word. But even that isn't enough for them. They're the malignant enemy prowling the earth seeking the ruination of souls. They are Wendigo, getting hungrier the more they kill and eat. They are restless spirits ever roaming. Because they are human, not Gods as they believe themselves.
Because the core of the problem is that they go contrary to all that is logical, loving, kind and proper. They go against the natural order of things. But instead of fighting this deadly impulse, they indulge it. They're keep trying to force a square peg into a round hole. And they just damage the peg and the hole. And the older they get, the more they do it, the more entrenched they become, the more convinced they become of their own godhood. But also the farther they get from light and love, the darker and colder they get.
And we who are their children thought that what they gave us was love because parents by nature, love their kids. So we gave them our good love, in exchange for their counterfeit self-serving harm. We threw good money after bad. The older we are when we realize it, the harder it is for us to change too. We have days, weeks, months, years, decades of conditioning to be their possessions, not children. We're practiced at giving ourselves to them, body, mind, heart and soul. We literally know no other way.
I'm going to be 61 soon and it has taken me that long to start processing that what I experienced was not normal and healthy but abuse of many kinds. I'm grateful to my husband for helping me put that in perspective too, to quit shielding, defending and excusing and to begin admitting that what happened was very wrong. And I sound really confident now because I'm faking it till I make it. But I'm going to wrestle with their gaslighting for the rest of my life
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