, Hello my friends. Today I listened to a talk on Youtube by psychologist Patrick Teahan about how narcissist parents destroy a child's sense of self by creating a false narrative about the child embedding their wrong version in her mind. In laymen's terms, they lie to and about their child and gaslight her into believing wrong things about herself. That is spot on what my parents and their new spouses did to me. The image they painted of me was of a disobedient, stupid, mouthy, bitter, jealous, selfish, arrogant, stingy, lazy spoiled brat. I was too sensitive but also too critical, a show off and a liar. That's all so rich coming from them, I see in retrospect.
And I believed them that I was the cause of all their problems. I was continually working to correct these "character flaws" I supposedly had. I was too obedient, to the point of doing all their work. I kept quiet and rolled over for everything including neglect, abandonment, endangerment and abuse. I was so humble I groveled. I endlessly gave away things I needed to survive and they endlessly took, depriving me of even the most basic care. I welcomed any new person they shoved on me and bent over backwards for them. When they raged at, threatened, hit, stole from, humiliated, mocked, kicked me out of the house, made me do all kinds of inappropriate things, I just assumed it was what I deserved. I have felt this way all my life. I was groomed to expect poor treatment.
You might think this sounds a bit exaggerated and it was, but not by me. I downplayed it. All my life I did what I call the 6 Ex's of their abuse. I excused, exonerated, expunged, excepted, explained away, exempted all the wrong they did to me. I took on myself the consequences of their bad actions both in the harm they caused and by allowing myself to be scapegoated. I was blamed for every bad thing they did. The exaggeration of my "terrible behavior" was on their part. But they did their job well and their version of me is the one that sticks.
I now have the onerous task of sorting out what was true and what was false and then trying to rewrite a more accurate understanding of myself. And I see that their scapegoating of me served their malignant narcissistic agenda. And as such it renders everything they said, wrong. I'd have an easier time sorting fly crap from pepper than figuring out what parts were accurate. So I've decided to throw the entire thing out because it's all fake. I was framed as the problem to distract from their wrongdoing both to me and to a lot of people. Each of my four "parents' has burned through many relationships. Unfortunately, that didn't occur until later.
When I was young, they were able were able to con a lot of people. People who should have helped me but didn't. Either because they didn't care or because they believed the lies. So this is how a narcissist parents creates a false self-image in their children. They design a fake ID of the child. They lie and get their version in first before the child is old enough to see it as fake. They hurry to tell others their false version because as you probably know, the first version of a story is almost always the one believed no matter how untrue or ludicrous it is. That's how false accusations perpetuate. And the innocent victim of the smear campaign has a devil of a time changing people's minds.
The liars don't have to prove their lies. They just accuse and then the victim has to disprove lies that if they'd never been told no one would even think about. Often the lies are so patently stupid that they're obviously wrong. But they're cleverly said by the liar to make them sound convincing. Narcissists aren't amateurs in the deceit game. They know what to say and how to say it. Such as my dad calling me "disobedient" when everyone knew I was doing the lion's share of the work in his foster care home. They knew because they said that them having an adult foster care home with young children was a terrible idea to begin with.
They knew I was doing work that was far too heavy and dangerous. They knew that everything he was accusing me of was kid stuff that all children do. Stuff he did as a kid and even as an adult! And yet somehow, no one stood up to Jack when he would rage at me in front of them. Did no one else see the irony in that?? My dad raging, as in spitting in my face, about how I was angry?? But yet, they must have believed that I was the problem. At least that's how my 11 y/o self interpreted their silence. As consent. Ergo my wrong assumptions that it was all my fault.
Narcissist parents also use partial truths or they tell half the story. The half that paints them as the hero-victim-martyr. And the child as the perpetrator. They say the child got angry but they don't tell how they enraged their child. My mother told everyone I was a liar and untrustworthy (that would be her). She said I was forgetful and that I lost things. To explain away why so many of my things disappeared when she was around.
Now this is also obviously wrong and why they believed her, I don't know. Everyone that knows Nancy knows she's "tricky" as one aunt put it. They also know she's deceitful, arrogant, entitled, haughty, demanding, two-faced, hypocritical, adulterous, serial cheater, neglectful and abusive mother, an exhibitionist, attention-seeking liar and thief. Definition of a malignant narcissist. But yet these same common sense people let themselves be gulled by her so often. They never, ever tried to help me deal with her. They never even acknowledged any of her horrible behavior to me. They (as in my entire family) left me to cope alone. Which is yet another reason I thought the problem was me.
Which leads me to the next gaslighting trick narcissist parents use against their child. They rely on the fact that the things they do are so outrageously, egregiously, blatantly wrong that no one believes any parent would or could do these things. But believe me they can and do. Just the fact that my stories sound so outlandish (like them abandoning me alone at 6 3K miles from home with strangers) should be proof that they happened. I could never make this up!
They also use the aforementioned exaggeration and manipulation to make the child's normal behavior sound like selling state secrets. That's what actually got me understanding where the problem lay. I think of how I do things with my children and grandkids, that were the opposite of what I experienced. And terrible things I'd never dream of doing were done to me. And I realize that I was a child too.
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