Hello my friends. Today on the path toward healing CPTSD, I'm looking at how my narcissistic parents' abusive double standards and gaslighting about it all, broke my brain. That's not a figure of speech. The adult brain of a traumatized child shows physical damage from the corrosive cortisol and adrenaline from constant stress and chaos. We are dry drowning in all the fear, obligation, guilt and crisis they flood us with . Our coping abilities are crippled from neglect, deprivation, hypocrisy, manipulation, selfish demands of parents. We are always confused and haunted by all the manufactured chaos and weaponized anxiety our parents put on us. We become hypervigilant.
We bring this damage with us into adulthood. We are chronologically grown up, but the wounded child within has never been able to escape and develop. She is trapped inside us because she was never allowed to be, to need, to want, to express herself, to live. We lack identity because it was stolen from us by greedy, demanding people who took advantage of our youth, dependence and vulnerability. Everything is backwards and upside down for us. Because we were being harmed by the very people who were supposed to be protecting us. We were serving, nurturing, defending, caring and doing all for our parents what they were supposed to do for us. They said I owed them everything. But they owed me nothing. I was an endless slot machine, paying out with nothing being paid in.
And one of the most disturbing things they groomed me to think I owed them was taking their burdens on me. I sacrificed my all, on their altar. I gave it all away to them. And I took responsibility for all their actions. I was pretty much born an adult, never being permitted to act or grow like a normal child. And I was born their parent, always expected to not only do for them but also cover for all their foolish, selfish choices.
And to make it even more baffling, I was also their child, not in the caring for way, in the possessive way. They owned me, body, mind and spirit. I was endlessly repurposed into whatever each needed at the moment. And because they were divorced and remarried, that mushroomed into four people, plus their new kids, that I had to wait on. And the demands were ever-changing, without warning. And I was just expected to know what was expected and provide it.
So I had to think like an adult and parent when I was a kid. Like a parent, I had to excuse their behavior. And that's strange for many reasons. Because parents don't excuse as in ignore bad behavior. They have to correct it. But I could never do that. I couldn't even say that what they were doing hurt. I had to be completely on board with everything Jack, Ginny, Nancy and Bill did not matter how dangerous it was to me. Because I had to also be subservient and under their rule like a child. I had to say it was okay by me when it wasn't. I couldn't even defend myself, let alone call them out. And then when things went wrong, I was taught to exonerate, excuse, explain away, expunge, justify and then accept responsibility for it.
I was both savior and scapegoat, servant and slave, surrogate parent and spouse. I carried them all, all my life with them. And now I've cut ties, and two have died. Which by the way, I've heard how I'd miss them when they were gone and regret missed opportunities. False. I don't miss them any more than I'd miss an abscess. It's so much easier without them around. I don't regret missed opportunities because there never were opportunities, only expectations. And I never let them down. What I miss is me. I want my childhood, peace of mind, and self back.
But even with none of them in my life anymore. They're still in my head and in my nightmares. I still feel responsible for them all. I feel all the guilt and shame over their actions, as if they were mine. Literally, my brain is so damaged that I am constantly confused. My memories are shot to hell by decades of gaslighting. And it's that gaslighting plus the double standards that caused the trouble. My dream now gaslight me that I actually did the wrong things they did.
So how did my narcissistic parents manage to substitute me as the sacrificial lamb? Therein lies the power of gaslighting. By indoctrinating me that I was the problem and the cause of all theirs problems they were able to Frankenstein my brain. They did crazy, outlandish things no one does let alone a parent. They were so insane that no one would believe it happened. And my devilishly cunning and deceitful parents knew this.
They purposely broke my ability to process all the shit they did. They wrote false narratives which they implanted in my head. They lied and brainwashed and got me all mixed up. And because a vulnerable child can't face the fact that their parents are actually the child's enemy bent on destroying them, the child has to protect herself. So she lets them spin lies painting themselves as victims and her as the perpetrator.
And being a very conscientious child, I worked for the rest of my life to make up for all the bad things they said I'd done. I let them endlessly use me because in my gaslit mind, I created the problem. And they took full advantage of this confusion on my part. No amount of service could fix this. They kept me dancing by withholding love and forgiveness. Now I see I did nothing that needed forgiving. But they did. And again, my young mind had no ability to conceptualize arrogant, self-centered, cruel manipulation on such a grand scale. By parents.
In my confusion and exhaustion, I somehow misfiled experiences in the wrong memory drawer. I put their wrongdoing in my drawer. I took on myself, their wrongs. My broken mind remembered their actions as my own. I just realized that last week. I'm 61. So for six decades those recollections have lain in the wrong drawer, toxifying. My dreams have been trying to properly sort them. Night after night, they show me endless images of myself, horrified and ashamed but I'm never shown what I did to feel this way. My dreams also show me in impossibly difficult, unsafe, gross situations with endless inappropriate demands. I thought the former was memories and the latter were consequences.
Now that I look closer, I see it's the other way around. The former dreams are consequences of my parents' cruel brainwashing. that I'm never shown what I did because I did nothing. They did. The shame I'm remembering is theirs. Not that I've never done wrong, obviously. But I don't dream about that because I've recognized, admitted, humbled myself, apologized and made amends. I dream about wrong that was done to me because the guilty parties have never done any of that. I think my mind is trying to help me see that it is not my fault what happened to me.
And the dreams of being overburdened, made responsible for everyone and everything, being abused and neglected, well, those are memories.
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