Hello my friends. Today on my path to healing CPTSD from narcissist parent abuse, I'm exploring how malignant narcissist parents make kids anxious and then shame us for being anxious. Then they gaslight us that we have nothing be anxious about and that we are just overreacting. They intimidate, frighten, confuse and distort reality so that we are always on edge. They fire a barrage of false accusations at us to make us jumpy. Then they scold us and make us feel foolish for feeling nervous. Which now I see is another of their gaslighting hypocrisies. It outs them as the malignant narcissist parents they are.
We're told that no one can make you feel anything. You CHOOSE to let them. Well, I beg to differ, on behalf of traumatized kids. Narcissist parents can and do absolutely coerce their children into feelings of insecurity, instability, fear, shame and guilt. By DOING irresponsible, unsettling, frightening, shaming and attacking things. With gaslighting, they create a false reality where life is dangerous, chaotic and and parents are unpredictable, vengeful, two-faced, backstabbing and must revered like gods or else there will be hell to pay.
But then these dementors rile kids up some more by turning on and blaming them for feeling exactly how the malignant narcissist parents groomed them to feel. My mother and father would alternately rage at, mock and humiliate AND then dump all their issues on me. I was scapegoat, sounding board, surrogate parent, surrogate spouse, sponge, complaint department, confidante and counselor. But I never knew which hat I was expected to wear at any given time. They weaponized my confused placating by continually flipping roles. So I was always behind and struggling to catch up.
I was exhausted and depleted from all the demands and FOG (fear, obligation, guilt) put on me. But I didn't dare say anything and just went along with it because it was only ever about what mom or dad or stepmom or stepdad demanded of me. And this is exactly how malignant narcissist parents want you. Tenderized. Ferberized. Compliant. Biddable. Moldable.
And then came round two of gaslighting. After making life a living nightmare (seriously I trauma dream about this shit all the time) I was a pretty shell-shocked kid and probably showed it. I don't know. Pictures of me show a kid with jaws clamped biting my tongue. Anyway, they spun my trauma responses to their abuse around so that it was just me being pouty, self-pitying, attention-seeking. Though I never once asked for or got help from anyone.
Out of the blue, my dad would bark at me to "stop being so heavy" to "lighten up." To stop "showing off." He'd shame and sneer at me for being jumpy and nervous. They'd call me ridiculous, foolish, immature, deceitful. I was just bumping along trying to please them. I had no idea that I was acting depressed. I was just trying keep my head down like they told me to. But I'm sure the exhaustion of trying to please unpleasable people showed.
Which was rich, coming from my dad, the heaviest element on the planet. He would scold me for "being depressed" as if depression, or manufactured and leveraged moodiness was his sole prerogative. He'd mope around and unload all his woes (mostly self-made) on me. He'd whine about how he felt so guilty and then side-eye me waiting to be reassured and soothed that he had nothing to feel guilty about.
None of them ever made wise, responsible choices. THEY were disobedient to God. They did whatever they felt like and then had the audacity to preach to me about how God expected me to serve them obediently. They had the gall to call out sin in other people as they were doing these things themselves. Oh they had plenty to feel guilty about. But I doubt he ever really felt anything but entitled arrogance. At least he never acted humble or contrite.
They dropped the ball on me so many times. Or should I say never picked it up. But of course, they just pushed the cigarette machine's buttons and she had to dispense what they wanted. I lied and said all was well and pasted a perma-grin on my face. But they were never satisfied. They'd start with the accusations of faking it, making it up, and insincerity. OF COURSE I WAS FAKING IT!!!! WHAT CHOICE DID I HAVE?? YOU MADE MY LIFE HELL AND EXPECTED ME TO THANK YOU FOR IT!! But of course there could be no authenticity because they had to placated all the time. It would have been unthinkably dangerous not to. Or at least that's how they all made me feel. This is the definition of shit and shoved in it.
Then I'd go to my mother's house for another take on it. She did whatever she wanted at any moment no matter how irresponsible, immoral or illegal. She left me to shoulder the consequences, gave me no help and then joined her boyfriends in traumatizing me and mocking me for feeling traumatized. I was just one big joke to them. A big joke, I might add, who was doing all the work in her foster home. She'd claim they did everything for me. That I was just ungrateful and she who was the victim (DARVO) Then they kicked me out of the house, for shits and giggles when I was 16 and told me it was my fault.
But remember I said earlier that they out themselves with their hypocrisies? The very fact that they told me to both lighten up (stop overreacting and being too sensitive) and that I was making it up for attention, is the key. I couldn't be making it up and overreacting. Either shit did or didn't happen. Which of course is even more bewildering.
But narcissists know they caused your pain. They know you're neither making it up nor exaggerating. But they would cut their own tongues out before admitting it. So they just throw a bunch of gaslighting word salad at you to see what sticks. Unfortunately it all sticks in the traumatized child's brain. She feels it all: guilt, shame, fear, self-loathing, confusion. She feels stupid, foolish, humiliated, ridiculous. But it's not the child who owns these issues. She is just the repository in which they dump their stupidity. She is the sponge that absorbs it all so her entitled, arrogant, manipulative sadistic dark tetrad parents don't have to.
This is their legacy. What they have indoctrinated me to be. It has taken me almost 62 years to start to sort out what is mine and what is theirs. It's why confessing my sins is difficult. I can't see clearly what I was responsible for and what I wasn't. So many failings and wrongs I've allowed them to gaslight me about now live rent-free in my head.
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