Dark tetrad narcissist parents gaslight and sabotage kids into auto-gaslighting and sabotaging themselves

Hello my friends. Today on the path to healing CPTSD from narcissist parent abuse, I'm exploring how dark tetrad malignant narcissist parents gaslight and sabotage their kids into auto-gaslighting and sabotaging themselves. After decades of their gaslighting and sabotage, I catch myself doing to to myself now. After years of being tricked into and trapped in harmful situations, being taught to ignore red flags and danger signals I now walk right into trouble which I probably would have avoided if I had had loving protective parents. 

Listening to narcissist specialist Dr. Ramani on YouTube, I heard a commercial with  a man saying that narcissists don't target weak women, they target the fixers who have been taught by toxic parents to expect too little. I need to find out  who this wise man is because those are profoundly eye-opening words. It's as if he read my life's script. My narcissist dad would literally say to his pouty narcissist wife, hinting at me, "maybe Mary could fix it." He would invite her to think of something I could do to please her, thereby avoiding his responsibility and dumping all of it  on me. Usually fixing meant me shouldering yet another task so she could "rest." She laid around a lot while I took care of her house, family, chores, laundry etc. 

That insinuation that I was somehow responsible to fix other people has haunted me all my life. Now, whenever someone is upset, I can't NOT feel obliged to make it better and guilty if I can't. FOG--fear, obligation and guilt to take care of others have so clogged up my view that I can't take care of myself. I learned that self-care was selfish and that tending to selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed people and anyone, was my only duty in life. I was shamed and gaslit into thinking I didn't have a self. 

This sabotaged my self-defense skills. Instead of protecting myself from dangerous people and situations, I ran straight into them. Just like in childhood, when any of my narcissist parents demanded something, I complied, no matter how much it hurt me. And with dark tetrads, it always hurts. They don't want you to do things that are good for you, too. They EXPECT and COERCE you into doing sick, weird, dysfunctional and devasting things that have lifelong harmful impacts on you. 

And pretty soon, they don't even need to gaslight you anymore. You gaslight yourself. So now you are participating in your own ambush. It's so twisted. I do not trust myself to make good decisions because they TOLD ME that safe, healthy and wise was wrong. Everything is bass-ackwards with dark tetrad parents. So now I'm confused about safe and unsafe. With all the warning signals out of order, I don't have a functioning safety system. 

And it's made so much worse when your parents are religious Christian narcissists. (boy, if that isn't a contradiction). They used the Bible to gaslight me, particularly the parts about being a servant to all. That was shoved down my throat. Though looking back in retrospect, I never saw them serving anyone but themselves. Now I see the hypocrisy, arrogance, double standards, exploitation and manipulation. But children know nothing of this. They just take things on face value, assuming their parents have their best interests at heart. 

Photo is me at 12 when I first moved in with my dad and his new wife. Already I was living in the FOG of fear, obligation and guilt. Plus shame, hypervigilance and anxiety.