Hello my friends. Today in the "healing childhood trauma" sphere, I'm looking at more dehumanizing double standards malignant narcissistic parents blame shift onto their kids. These are strange, out of nowhere, unprovoked smear campaigns that leave the child confused and destabilized. What I'm learning about this nonsensical rhetoric they heaped on me was that it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with them. But being self-righteous hypocrites, they could never admit to wrong. So they played the gaslighting DARVO game and blame-shifted it onto me.
I have believed their smear campaigns and lived with guilt and shame which I understood was mine because they said it was. I've also lived in utter confusion about it all. I never even thought about it until a few days ago. I just accepted that their shame was mine. With strategic distortions, omissions and deceptions, they walled me in, brick by brick, to a prison of gaslighting lies. It's so bewildering that even now it's hard to recall or explore. All I remember feeling was intense unbearable emotional pain and shame.
Let me explain what some of these disturbing things were that they said. And maybe you can see the faulty, deceptive illogic it took me so long to. First, here's a list of some of malignant, twisted things my narcissistic parents said in my article Beware of these red flag dehumanizing, invalidating things malignant narcissist parents say They are dehumanizing because they undermine a child's core, natural self-defenses, reducing her to a drone slave. And it is important to note that they say these things in series, because they are SYSTEMATICALLY tearing down the child's resources and walling her up in a shame prison. So they have scripted "comebacks" or retorts for anything she might say to defend herself. Yes it's very dark tetrad. Here is the litany.
--How dare you (do or say whatever it is they say you've said or done). There's no answer for that because it is a setup. Anything you say will sound like backpedaling. The sneaky, surprise ambush is the indefensible position. The thing to note is that the child very likely didn't do or say anything wrong. It's all gaslighting designed to destabilize the child. She was framed to take the rap for the PARENT's actions. But if the child should show some courage and ask what it is she supposedly did, they come back with...
--You know FULL WELL what you did. Said by the parent with such vitriol that the child feels physically sick. More gaslighting. The child obviously doesn't know or she wouldn't be asking. And the PARENT DOESN'T KNOW EITHER because THEY ARE MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG. For NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY and to leverage an already shewed power differential. But all they have to do is accuse the child and tell her she knows and she believes them because she is conditioned to accept their fake gaslighting version of reality. The levels of soul confusion this one comment has caused me. As if it wasn't bad enough, they double down...
--You have no excuse. There's no excuse (for whatever it is I did). You're just making up excuses. I heard that so often yet for the life of me, I can't recall what I did or what excuse I was supposedly making. But again, there's no comeback save trauma responses. Anything will sound like more excuse-making. I was a biddable child and didn't defend myself or talk back. That's why this blog exists now! So why did I hear this so often? I see now that my malignant narcissistic parents said this to me but were telling on themselves. THEY had no excuse for their irresponsible, feckless, chaotic behavior. But they wouldn't admit that because they were entitled, arrogant, remorseless, Machiavellian control freaks. Someone other than them must always suffer the consequences of their rotten choices. And again, it didn't need to be true. They just has to INSINUATE that I was doing it and I believed their lies.
--You should be ashamed of yourself. Shame on you. I can still hear my mother's exaggerated, melodramatic pearl-clutching voice, dragging out the words in shocked horror. I can recall feeling very ashamed. But never why. Those details were always missing. I used to auto-gaslight myself that I knew what I had done to deserve such shame. But when I try to call it up, there's never anything but her scornful voice. I learned recently that "shame on you" is a tell-tale phrase narcissistic parents use on a child. And boy, do we feel it. It floats menacingly just below the surface of our cognizant memory. And the horror of it threatens to devour us on the daily. Yet we have no clear idea of what it is or why it is there. It was implanted there by cruel parents who would not take responsibility for their own actions.
This Narcissistic parent quadfecta bombardment renders the scapegoat child helpless. It's effectively sucker punching, kicking her legs out, kicking her in the back and stomping on her when she tries to get up. It haunts us all our lives. It keeps us in dark places to deep to reach. Next I will blog about how, though I can't yet understand or feel it yet, I know that it was all gaslighting self-serving cover ups. I'll expose their dirty little smear campaigns for the lies they are.
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