Hello my friends. I've been writing a series on the gaslighting around childhood trauma and narcissistic parent abuse, by blind guides-- toxic flying monkeys who shame us while claiming to help. This is part three on detoxing from blind guides gaslighting. This post intends to help us heal from the would-be healers who misdirect us.
So is there any hope for surviving blind guides? I need to do a lot more digging but yes, I think so. It lies in watching how healthy people cope with gaslighting and toxic blind guides. It's about differentiating healthy from hurtful unsolicited advice. It involves following people like psychologist Dr. Ramani who is trained in narcissistic abuse. It requires retraining our trauma responses. And recognizing blind guides for who they are.
I think the place to start is by listening very carefully to what people are actually saying and if it sounds wrong, toxic, hurtful, stop right there. Don't go any further with it. Don't trauma respond (as I do) with fawning acquiescence. Don't bow to them as if they are some kind of moral authority (as I do). Don't recant, backpedal on your own wisdom. Hit pause and calmly end the conversation. Then take time to reflect on what they said, why it felt off and your feelings about all that.
And I realize writing this that I need to go back a few steps. Those of us with childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse, do not know what we feel. We were told what to feel and never had the luxury of owning our own feelings. We gaslight ourselves because we were gaslit that we are wrong, making it up, exaggerating, showing off, etc. That's what makes us such easy prey for blind guides in the first place. So we can't rely on our feelings alone. They are often just programmed trauma responses.
We need to go deeper to our core visceral responses. For me, it's literally my gut that tells me something is rotten. I feel sick and my stomach hurts. Like I've been kicked there. Because that's what blind guides do: they hit you when and where you are vulnerable. So we work backward from the core responses. We look past the blind guides' superficial "helpfulness" to see if there is poison lurking that is making us sick.
We ask ourselves why this thing they said that is supposed to help us feels so unhelpful. Then we dig deeper still and find that this was how our narcissist parents abused us, by conning us into thinking harm was helpful. That the nasty things they said were things we needed to hear. And then we dig into why they would do these hurtful things and we find they had a vested interest in keeping us in a chaotic, stressful, precarious, destabilized state.
Which is what makes us so vulnerable to blind guides. We were raised by blind guides. So from there, it's a matter of rethinking who actually has our best interests at heart. Not what the gaslighting voices in our head say. What our common sense says. And then we begin to dig ourselves out of this pit of shame we've been forced into.
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