Hello my friends. I began this blog to chronical how I lost 100 pounds without GLP-1 drugs or weight loss surgery. And then I had a series of epiphanies about my own childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse. And I started to see how weight loss, weight gain, obesity, anorexia were linked to childhood trauma brain damage. Today I'm sharing how I lost 100 pounds by realizing that I don't understand my childhood trauma brain. I'm beginning to see how accustomed to narcissistic parent abuse, toxic shaming, abandonment, neglect, endangerment, exploitation, parentification, bullying, dehumanizing, invalidation, scapegoating, blame-shifting, sabotaging and gaslighting I had become.
Narcissistic parent abuse was more than normal. More than just my reality. It WAS reality that I had become so inured to that I could not see that it was crippling, deforming and killing me. And what got me seeing more clearly how deep in I was, is when someone asked me how I didn't see it then. How did I cope? Did I resent and fight it? Did I even know it abuse and not love my narcissistic parents were dishing out? And most important of all, how did it FEEL to be so badly mistreated. (by the way those are the terms questioners asked, not me).
And the answer to all is, no, I didn't see, or know or understand. Because narcissistic parent abuse was hard-wired into my brain. I did not feel discomfort as a separate thing from routine comfort. Discomfort was all I knew. It was not comfortable but it was familiar. Like walking around with a stone in your shoe that hurts all the time, but I was used to it. This doesn't make it hurt less, if anything more with all the infection, concomitant injuries and extended damage. My trauma brain has adapted to pain as normal life. Like a blister that forms over the stone's constant abrading. I don't understand that there is life without the constant pain of the stone.
And yet I do. Apologies for constant contradiction, but here's what I mean. A traumatized child understands on some level that the hell her narcissistic parents are putting her through is not what other children experience. But her parents malignant weaponized gaslighting taught her that abuse is what she deserves. Because somehow she is not like other girls and not in the arrogant way we hear this phrase now. I was not like other girls because I wasn't worthy of the love and care other girls got. That's how I framed all the narcissistic parent abuse. Good enough for who it was for.
This constant hurt created what I call an emotional leprosy in my childhood trauma brain. I've mentioned how a therapist said I have a "scary high pain tolerance." That is because pain is all I know so it has to be really bad for the stress and chaos cortisol damaged receptors in my brain to register it. What I had wasn't periodic or episodic experiences of pain. It was rare episodic experiences of joy, peace and feelings of acceptance.
And wow does the religious gaslighting have a heyday with that. You don't feel joy?? Shame on you! Bad Christian, you're not praying, trusting, living for Jesus, etc. Which is really nasty to do to an adult, but to a developing child? My narcissistic parents used this on me all the time. Subjecting me to crazy abnormal, dehumanizing experiences and demanding that I respond not just with normal goodish responses but perfect, Christian responses. I had to do all the work without the resources. And, I might add, my narcissistic parents behaved with nothing like the Joy of the Lord, they preached about. They were petty, petulant, selfish, entitled, arrogant and cruel.
I thought I was supposed to feel gross, ugly, fat, stupid, in the way, ashamed, exhausted from overwork, all the time. Not because children were supposed to. Because I wasn't a child but a three-horned monster like Caliban who had to be punished and beaten and enslaved. I thought that God had ordained that I be miserable as a matter of course because I had in some way failed him and everyone. I was not just a second class citizen, I was an outcast.
So what in the world does that have to do with how I lost 100 pounds? It has to do with not realizing or not being able to articulate how much misery you are in. It has to do with being such an empath that I protected everyone else at my own cost. I body blocked and took on the sins of the family so no one had to feel any guilt or consequences. And I wasn't supposed to feel good about any of it. That would be attention-seeking pride. Like I said in an earlier post, they had a clapback for everything I did, despite me giving them nothing to clapback at.
I have been able to regain or actually just gain, some personal autonomy and power since going no contact with my narcissistic parents. I don't make childhood trauma response decisions as much as I did. Yes it feels strange. My dad used to browbeat me about how wicked I was by "leaning on my own understanding" anytime I showed any independence. Just another of his misquoted, preached rather than lived, Bible verses. But again, I didn't know that because Jack made himself God to me so I thought that going against him, no matter how wrong his teaching, was going against God.
The story of how I lost 100 pounds is still being written. But the more I unpack the more I find childhood trauma responses and a broken, childhood trauma brain damage from narcissistic parent abuse driving all my dysfunctional behavior.
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