Childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse causes cognitive dissonance, dissociation and emotional fracturing

Hello my dear friends. Today in my quest to heal childhood trauma from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm exploring how we who were harmed by abusive parents used cognitive split and dissociation to juggle the very disturbing, terrifying and dangerous reality we were daily subjected to. My reality was a relentless cycle of abuse: emotional, physical, financial, and sexual. I endured medical neglect, deprivation of basic needs, and routine endangerment. I was forced into roles of parentification and enmeshment, while being subjected to extreme scapegoating, dehumanization, and gaslighting by those who were supposed to be my protectors.

Abnormal-normal and normal-normal in various forms

This happened at the hands for four people who called themselves my parents. Both of my parents and their new partners were irresponsible, demanding narcissists.  I got shoved back and forth between them and moved randomly. I lived in 40 different places before age 21. My life was endless upheaval, chaos, stress and conflicting demands. Each environment demanded a different version of me, forcing me to treat these wildly unstable, abusive settings as 'normal' just to survive. It took me till I was in my late fifties to get any of this. When I did, it explained a great deal about my dysfunctional trauma responses, especially fawning, placating parents, not holding them accountable, tolerating abuse and taking on myself the consequences of their awful behavior. 

Multiple fractured realities

I had to juxtapose five sets of "normal": each parent's abnormal normal expectations place on me, plus the real world where this was not normal. To juggle the chaos, I had to do what I have since learned is dissociation. I had to fragment myself to appease their hypocritical, unsafe commands plus exist in the everyday world. Even with other family, I had to morph, to hid the bizarre "normal" that was my daily family life. I had to somehow navigate that very different outside reality that was so contradictory to the hidden "cult" reality of my narcissistic parents. And this narcissistic cult itself was multiplied four times by my four narcissistic parents. 

Manifestations of cognitive split in childhood 

Here are a signs to look for in a traumatized and abused child. 

• Neurodiverse "autistic" behaviors: As a child, I banged my head in order to be able to sleep. I understand now that I was trying to "reorient" my chaotic, disparate reality in the only way I  knew how. By trying to fit me to it, because I couldn't juxtapose it with normal. 
• Complex fantasy world: this is not to be confused with my parents' narcissistic fantasy of god-like power, control and entitlement. This was my land of  imagination where life was safer, straightforward and cohesive, not fractured and dangerous. 
• The "distant stare" or "side eye nervous tic": Traumatized kids literally hear voices and see ghosts, of haranguing, threatening, abusive parents. We're trying to cope and focus on our immediate reality while hearing their shaming, mocking scolding voices. 
• The "trauma grimace': We clamp our jaws shut to lock in secrets they made us keep. And to prevent ourselves from screaming with the agony of what we're enduring. 
• Fawning: Beware of the child who is too eager to obey. We are people pleasers who are terrified of failing and getting punished randomly. 
• Being too much because we're told we're not enough. 

Manifestations of cognitive split in adulthood

Here's a breakdown of the cognitive split of childhood trauma in adulthood. 

• The Apparently Normal Part (ANP): This is the side of the self that manages daily life, tries to fit into the family system, goes to school or work, and handles standard responsibilities. It actively suppresses the trauma memories to keep functioning.

• The Emotional Part (EP): This is the part of the personality that holds the raw trauma, the intense fear, the pain, and the defense mechanisms, like fawning, people pleasing, freezing, flight, or hypervigilance). It remains "stuck" in the traumatic experience.

Other Related Psychological Terms

Here are some ways we juggle all this cognitive dissonance. 

• Compartmentalization: The psychological defense mechanism where the brain forces conflicting ideas, values, or traumatic experiences into separate mental "drawers" so they don't clash or overwhelm the conscious mind. It's how a child can know a parent is cruel, yet still feel and express intense, unconditional love for them in the next moment. It's how we manage to cope with the outside world while struggling with the threatening interior monologue of their voices. 

• Cognitive Dissonance: The intense psychological distress that happens when you hold two fundamentally contradictory beliefs at the same time (e.g., "This person is my protector" vs. "This person is hurting me"). To resolve the agony of this dissonance, an abused child's brain will often default to dissociation or denial because they are physically dependent on the abuser to survive. it took me till I was almost 60 to start processing any of this. 

• Psychic Splitting: A psychoanalytic term for the inability to bring together both positive and negative qualities of oneself or others into a cohesive whole. It results in seeing things in extremes (e.g., "all good" or "all bad"), a defense mechanism often forced upon children who have to cope with highly erratic, unpredictable parents. We go outside ourselves to escape our horrible inner reality. 

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