Hello my friends. Today on the road to childhood trauma recovery, I am angry. And I'm going to sit and stay with that anger awhile. I am frustrated not just by the hell my narcissistic parents put me through but the hellish aftermath of that abuse that has destroyed so much of me. I'm mad that it took me so long to realize that what they did was abuse because they were so deceptive. And that it took me 60 years to give myself permission to be able to express this anger. And to be able to admit without guilt that it is righteous, justifiable anger I'm feeling. And I realized that one reason it took me so long were the gaslighting hypocritical accusations made against me by my malignant narcissist parents.
The Anger Paradox
One of the things I'm angriest about now, is that I was always scolded, by my savagely angry parents (all four, bio and step) that I was the one with the anger problem. Yet I never recall ever doing anything in anger toward anyone. They did all kinds of things to humiliate, stress, upset, destabilize and frustrate me. Things that should have made me angry, but didn't. I recall placating, humoring and walking on eggshells around them. All I felt and showed was FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) to them.
The scapegoat trap
Narcissistic enmeshed parents use their children to get what they want at no personal cost. Especially that scapegoat child. She is their human shield and the fall girl for all the consequences of their bad behavior. These enmeshed parent space invaders destroy the child's self defenses. They steal her identity. They punish her for being. They sabotage her self-care skills. They implant a false sense of self as servant to them. To them, the child does not exist as a separate person, only as a possession. And they drill her in being a good foot soldier in dad's and mom's army. They ensnare their child and keep her caged. The trauma bonded child has betrayal blindness and is unable to see anything clearly.
Gaslighting lies
Narcissistic parents are masters at gaslighting revisionist history. My parents had this uncanny ability to weave a tissue of nonsense in such a way that it seemed plausible, to me anyway. It seemed legit to others because I never heard anyone say anything against the outrageous neglect, abuse, exploitation, endangerment and child abandonment I experienced. It didn't help that I was an empath and people pleaser so already set up to be the scapegoat. Personal boundaries were punished. Privacy was invaded. And being groomed toward service, trauma responding and fawning, I was an easy target for gaslighting.
The DARVO Deception
Narcissistic parents lie all the time. Their lives are lies. They misrepresent themselves. So if someone criticized them, it was spun to make themselves out to be victims. So I both felt sorry for them but was also targeted by them. They used me as a therapist but also a dartboard. Because narcissists will launch malicious smear campaigns against anyone, especially helpless children. They twist and manipulate everything. But then they DARVO, denying reality, attacking, and reversing victim and offender roles. These crybullies play the innocent and injured parties and the scapegoat child as the big mean bully. And they are quick to get their fabricated version of events in first because they know that people have a bad habit of believing the first account they hear. Even against evidence of their own eyes or common sense.
Pot meet kettle
So when it came to anger issues, they had them and I was blamed for them. All four of my parents were ragingly angry but would never admit it. Then they would say it was justified and I was both the cause of their anger. But also the only one who was angry when I had no right to be. Which is of course ludicrous. You can't have it both ways, either you're not angry or you are, for a reason. What they were is kind of hybrid of self-pitying and enraged over narcissistic injury not real hurts. And what should have angered me but didn't was real hurts they really did to me. But that's just another of malicious parents' dirty double dealing hypocrisies.
Righteous Anger vs. Narcissistic rage
Real healthy justified anger is more frustration, sadness, stress, anxiety and confusion. All of which I felt. It might look like speaking up for yourself against attacks. Which I never did because it was too dangerous. My dad would fly into a rage and beat me because he said I was angry?! I never said anything let alone in anger. I just cried and begged to be forgiven. And this is one of the things I am angry about now. That my poor little loving heart got so broken by these vicious, vindictive, cruel people. That's what narcissistic rage is: petty, resentful, bitchy, sulky, jealous, petulant, pouty, passive-aggressive, aggressive, quick to anger slow to forgive, nasty, malignant and malicious. All the things my "Christian" parents preached against but were.
Right for them, wrong for you
And they didn't tell me I had an anger problem in a caring, how can we help, way. Even that can be kind of judgmentally annoying when someone "points out" your problem, especially if it's one they had a hand in creating. Extra especially if they don't admit they had a hand in causing it. My parents said it in a completely scornful, insulting way, as if anger was a fault of mine not a normal emotion. BUT the cherry on top was that they were each and all very frequently overreactive angry with me in big loud and sullen passive-aggressive ways. I was always hearing about how I'd let one of the other of them down, whomever I happened to be living with at the time. But they felt completely justified in their rages. And they made me believed I deserved to be attacked.
The one-sided story
Another thing that was never addressed was, if I was so angry, why that might be. Nobody ever talked about the endless, constant chaos they put me through. My parents moved to Alaska on a whim, were jobless and left me homeless and abandoned in various situations. I was left to play alone on the streets, from about age 4. Both parents cheated on the other. I was shuffled between 40 different homes and 8 schools before age 18. They both brought in a string of strangers to live with us. Both opened foster care homes and made me work like an unpaid servant in them. Both coerced me into dancing attendance on their boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses and new kids like a live-in maid. They used me as a surrogate spouse, parent and servant. But no one ever acknowledged any of these. They never admitted to doing anything that would have caused any normal person anger.
Narcissistic Egomania
Never once was I ever told HOW I was supposedly so angry or what I did that made them say this. No evidence was given. No facts. Because they couldn't because I didn't act angry. It was as if just accusing, made it true because they said so. That's a narcissist for you. My dad actually said he just "knew" I was thinking nasty things because he could "read my mind" and he "knew me better than I knew myself." That's an enmeshed narcissist for you. Speak unmitigated bullshit but say it in such a way to make it convincing. And they are convincing. They had me believing I really did think things he said even when I knew for a fact I didn't. These kinds of people are brain pirates and they know how to eff with and eff up your mind. Funny for being such a mind reader he never read the awful things I was thinking about myself. The many acts of self-harm I committed against myself, thanks to their gaslighting lies. No empathy there, just accusation. And he got narcissistic supply off terrorizing his child. Let's just let the bat guano crazy of that marinate.
All the pain and no gain
And did I get angry when falsely accused of being angry? At them, no, but should have been. And you'd think being such an "angry" person I'd have immediately, well, gotten angry. But the only anger I felt was at myself, all the time. My mother would say "you should be ashamed of yourself." She never said why, but I sure was ashamed. Thanks, Nancy for putting the gun in my hand. I spent all my life believing I was the awful person they said I was, agonizing over my awfulness, having nightmares nightly about my awfulness. Fighting against demons of self-harm. Sometimes, the pain would well up and I'd explode and melt all over the place. But even then it wasn't anger like it should have been. It was shame and self-loathing. Now you might be tempted to say isn't that just what your parents did? No. Theirs was strategic and purpose built to shame me into all those trauma responses. It was to control, destabilize, manipulate and wear me down.
The light dawns
For the majority of my life, I've hated myself for being so "angry." Till one time, I woke up to the gaslighting fallacies they'd been spouting. I asked my stepmother, who never could find a good thing to say about me, an innocent question about my dad. How was he, or something. She said in this spiteful way, that "well, he doesn't want anything to do with you because you're so angry all the time." This about the man who had beaten me in front of everyone, just because. This after she had just dumped on me about how "mean" my dad was to her. Mind you, I'd seen them once in about 10 years and only because I made the effort. And all of a sudden, I realized she'd been blame-shifting and hateful to me all my life. There was never a time when they took my part. I couldn't remember one kind thing they'd said to or about me. And it all made sense. It was how they were.
The real story
It was never about me being angry or not. It was about projecting both their anger and the splash back from it, onto me. It was about painting me as the villain to distract attention from their shitty treatment of me. And that does make me angry now. Angry that young me was so mistreated. Angry that I've hated myself all my life when I could have been happier and healthier. Angry that my kids got such a broken version of me. Am I blaming them for my problems? Yep, sure am. I was a child being used as a punching bag. I didn't know any better and thought this was what I deserved. Now I have to spend the precious time I have left trying to undo that brain damage. So yes, it's about time I put the responsibility where it belongs.
No comments:
Post a Comment