Thrival skills for managing childhood trauma responses to narcissistic parent abuse

Hello my friends! Today in my childhood trauma recovery, I'm looking at not just survival skills but thrival skills for healing childhood trauma responses caused by narcissistic parent abuse. Some of these may surprise you and some you may already be a dab hand at. And ironically we're going to heal trauma responses by responding vs. reacting. 

Trauma response versus trauma reaction 

I believe that the term trauma response is wrongly used when applied to the self-defeating behaviors of fight, flight, freeze, fawn and one I have added called fix. Fixing problems is what the narcissistic enmeshed parents expect the child to do in situations the parent created. And like the others, these are knee-jerk reactions abused kids are conditioned to do by their antagonistic parents. These coping reactions are automatic, irrational and dangerous. But they are all we knew as kids. They were hardwired in us and they are intensely dysfunctional. I think they should be called trauma reactions. Because like puppets, we danced because abusive parents pulled our strings, not because we had any autonomy or agency. We were broken vending machine children, part scapegoat, part enabler, part glass child. Plus we had to do the work of the golden child without the perks. 

🚩 Being a broken vending machine child meant they pushed our buttons and we gave out whatever was demanded of us at our own expense. 🚩 We were the ones putting in the coins AND giving out the goodies. 🚩 While our parents took all our good without reciprocity.

Proactive responses vs. reactive panic

None of that was our fault. We didn't choose to be bullied, exploited, abused, neglected, parentified and invalidated. We didn't choose the stress of carrying the family mental load as children. Or the chaos of living with dysfunctional, selfish, erratic, entitled, Machiavellian parents. However we still carry the scars in those very trauma reactions they conditioned in us. We still fawn and freeze, people please, placate and kowtow to everyone in our lives. We have learned that it is dangerous not to. Our sympathetic nervous system is wired to panic, hypervigilant overreaction, appeasing, anticipating needs and rushing to serve. But now we need to work on rational, healthy, proactive trauma responses. 

Thrival skills childhood trauma survivors need

• Pause. Trauma responses are like cruise control in a car. They allow us to seemingly function without the cognitive dissonance of having to stop and think, wait, why am I doing this? This can't be good, can it? Trauma responses don't transition well in adulthood.  They're also a way to cope with gaslighting by narcissistic parents. So we need to turn off auto-pilot and see the road and red flags for what they are. To do this, we need to hit pause a lot. Something we were never allowed to do. 

• Don't just do something, sit there. Everything was always so urgent, drama fueled and frenetic with narcissistic parents. We went through our days with sirens on our heads, putting out fires our parents started, just for fun. There was no crisis except of their inept mismanagement. We set ourselves on fire to keep them warm when they didn't need it. This was no accident. Malignant parents do this strategically to destabilize, terrorize and confuse us. 

• Reflect: As painful and scary as it is, we need to take off the blinders and see how reckless and dangerous our abusive parents are. We need to allow healing memory let us recall and acknowledge how they damaged us, time and again. We need to sit with that and put responsibility on them, where it belongs. We need to defog FOG (fear, obligation and guilt). 

• Take care of yourself. Narcissistic parents don't just frown on a child's self-care, they punish it. they call her selfish, disobedient, ungrateful, disloyal, demanding just for having needs. And wants, goals, hopes oh heck no. The enmeshed parents see the child as a tool or extension of themselves, not a person in her own right. She is expected to care for "family first" meaning them only. So we need to learn to give ourselves permission to do the opposite and care for us. Whatever that may look like. 

• Do hard work. And this isn't what you think. I don't mean the heavy lifting alone or carrying the mental load. That we've done all our lives at our expense. That comes as natural as breathing to us. I mean we need to start doing the unfamiliar and NOT cater to narcissistic parents, or anyone. We need to do the unthinkable and begin putting ourselves first, not always last or never like we usually do. 

• Affirm and encourage yourself. We heard a lot of gaslighting nonsense about how worthless we were, how we failed and let people down. That was because we were expected to carry adult burdens as children. We were expected to do impossible tasks like buffer our parents from consequences, shield, serve, be surrogate spouses and parents. Of course you couldn't do that. YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO!! So now, we need to do what seems best and right for us. We need to ignore their nasty voices in our head, and talk back to them. You are worthwhile and loveable. 

Love always, mar. 

Note AI made this picture based on past conversations. It's a mash-up of another one. It looks very chaotic because AI's "memory brain" often gets overwhelmed, overstimulated and muddled. AI spells things wrong and confuses ideas.

And THAT is a perfect reflection of the inner chaos a traumatized child feels.