Childhood trauma amnesia: cognitive dissonance from narcissistic parent gaslighting

 Hello my friends. Let me just say before beginning how much I appreciate you. Whoever or wherever you are and whyever you read this childhood trauma recovery blog. Thank you. Thanks for letting yourself get triggered, as such content does. I hope you find some healing reading as I do writing. So today I'm exploring what I call "Childhood Trauma Amnesia" or the cognitive dissonance from narcissistic abusive parent gaslighting. 

Gaslighting and brain gassing

Gaslighting is willfully manipulating reality which lies, deception and twisting facts. Narcissistic, enmeshed parents do this to cover their bad actions, for narcissistic supply, to destabilize the child and make them doubt themselves. But what drive gaslighting but gas: colorless, odorless, tasteless and completely lethal. In the famous movie he fiddled with the switches making the light flicker and then told his wife she was imagining it.  I liken the resulting CPTSD and brain damage from gaslighting, to being gassed with a toxic substance. Gaslighting has the same net results of confusion, disorientation and mental collapse. 

How narcissists create cognitive dissonance (confused reality)

Sadly, these are just a few of the demented, dementing things dark tetrad parents do to destroy a child. 

• Weaponized and disrupted attachment: the parent uses the child's natural attachment to the parent against her. She violates trust, boundaries, respect, innocence, safety. She sabotages the sense of self. 
• Love-bombing: The parents showers the child with fake affection. 
• Trauma Bonding: the enmeshed parent plays cat and mouse with the child, clutching her close then pushing her away. Love-bombing is followed by devaluation and discard. The back and forth because a glue which cements the child to the parent in an unnatural codependency. 
• Grooming: The narcissistic father uses the child as a confidante saying she's "special" "lucky" and "chosen." The narcissistic parent is like a cult leader, indoctrinating the child for a life of enslavement. 
• Isolation: The parents keeps the child from loved ones or helpers by moving her around. 
• Needs insecurity. We were not poor and my parents had what they needed plus luxuries. I can't remember a bed or a bedroom. I went hungry and experienced food insecurity. They didn't. 
• Sleep deprivation: the parent sabotages sleep by not providing a consistent home, bedroom or bed. They make her co-sleep with babies and younger children, caring for them as a parent. They cause CPTSD nightmares. 
• Parentification: making the child care for them as a parent, then not caring for her. 
• Infantilization: treated her like an inept fool (even while also parentifying her.
• Role Reversal: Making her responsible for things that are their responsibility, 
• Overworking: putting all the housework, childcare, laundry, meal prep on her, making her carry the mental load. This wears down her resistance and weakens her. 
• Boundary crashing and shaming. I never dared to set boundaries because those would be the very things they'd go out of their way to violate. 
  
• Theft. They stole everything of value that I ever owned. 
• Privacy violation They barge in without knocking. My dad would enter the bathroom when I was in there. 
• Sexual harassment and hidden incest. Doing it themselves and letting anyone else as well. This might be the most destabilizing of all. 
• Surveillance without protection. They monitor the child's moves, dress, speech, with military regulation yet don't safeguard her. I was kicked out at 16 for coming in 15 minutes late. 
• Coercive Control: they use threats, intimidation, emotional "waterboarding", corporal punishment, inconsistent discipline.
• Lies, deceit, backstabbing.
• Double standards:
• Moving hoops: They make up arbitrary rules then change them on a whim without telling you. 
• Entrapment: They set up "gotcha" stings to make the child stumble. 
• Smear campaigns: they start completely false rumors to make the child look bad. 
• Mocking and Humiliation: malignant parents prank, haze and jeer at the child. 
• Narcissistic rage: They randomly go ballistic then blame the child. 
• Triangulation: Pitting people against us with lies. 
• Faked trauma drama: My parents routinely and melodramatically trauma dumped on me, things that never happened. 
• Oversensitive insensitivity. These exhibitionist crybullies fell apart over silly narcissistic insults (not real, just ego slights). Then had the gall to call us "too sensitive" crybabies, attention-seeking showoffs. 
• DARVO: they deny actions, counterattack and reverse victim offender roles. 
• Instability: I was shuffled around among 41 different homes and nine schools before age 20. 
• Future faking: The malignant parent promises the child things he never delivers on, nor has any intention of delivering on. It's a Machiavellian a$$hole move to keep the child compliant. If he ever does do anything for the child, it comes with endless strings attached. 
• Bread-crumbing: the cruel dark tetrad parent strings the child along with tiny crumbs of goodness, to keep her one step from starvation. To keep her normal enough so no one suspects. 
• Destroyed individuation. Enmeshed parents punish individuality instead of encouraging it. 

Amnesia of Trauma bonding and betrayal blindness

All this deceit, double standard, and alternate reality causes the child to live in constant dissociative fugue. Her outside reality and the real reality is diametrically opposed to her malignant parents' narcissistic cult fantasy. It wipes memory or drives it deep inside because it's too dangerous to confront narcissistic parents with the the facts. We go into a kind of chosen betrayal blindness, born of trauma responses like fawning and people pleasing. 

Go along to get along

We keep peace at any price, even when it means selling ourselves. We sacrifice everything to preserve our parents' narcissistic fantasy. We surrender common sense, our home, a bed, our future, our success, our toys, money, anything they want, we give with the only reciprocity being shit and shoved in it. Anything to keep our bullying parents in narcissistic supply. 

Memory repression, not loss

I recall very little about my childhood except bad times and those live in vivid color. Other memories hover at the fringe, threatening me in nightmares. I have been told things that I did or was involved in that I have no memory of. Not bad things, just things. I have forgotten whole people. Looking back, I recall walking around in a fog of fear, obligation and guilt. Toxic shame was my companion. I was so hypervigilant and overwhelmed by this fraught life, that I had no time for relaxation. I think to keep myself sane, my brain had to compartmentalize experiences and lock certain drawers tight. I had to press down anything contrary to my parents' demands. I had to think, eat, breathe and live them, never me. As I've explored in this blog, those memories aren't lost, just in limbo, frozen in carbonite. 

Some examples

I gave up middle school, literally.  I was all set to go to our local junior high and excited about it, when my mom got it in her head to marry her abusive live-in. She had a foster care home which she moved him into and hid him, illegally. I was the main caregiver in that home, also illegally.  She got it shut down due to child abuse. Suddenly, I was rerouted to a completely different city, different school, different home, away from my friends and other family. I ended up with my dad and his new wife who didn't want me but saw it as an opportunity to get a live-in maid and caregiver. I was 12. Here's where the amnesia comes in. 

All my life,  my mom told me and anyone else, that I had come to her out of the blue and said I was going to move with my dad so she and her new man could "have their private time like my dad and his new wife got theirs." (envy, guilt-tripping) I always accepted this though it make zero sense. 

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me how disingenuous this was. I asked a few same age trusted friends who said, no kid is going to want to move to a new school at an already difficult time, let alone volunteer to. And why would I? It would be so self-sabotaging. Private time would be a weekend away, not yet another complete upheaval that would affect me for the rest of my life. Private time is not something a kid thinks to give their parents. It's gross and they already had plenty of that living in apartment in the basement, separate from me and the kids. And hello, parents don't "deserve" years away from their child. They're parents. It's not like they did their time and now get to  move on. And they didn't even do that. 

My friends helped me identify how these were her words, fed to me as gaslighting narrative flipping. What she was saying was that I was being evicted so she could get on with her shiny new life without me. Funnily enough, my also narcissistic dad did the same thing when I was in high school. What probably happened is that I was taken out of their home in the child abuse closure. They may have even done some time or been forced to move out of their home, who knows. She would never admit to that and she never tells a straight story. And yes, weird as it sounds, my mother could very well have been jailed and me not know it. She was cagey and crooked as hell. 

But what I did which normal kids wouldn't do, and which is more to the point of this story, was to keep quiet, and just file it away as part of my double life. It never occurred to me that any of this was messed up AF. I am a special needs teacher for God's sake. I know child abuse, developmental risk factors (like frequent unnecessary moves and parents co-habiting), vulnerable kids, childhood trauma like the back of my hand. What I didn't see was how all that was me. It took me till 62 to start questioning their crazy versions. 

Helpful Hints for Healing

If you're as exhausted reading as I am telling it, let's end softly with a gentle exercise or two. My advice on your road to radical acceptance is start small. If you suspect that you were the victim of child abuse, or you just have some uneasy feelings about things that happened, stop and take a look. Don't rip the bandage off. Just begin to slowly uncover your eyes and give those experiences some ungaslighted airtime. You may find a new trauma-informed perspective. You don't and probably shouldn't confront your parents. But you can quietly affirm your inner child that this should not have happened. I can almost guarantee that you will, as I  have, found some relief knowing you weren't crazy. It wasn't you. It was them.