Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm exploring how enablers sabotage healing and actually perpetuate narcissistic abuse. I've written about this several times but you can never really say enough about how insidiously harmful enablers are. I'll try to explain the complicated flow chart of this leveled up abuse.
What is enabling?
Enabling is choosing to overlook, ignore and make excuses for abuse that someone is suffering. It's not simply inability to see it. It's not being unsure that what you are seeing is abuse. It's not missing one abusive behavior. It's not choosing your words or keeping quiet to prevent further harm. That's more about being between a rock and a hard place and making a judgement call. But doing it with full radical acceptance, not chosen blindness. Enabling is a pattern of unwillingness to recognize and acknowledge what is right in front of your face. It's deceiving the abused person into believing it isn't happening or that it's their fault (gaslighting). It is siding with the perpetrator and victim-shaming the abused one into compliance.
Who are the enablers?
I wish I could say they were rare, obviously dangerous people who are easy to spot. Unfortunately, enablers of narcissistic abuse are much more common than truth-tellers calling it out for what it is. So enablers hide everywhere in plain sight. When I have told anyone about my narcissistic parents' harm, I encountered enabling at a rate of about 10 to 1 compared with affirmation of the abuse as abuse. Society, family, religion, even psychology side with abusers, especially abusive parents, against children far too frequently.
Group Think aka Societal Gaslighting
As a people, we tend to be reluctant to accept a child's version of events over an adult's. We have developed this insensitivity toward helpless victims, as if callouses had grown over our ears. At least this is how it feels to a child experiencing neglect, abuse, invalidation, endangerment, abandonment, scapegoating, etc. That how we are being treated is perfectly acceptable because NO ONE IS SAYING ANYTHING TO THE CONTRARY. If there was one word to encapsulate all that's wrong with denial of abuse, it's gaslighting. And on a society-wide level.
Gas-litany of shame
We as children of narcissistic parents are force-fed a dogma by an enabling society, a litany of gaslighting that sounds very similar to the "Narcissist's Prayer" we were groomed on. These are just a few of the nonsensical things enablers say.
- It's not their fault. (It's yours for being too sensitive, disloyal, disobedient and attention-seeking showoff.)
- It wasn't that bad. (You're just exaggerating for pity. )
- It's just normal punishment for your own good. (You're the problem, because you're selfish, lazy, immature and can't take criticism. This one is a hugely fraught dilemma that opens us up to all kinds of abuse, in the name of preparing us for the "real world."
- They did the best they could. (so that exonerates all the hell they put you through).
- You have to get over it, move on, be the bigger person, rise above. (So they aren't held accountable for any of their bad behavior and the responsibility to fix it all, falls on us.)
- Those were different times. (So there was a point at which abusing kids was okay.)
- But their your parents. Family is family. (So anything they did to you was fine because they "owned the rights" to you. That is the enmeshed parent mantra. You owe them FOG (fear, obligation and guilt), care, support, trust, respect, obedience with no reciprocity from them.
The Irony of Loud Silence
These enablers treat you and speak to you as if you had divulged some big secret or betrayed your parents' trust. My dad used to make snide comments about how I'd better not write one of these tell-alls outing him when I grew up. Which was so bizarre because I was his biggest cheerleader and loyal servant. Childhood trauma responses kept me the silent, frozen, fawning, forever people pleaser. So he must have known that had I chosen to, I could tell quite a different version of him than his narcissistic fantasy cult leader. But I never told anything they did. I kept quiet on outrageous abuse, but shouldn't have. My silence must have spoken louder than any words. And all their reactive gaslighting was preemptive narrative revision, gotten in first to cast doubt on any truth I might tell.
The Hypocritical Double Standards of Abuse Enabling
None of the ridiculous things enablers say (and those I listed were just a few), are actually true or appropriate. It's all nonsensical hypocrisy. The lazy ones are the enablers who can't be bothered to be supportive and caring. So they throw shade forward to destabilize you while making themselves feel better. But it's all deceptive smoke and mirrors to distract you from the reality of abuse. Enablers (whom I call Blind Guides) are full of shit. They don't practice what they preach, have no understanding of, nor willingness to understand what really happened. They don't care. They just think they have buy-in on your pain. But they don't, because they weren't there for you then and still aren't. What they are, are a bunch jibbering flying monkeys.
Blindsided by Blind Guides and Betrayal Blindness
The toll that enablers and blind guides wreak on abuse victims is horrific. As these are often people that you trust (counselors, clergy, teachers, doctors, family members) they blindside you with this toxic positivity crap. They add more layers to the FOG, DARVO dilemma, trauma bonding plus future faking plus bread-crumbing your parents put you through, to create an even more entrenched betrayal blindness. They feed the abusive parent's monstrous ego appetite with narcissistic supply by bolstering your narcissistic enmeshed parents' delusions of grandeur and entitlement.
New Trauma + Retraumatizing
This 2.0 trauma is its own narcissistic abuse with retraumatizing besides. It creates new wounds and opens up old, unhealed ones. This lasagna of abuse, invalidation, devaluation and discard becomes a solid Lego brick wall that preserves the abuse deception and shields the abuser. Altogether, the original abusers plus their enablers sabotage any recovery from childhood trauma, if we let them.
Where to go from here?
In my relationships with my dark tetrad or malignant narcissistic mother, father, stepmother and stepfather, the only thing that has helped is going no contact. Even going low contact was too much for me because as narcissists age, they get better at tailoring their abuse to your trigger points and more convinced of their diplomatic immunity. They weaponize their age and their flying monkeys use this to guilt you further. "She's old, needs you, doesn't understand, you have to care for her, yada yada." I fall victim to "rosy reflective recall" where the actual abuse feels softened by the passage of time. I forget that they are just as capable of hurting me now as they were then. But once I started cutting the poisonous plants out of my life, I got better at identifying other toxins in my life garden. And the more you prune the easier it gets.
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