Hello my friends. Welcome to part two of the Divorced Child Dilemma series. Today in my childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm exploring how healing requires radical acceptance of this uniquely fraught space.
Two conflicting and invalid documents
The malignant parent divorces from himself from responsibility to the child while also binding them to endless obligations. He issues the child a decree of divorce along with a contract of debt into perpetuity. The child grows up believing these are valid and binding but they aren't because the child didn't sign or agree to either. So how does a parent achieve this bizarre setup?
Parent enmeshment
Enmeshed parents believe they are infinite and god-like, omniscient, all-seeing and supreme. The child is just and extension of themselves. She has no more rights than plunger used to clean the toilet. Individuation and autonomy are punished. Self-care is selfish. The enmeshed parents violate the child's boundaries and invade her privacy with no more thought than they would to entering their own bedroom. They walk in without knocking and eavesdrop on conversations. They feel entitled to criticize things that are none of their business. They read the child's diary not to help or understand but to gather data they cause shame her with. The child gets used to be caught in their gotcha traps.
False responsibility ratio
In the narcissistic family cult, the parents create a parallel universe where there are two sets of janky rules, one for them and one for each child according to the role they have cast them in. The narcissistic parents make it up as they go along, lying, gaslighting, script-flipping and narrative-shifting, role reversal and creating an artificial parent-child debt burden (the contract of obligation) in which the child owes all to the parent, yet nothing is owed to her. The parents implant a false sense of responsibility to and for them in the child. Then they deny all responsibility to and for her. It's win-win for the parents and lose-lose for the child.
The Parentified Child
Part of that invalid contract is the parentification clause. The parentified child is groomed in a FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) to the parents with no reciprocity. The Broken Vending Machine Child (who is elements of all of the family system roles, especially scapegoat child) dispenses everything demanded of her, with nothing good coming back to her. The coin slot is broken and the family takes whatever they want, free. Caring, nurturing, mental load, housework, support, chores, loyalty, obedience, respect, compliance, duty, being a punching bag, listening ear, all that and more, the child pays out in endless debt to the parent, yet receives only the most cursory, if any, care in return. She is expected to parent the parent like a child, yet infantilized and treated like an incapable idiot when it suits them to paint her as such. There is never a real, healthy parent child dynamic.
Coercive control
But still, you're asking, how do they manage this. By weaponizing the power differential. Parents naturally hold the power differential to protect, defend, nurture and guide the child. And the child naturally loves and trusts the parent. The dark tetrad parent exploits their authority and the child's attachment to them, to break the child down. They enslave the child in their narcissistic cult of FOG and even intimidating coercive control.
Surveillance with safety
Malignant parents monitor ridiculous things with micrometer-like precision yet don't provide even basic care or necessities. They engage in surveillance to entrap rather than protect the child. The set the child up with disturbing sting operations. They keep tabs on things they have no business monitoring. All four of my "parents" were hypervigilant over my every move or facial expression, not because they were anticipating my needs or fawning. They were looking for something to ambush me with. They got narcissistic supply off humiliating, baffling and terrifying me. That's no conspiracy theory. Though I wish it was just me exaggerating or too sensitive.
My lazy, jobless, abusive stepfather, with my mother's smiling approval kicked me out of the house at 16. The curfew which was supposedly to protect me, endangered me by making me homeless. These parents hide malevolent fascism behind a guise of concern which shows itself in the illegally abusive ends to which they will go to wield power.
Owned by not owed
"My wife is married, I'm not." I once heard a serial cheater say this laughingly about his relationship. And this illogical fallacy perfectly demonstrates the bespoke gaslighting hypocrisy that the traumatized child is subjected to. The parent effectively says "You are my child, my possession, with all the rights of ownership that go along with it. You are indentured to me forever. I own you. I am your parent authority figure, but I am not responsible to or for you. I owe you nothing. You are accountable to and for me, and I'm accountable to no one, least of all you." Yes it really is this ludicrous and insane.
Divorced yet still married
Malignant parents sabotage the child's natural attachment to them, to confuse and destabilize her. The enmeshed parent divorces themselves from responsibility to the child while also, hypocritically, keeping the child "married to" them in terms of what she is groomed to believe she owes. These control freaks leverage essentials like food, shelter, safety against her. They create a false burden of debt that they bind her to. They steal all good things like personhood (identity theft), sense of self, independence, autonomy. They sew her up into a tight net of obligation from which there seems to be no escape. The "wedding ring" that only the child wears, is actually manacles and shackles. She is handcuffed to them for life.
Trauma bonded betrayal blind bondage
The enmeshed parent plays a double dealing hand of "blanket training" and senseless carrot dangling which she snatches back for no reason. The narcissistic mother makes necessities into rewards that must be earned and which can be removed at a moment's notice. The narcissistic father uses love bombing and future faking and bread crumbing to trap the child in endless tail-chasing. The more the child purses the parent the more the parent plays hard to get. Till the child is twisted into a pretzel and stuck in a cycle of lawless, anarchic punishment and deprivation. And this is so normal and everyday for the child that she develops betrayal blindness. She believes them that she is the problem and caused this chaos. Even though no one around her lives anything like this.
Gaslighting and grooming by deprivation
Normal people have no concept of this unique hellish reality that kids with CPTSD live in. They are given essentials as rights, not rewards or contingencies. They don't have to earn a roof over their head with constant hoop-hopping only to have it randomly taken away. They are not told they lost the privilege of a home or a bed by some trumped up charge levied against them. And the parents know this. They use the very craziness of what they put her through, to keep her quiet. Who would believe you, they say. The child gets worn down and worn out. The neglect and abuse deplete her basic resources. Through a kind of Munchausen's' by Proxy they keep her sick and tired and hungry so that she is biddable.
The transactional one-sided contract
Malignant parents make everything transactional. The child has to earn basic unalienable rights. They wrote a contract of obligation before she was even born. They bound her to duties, expectations and demands before she could speak or walk. The child never signed or even read the contract. They just told her she had to guess what they, and anyone else they bound her to, wanted. Then they punished her failing mind reading. Then they changed this imaginary contract again. But then they violated this contract that they coerced the child into. They didn't keep up their end of the bargain because they are entitled, arrogant, ruthless, believing no rules or contract binds them.
The Divorced Child is Forever Thwarted
Adult Children of Narcissists grow but we don't develop. I don't mean we're immature. Most of us have had to be far too mature too young. While the grownups in our lives acted like irresponsible, immoral, feckless, reckless failure to launch-ers. What we lack is not adulthood but childhood. We weren't allowed to differentiate, to individuate. The power they wielded over us dogs us. We struggle to see anything clearly. They may not have actually had that power, but tell that to our trauma brain. Tell that to our inner child who forever lives in this blanket of burden they crocheted for us.
The way out is walled up
I would like to promise you and my inner child that there is hope, a way out. But that was sealed off for us strategically to keep us enslaved to them. So maybe what we have to do is tunnel another way out. Going no contact is one exit for me. I'm also seeing the prison has a glass ceiling that is breakable. Enablers and flying monkeys have smugly told me it's me that is trapping myself. Aka, I'm imagining it. Well, they would say that. They always took the narcissists side over the wounded child. So maybe I need to go no contact with anyone and everyone who holds me back from healing, from getting unstuck from family of origin.
Breaking contracts I never signed
Actually, what I have to do first is to find a way to realized this contract they wrote, never existed. It was never notarized nor signed by me. It's as worthless as the nonexistent paper it was printed on. These were just made-up unethical, illegal, immoral demands placed on me by unethical, law-breaking, immoral people. Then I have to emotionally tear up this invalid contract. The tricky part will be to help my poor inner child understand that this was a fake.
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