Hello, dear and lovely people whom I hope I may call friends. I just want to take a sec to thank you for reading this blog. So as you know, it's morphed into a journey of exploration into CPTSD I developed from a life of narcissistic parental abuse. This takes the form of physical, emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual, medical and financial abuse. My four narcissistic parents enmeshed with me and took turns endangering, abandoning, exploiting, scapegoating, parentifying, manipulating, triangulating, shaming, invalidating and gaslighting me.
Today I'm looking at the ickiest, nastiest narcissistic abuse and that's covert sexual abuse and emotional incest. Yeah, I know, we do have to go there and I hate it as much as you do. It makes me physically ill and livid with rage. It's going to be a bitch to write about.
So overt CSA (child sexual abuse) and incest are horrific. But there are two forms that are possible even more dangerous emotionally. And it is so insidious. And that is emotional or covert incest. One of the worst aspects of covert incest is that you don't even realize it's happening. Because it's "touchless" and undercover, you just assume all kids go through this. Because you've been gaslit into thinking it's normal and grossest of all, that God expects you to provide this service for your parents.
So what exactly is emotional incest? Well, actually all forms of narcissistic abuse are emotional incest in that the parent parasitically enmeshes with the child, feeds off from them and lives through them. The child lives only for the parent (or in my case, four parents). They behave like children expect their kids to parent and also partner them. They confide in and expect the kid to fix their problems. Blech.
Covert sexual abuse takes it to another level. The parent confides intimate and personal sexual details with the child. She exposes the child to predators, almost dare I say, like a pimp. It's contactless sexual assault. And it worms its way into your very soul. In my case, my parents had divorced and I was forced to listen to not only my mother's experiences with my father, but with her multiple other partners.
She got away with this by gaslighting me into believing it was for my own good. That she was just doing her job as a mother to "protect me" from abuse. But it was abusive in itself. These were not just the "facts of life." These were her personal experiences. I did NOT want to hear it and would cover my ears and beg her to stop. But (this is so disgusting) she seemed to take lurid pleasure both in telling me and in my objection to it.
She dressed like a "hooker" for her singles group Halloween party and had me help with the costume. I was probably the only 8-year-old who knew what a "hooker" was. She would make out with various boyfriends in our kitchen as I got ready for school. She had at least one affair with a married man twice her age. And she loved to flaunt her body in front of me. I didn't know till I was an adult that very few kids had seen their parents naked on a regular basis.
And it turned out not to even be protecting but actually weaponizing it against me. She traumatized me to the point of nightmares describing how different men had "molested" her. Yet when the neighbor kid sent me dirty letters telling me he'd like to rape me, she told me to laugh it off and then started dating his father. She left early from "A Clockwork Orange" because supposedly it was so dirty. But then came home and told 9-year-old me the plot in graphic detail.
She did not defend me when her next boyfriend openly mocked me about the size of my breasts. She laughed along. When they had a foster home, she brought in a teenage boy with a history of predator behavior who promptly assaulted me his first day there. When I finally got up the gumption to tell her, she was annoyed, not on my behalf but on his because now he'd have to go back to Child Haven. I have never really recovered from that experience. I still feel like a dirty you-know-what a lot of the time.
And to extend the prostituting metaphor, she essentially turned our home into a brothel when I was 11. On top of having a foster care home, she moved her boyfriend in and made an "apartment" for them in the basement. I was moved out of my room so my uncle and his girlfriend could play house. One teen in her foster care was given the living room to sleep with her boyfriend. I was left to (illegally) share a room with four special needs kids under 5. I was responsible for all areas of their care, her being two floors down.
Now, juxtapose this with her very weirdly strict "Christian" preaching. Yes. She fancied herself a minister through all this. She took us all to church and played the organ. All while living in what her church flatly called bigamy, adultery, immorality and sin. What she herself deemed wickedness in others, was just daily life for me. And all of it interwoven with a steady diet of dangerous people and situations.
And that's to say nothing of the chaos from my dad and his chaos. At one point, he, 35 was dating a 17-year-old. I was nine. We'd go to her house and hang out in her bedroom. She had stuffed animals on her bed. Her parents doted on me like I was her sister. It was both heartbreaking and nauseating. And if you think that wasn't weird in 1973...Let me just say, I didn't even know anyone with divorced parents, let alone a mother with a live-in boyfriend and a dad dating a high schooler.
So consequently, I lived in constant cognitive dissonance. I have huge gaps in my memory, and especially in the ages of 8 to 12. But these things I can't forget. I wish I could. I wish I were making these stories up. I wish now that I could have had loving parents. Or at least someone to tell this to. But no one knew. And at the time all I felt was incredible shame. And fear, because to protect these delusions required a lot of gaslighting and a ready scapegoat. And that gaslit scapegoat was me.
Even now, I feel ashamed of myself as if I was the one behaving so badly. I dream almost every night that I'm failing under a mountain of crazy expectations and everyone is mad at me. I feel guilty for telling what they did as if the fault lies in my saying it and not in them doing it. I spent one summer trying to talk myself down from suicide, at 11. I shudder when I think how close I came to becoming a statistic. I've kept a lot of people's secrets.
Which is so ironic because my mother made no secret then of her, for the time, quite deviant and immoral behavior. I just found out that my mother had even dumped on my friend too, when we were 11. She must have felt some kind of judgement because, unprompted, she told my friend that she acted so promiscuous because her parents had been too strict. So basically blaming us all for her behavior. My father not only made no secret of his bizarre behavior, he flaunted it. And then blamed me for being too sensitive and too critical.
It's taken me six decades just to start coming to terms with all this. It never occurred to me that any of this was even inappropriate, let alone disgustingly wrong. They don't call it "covert" incest for nothing. It hides in plain sight. And being perpetrated on gaslit, shamed, blamed child scapegoats, who are afraid of their own shadow, helps keep it hidden.
Uncovering it has been helped a lot having a husband who is not afraid to call it what it is. Thank God for him.
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