Hello my friends. Thanksgiving approaches and one thing I'm thankful for this year is that I finally see what happened to me for what it was: narcissistic parental abuse and neglect. I'm grateful to have words the put the pain, fear and shame into perspective. As unpleasant as it is, I'm glad I'm no longer ignoring the CPTSD effects of parental abuse (particularly sexual, religious, financial and medical) exploitation, abandonment, endangerment, parentification, scapegoating, invalidation, shaming and gaslighting.
Probably the most disturbing aspect of narcissistic abuse is one I've not addressed much. However it is integral in bringing this weird coup that narcissistic parents launch against their kids. And that's enmeshment, which is the destruction of a child's natural boundaries, a hostile takeover of their lives and an exploitation of their selves for the parent's selfish ends.
Enmeshed kids don't express wants, needs, feelings and thoughts of our own. Because we didn't know we had them. Because we were indoctrinated into the cult of mom and dad (and in my case their new spouses). We were nothing more than acolytes, temple slaves, vestal virgins, there to serve, to be neither seen nor heard. We don't know where parents stop and we begin. If all this sounds like scary psy-fi, just wait. There's more. And I wish to God it was fiction. Here are bizarre parasitic ways narcissist parents enmesh with their kids and pirate their lives.
Medea syndrome. Narcissistic parents don't just live through their kids, they devour our selves. At birth. Because the narcissist only sees others as extensions of their larger than life selves. People aren't just servants, they are arms and legs. We don't exist outside of the narcissist.
Parallel universe. We appear to from the outside to be extant selves. But the narcissists have killed off any independence. They've laid siege to our identity or personhood. They've shamed any efforts at self-care. They've taken away all means of support. Society expects us to behave like fully functioning individuals, like normal kids. But we aren't normal kids. Narcissist pirates are at the helm, controlling us remotely with fear, shame and deprivation, even as we go about our days. We are robots programmed to live for narcissist parents.
Yes, it's terrifying. No, it makes no sense to anyone who has never experienced this. Yes we look like oddballs. And act like performing circus freaks. And it doesn't get better. It gets worse as the narcissists get better at manipulation and gaslighting.
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