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 for what they did, to be able to 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 weapon of narcissistic abuse is one I've not addressed much. However it is integral in bringing off 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.
They have Medea syndrome. Narcissistic parents don't just live through us, they devour our selves whole. At birth. Because the narcissist only sees others as extensions of their larger than life selves. People aren't just servants. Servants have lives of their own, if stifled ones. We aren't just owned by them, we are them, just like their arms and legs. We don't exist outside of the narcissist.
They force us into a parallel universe. We appear from the outside to be separate and extant selves. But the narcissists have killed off any independence in use. They've terrified us into submission. They've laid siege to our identity and personhood. They've shamed us off from any efforts at self-care. They've taken away all means of support. Yet society doesn't see this. They just see us as kinda weird kids but perfectly capable of all things expected of normal kids. People expect us to behave like fully functioning individuals. 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.
They turn us into freak show oddities. We're groomed to grovel and kowtow. They are our organ grinders, and we dance like performing circus monkeys. This makes us perfect targets for creeps. Our narc parents mock us for behaving weird yet feed off the attention we attract. See the funny monkey beg. Isn't she ridiculous?
They cut us off from help and isolate us. We're dependent on them but they are not dependable. Yes, it's terrifying. No, it makes no sense to anyone who has never experienced this. And it doesn't get better. It gets worse as the narcissists get better at manipulation and gaslighting. Is there a way out? Yes. But we have to first recognize what we are, or have become.
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