Hey friends. I've been doing a lot of truth telling about years of abuse, neglect, abandonment, endangerment, exploitation, toxic shaming, invalidation, intimidation, parentification and gaslighting from four narcissistic parents. I've been down a long dark, complicated tunnel that I don't yet see the end of.
I don't remember a time I wasn't ashamed, humiliated, terrified and utterly confused. It's with me day and especially night, in my dreams. You would think writing about it would help. So far, it just seems to make things worse. Here's why I think that is.
For almost six decades of my life, I believed my narcissistic parents' version of events. I made excuses for their horrible behavior. I gaslit myself that it was my fault. Or that I was imagining things. Or that others experienced the same thing and I was just too sensitive. Because they told me this was the case.
It was so bad that I blanked out months of my life. I squashed terrible memories into a closet of my mind and bolted the door. These experiences oozed toxins all over. They burned and poisoned me. But as long as I could contain it to my mind, as long as I could fake that everything was okay, no one ever knew. Unless they looked closer at me. The obvious signs were there for anyone willing to admit it.
The people I called my family industriously worked to keep any understanding of what was actually happened to me quiet. Even from me. And boy, did that narcissist prayer come in handy. They could have written it themselves. It didn't happen. If it did, it wasn't my fault. If it was, I didn't mean it. If I did, you deserved it. They had an excuse for everything. And I believed it because mommy and daddy and stepmommy and step daddy said so.
And they lied, and lied and lied. They lied to cover other lies. They twisted and manipulated and triangulated and mirrored and backstabbed and invalidated and dismissed and scoffed at and shamed and mocked and pouted. They even weaponized, trauma dumped, scapegoated and lashed out. They launched smear campaigns, gaslighted, projected and talked a steady stream of weird word salad nonsense.
They tagged God in on this. They would weaponize scripture against me. They bound me up to burdens they didn't help carry. They made themselves God to me. They lied about what God supposedly expected of me. They preached but did not practice. Their egregious adult sins, which they did not acknowledge, confess or repent from, were "covered by the blood." My mistakes of childhood were blown up into cataclysmic sins for which there was no forgiveness.
Crazy on top of crazy. I was exhausted just trying to keep up. But they seemed to have boundless energy from the narcissistic supply I gave them. I see know why it's called supply. Narcissists get high and trip on the suffering they cause their victims. My mother and father would both babble and rant incoherently like coke heads.
If I was feeding them supply, they were giddy with it. Literally, high on their power trips. They were all over the place with wacky, delusions. My mother rationalized away her sleeping with married men as doing good deeds because their wives were so mean. While preaching morality to others. I believed her. If I did that I'd feel insane guilt. She is a rabid MAGA supporter yet she paid for and took a girl to have an abortion because "she was going to anyway." I still can't shake the feeling that she was somehow right and it was somehow okay. For her.
If questioned, they would spray all kinds of venom, passive aggressively and just plain aggressively. So I never questioned. Until now. And once the blinders are removed, you can't unsee what was happening. And it is incredibly depressing and exhausting. I realize that the people who were supposed to love me, to be my family, were just a bunch of arrogant, nasty control freaks to me.
Writing about it seems to make it worse. But that's because instead of just being generally miserable, not knowing why and blaming myself, I now see what happened clearly. I see how I was exploited. I see how I was abandoned and endangered and neglected and abused and parentified and gaslit. The betrayal is almost unbearable for an adult mind. When I was a kid it would have been impossible to except. So I coped the best I could.
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