Hello my friends. Today in my quest to heal from CPTSD (childhood or complex post traumatic stress disorder) I'm looking at how gaslighting after effects follow me everywhere. If you're new to the blog, welcome and buckle up because we get very intense around here. I'm trying to deprogram and reparent from a lifetime of narcissistic histrionic parental abuse, enmeshment, neglect, endangerment, abandonment, exploitation, invalidation, triangulation, parentification, scapegoating, shaming and gaslighting about all that.
So first, I want to explore the idea of parental gaslighting. I think of this as indoctrination and brainwashing into the fantasy cult of the enmeshed, narcissistic parent. All reality is denied except the delusional unreality of the narcissists. Every experience I had, or was shoved into, was twisted to suit my narc histrionic parents' narrative. Good was bad, wrong was right, immoral was Godly, I was selfish and too sensitive, you get my drift.
I get why the term gaslighting is used. But as a survivor, I'll say that it is more like gassing. Those of us with CPTSD have been mentally and emotionally gassed, like soldiers in WW1, with toxic behavior and poisonous thinking of the histrionic narcissists. You can see it in our eyes, the squinting and shielding from being constantly on the defensive. Our brains are burnt from years of parental nonsensical hot air and self-centered manipulation. They're damaged from constant dousing with cortisol and adrenaline, in response to their manufactured crises and stress.
And like any other burn scars, they don't go away. There's no brain grafting process that can remove damaged memories and thought processes and replace them with good, healthy ones. This is our normal and it follows us everywhere, into every new situation, relationship and experience, like our legs or liver. It's kneejerk response. I expect abuse and shaming. It's kindness I don't understand. And this has caused untold problems in my family of now relationships.
For one thing, no one knows that my brain processes are radically different from most everyone else's. I look fairly normal on the outside, and so normal behavior is expected of me. But my insides are abnormal AF. Everything about me, how I think, feel and act is cockeyed, skewed and distorted. And the one thing that helps me fit in is also the thing that makes it more difficult for others to understand my predicament.
I am an actor. I know how to read faces, mirror responses and mimic behavior. I'm pretty good at sensing appropriate and healthy behavior even though it's a 180 from what I learned and how I was treated. So if I appear to be always "on stage" it's because I am. I'm desperately struggling to learn the lines and play my part.
Is it fake? Eh, yes and no. It's not genuine because these are learned behaviors. Healthy interaction and life skills weren't modeled for me. You can't be abused, neglected, endangered, abandoned, invalidated, manipulated and parentified on a daily basis and learn healthy behavior. Cerebrally, I know what's right, but core response is still sick. So I fake it till I make it.
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