Hi friends. Happy belated Thanksgiving. This year, I'm grateful for being able to finally recognize narcissistic parental abuse. And now that I see, I can begin to address and hopefully heal my CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder). Here are some oddly helpful tools to do that. Odd because we might not think of them as typically helpful (some might even seem counterintuitive) but then, my life with narcissistic parents was anything but typical.
1) Pay attention to the voice in my head. There's a lot of shame, fear, insecurity, hypervigilance, grief, bewilderment, anxiety and stress in my mind from decades of having to dance attendance on four selfish, self-centered, demanding parent dictators. I rarely to never feel confident about anything thanks to the nagging self-doubt. So now, when I feel shame niggling, I listen closely to what it's saying.
2) Dissect shame. For the longest time, I felt constant, pervasive shame without really even being conscious of it. Shame was as much a part of me as my leg. I was indoctrinated in shame by parental abuse, neglect, invalidation, exploitation, endangerment, abandonment and gaslighting. So now that I know this, I'm taking apart this endless self-disgust to get to the root of it. And what I'm finding is that most of the time, it's not about what I've done but what was done to me by narcissistic parents. Or it's from coping skills I've had to adopt to placate them. Or their neglect of my basic care and lack of self-care skills. Often it's from my parents' purposeful self-serving sabotaging of my sense of self.
3) Quit the coping mechanisms. I've learned a lot of unhealthy defensive moves from years of oppressive parents. Funny thing though, they didn't actually defend me. They just humored, enabled and even armed the oppressors. My empathy was used against me. My people pleasing was weaponized to the point that I was everyone's servant. My love, devotion and support was exploited. And my self was absorbed into their ginormous, greedy egos. So now, I'm needing to learn to please others less and me more. To love, support and be devoted to me. To empathize with myself. To meet my needs. And if this goes contrary to what others expect of me, so be it. It should. Anyone who would expect me to care for them at my own expense doesn't care for me.
4) Disable instead of enable. So clearly, parental abuse, neglect, exploitation, scapegoating, parentification, abandonment, endangerment, invalidation, shaming and gaslighting didn't happen by accident. Or all at once. It started early and gained momentum. And that happened because people enabled my parents. I enabled them. Growing up in this, I learned to excuse cruelty, defend their right to hurt me, ignore pain, expect nothing of them and fulfill their incredibly inappropriate expectations. I learned that it was wrong to care for myself, that I was the one with the problem because I was "too sensitive." So now, I'm disabling their power over me. I'm cutting contact and holding them accountable for what they did instead of enabling further hurt.
5) Grow thicker skin. I was always told, when they were shaming, mocking, humiliating me that I was too "thin-skinned. " I was told not to take personally, their very direct attacks on my person. They could offend but I wasn't to take offense. As if doing so was yet another of my failings. I was to feel the hurt, to know that I was being shamed, but not say so. Growing thicker skin wasn't to protect me but to give them a better target.
But me getting tougher is coming back to bite them. Because now I'm not the pushover, ever willing to "help out" and get kicked for it. The doormat has picked herself up and now they have no one to wipe their feet on. My sympathetic ear is turned deaf and my soft heart has grown colder. My supply of Fs to give has dried up and I refuse to be a human crutch any longer.
6) Serve God by serving myself. Okay don't hear what I'm not saying here. All my life I was force-fed this notion that waiting on four self-centered people was serving God. But it wasn't. It was pandering to their massive egos. It was worshipping them and putting them as other gods before God. And it was killing me. So now, I'm taking better care of me by not caring too much for them. I still care, but only for people who deserve it. Not people who exploit it and me. Yes I get to make that call. I decide who that is and how I will manifest that care.
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