Hello my friends. My recovery from narcissistic dark tetrad parent abuse turned a corner recently when I decided to go no contact with them. And I'm finding that cutting ties with abusive family is harder than I thought and much harder on me than on them. Nevertheless it's a necessary decision that I wish I'd made decades ago. Here's how and why.
So how is it harder on me than on my four narcissistic dark tetrad parents? Because they cut ties to me ages ago. They energetically distanced themselves from any responsibility TO me even as a little girl. My parents have been absenting themselves, neglecting, endangering and at times abandoning me since day one. But with equal energy, conversely expecting endless responsibilities FROM me.
Then they divorced and hooked up with new dysfunctional partners who felt zero responsibility to me but who expected me to do inappropriate, unhealthy and unsafe for them. They were aided and abetted by my parents who used me as surrogate spouse, surrogate parent, servant and scapegoat. While gaslighting me into thinking this was all normal and what God expected of me. To do otherwise would have been disloyal, disobedient and wicked of me. Even though they showed no loyalty to me or obedience to the God they claimed to serve. And I bought all the crap hook, line and sinker.
Which is why cutting ties now is so difficult for me. They weren't tied to me. They cut me adrift with the umbilical cord. It was only because of my grandparents that I got anything like love and care. But I was sure as hell was leashed TO them, like a dog. And like a dog left out in the rain, I was to expect nothing from them, no security or support. Not even basics.
I recently heard the term enmeshment in which healthy boundaries are trodden down. And enmeshed child doesn't exist extant. She is absorbed into parents and consumed whole. And this is a perfect analogy for my life. I felt caught up in a mesh net whose ropes only grew tighter the more I struggled. They enmeshed themselves in my life with countless cords of expectation and demands.
I was caregiver, confidante, sex therapist, buffer, a mark for their cons, defender, guardian, needs meeter, want provider, fairy godmother, whipping girl, a bone thrown to their new spouses to placate their voracious greed. They used endless and confusing guilt, shame, blame shifting, threats, bullying, Draconian punishment, exploitation, manipulation, triangulation and gaslighting to tighten the knots until I couldn't move.
So I quit struggling and just accepted imprisonment. Pretty soon they didn't even have to bother to demand. I just rolled over and let them do what they wanted with me. They didn't have to excuse, explain, exonerate, exclude or exempt their behavior. I did all that for them. I participated in my own torture. I handed them the whips and bent over for easier access.
I've overlooked, ignored and defended shocking abuse at their hands. Yet I can't get it into my head that this was wrong. And I can't get their voices and teachings out of my head. Over the past 60 years, these ropes which enmesh me with them have petrified. I'm unable to sever bonds. I don't love them. I never have, really. I have just felt beholden to them. Because they indoctrinated me into believing I owed them everything.
It was drummed into me that my place was to give good, take bad, allow pain, never question, never stop. My memory is Swiss cheese but I recall in crystal clarity being endlessly told the many ways I let everyone down. I vividly remember my mom's husband screaming and waving his fist in my face, while I was holding my baby daughter, how I was a pathetic excuse for a person, unfit to live and to "get the hell out of his house." Because I'd dared to ask where the baby was. While my good Christian mother looked on and approved.
If you read my back posts on them, you'll see their pattern bullying. But I didn't at the time. I just felt obliged to grovel and beg for readmittance into their family. Which I was never a part of anyway, except as general dogsbody. Which of course was the point of the exercise, to get me more enmeshed in their hellhole of a life. My brain knows sorta that I owe nothing and whatever I may have was paid over and above decades ago. But my core still believes I do. My self is still trapped in those crippling bonds.
I think what I need is something to dissolve the ties which I can't untie. I don't yet see what exactly that solvent might be. But I am starting to accept that God does. I say starting because God as a loving father was destroyed for me, by their selfishness. Images of my parents and stepparents as gods were superimposed. So I'm having to work to come of hiding from God. I have to pry terrified hands off my eyes. I have to dare to consider that they were wrong and that God does actually care.
Maybe lancing their corrosive acid from my heart and the saltwater tears of grief for the family, love and care I never had will be what breaks down the bonds.
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