Hello my friends. The first response I get when people hear my backstory of abuse from four narcissistic parents is, "what kind of parent does that??" or "What parents doesn't provide that for their child?" And those are excellent questions. How does a parent treat a child as I've been treated and call themselves a parent? But it took me a lifetime to realize what lay behind the intense pain I felt.
Having just come to terms that it was abuse and not just their version of love, I'm still working to answer that. Narcissism, and other cluster B personality disorders seemed to fit the bill, sort of. What makes it more difficult is that I lived with not one or two but four self-centered, hurtful parents, or as I now call them authority figures (two bio and their two new partners).
Each manifested a little differently, my father being more grandiose with some covert, his wife, covert, my mother grandiose, covert and malignant and her husband just a raging maniac. But narcissism didn't alone didn't cover the many levels of systematic abuse (physical, emotional, medical, financial, religious and sexual), neglect, endangerment, abandonment, shaming, invalidation, enmeshment, exploitation, manipulation, parentification, bullying, scapegoating, double standards for them and their "real" families, exclusion of yet dependence on me and gaslighting about it all. Which could in part been a result of abuse from all sides but still didn't quite fit.
I just recently learned two terms which do: dark triad and dark tetrad personalities. Dark triad is narcissist (entitled and manipulative, Machiavellian (deceptive, exploitative, self-serving) and psychopathic (purposely harmful, aggressive). Dark tetrad adds sadism, or deriving pleasure from the suffering they cause. And when I look at my parents, especially my mother and father, through this lens, boy, do things become clear. My dad ticked most of the boxes for dark triad and my mother ticks all the boxes for dark tetrad. And then when they remarried, they chose new partners with similarly nasty personalities and they all fed off each other.
I've been told that I can't "diagnose" these things. Well, I sure can tell you what I saw (all these behaviors manifested since my inception) I can say what it was like to live with (miserable), what they did (countless cruel things) and how they treated me (abominably) . How it made me feel (confused, ashamed, suicidal) and how I struggle now with CPTSD from all the suffering. So diagnosis or not, THAT is my story. and mine alone. I know from a life of experience what it's like to live with dark triad and dark tetrad parents.
I'm just some college student latching on to psychology terms and twisting them to fit. Hell, I studied and have a degree in psychology and I never once considered how what they did fit to a T, these clinical patterns I was studying. I have a background in child abuse and neglect and I never saw myself in it even though the writing was clear on the wall. It took me 60 years to get to this realization. The lies, deceit, gaslighting and manipulation are very potent. But now that I do see, I will never be able to unsee. I'm a little late to the party but better late than never.
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