Hi friends. You know how every so often you get an aha moment where things that didn't make sense suddenly do? I'm having a lot of those surrounding my dark tetrad parents and the toxic things they taught me. One that occurred to me today is how a lot of the coping responses that kids with CPTSD do are driven by self-protection. Now if that isn't bass-ackwards I don't know what is: a child having to protect herself from the very people who are supposed to protect her!
I'm not talking about the occasional slip-up in parent care. What I experienced was a consistently chaotic, unsafe environment with four dangerous, enmeshed narcissistic dark tetrad parents who strategically tore down any effort at boundary setting. They terrified me then weaponized that fear against me. They shamed me for daring to think I deserved better. They wore down my resistance with cruel and inhuman mind games, until they had a shell-shocked too-compliant nervous wreck of a kid. A kid whose entire approach to life was dancing attendance on others.
So what was the lightbulb in realizing this? That pretty much everything, no I take that back, everything I thought and felt and now think and feel as an adult is informed by fear and shame. And everything I did and do is driven by self-protection from threat. I grovel because I was taught to. I keep quiet because I was slapped until I shut up. I second guess myself on anything because I was lied to and gaslit about everything. And the realization of all this is staggering. So much so that I can hardly believe it's true.
But the more I fact-check the more lies I uncover. And the more I understand how dark tetrad (self-centered, manipulative, exploitative, remorseless, cruel) parents screwed up every normal thing for me. Let's go back to the example of self-care and care-taking. My parents really flipped those concepts around. They systematically drilled me in care-taking of them and not taking care of me. Self-care was selfish, disobedient and unGodly, for me. And it was very dangerous not to give them their way, so I did. And I do now with everyone else out of that same perceived danger.
They were very black and white about how rules applied to me and 500 shades of gray for themselves. So now, everything is a moral dilemma for me and one I'm always failing on. A moral dilemma about which, I might add, they have no qualms about. There was soooooooo much deception and exploitation!
And words, oh my how they used them to twist and twist, till they had me all screwed down. They used dark hints, screaming rages, constant irritation, veiled threats, demeaning tone of voice, scoffing facial expressions to perfection. God, when I think of it, it was like a bad melodrama, with Snidely Whiplash and his menacing eyebrows and stagey piano. It sounds kind of ridiculous now. But at the time it was really scary. I still get a stomachache when I recall.
I remember my mother was always in and out of roles and I never knew (still don't) which is the real her. And certainly not who I was expected to be, in response to her shifting selves. She would dump some icky stuff about sex on me and then suddenly become annoyed by some kid thing I'd done. Or nothing. Then she'd play the mommy role and drum up something I'd done wrong so she could chide me. She'd adopt this smug, prissy look and slap me across the face. Then she'd make out with her boyfriends in front of me, almost like a mean girl flaunting them. And then she'd march me to church and shame me for wanting to wear tennis shoes.
She'd make very backstabby remarks and then call others "catty." She'd call others on immorality and then literally strut into the room wearing super skimpy clothes. And then she'd play the pretty baby who just needed a fwiend. She'd do this odd lip pout and confide in me like a bestie. She's say "we're more like sisters than mother and daughter." Then laugh at me with whoever was her current boyfriend. And then make supper like a real mom. I didn't get at the time how odd that was.
I was suspected and accused of all kinds of weird shit which I was lied to and about having done, though I have no memory of it. Actually, I have implanted false memories that when I look back now, I can't recall. So I question myself mercilessly. I dream I supposedly did these terrible things every night. It was like living among shadows of monsters. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to just be a kid. To laugh and not feel guilty. To play and not be afraid. To be loved, oh, that one. Yeah.
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