Hello my dear friends. In my quest to heal CPTSD from narcissistic dark tetrad parent abuse, I started a series on 25 biblical and moral principles that dark tetrads fubar for their kids. Today I'm looking at number 3, the parent-adult-child dynamic. People with dark tetrad personality traits are exploitative, narcissistic, entitled, malignant and cruel. As parents, they wreak the most havoc on their children, particularly the scapegoat child.
Using weapons of abuse, neglect, manipulation, parentification, abandonment, endangerment, shaming, invalidation, enmeshment and gaslighting, they distort a child's reality so far out of shape that it isn't recognizable anymore. If these parents are Christian or of another religious persuasion, the teachings of that faith become tools to control a child also. Basically, everything in the child's life is twisted, flipped on it's ass and messed up. And the parent/child and child/adult relationships are some of the worst.
Before I delve into this, a bit of explanation. So, I'm an old Freudian at heart. And I have always had great respect for the work of Dr. Eric Berne who based his transactional analysis model of parent-adult-child on Freud's superego-ego-id teaching. The parent or superego is bossy, overcritical and rigid, the id or child is self-centered, entitled and immature and the adult/ego is mature, rational and balanced. In these disciplines, these three exist in all of us. Each one has some merit but the Id and Superego must be kept in check. Problems occur when we get stuck in the unhealthy parent (superego) or child (id) state.
And narcissist dark tetrads dwell permanently in Id-Superego mode. Which of course is a contradiction. They are overly critical, bossy, demanding and harsh while also being childishly selfish and irresponsible. They want what they see as the perks of being both parent (controlling, authoritarian, punitive) and child (irrational, petulant, spoiled and pampered). They want none of the responsibility of being an adult.
Now, to you and I, these aren't perks. Good parents don't enjoy disciplining their children. They do it because they are also grownups who know children need guidance. And chronological-age children aren't whiny brats. They are just growing and learning to advocate for themselves. But in narcissists, these behaviors are destructive and dangerous, especially to their children.
The roles in these relationships are flip-flopped. The immature parent usurps the role of child and thrusts the unprepared child into the adult role. They expect adult behavior from the child. They groom her to perform duties of a parent (parentification). Yet they retain the "right" to control the child as if they were parents. And their adult age aids the deception. Society expects that people who are of majority to be adult and underage to be a child. No one expects that the child is the one doing the heavy lifting and so they miss the obvious clues.
And Christian dark tetrads weaponize scripture to support this. They hound the child to be "respectful and obedient" to their parents. They twist this to mean serve, wait on, kowtow too. However in this fubared relationship where the adult is acting as the child and the child is acting as adult and parent, this doesn't apply. The Bible is not referring to people who call themselves parents but who are in fact being parents. St. Paul speaks of adults putting off childish ways. We act like children when we are children but we grow up as we age.
Dark tetrads just age. They refuse to grow up. And this contradiction destroys childhood and much of adulthood for their kids.
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