Hello my friends. Working to heal from CPTSD is taking me on a strange odyssey full of turns and surprises. I've come to realize finally, after 59 years, that what I experienced growing up in the abusive, neglectful homes of four dark tetrad parents, is nothing like normal. Basically everything was flip-flopped and bass-ackwards. Everything. Nothing in my childhood fits or matches anything resembling normal. My life was like a crazy quilt of tiny, mismatched pieces all jumbled together. The result is constant chaos and stress.
I've begun a series on normal things dark tetrad (malignant, exploitative, selfish, cruel) parents fubar for their kids. Today I'm looking at how these parasites enmesh themselves in their kids selves and rob them of not only of a childhood but also the joy that comes with it. They substitute it with manufactured chaos, stress, anxiety and adult pressures. They force the child to think and act like a child when she hasn't the maturity to do so. They make her parent them. Then they shame her for not being more child-like. And I cannot begin to tell you the existential pain and confusion this causes.
It's much worse when the parents are "religious" (by that I mean self-righteous because nothing they do resembles real spirituality). They weaponize scripture. They continually subject her to very unBiblical, unChristian, unGodly behavior and situations. But the hold her up to every letter of the law. They fault her for being imperfect when they've provided no model of morality, goodness or even decent parenting.
You know how Jesus talks about being child-like in your faith? And that a little child shall lead them? And how parents are supposed to let the children come unto me? Well, children of dark tetrad parents get a twisted version of that. Because our childhood was stolen. Our innocence usurped and our joy smashed. Every child-like thing we do is shamed. Where normal parents think a kid's behavior is sweet or cute, narcissistic parents shun and shame it.
They do their utmost to sabotage our innocence because they resent it. They make us feel weird, ugly, stupid, awkward and clumsy. They push us away. Where a normal parent can't get enough lap time with their children, a dark tetrad wants none of it. They make the child feel distasteful and weird for wanting hugs. They make touch sexualized. And boom goes the child's innocence. Her sense of wonder tainted. Her joie de vivre pissed on.
They endanger, terrorize, abandon, neglect, manipulate, extort, humiliate, emotionally water-board, betray, lash out at, future fake, gaslight, scapegoat us. They demand disturbingly unnatural things of us . They exhaust, deprive and wear us down. But then they also punish us for not being like "happy, normal kids." I was told I was unlovable because I was angry, bad-tempered, selfish, attention-seeking, show-offs, too sensitive.
They show blatantly partiality to their other kids. Whom they do not subject to these tortures and so do not act so broken and messed up. They take everyone's part over ours. Toward us, they show only vendetta, for what, we don't know. But it's a pretty effective way of wiping the smile off the child's face, for sure. But I tried to smile, to make them happy and to make them love me. Albeit through my tears. And I got even that wrong. That apparently is "fake" and "attention-seeking."
They act bitter, sarcastic, two-faced, spiteful, shaming, backstabbing, malicious and deceitful. Then accuse us of being all these things. And we believe them and it grieves us. Since we care too much about pleasing them and too little about ourselves, we're in a constant torment of self-hatred. Which they very much approve and exploit. If we feel any good about ourselves, it's "prideful" and "arrogant."
We must feel constant shame but not show it because then that's showing off. I got so caught up in their toxic waste tip that for much of my life, self-harm seemed the only option. I never blamed them. And yet my dad told me I was "too heavy" and "exaggerating." And that I "needed to lighten up." Mind you, my dad had been threatening me with his own suicide since I was 5. He felt no qualms dumping his "depression" and woes on me.
Now I understand, or I think I do, that my parents were putting all their shame on me, as scapegoat. But that realization doesn't do me much good against a 60 years-in-the-making wall of shame. This shame lurks in vague shadows in my waking hours. Occasionally it bursts out, when triggered, in odd trauma responses of freezing, fawning, fixing, flight and fight. At night, it's a different story.
I dream terrible nightmares in which I do unspeakably awful things. For most of my life, I thought these were memories of my wicked behavior. I'd have floods of sickness from "remembering" things they'd said I did. I wake up crying, screaming and begging, not for help but forgiveness. And everyone just looks on in scorn. It has crushed my soul.
This is what caused me to start looking into my past. And now that I'm removing the blinders, I'm recalling that what I thought were things I did, were lies made up about me. I think. I'm still not sure because their gaslighting was very convincing. But the scorn, shaming, humiliation, that happened. I recall now, the shock of the sucker punching. The ooof of having the wind knocked out of you by people who call themselves your parents. I know now why my stomach feels so sick. I was held up to the family firing squad and repeatedly fired on at till my entire self was shot to pieces.
All I am now is a tattered soul, riddled with bullet holes, more bits than whole person. That's what dark tetrad abuse does to you. It fragments your heart. It splinters your self. It shatters your peace of mind. It irreparably destroys your inner child. You're left with a damaged brain, neither adult nor child, never grown up nor young at heart. Always old, used up, dessicated.
It's safe to say that children of dark tetrad parents aren't children at all. Consequently we never really grow to healthy adults without a lifetime of working out these problems. We are conundrums, never adult nor child. We are creatures Frankensteined by mad scientists, warped out of natural shape. We're always in the wrong body, either forcefully grown ups in little bodies or misaligned little people in big bodies, with the entire child self missing and trapped in it all.
I know all this must be really hard to read. It really hard to even think about let alone write. It all feels so incredibly fouled up beyond belief.
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