Cheat codes for CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent gaslighting

Hello my friends. Today in my CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm starting a series exploring why we put so much energy into preserving relationships with narcissists. Why do we as victims of their narcissistic abuse worry so much about them, what they want, need, feel and so little about ourselves? Why do we not go not contact and be done with it? There are many factors but one that seems to encompass them all and that is narcissistic gaslighting. Here are cheat codes to degas gaslighting and find healing. 

What exactly is gaslighting? 

Let's unpack this commonly used but often misunderstood term. At the heart of gaslighting is willful and self-serving lying in all its forms. This umbrella concept includes distortion, distraction, deception, evasion and manipulation. Like an artist, a gaslighter uses these untruths as paints to create an entirely false picture which he presents to the person he is gaslighting, as reality. Usually it is someone who wields some kind of power differential over another and so is able to rewrite the script so the person believes it. This psychological brainwashing is emotional abuse which uses insidious, destabilizing, undermining and second-guessing to make the person doubt her own perception of reality, memory, sanity, or judgment.

The Gaslighting Enmeshed Parent Narcissist Trifecta

People who gaslight are usually also narcissistic and enmeshed. Arrogant people believe they are above rules and have the right to use people as tools. When you add parent enmeshment to the mix, you get a really nasty Dark Tetrad cocktail of arrogant, selfish, ruthless, cruel, control freak bully. The enmeshed parent believes he owns his child. His arrogance tells him he has no obligation to her while she owes him everything. My narcissistic father thought he was perfectly justified, as the parent, to use me, the Broken Vending Machine Child ™(a term I coined and will explain later) as as servant, surrogate and to get narcissistic supply. He felt no duty of care or need for reciprocity.  And that's why narcissistic parents can so easily gaslight their children, because the child has a natural attachment to and trust of them, plus the parent has authority over them. 

All for One and None For the Scapegoat

My Machiavellian and narcissistic mother and father were willing to exploit me, my love, devotion, sense of obligation to them, to get what they wanted. All's fair to these lawless hypocrites, who hold themselves above censure while rigidly censuring other people. And the Broken Vending Machine Child ™ gets the brunt. She's all the family system roles in one. She's the Golden Child in terms of parentified expectations (but without the exemption from rules of the golden), the glass child whose individuality is seen right through, Cheerleader Enabler who must always prop up the narcissistic parent and the Savior or Scapegoat Child who must take on herself all consequences for the parents foolish, dangerous actions. This false teaching that I was responsible to and for them, is the gaslighting of parentification. 

Trauma Bonding and Betrayal Blindness

Trauma bonding is a sticky net that enmeshed parents crochet for their child to keep her wrapped up in them. my four narcissistic stepparents and parents wrote the training manual on trauma bonding. They played the game like pros with

• Love-bombing ( a type of grooming-gaslighting which singles the child out and makes the feel special but which is just to give the child a false sense of security which is then exploited)
• Future-faking (another type of gaslighting which paints a future full of promises that are all routinely broken, and then the parents blame-shift fault onto the child for their broken promises so she feels responsible for it)
• Bread-crumbing (the child is consistently deprived, then fed just enough to keep her compliant and coming back for more. This ultimately leads to a betrayal blindness and cognitive dissonance in which the child believes that because they provided something, they must be good parents. 
• Devalue and Discard (the parent pushes the child away for no reason and then blames and shames her for "causing it." This is where the DARVO distortion comes in, too. The parent Denies, Attacks, Reverse Victim and Offender roles. She set up the child as the villain and herself as the martyr. 
• Hoovering. Then the malicious parent "sucks" the rejected child back in with self-pitying lies about FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) that the child is supposed to feel toward this parent who has devalued and discarded her. And the trauma cycle begins again. 
• Gassing The fuel for gaslighting is gas, toxic hot air. Over time, these noxious fumes brain damage the child, causing self-destructive trauma responses like fawning. And like carbon monoxide, this mind gas is odorless, colorless and tasteless. It causes betrayal blindness which makes the child unable to recognize it. 

Why Gaslighting Is Effective

Gaslighting is rarely overt; it usually happens incrementally over time. My parents chipped away at my sense of self and self-confidence causing self-abandonment by a 1,000 cuts. They used chaos, backstabbing, isolation, coercive control, little digs, subtle mocking, second-guessing, humiliation, DIMMER, triangulation, gotcha set-ups, toxic shaming for normal behavior and a host of other destabilizing actions. They painted me as a liar. Because the manipulation is subtle and often delivered with absolute confidence by someone the victim trusts, the victim gradually stops trusting their own internal compass, relying instead on the manipulator to define reality. Over the long term, this erodes self-esteem, creates intense self-distrust, and can lead to chronic anxiety or trauma responses.

Cheat Sheet for Recognizing Gaslighting

It's only in retrospect that most Adult Children of Narcissists are able to see their parents' lies clearly. It took me reading some Reddit AITA posts, at 60, to understand what my parents had done.  But hopefully these realizations can help younger generations spot it earlier. Here are some cheat codes to spot parent gaslighting. 

• Denial and Distortion: Denying events happened, insisting conversations you clearly recall, occurred differently, or flatly saying "that never happened" ("You're making things up").

• Trivializing Feelings: Minimizing the victim's emotional response or concerns to make them feel overly sensitive ("You're blowing this out of proportion" or "You're too sensitive").

• Double standards. My narcissistic father used the "too sensitive" accusation against  me all the time along with "you can't take criticism" when he was in an narcissistic rage and attacking me. Then if caught out, he'd take narcissistic insult, quickly backpedal and say I was too critical of him. Narcissists have a comeback for everything. They are always right and you are always wrong. And my betrayal blindness made me think he just cared about me, and made me miss the insults and humiliation he was heaping on me. 

• Countering: Questioning the victim's memory of events, even when the victim remembers them accurately ("Your memory is terrible," or "That's not how it went at all" "You're making this up." "You're just showing off for attention).

• Evasions and backpedaling. Pretending to forget something which they clearly recall. Purposely confusing order of events. She only tells the part that the child did, not what she did to provoke it. My mother lied and said I hit her without telling how she routinely slapped me. She told it in such a way that ignored that fact that I raised my hand to protect myself, not against her. Then she lied and said she never slapped me. 

• Half-truths, exaggeration and sanitizing. The parent cherry-picks parts of stories that make herself look good and the child look bad. She exaggerates the child's behavior into capital offenses while euphemizing her own words and actions to sound innocent and calm while neglecting to tell how she herself overreacted, cursed and screamed abuse. 

• Spinning. Rushing to get their spun version in pre-emptively, before anyone has a chance to question them. Then any other version will look suspect. 

• Withholding and Blocking: Pretending not to understand ("What do you mean?" when you're speaking clearly) or refusing to listen ("I'm not talking about this again" or giving the silent treatment and cold shoulder, to create self-doubt).

• Rewriting the Narrative: Blaming the victim for the abuser's actions or twisting situations to make the victim appear at fault ("If you didn't provoke me, I wouldn't have to act this way").

In short, if something sounds or feels off, that someone with a history of invalidating you, says or does, believe that it is gaslighting. 

Talking back to narcissistic parent abuse to heal CPTSD: rewiring the gaslighting

 

Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery, I'm talking back narcissistic parent abuse voices in my head. I'm telling the correct version of me that their gaslighting reframed as "the problem." I'm encouraging you to talk back to the voices in your head and if you can't well, I'm more than happy to do it for you! Time to silence their DARVO and crybullying nonsense once and for all. 

Surprise ways to talk back to parent bullies

So this might sound contradictory, but along with this blog, I maintain several others on poetry, food and cooking and lesson plans for kids. And I have found radical acceptance and CPTSD recovery in such diverse outlets. I unpack a lot of childhood trauma issues of trauma bonding, toxic shame, narcissistic abuse and parent enmeshment in my poetry blog called The Writers Garden. I find myself "talking back" or "sassing" as my narcissistic mother loved to call it. I can her and my narcissistic father out, in verse, for the child abuse and neglect, with child abandonment and endangerment, plus coercive control they subjected me to.  To name a few of the atrocities. And you know what, finally, I have the last word. No more fawning and people pleasing and being nothing more than narcissistic supply. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it. Like I just wrote in a recent blog post called "My Poem, My Rules" I'll decide what to say, not my abusive gaslighting parents. 

Squeak Up! 

Anyone recall the adorable kids' book "Hooway for Wodney Wat"? In this story a timid hypervigilant little rat with speaking difficulties,  finds his voice and learns to "squeak up" for himself. Let's all be like Wodney, and stop silencing ourselves. Let's cease humoring and soothing arrogant bullying parents who use us like cat's paws to get what they want at our expense. See, we Adult Children of Narcissists have been beaten down by the double-edged sword of infantilization plus parentification. Enmeshed parents taught us we were possessions, not people. Our one job was to serve them. And we need to mouth off to that dreck here and now. 

Defog the FOG

FOG stands for Fear, Obligation and Guilt which our malignant parents force-fed us on. They groomed us to think that we are forever bound to whatever ridiculous demands they set for us. They use words like "respect" and "duty" and "family loyalty" and "debts you owe us."  Yet they never give us those same things. Only the Broken Vending Machine Child must give out with no reciprocity from parents. We're taught to give without counting the cost to people who only take from us and always count the cost of the little bread-crumbing they give us. Life with narcissist parents is one-sided transactional and business-like when they do the littlest thing for you and it's "family does for family" in the enormous, unreasonable expectations they put on you as scapegoat child. You are only family when it suits their narcissistic fantasy. The rest of the time, you are a live-in unpaid nanny, cook, housekeeper, pacifier and caregiver. It's time now to take off the betrayal blindness glasses and see the dysfunctional mess behind the facade of Happy Families. Then you can start to talk back to that unbalanced power differential and reclaim your long-overdue differentiation from your family of origin. 

Let the locked door stay shut. 

Narcissistic Parents go no contact first, beginning when you're a child. They play the Devalue and Discard game from birth, pushing away and then clinging tight when you want freedom and they want control. So if you go no contact with them, expect a barrage of narcissistic rage fueled by petulance, pouting and retaliation. This is not because they want to stay in contact with you. They only contact you when they want something. What they crave is power, domination and control. THEY dictate who cuts off whom, not you. The very people who didn't have the time of day for me, when I sought them, EVEN if it was to do for them, like it usually was, went into narcissistic injury mode when I stopped pursuing and went grey rock. But I beat them to the punch. I let the door they locked on me, stay shut. And oooh, they did not like that. They tried all the control freak tricks like hoovering and love-bombing but it always ended in devaluing and discarding of me. Till I "spoke my mind" by cutting ties to them. This is the Teflon moment, when they can't touch you anymore. They can play their games and you can stand your ground. 

🔒 The Tables Have Turned: Freedom Outside the Cage ⛓️

Narcissists don't like it when you leave shut the doors they slammed on you, and don't beg to be let in. Because now THEY are the ones locked in and helpless and you are outside the cage they created, and free!

Speak in your words whether they understand or not. 

And my language is action. I let my deeds speak for me. I don't answer calls or respond to "phishing" texts. My mother repeats all the estranged parent inanities, about how she doesn't understand, what has she done to cause this, has she "offended me" in any way? Yada yada. She never cared when I was still under her thumb. So all this is just fishing. She knows what she's done. She was there. I don't bother to JADE (justify, argue, defend, explain) why I don't respond. The few things I reminded her of, just met with DARVO and gaslighting. "That didn't  happen. I don't remember (kicking me out of the house at 16 and making me homeless).  I wouldn't do that" (leaving me alone at 11 with her four special needs foster kids under five and a violently abusive boyfriend. Which at the time she lied and said was my fault.) You get the picture. Then when I still stood firm, she played the victim card and then the blame-shifting one. It's just Narcissist Prayer UNO reversing, bait and switch and story-changing, trying to get me to back down so she can claim that moral high horse she thinks she rides. Never once has she sincerely apologized or even admitted wrong. She just evades, lies, cons and scams. And I'm tired of trying to make her understand. That's the definition of insanity, doing what you've always done and expecting a different result. My dad did the same things till he died. Never once admitting any fault, still expecting carte blanche forgiveness for sins he never confessed while extending no mercy to me, ever. 

Let the insane speak for itself. 

So heres' where we speak our truth by saying nothing. When the narcissist rages and acts crazy and dysregulated, we step back and let it happen. We don't rush to excuse, defend or clean up after them. We get our loved in our care out of their path. We let people see them at their worst, instead of lying to cover for them. When their scams blow up, when they run out of money, when they get called out, we do nothing to help. If CPS or the authorities get called in, we do not bail them out. We do not hire attorneys. We let them suffer the consequences of their actions, for once, instead of body-blocking them. This is the only way flying monkeys and enablers will get it, too, by the way. They have to see the narcissist implode in upon himself before they understand that this insanity and chaos was your life. 

Radical acceptance is the goal post in the field of recovery. 

Surprising Ways to Heal CPTSD from Narcissistic Parent Abuse

Hello my friends. Today in my childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm going to share to ways to heal CPTSD that might surprise you. We will take on narcissistic parent gaslighting, parent enmeshment, trauma bonding, childhood trauma responses and other hurtful impacts of child abuse, in ways that may seem odd or even counterintuitive. But from my experience living with four narcissistic parents, I can say that they work.  

Turn off the gaslighting gas. 

Probably one of the worst things that narcissistic entitled, cruel, selfish parents do to kids is to gaslight them. This isn't just lying, it's deceiving and rewriting reality on an epic novel scale. Narcissists distort everything to fit their main character syndrome and to get narcissistic supply. They lie as easily as breathing. So we Adult Children of Narcissists (ACON, if you need a support group) kids grew up in a bewildering and bespoke wilderness of false FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) where our parents' hypocrisy, double standards, scapegoating, backstabbing, smear campaigns, role reversal, exploitation, future-faking, triangulation and DARVO, ruled the roost. What we as child abuse survivors need to do is to start seeing through the fog of gaslighting to the true, clean fresh air of real reality. It wasn't our fault. We were kids. It was their arrogant narcissistic fantasy. And what do we know about fantasies? They are fake. 

Cut the ties that bind

Parent enmeshment weaponizes the child's natural attachment and the parent power differential to coercively control and dominate her. The enmeshed parent who is almost always also narcissistic and Machiavellian (determined to get her way whatever the cost) absorbs the helpless child into her enormous greedy egomania. The child must have no needs, wants or voice. All must funnel into this energy vampire parent. The narcissistic mother or father (in my case, both) with the hypervigilance of KGB agents, monitor and control the child over things that aren't their business then blatantly, abusively neglect basic care. They sabotage any individuation which they take as narcissistic injury. If the child so much as looks crosswise or seems to show any independence the narcissistic rage venom sprays. My malignant parents crocheted a blanket of demands and expectations to trap me, not to protect me. All this creates insane cognitive dissonance. We have to sever those ties by going no contact with enslavement and coercive control. We owe this to our little inner child who couldn't break free because it wasn't safe.  

🚩 Breaking Free from Enmeshment 🚩

To get out of the enmeshment web, we first have to see it. So breaking free means seeing past betrayal blindness to the parents actively sabotaging our growth and development. Once we see it, we can begin to understand that this net isn't real. It's woven of FOG and gaslighting.

🚩 🚩 🚩

Dissolve the Trauma Bonding glue

One of the biggest aha moments I had in my narcissistic abuse recovery was to see clearly how trauma bonding had caused my betrayal blindness. The enmeshed parents cement the child to them in a one-sided trauma bond. Using their famous gaslighting, they convince the child that they own her and owe her nothing while she is merely a possession who she owes them everything. It's the ultimate power play with parentification and infantilization plus coercive control and DIMMER They use love-bombing with manufactured FOG and hoovering followed by Devaluation and Discard. And then they repeat these insidious cruelties until the child is Ferberized, desperate for love and compliant.  

💡 ☀️ Breaking Through the Toxicity ☀️ 💡

Narcissistic parents use toxicity and cruelty to dominate and control their kids. We as adults have to dissolve that toxicity. Happily we don't need more chemicals. Simple radical acceptance and awareness are the "wire cutters" that destroy our prison.

💡 ☀️ 💡

Deny DARVO its power

Here's where we break free, or stay stuck, where the radical acceptance and awareness either lose or gain their power. Because narcissistic parents do not like autonomy in their children. They consider them possessions and how dare a spoon talk back to the cook?? If you grey rock or go no contact or just stop being so compliant and people pleasing, be prepared. If you start using your words where before you were trauma responding with fawning, groveling and soothing, plan on them taking major narcissistic insult over it. Despite bullying me all my life and me taking it with a smile, my narcissistic father and his vulnerable narcissist wife, were quick to start the crybullying and DARVO if ever I even hinted at any independence from his cloying control freak iron grip. I made the mistake of not being that prepared Boy Scout and expecting his narcissistic rage. I won't make that mistake again if ever I have to encounter my narcissistic stepfather and mother. I will stand my ground and engage only on my terms instead of letting bullies call the shots. 

🛡️ ⚔️ Always Prepared & Protected 🛡️ 🪖

Dealing with narcissistic parent vengeance requires Eagle Scout levels of "always prepared." You must gird your loins for the ambushes and rages that are sure to come. But you can do it. You've done harder things than this all your life, just by surviving their abuse.

🛡️ 🪖 ⚔️

Don't JADE but also don't "forgive and forget." 

There's a reason for bygones and why we shouldn't just let them be. What happened, happened. All the gaslighting in the world can't erase the scars that narcissistic parent abuse left on us. So when I finally decided to let the doors they slammed on me stay shut, I did so quietly. I won't be confronting them, having heart to hearts or forgiving them. Any "apology" I've ever gotten and they are scant, were just backhanded and not admissions of guilt. They were blame-shifting guilt traps to trick me into confessing to things I'd never done, to taking the blame and the brunt for my parents bad actions, as I'd always done. So now, I will not justify, argue or answer questions, defend or explain why I've gone no contact (or accepted that they went no contact with me). And the only regrets I have is that I was deprived of a healthy childhood and that didn't cut ties sooner. 

Why you feel joy in narcissistic abuse and it's not what you think

Hello my friends. Today on my childhood trauma recovery journey, I'm unpacking a bizarre phenomenon that occurs with people experiencing narcissistic abuse. And that is the positive glow they report feeling occasionally, with the narcissist, despite the ill treatment. Here's a breakdown of why you feel joy in narcissistic abuse. And it's NOT what you think. 

No you're not a masochist. 

Dr. Ramani just made a vlog which you really must watch, discussing these feelings of joy at being with narcissistic persecutors. She said that so many people reported periods of joy (they used that word) in narcissistic relationships. I can relate to this experience from having lived with four narcissistic parents who were frequently malignantly cruel. And yet, I often (FAR too often) felt only self-blame with none the anger a normal kid feels, let alone one who is being unfairly targeted. I felt happy and lucky to have them because they told me I should. Even when I didn't have them, even when they abandoned, endangered, severely neglected, exploited, humiliated and coercively controlled me. Does that mean I was a masochist, and a glutton for punishment? No. This was betrayal blindness, a trauma response to survive their sadistic treatment. 

The Joy Dilemma

But why joy? Why do so many childhood trauma sufferers use that specific word to describe relationships with their parents? Because this is all we know of joy with sociopathic or narcissistic parents. We don't know love from pain, suffering and abuse. Fear and hurt are our normal. We have deep betrayal blindness, what I also call emotional leprosy, which makes it impossible for us to differentiate pleasure from pain. Hypervigilance, fearful fawning, chronic anxiety, looping panic attacks, sick dread and terror are our daily life. We are never relaxed and comfortable (our malignant parents make sure of that) and certainly never anything like truly joyful. We have heard others describe joy and so we think that occasionally not feeling quite so awful must be what they are referring to. 

It's not reciprocity or generosity, it's bread-crumbing.

Narcissistic enmeshed parents take and steal all our selves. These self-absorbed people absorb us into them. I call them Black Hole Parents always consuming and never satisfied. And conversely, (because everything is flip-flopped) they only parse out bare minimum to string us along. This is bread-crumbing and that is not generosity or parental nurturing. It's a rationed scraps occasionally thrown to us, just to keep us alive. But we are so used to deprivation and pouring into them from our own empty cups, that it feels like a banquet. And this is not reciprocity either. My narcissistic stepmother and father demanded that I as their Broken Vending Machine Child, pay out whatever they wanted at my own expense. Yet failed to provide a basic bedroom, bed, pillow or enough to eat. 

🚩 🚩 🚩

The Broken Vending Machine Child experiences food insecurity and deprivation, while the toxic family has plenty. And yet is expected to dispense any goodies they demand of her, at her own expense.

🚩 🚩 🚩

Why you are confused

Because narcissistic parents purposely confuse you. They lie, deceive and con, by nature. Gaslighting and DARVO (deny responsibility, attack, reverse victim offender) are their trademarks. My narcissistic mother and father wove a blanket of lies which they wound around me. This is one manifestation of parent enmeshment in which the abusive parent entraps the scapegoat child in their narcissistic fantasy cult of servitude to them. They create a parallel universe of FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) in which the parentified child is made responsible for the parent. This caused me intense cognitive dissonance, emotional and even physical pain. That fact that none of this is real and that my narcissistic father and mother do not have this power, doesn't matter. My trauma brain thinks they do. 

It's not joy you're feeling. 

You know how when you're in great pain, having it hurt a little less feels like relief? Sometimes you may even cry. These are trauma reactions to shock which raised cortisol and adrenaline. As they subside, you are left shaky and crying tears of relief. You may even feel "high" or euphoric. That's your brain's neurotransmitter releasing an enkephalin and endorphin rush. These mood boosters are natural opioid peptides your brain sends to help you cope with intense pain. Your brain perceives narcissistic abuse with the same high alert threat level as extreme pain. This precise process happened to my husband recently when he dislocated his shoulder. The shock and pain caused this chain of events, including the "tears of relief." But it wasn't joy. It was feeling level 7 instead of level 11 pain! 

It's not "Happy Families", it's trauma bonding

Narcissistic parents not only sabotage your ability to feel, they weaponize the child's natural attachment to them and exploit her love of and respect for, them. They play the fake love-bombing with Devalue and Discard Game. Then there's the hoovering you back in.  They make you responsible for them when you are a dependent child and then needs-shame your natural dependence on them. They lie to and about you. It's a constant lose-lose game of hypocritical double standards and moving hoops. By setting you up to impossible standards, they assure that you will fail. And then they punish you for "failing" their impossible standards, all while legitimately failing you in the simplest and most basic necessities. This fear of failure keeps the child forever hopping through their hoops hoping to one day be good enough.  This endless tug-of-war cements the child with super glue strength trauma bonding. But it's not love. It's coercive control. 

And it's NOT a sign that you are wrong

This "joy" you feel isn't real. It's not lasting. It isn't the narcissistic parent suddenly turning over a new leaf. It's not that love you've so longed for. Narcissists only stop abusing when THEY get sick of it or if it's not getting them narcissistic supply. Often it's just a temporary ceasefire to keep you baited and hooked. They have to be nice sometimes or you'll see through them. Well, I say, read the red flags they are waving, now. Narcissists don't change unless it suits them and then it's only to change tactics. This is not a reason to distrust yourself or let your guard down. Going no contact was when I first began feeling anything like joy. Because now, I can begin to manage my own pain. And I know what pain and love and joy are and are not. 

Bizarre CPTSD Trauma Responses from Narcissistic Parent Abuse

Hello my friends. Today in my CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I'm exploring bizarre trauma responses that malignant narcissists condition in their children. Using destabilization, abuse and neglect, trauma bonding and gaslighting, our coercively controlling parents brain damaged us into acting in humiliating, dysregulated knee-jerk patterns. These odd behaviors dog us adult children of narcissists all our lives. 

Hijacked and Hacked Childhood

We traumatized children had our lives hijacked by parent enmeshment and coercive control. The malignant or dark tetrad parent hacks into the child's brain HTML and implants what I call "command prompt Trauma Triggers." Malignant parents passive-aggressively "wind us up" using command prompts only we recognize. We unconsciously and robotically react from our trauma brain, then they scold us for trauma reactions they bred in us.  They say and do things they know will make us anxious and hypervigilant because they are the ones who trained us to. They punish us for not dancing to their tune, and mock us if we do. 

Disturbing Childhood Trauma "Mind Effs" 

Psychology defines trauma responses as freezing, fawning, fight and flight. From my own experience living und the regimens of four narcissistic and enmeshed parents, I've added a few more "mind effs." 

• Fright. Narcissists are truly terrifying to live with because they are deceitful, back-stabbing and violent over the most inconsequential things. They take narcissistic injury over non-issues and suddenly they are in a towering spiteful, vindictive narcissistic rage and you have no idea where it came from. We walk on eggshells and still they go ballistic over nothing. I have spinal and foot damage from "pretzeling" into contorted shapes to somehow appease them. This ungodly terror they instilled looks pretty weird in normal society. 

• Floundering. I am clumsy and stumble over nothing because I am out of balance. I could never walk confidently because my narcissistic mother and father were always springing some random chaos on me. They set up "gotcha" stings just to humiliate me. They jerked the rug out from under me on the daily. Betrayal blindness kept me from seeing that this was intentional. What parent sets their child up to fail? 

• Brain FOG. All this narcissistic abuse is utterly baffling. We were terrified into disturbing reflexive behaviors we didn't even realize we were doing. The narcissist gaslights the scapegoat child into obsessive compulsive preoccupation with fear of, obligation to and guilt over the self-absorbed parent. A few years ago, I was scolded for not being able to deal cards correctly. The scolder asked how I was unable to do so simple a task. Welcome to childhood trauma brain damage, buddy. It impairs everything. 

• Fugue state. Nothing makes sense in this narcissistic fantasy cult they created for us. There are two sets of ever changing self-serving rules. The authoritarian parents demands total control. And this looks nothing like the real world around us. No one addresses our upended reality. We experience cognitive dissonance with every step. 

• Flip-flopping. Insecurity has taught us never to make a decision until we get approval from high command (our Machiavellian parents). And they withhold and deprive us of basic things we need to live. And individuation is punished. And just when we do land, they move the target and scold us for not reading their minds. In the adult world, this translates to "waffling." You better believe that abused kids are indecisive. It was too dangerous not to be. 

• Frenetic and frenzied. Traumatized kids run on nervous, hypervigilant energy. Life moves in an unnatural fast-motion. It's a constant game of Twister trying to navigate their hoops. But no matter how fast we move it's never enough to outrun their rage. 

• Trauma Frowning. Our parents get narcissistic supply from confusing us. We have to take their every whim seriously yet we're scolded for being "too sensitive" "too serious" and not smiling more. Our frowns are from having to concentrate too hard on people pleasing and figuring out what they want. 

• Fear of Failure. This is terror like no other. I have a sick dread of my narcissistic father that borders on manic. And he's been dead for 6 years. That's how shockingly horrific emotional abuse is. 

• Fragility. I hurt all over, all the time from many autoimmune issues. I am exhausted and do not know how to ask for help or that it is okay to. I'm very vulnerable to toxic shaming and toxic positivity from "blind guides." I am codependent on gaslighting to narrate my reality. 

• Freak out. I have had full-on breaks with reality not because I am broken but because reality was broken for me by narcissistic parent gaslighting. I have fallen apart. I am fallen apart on the inside and sometimes it shows on the outside. But not as often as it should given the chaos I lived in. 

• Fraught. Everything narcissistic parents demand of the child, is a desperate high stakes, do or die emergency. Serving them, in the most mundane tasks, takes an insanely high precedence over all else. Just carving out time to do homework requires the strategic planning of a major engagement. Every expectation is marked urgent. While the child deprived of basics. 

• Fracturing. Trauma bonding with all the ick that goes with it, caused cognitive split personality. Their bread-crumbing (being strung along) and future-faking (being lied to, made promises to that were always broken) destroyed any sense of reality. The love-bombing followed by Devalue and Discard ruined us. But no matter how we resiliently rose above, stayed silent and managed, we were told we were "overreacting" and "exaggerating." When we said nothing. 

The Final F

You might think my "great amen" will come in forgiveness. But I have been doing that all my life and it has just made them more arrogant and entitled.  And you know what the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing and expecting different results. If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. So I'm going to practice a little Alanon wisdom. I think recovery might lie in doing something different than all this insanity. I am trying to practice mindfulness and "free floating." Not rising above in some vain attempt to "be the bigger person." Not endlessly forgiving. Just letting it happen. Let them be as off as they want, and watching them burn bridges without rushing to put out the fire. That's includes letting slammed doors stay shut. I didn't go no contact with my parents that are left. I just didn't hold the door open. What they closed, stays closed. End of. 

CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent coercive control

Hello my friends. I'm working on childhood trauma recovery from narcissistic parent abuse. Today I'm responding to a YouTube vlog by narcissism expert Dr. Ramani on the coercive control of narcissistic abuse. My entire backstory is peopled with narcissists (four parents, two bio, two step plus their children). I'm unpacking the CPTSD from this awful enslavement on this blog because it's such a huge, fraught issue that I couldn't address is fully in her channel comments. 

• Memo: Please, if you're dealing with childhood trauma from malignant parent abuse or narcissists in any relationship, run don't walk to Dr. Ramani's channel. She is the Shell Answer Lady on things narcissism. You will find comfort. 

Dark Tetrad Parent Abuse

Narcissism is characterized by arrogance, entitlement (above-it-all-ness), selfishness, low to zero empathy and remorse and pathological lying (gaslighting). The Dark Triad adds a Machiavellian component which basically says "I can do whatever I want, no matter how abusive, to get my way." Then the Dark Tetrad adds cruelty, which is fundamental to all narcissists if they are pushed but the Dark Tetrad requires malignancy for narcissistic supply. The dark tetrad narcissistic father, like mine,  "gets high on" hurting people, especially his scapegoat child. My narcissistic mother NEEDS to destabilize me to make herself feel powerful and superior. 

There are two types of people: those who succeed on their own merits and those who climb on others to make themselves look taller. The dark tetrad is the latter. 

Bizarre Hypocrisy of Religious Narcissist Parent

All I've just described flies in the face of Christianity. And it perfectly describes my hypocritical, two sets of rules religious narcissist parents. Yes, that's a contradiction in terms. Christians are called to be 

• Humble: the Christian narcissist is arrogant, bragging, cocky, sarcastic and cynical.  
• Merciful: the Christian narcissist is ruthless, grudge-holding, petty, malicious and unempathetic. 
• Contrite of heart: The Christian narcissist feels and shows no remorse. He doesn't lack it, he ignores it. He plays DARVO (denies and deflects blame, attacks, and reverses victim and offender). Instead of sorrow, he points fingers away from himself in angry resentment. 
• Teachable: The narcissist browbeats his children with punitive discipline, yet takes narcissistic insult if he is corrected. 
• Loving: The narcissistic parents withhold love while expecting god-like adoration from their children. The only love the child knows is trauma bonding. 
• Honor God: The religious narcissist honors only herself. She coercively controls her child into mindless  obeisance too. 

  Existential Crisis: My parents didn't just think they were gods. They each acted like they were THE ONE TRUE God. And I believed them and disobeyed the real God, serving them. Who would you obey: an unseen entity or the malignant humans with total control of you? Yep, that's who I chose too. 

Narcissism gaslights the narcissist

There is a litany of gaslighting and that narcissism itself feeds the narcissist. It paints a false narcissistic fantasy in which the narcissist is the supreme cult leader. It uses self-serving lies which the gullible dark tetrad already wants to believe. 

• Arrogant self-righteousness tells the narcissists that she is always right even when she is doing dead wrong things. That she is above all normal human rules. 
• Entitlement beguiles the dark tetrad with delusions of grandeur,  that she is endlessly owed whatever she wants and that she owes no one anything. Even her child. 
• Parent enmeshment dazzles her with promises that child is a possession not a person. That mother should sabotage any boundaries and violate privacy with a hypervigilant monitoring. Not to keep the child safe, but to control. 
• Parentification lulls the parent into a false sense of security that she is not held to  normal parent expectations. That she must always be pampered by her child who is actually her parent. 
• Machiavellianism promises the narcissistic dad that he can should do whatever he wants to get his way. No holds barred. No low is too low. 
• Sadism tells the parent that it feels good to hurt the child, that the child had it coming and that this is for her own good. It says ( and this is heretical I can hardly write it) that God wants the parent to abuse the child. 

The Nightmare Web of Coercive Control

The parent uses an evil bag of tricks and mind games to force the child into a destabilized place so she will be desperate and compliant. The parent randomly aims fear arrows to trigger the child. Just when the child starts to feel a little safety or predictability, WHUMP, another arrow lands. And the child's trauma responses activate. Fawning from FOG (fear, obligation and guilt), freezing, fixing and what I call pretzeling. The child twists herself into painful contortions to try and be whatever the parent demands at that moment. I have spinal damage from this. The malignant parent 

• Abuses the child in odd, often hidden ways. My stepfather mocked my breast size as a child, and my mother looked on approvingly. 
• Neglects and withholds necessities or makes them transactional (I was told I stay with my dad and narcissistic stepmother only on conditions of doing any and all chores they set me to). 
• Trauma bonding: The parent wields an arsenal of weapons against the child to create an unnatural codependency. 
• Natural attachment is punished then exploited in a Cat and Mouse game. 
• Power differential becomes a stick to beat the child with. 
• Bread crumbing: The parent feeds the child just enough for survival, but not enough to satisfy. Because the child is dependent for needs, this strings her along. 
• Love-bombing: This mind eff makes the child think for once she has earned the love she desires. But it's just for show and to make her compliant. 
• Future faking: Lying. Making and breaking promises to boost trust and create betrayal blindness while doing exactly as the irresponsible parent wants. 
• Triangulation and smear campaigns. Lying to and about the child to pit people against her. Whether people actually believed my parents or not, I couldn't know. All I knew was no one was speaking or standing up for me. It was all just swept under the rug. 
• Child endangerment. When a parent purposely leaves or puts a child in gratuitously unsafe situations with unsafe people, it creates cognitive dissonance and terror-induced brain damage. 
• Child abandonment. Leaving the child alone, or with strangers, is one of the most disturbing things a parent can do. Mine gaslit me that they were "doing God's work" while I was playing alone downtown in a strange city at 5. 

Gestalt and Bespoke Abuse

The whole effect of all these experiences of abuse is greater than the sum of the parts. Which is already a hell of a lot and way too much for the child brain to come to terms with. This bespoke abuse is tailor-made to the individual child. All of my natural, healthy inclinations and abilities were destroyed as much as was possible for them. My empathy was utilized to make me loyal and silent. My self-esteem was sabotaged so that I was insecure, ashamed and self-loathing. Self-care was punished. Individuation was shamed and scorned. And they never admitted to any of it. Which weirdly is where my salvation comes. 

"You're lucky, we're good parents." 

The fact that these abusive parents actually told me that I was so fortunate to have them, is the red flag I needed to see. Good parents don't preen themselves and use their parenting as a way to shame the child. This shows the gaslighting loud and clear. The fact that they had to create a slippery slope, comparing themselves to people who actually did care for their kids, says they live in lies. And then there are the passive-aggressive digs that I wasn't properly grateful for all they'd done for me. This made me see that it was always ever about my obligation to them, with no reciprocity. They purposely didn't keep a roof over my head, let alone provide a proper bed, bedroom, consistent food on the table, shoes, clothing, medical care, etc. I was the silent homeless "latchkey kid" without a key, before there were words for it. And that doesn't start to cover all the heavy burdens of housework, childcare, lack of privacy put on me. 

The Ultimate Coercive Control Horror 

All this chaos, gaslighting and trauma has left me with permanent brain damage of that FOG I  mentioned. I still live in ungodly terror of my dad and stepmom and they've been gone for 6 years. I had to go no contact with my mom because of the physical, emotional and sexual abuse she and her ex put me through. And I still live in shame for that, even though I didn't go no contact as much as simply allow the doors they slammed on me to stay shut. You may ask, what are you afraid of? And I answer, damned if I know. It's is visceral, gut-level baffling but utterly real. Or real feeling. It is a sucker punch they keep landing on me. I trauma nightmare about it every night. 

The Pandora's Box Reveal. 

If you identify with this parent-caused trauma, I'm so sorry. I have a feeling that too many of you are vigorously nodding your heads in agreement and that sucks. But out of this Pandora's Box, there is one small fairy of hope and she can light our path. Her beacon shows that no matter how real their reign of terror felt, it was fake. They did NOT hold the power they seemed to. They were not gods. They were cowardly playground crybullies. That fear that we felt, was simply a survival trauma response. We never owed them our lunch money. It was just all a mirage. They were just, like Scooby-Doo says, "a man in a mask." They cannot hurt us now. And no, we didn't "let them hurt us" then. We never signed up for this. We just got shoved into it when we were too young and helpless to understand. Where we go from here is now up to us. I'm practicing pushing past the pain and discomfort. I'm doing hard new things that are helping. I'm faking courage till I make it. 

Love always, mar. 

CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent abuse requires new behaviors that are not trauma responses

Hello my friends. Today in my CPTSD recovery from narcissistic parent abuse, I am exploring healthy new behaviors that are not trauma responses. Also called trauma reactions, these unhealthy behaviors include fawning, freezing, fighting, fleeing and another one that I add, fixing (people pleasing, absorbing consequences of and making excuses for others' hurtful actions). And for me, change begins with radical acceptance that the gaslighting of narcissistic abuse was really potent by not real. 

Childhood Trauma Bonding Begets Trauma Responses

Every time I unpack a new concept related to narcissistic parent abuse, I begin by explaining the trauma bonding sequence. This is to remind us both how these dangerous trauma reactions came into play. The parent plays a treacherous Cat and Mouse game of love-bombing (fake shows of affection), bread crumbing (stringing the traumatized child along), future faking (systematically making and breaking promises) followed by random Devalue and Discard for no reason. The malignant parent does this to break the child and make her anxious, hypervigilant and codependent, always chasing the parent for love. The child learns that love is conditional and must be earned WHILE ALSO being expected to give love and respect unconditionally to people who have not earned it and do not give it. 

• New behavior to practice. Respond with love and respect only as merited. To anyone else, just maintain cool aloofness or go no contact. I'm learning to match energy, to stop indulging selfish arrogance and start investing it only in relationships where it is reciprocal. 

The False Reality of Parent Enmeshment 

I use the terms enmeshed parent and narcissistic parent somewhat interchangeably because selfish, arrogant parents are also enmeshed in their children's lives. Not with safety nets that protect us. They strangle us with the distorted narcissistic fantasy they indoctrinated us with. My narcissistic mother and father literally taught me that I didn't matter, that self-care was selfish. Needs were shamed. And being the Broken Vending Machine Child I was parentified to tend to and provide for my parents as if they were my children, with no reciprocity of basic things normal parents are supposed to provide. Individuation was punished and I was force fed gaslighting that my one job was to serve my narcissistic father and mother and any new people they chose to force on me, after they divorced. 

• New Behavior to Practice: I need to stop following my Machiavellian parents' self-serving agenda. I need to cut those unsafe ties that bind. I need to see that this FOG never existed and was as insubstantial as vapor.  I need to go no contact with fawning and people pleasing. 

The Divorced Child and the Black Hole Parent

The natural attachment in the parent-child dynamic only tie one way. Malignant narcissist parents (and they are all malignant if they don't get their way) cut ties and go no contact with their children at birth, as regards anything they owe the child. However the same parent who have shut her out, also trauma bond this "divorced child" to them with distortions, lies, deceptions and FOG (fear, obligation and guilt). They paint a bizarre gaslit reality of double standards, two sets of rules and god complex entitlement. The trauma bonded child is owned, ever-owing and obligated to the demanding never-satisfied Black Hole Parents while also being owed nothing by them.

• New behavior to practice: I have to stop dysfunctional trauma responding by endlessly trying to please unpleasable people. I need to please myself and those with whom respect and giving is a two-way street. Without reciprocity in relationships, one person will always give too much good and accept too much bad, while the other gives too little good and too much bad.  

The End Game of Destabilization

My narcissistic parents withheld, stole or sabotaged everything for me. That included security, shelter, a bed, food and clothing. I (and only I) experienced homelessness, child abandonment, food insecurity, medical neglect, emotional, physical and sexual abuse, among other things. I was sick and tired all the time, too tired to enjoy simple things other kids had. I was told that "we" were poor and yet I saw everyone else, including my parents, their new spouses and kids, with more than enough. Childhood poverty was for me and me alone. The ultimate end game was destabilization through invalidation, narcissistic abuse and coercive control.  Because a stable child threatens the dark tetrad parent's reign of terror. 

• New Behavior to practice: I need to get out and stay out of the path of destabilizers. I need to use radical acceptance that they will never be anything other than dangerous. I need to practice confidence to walk firmly steer clear of dangers by heeding the red flags.