Hello again! This week has been one of massive awareness for me into experiences with parents that I know now to be narcissistic abuse. At 59, I'm just now beginning to pry my fingers off my eyes and out of my ears and admit that what happened may have been narcissistic abuse. Okay, was abuse. With large sides portions of exploitation, neglect, abandonment, manipulation, triangulation, trauma and shame-dumping and gaslighting about all of it.
This has left behind raging CPTSD complete with nightmares, voices in my head, many weird physical manifestations (dizziness, shaking, ulcer, odd adult onset allergies, crippling arthritis, self-harm and apnea. I have a form of brain damage. I cannot think straight, feel right or respond with anything like normal emotions. As an empath, I can't get truly and appropriately angry about what happened. I can only feel shame, guilt and pity for the four narcissists in my life.
And hit pause there, if anyone is thinking that anger is wrong and that I shouldn't feel it, let me stop him right there and show him to the door. I don't need more shaming. That was part of the gaslighting. "look at Marilisa. Isn't she bad? She's so angry. Let us punish her. Who's got the rocks?" All the while they were doing insanely frustrating things that would have driven a cleric to anger and making me live in a big bowl of their rage soup.
I know as I write this that you as readers are probably not thinking that. However this is a consciousness stream so I'm saying it as it comes. Anyone who would suggest, like me dad and mom did, that I'm the wrong to want to feel anger, hit the road. None of us needs anymore stones hurled at them. And anyone who hasn't lived my life, so basically everyone, can't know what it was like. Just as I don't know what your life is like and wouldn't presume to tell you what you need. If you're with me, which is more likely, if you get it, good. I'm glad for both of us.
And yes, I realize that a lot of what I just wrote was not to you but to the narcissists who scapegoated and then shunned me. Thanks for being me through that. And fair warning, there will be a lot more of it in future.
And here's the weirdy beard part. I never did get angry with them even though I should have. Keeping silent very nearly killed me. What they proclaimed to see in my was a reflection of their own rage in the fear in my face. I accepted every shitty thing that all four of them doled out. I never held them responsible. I made excuses for them and absorbed their wrong-doing, including acts of toxic rage (physical abuse, seething, screaming tantrums, mocking, marginalizing, etc.)
I need to feel anger as part of the grieving for the childhood that never was. I need that righteous anger to steel my reserve to get out, energize my exit and prevent me from allowing further abuse. Trust me, I'm not looking forward to it. But I am hoping that some of the poisonous gas in my brain will be burned off in the fire of anger. And then I can let in some fresh breezes and air the place out.
I'm only in infancy and working toward better. But it's going to take a long time. And even that filled me with toxic shame...I should be moving on, getting better, doing it faster, blah, blah. But I'm not doing things their way now. I don't have to listen to them anymore. I'm free or at least, the cage door is open and I can leave any time I want.
Thanks for hanging in there. If you need to end a relationship with a narcissistic abuser or just clear your head from gaslighting, you've come to right place. And you're most welcome. If you need someone to tell you that it shouldn't have happened and that is wrong, I'm your huckleberry.
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