How religious abuse sabotages a kid's God-given safety system

 Hi friends. I'm on a mission to heal my CPTSD caused by decades of narcissistic parental abuse, neglect, endangerment, abandonment, exploitation, scapegoating, parentification, invalidation, constant shaming, intimidation and gaslighting. Today I'm looking specifically at how religious abuse sabotages a kid's God-given safety system. I'll also explore how narcissistic parents pervert and weaponize religion, specifically Christianity, to destroy their children. 

"Christian" narcissistic parents have a huge arsenal of weapons for child abuse, in the Bible. I know, you're thinking, um, what?? The Bible teaches God's love. Well, I know that and you know that. Because to us, the Bible is an instruction book. And a love story from God to us. To a narcissist, it's a weapon of mass destruction. It's a buffet of options from which they pick and choose what they like for themselves. God is love to them. For others, He's a harsh tyrant raining down molten lava on his hapless victims. 

Narcissist parents twist everything in the Bible to suit their selfish ends. They use it to justify their cruelty, exploitation, manipulation, endangerment, abuse, neglect, shaming, parentification, invalidation and harassment of their children. At least mine did. Let's take the trope of "faith over fear" which you'll know if you have followed this blog I believe is a huge heresy. And I'm not one to use that word lightly. 

My narcissist parents ( I had four), terrorized me regularly with violent anger, Draconian punishment and constantly shifting expectations. They wore down my resistance with medical and physical neglect. They told me all sorts of crazy crap and got me so confused that I went into a dissociative fugue and shut down for large periods of my life. They made up lies about what God expected from me that I was afraid of my own shadow. They made me slave for them until my back was so crooked I couldn't stand straight. They abandoned me in frightening situations and left me at the mercy of terrifying people. 

And then, they shamed me for being afraid. They called it "showing off" and "disloyal" and "attention-seeking" and "lies." They literally laughed at me because I was so shell shocked by their atrocious behavior that I walked and talked and cried and screamed in my sleep. Then they'd pull out the "faith in God" spiel. A God whom they had previously said pretty much despised me. I mean  why else was I left to play alone in strange cities? A loving God wouldn't do that so I must be unlovable, right?

So you might be thinking that's exaggerated. Which of course it is, to an adult who has had a relatively safe, secure and loving family life. To a child who's been mistreated, it's all too real. Downplayed, if anything. I have only just at 60, begun to fully unpack the unutterable terror that has assailed me all my life. Being scared witless by your parents and then shamed and punished for being afraid is the definition of shit and shoved in it. And damned if you do and damned if you don't. 

And this bizarre quagmire is incredibly useful for toxic parents to keep a child in line. Fear is a poor motivator but a great disabler. By keeping thinking that everything I do is wrong, not good enough, done for wrong reasons, they kept me ever hopping thru hoops, trying and never managing to please. Think about it. If you guilt a kid into thinking that parent pleasing (four of them, mind) is God's will and that she is always failing, why you've just set off a perpetual motion machine. I was frantically spinning my wheels and going nowhere. And the inner pain and anguish is indescribable. 

So how did they manage that? How did I not at some point see through this shame sham? Because what abuse and then gaslighting about it does is to sabotage a kid's God-given safety system. Hurting a kid repeatedly and then lying about it, saying it's the child's fault or that it didn't happen, damages her inner CQD signals. She fails to heed the iceberg warnings because she's been taught to ignore red flags. Red flags God has put in place to protect. And she keeps ramming the icebergs and damaging her little boat. Pretty soon it's broken on the rocks. 

That's where I am now. A 60 year old shipwreck. All that messed up, toxic, harmful junk from childhood is as real to me now as it was 55 years ago. In fact, it's gained momentum over the years. My dad's angry shaming voice, his wife's passive aggressive rage, my mom's exploitative backstabbing iand her husband's malignant abuse are scarier now than ever. 

And we can all say, till we're blue in the face, that I'm an adult now. Old enough to know better. I'm not bound by those old, wicked teachings. Trust me,  I punish myself all the time, over this. If I had enough faith, I could overcome this reign of terror. Oh that I could. But that's not how it works. 

God instills in us, a sense of fear, to keep us safe. He doesn't want us to blindly ignore his warning system, to plow heedlessly through caution tape. He gives us warning signals to recognize dangerous people. Unfortunately, when those are the very people who are supposed to care for us, well, we're kind of screwed. They are the wolves in sheep's clothing. The tormentors with parent faces. And because we are children, we know none of this. A child, especially a traumatized one, accepts her parents' version of everything, no matter how hurtful it is to her. They are God to her.