Hello my beloved friends. If you've been following, you'll know I've been wandering in some some completely uncharted territory in my memory and experience. I've really looked for the first time at things that happened and have happened throughout my life, involving abuse, neglect, exploitation, manipulation, triangulation, parentification, abandonment, endangerment, shaming, invalidating, scapegoating, gaslighting and more, from four parents.
What got me started was weirdly Reddit, particularly posts on AITA by kids experiencing these things now only with words to identify what is happening. These triggered a tidal wave of memories from beginning 60 years ago up to now, of abuses for which I didn't have words for. And a comment by a very much loved young lady in my life, helped identify further, what is probably the most heart-breaking feeling in all of this.
And you might be surprised by what it is. How about anger? Is that the worst? It's a difficult one for sure. There's a lot of shaming against expression of anger by people who can't or won't understand. Perpetrators of child abuse use it masterfully to shame the poor kids they are hurting. Narcissists adore whistle-blowing on their "angry" victims because it takes the blame off them and onto the "angry" person. My vindictively, viciously, venomously angry parents loved to blame shift their poison onto me. The calmer I stayed the more they threw at me till I cracked and then they nailed me. If I didn't crack they lied and said I did. Same net result. And I don't know if abused kids can ever really feel the anger we probably should feel. But that's not the worst.
Is it fear? Absolutely there's that. Abuse of various kinds, neglect, abandonment, endangerment, shaming, invalidating, backstabbing, scapegoating, parentifying by parents causes unspeakable terror. Fear that is so chokingly prevalent but so dangerous to express that it goes deep into bone marrow. And sits there lurking. It's the worst kind of fear because the monster is real.
But that's not the worst. So is it shame? Oh without a doubt, shame grows where abuse goes. Sick, pit of the stomach self-disgust that is gaslit into you by people repeatedly hurting you with smiles on their faces. It's utterly confusing, being told right is wrong when you do it and wrong is right when they do it. I'll spend the rest of my life having to repeat to myself "it's not you. Shameful things were done TO you." Lather, rinse, repeat. Now I think of it, that is the worst too.
But the feeling that, I think is the most heartbreaking, is loneliness. Every Advent and Lent, I ask God to give me a focus for prayer and two years ago, He gave me lonely people. Gave it to me in such a way that my empath self was shattered with grief for the lonely. This was before I really started exploring my past experiences. Now I see that I was one of the lonely included in that group.
Why is loneliness so sad? Because it is so damn vulnerable. It puts us at abusers' mercy. It puts us at everyone's mercy. We take shit we oughtn't to, because we want not to feel loved and with someone. IN a way, it's the distillation of all the other shitty feelings. Fear causes anger (or frustration or a triggered reaction or stress or anxiety) which causes shame which causes fear, you know the pattern. And then, bad people use this to excuse scapegoating, shaming, excluding, exploiting, abandoning, etc.
We are lonely because we have driven people away. In my case, it was my "sin and disobedience" that apparently made me untouchable. They had to keep me from others because I was so nasty and toxic. In short, if I was lonely I'd only myself to blame. Completely ignoring the fact that their actions had brought out all this. I had been LEFT TO PLAY ALONE since I was 4. I had been LEFT OUT of everything except the heavy lifting. I had been EXCLUDED (cut out, excised, erased) from family when my birth parents broke up our family and started "their own" families with no room for me. Except again for the heavy lifting.
There's an old saying, "alone but not lonely." Which I do think is possible. What CPTSD kids experience is alone AND lonely. We do not know what it is like to be loved. We don't know what trust even looks like, let alone when it's safe or not safe to trust. We are left to figure things out alone as preschoolers. We are shamed and told we're a nuisance if we ask for help. Or even just inadvertently show that we need it.
We grow up knowing that we annoy, irritate and upset people. We not only get in the way, we ARE in the way. We are obstacles to good things in others' lives. So why would we not separate ourselves? We do not want to cause problems for mommy, daddy, new mommy or new daddy, would we? We are the albatross around the neck, the millstone dragging others down. Through no act of our own. Just by being ourselves. It's a twisted, perverted version of Mister Rogers. Instead of us making each day a special day, just by being, we make each day miserable. Just by being.
But hearing this lovely lady whom I love talking about feeling lonely, makes me think. And it makes me righteously angry as well as heartbroken. It's time to stop this nasty CPTSD gaslighting in it's tracks. It's time to turn the tables and show it up for what it really is. Kiddo, if you've been abuse and shamed into thinking you're the problem, you're not. Abusers abuse because of something in them. Invalidators invalidate because they are broken. You aren't the millstone. They put one on you.
My "family" put millstones around my neck in the form of angry, bitter, abusive people they had pitted against me and allowed to victimize me. They had become millstones by always taking the other's part and never supporting me. They made me the fall guy for things they had done. They'd left me dangling, exposed and vulnerable. They had abandoned me for boyfriends, girlfriends and their new kids. They had cut me off from the loving people in my life. They'd tried to poison us against each other.
I wasn't a failure because I didn't serve or parent them as I should. They put wrong expectations on me to serve and parent. A child is a family member, not unpaid staff. A child is not a surrogate spouse. A child is not a parent, either to their parents or other children. A child is not a scapegoat because there is no such thing. There's no thing or person who can take the weight of another's actions on herself. If a scapegoat is needed, it's because the parent has done shameful things that he and she should be confessing, not lying about, covering and pinning on an innocent victim.
If you are feeling loneliness and isolation, take a look at why. Are you actually doing things to alienate? If so, try to figure out what those things might be and work to stop doing them. Do you prefer being alone? That's okay. Or have you been brainwashed into thinking you don't deserve any better? That people are better off without you?
That my loved one, is complete bollocks! We need you. You matter.
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