Hi friends. I've been re-examining pretty much everything in my life. I've finally admitted that my parents were both narcissists who divorced and married other narcissists. And that this collective of narcs abused, neglected, abandoned, endangered, exploited, manipulated, triangulated, parentified, scapegoated, invalidated, shamed and gaslit me throughout my life. Today I'm looking at a particularly insidious form of narcissist parental abuse, and that's religious gaslighting. I'm examined how it destroyed my understanding of God.
Narcissists may talk a good Christian talk. They may get others to believe they love God. My parents even claimed to be "preachers" proclaiming the good news. But what narcissists truly believe is that there is no God outside of themselves. And they show this in their every action. And as we're told in scripture, it's deeds, not words that matter. A tree is known by its fruit.
They talk about obedience to God but they are not obedient to Him. They lean on their own understanding. They go their own way and do their own thing. And then they further gaslight by calling their will, God's will. Their thing is God's thing. But even a cursory examination of scripture proves their agenda. They disobey scripture and act contrary to it. They literally believe, and show in their actions, that God's commands, which they regularly preach, apply to others, but not them.
My parents got divorced for no good reason. They committed adultery. They neglected my care. They abandoned and endangered me. They exploited me for their own selfish ends. They married other self-centered people whom they called my parents and made me serve them. They pimped me out to be abused as their new partners saw fit. They had children whom they favored and they scapegoated me. They coveted money and possessions, and ignored my basic care. They used people. They stole from and cheated people, including me, out of things. They lied and gaslit. All while reading their Bibles, going to church, praying and preaching.
And you would think this would confuse me, but it didn't. I wasn't at all confused about God because I knew it was my mom, dad and their spouses. They WERE Gods to me. Parents are the living image of God, to a kid. If it's a wrong or contradictory image, the parent is the one the child believes. I never knew any others. The Bible God and my parent fused and enmeshed, so that I never knew there was a difference. Anything that didn't fit was put down to my wrong thinking.
And they were very good at religious gaslighting. So good that my mom had me believing she was doing God's will shagging married me and conducting a series of affairs. She had me so guilted for asking why she was divorcing my dad, I thought it was my fault. Even her foul-mouthed, sponging, laybabout boyfriend knew God's will better than me. He took pride in exposing my "sins" (as a kid).
My dad had me suicidal over my failure to guess what they wanted and provide it. I was a constant disappointment to all four of my parents. I routinely failed to meet their contradictory, ever-changing, selfish, and I see now, unBiblical demands. No amount of work I did was enough. Even co-sleeping with their babies and parenting them as if they were mine, wasn't. I don't remember when at least one of them wasn't furious and disgusted with me. These were the Gods I grew up with. If you've never experienced anything like this, and can't understand it, think cult.
How did they manage to so completely hoodwink me? In several ways. Scripture explains that if you train up a child in the way he should go, he won't depart from it. Well, the reverse is also true. Train her up in the wrong way, gaslight and brainwash her from the womb, and she can't get it out of her head, either. Like I said earlier, parents are a child's first earliest "god." What they do with that determines how the child relates to the real God.
If they are serving God, they humbly present Him as He is, as best they can, then the child is able to form a healthy relationship with God. If they present themselves as God, if they weaponize scripture to serve themselves, the child relates to God only through parents. They gatekeep God from her and put themselves in the role of Jesus, as the only way to the Father.
They also quoted scripture accurately. The Bible did seem to be saying these things to me. And that's just the problem, I now see. They quoted scripture out of context and AT me, like a weapon. But they weren't LIVING it. They were preaching but not practicing. They were white-washed sepulchers, full of death. They were binding people to burden they didn't carry. They led little children astray. And once I saw that, all the rest fell into place.
They fancied that everything they did was God's will. Even sin. When something bad happened to them, it was someone else's fault and was thwarting God. Even though the fault was usually theirs. When my mother lost her foster care license, it was everyone else's fault, when she abused the children. When she and her boyfriend conceived a baby, in adultery, shortly after the child abuse charges, this was God rewarding them and punishing those who stood in her way.
Everything was twisted to their benefit. They expected blanket forgiveness and exoneration though they never once confessed a sin. However, for others, it was fire and brimstone for the slightest transgression (which were often made up when I wasn't sinning enough)And woe to anyone who suggested that they might be wrong. Even God. He was kicked to the curb, and exploited just like me.
But God is not mocked. He is not a supporting actor in someone's show. His word is not a tool to use against people. There is one God in three divine persons, and They are not four narcissistic, self-centered, abusive human control freaks. I didn't know that then. Or maybe I did. Maybe it was just safer to play along. I'll blog more on that later.
Where I find myself now is having to rethink God. It's my choice how I do that. I was abandoned, it felt like by even God Himself. And now it's me that has to find my way back, or forward. Please pray for me in that. It's a brave, but terrifying, new world ahead.
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