Hi friends. Here are some more thoughts on what CPTSD looks like and weird ways narcissistic parent abuse makes a victim act. Today I'm looking at some trauma responses. I'll show how a dark tetrad (self-serving, exploitative, malicious bully) parent weaponizes the very dysfunctional behavior they helped to create. We'll start out with the trauma response of flinching, or the startle reaction.
We who've been traumatized regularly are on ultra-high alert. We perceive threat everywhere because there always was danger. It may not have been apparent to others but we knew it was waiting. It wasn't accidental and we weren't prepared for it. It was manufactured by dark tetrads to keep us in subservient fear.
Instead of protecting us, like normal parents, dark tetrads destroyed our defenses rendering us constantly fearful and helpless. We don't know how to prepare because it comes out of the blue. Dark tetrads love the weapon of ambush. So we get caught off guard and flinch every time. When we hear a loud sound, we hit the dirt, even if it's just a passing car.
Now you would think seeing us flinch would this would soften our parents' hearts. I felt no end of sad when I saw my kids or grandkids do it. But no, in fact, they harden theirs. Our flinching pisses them off. I don't know why because I'm not a dark tetrad. I think it's because someone might see us and start to question why we're so jumpy. It reminds them that they've put us through hell and broken us. But do they take any responsibility for us or the mess they've put us in? Not a chance.
They blame us for being "so dramatic" They tell us to quit showing off or they'll give us something to be afraid of. Mind you, we can no more control these trauma responses than we could stop breathing. THEY conditioned us to do these things.
My mother got it in her head when I was 7, to start slapping me across the face. She said I got "lippy" with her. I've no idea what she even meant by that. At the time, I just figured I did yet another thing wrong. Nos I look back and remember how people pleasing I was and what a lot of wretched things she did that I overlooked. And I can't think of one thing that would cause me to earn a smack in the mouth. Most likely, knowing her penchant for adopting roles, she'd heard someone complaining of their mouthy kids and decided to cast me in that role and herself as put upon parent.
Even now, she humiliates me in front of others telling how she had to smack me, but stopped because I "hit her back" once. Or raised my hand to. My mom's never been one to let accuracy get in the way of a good story. I believed I did, for the longest time, till, again, I stopped to really consider this. I never ever accused my mom of any of the wrong she did to me that I should have. I just excused it all. So why would I hit the person I had worked so hard to defend??
Answer, I wouldn't. What I probably did, was flinch. And one thing you tend to do when you flinch is to throw up your hands in a startle response. Any real mother would know this. And would NOT weaponize it. (Who's the dramatic one now?) Or I was protecting myself from her oncoming blow. Like shielding your face. But no, mom has to tell it like her big mean daughter hit her mother! Gasp, where are my pearls to clutch! What a bad seed!
Never once does she admit to throwing the first punch. Never do we address why she was hitting me in the first place. Now I have slapped my daughter and I admit it. I'm not proud but humiliated and ashamed. I've confessed it repeatedly and told my precious child that it was ALL my fault not hers. But I thought I was supposed to.
I did it because my mom said not slapping was "spoiling the child." After all, mom had slapped me and mom is always right, right? Interestingly, my mother has now flip-flopped on that. She saw what she said were red marks on my daughter's face and decided to punish me for doing what she had taught me to do. Funny she never bothered with how many red marks she left on my mouth and face.
She told my children not to tell me and my husband (dark tetrads love secrets) but she was planning to call the police on me for child abuse. She has had run-ins with CPS but I hadn't. So I guess she was punishing me for her bad choices too. My kids (God love 'em) said "err, you hit mom, Grama."
The one with the supposed red mark said she was always mouthy and deserved it (she was but didn't, and I would never tell her she did, even if I did get mad and slap her. Just saying). My mother lied to their faces and said she had NEVER hit me once. And that daughter was just protecting me, her abusive mom.
But lest you think my mother did all this because we were in some kind of fight, no. Or that I antagonized her in some way, no. I've only covered for her. Never confronted. She did this is the most passive-aggressive, smile-to-my-face-stab-me-in-the-back, underhanded way possible. And I DIDN'T SEE IT COMING.
Situation was we were effectively homeless having just sold our mobile home to buy a house that was about to be condemned. It had been trashed in the interim between us seeing it at the current tenant moving out. We'd let her stay till her Habitat House was ready but the landlord, our church, hadn't checked up on her. We were struggling just to afford it and I was hustling to get it livable. I had four young kids. And I had just lost a stillborn baby.
I was at my wits end and my old demon suicide was howling. Demons that my mom and dad had put on me, him by constantly threatening me with it and her by dumping his threats on me. Anyway, I didn't want to leave my kids like my dad wanted to leave me. I wanted to do better and get better for all of us. So I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital day program.
My husband was working two jobs and my mom had volunteered to watch the kids (very rare and always leveraged for guilt). She was a little to quick to drive me to the hospital and told them some lies which exaggerated my behavior. At one point they asked her to step out of the room and asked me for the real story.
I told them and they said it sounded like I needed a rest from her, as much as anything. A counselor told me that based on my brief stories, my mom sounded delusional, narcissistic and spiteful and that I had far too high a pain tolerance. So I did my course, found that it was PMD as much as anything, causing it.
But my mother was busy conniving behind the scenes. She had both created the suicidal feelings and shamed me for them. You know the drill: mommy is nuts so we better put her away so you're safe from her and hero grama will take you. So here's me trying my utmost to be mom to my kids while grama dearest is undermining me every step of the way. And here's me thinking she's helping.
And then I come home to four crying kids terrified that Grama is going to take them away from mama and daddy. I found out later that she said all these things behind my back, and that she and her husband who had routinely abused me, and whose other child was killed due to their negligence, were planning to file for custody of my kids. All while showing me her fake-caring "Christian" face. When I was struggling just to survive and not perpetuate the shit they'd put me through.
I told you this shit comes from out of the blue with these dark tetrads. And yet, not. Oh to the victim it comes from nowhere but, in their heads it's deserved. They've been storing things up against you. Not things you did, but things they said you did. Lies, distortions, gaslighting, inventions, twisted, trumped up stuff.
They've been playing a long game and they're out for your blood. You didn't do anything to get revenge for. If anything you were too functional despite their torture and you made them look even worse by comparison. But they don't' need a reason. They're sick, deviant sadists who like to punish. And they, sickest of all, use God as an excuse for their vengeful spite. He supposedly called for the attack.
So they bide their time till you're at your most vulnerable and them, BAM! Gotcha! You never see it coming and the shock takes your breath away. Then they gaslight you that you're imagining it or you brought this on yourself. They never explain how both could be true but you're in too much pain to think of that. You forget that it was their abuse that caused all this in the first place.
A direct kick in the solar plexus would hurt less.
Later I'll share what woke me up to this.
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