I may repeat various aspects of my experience, either to flesh them out fully, or to note how they were relevant to my experience. It is all a part of healing, so I am giving myself the allowance to repeat what seems to need repeating in my heart. For too long, I've listened to everybody else's evaluation of me. It's time for me to listen to myself, even if that means repeating something. Clearly, it feels needed to repeat it.
My father regularly compared me to my friends, asking me why I couldn't be more like so and so. He told me plainly if he thought I'd gained too much weight. He placed entirely too much focus on the poems he wrote for me, rather than on me as I was. He wrote letters filled with compliments to teachers who motivated me to like what he liked. And when he did perceive me as hurt by a teacher -- and it took me becoming completely out of control hysterical before they stopped trying to blame me for whatever had upset me -- he would get them fired in an angry act of power. And then treat me as an annoyance after, because I interrupted his more important work. I really truly could not win no matter how hard I tried. Somehow, he felt firing a bad teacher would soothe my pain.
It never occurred to him that this doesn't work for children. That "winning" might mean having your parent's devotion, full focus, support and attention, without judgment.
Because in the end, it was all about his comfort. And my mother's. Anything that upset the status quo was a "problem" they didn't feel they should have to deal with. Any big emotional upset was not comfortable for them. My brother says they did the best they could. I don't believe for a second they came even close to the concept of "best." People who do a good job at something work at it. They didn't work at parenting, not for a moment. And they certainly didn't address any of their own issues.
As little as some may like it, or see these characteristics in themselves, they are strong indicators of the spectrum of narcissistic personality disorders.
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| Source: https://www.facebook.com/PPAAlife |
All of this type of behavior is the opposite of supporting your child during emotional development. This is removing all support systems, and then kicking out the legs underneath. Need we remind ourselves that (theoretically) adults are the ones with the developed frontal cortex. It is their responsibility to understand that the child needs their assistance to navigate difficult situations, to find ways to peacefully resolve conflicts, to BE that frontal cortex and to do so without damaging their child's fragile new psyche. Shaming and punishing and yelling do the opposite of help. They harm. Especially coming from every direction a particularly sensitive child turns. If they could find a way to blame me, they did. It was never their fault. And they never once apologized to me for any mistake they might have made because they never made any. And, besides, a child should not be apologized to.
As I mentioned earlier, this particular feature of finding me wrong no matter what about my mother served several of my predatory friends very well later in my life. In fact, sabotage was often my mother's go-to action against me or others. She often spoke to other members of the family about me, and often spoke to my friends and their parents and her adult friends about me in unkind and uncomplimentary ways behind my back, and it would find its way back to me again and again. This has an actual name. It's called "triangulation." And my heart would sink and my cortisol would shoot way up and I'd feel ill, over and over and over again.
The only time I was bragged about was if I was doing well in some area they approved of, and it was to someone besides me. They blustered with a kind of pride at my various successes as long as those successes met with their specific guidelines of approval. It wasn't until I started getting starring roles at university in play after play, that they suddenly were swooning directly to me, instead about me to someone else, or discussing my "problems" with others. And it was because I was an extension of them. I was making them look really good in their minds. But it, too, was temporary, fleeting, for around the next bend, the shame would return. It was the constant.
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In all the incidences that occurred in my younger child life in which there was a conflict, only one single time did my parents support my position and *actually* offer me some emotional support, and it was because my parents heard for themselves the horrific things that were being said to me. A 14 year old boy I had broken up with called me to cuss me out quite viciously. My father happened to pick up the phone too and hear it live. That boy ended up at my front door with his dad to apologize (itself a rather pointless act, but I at least felt vindicated on some level -- because it was my father's definition of "winning"). It was the single only time they believed me, and it was only because they'd witnessed it, too. But if they didn't witness it themselves, they never once supported or believed me. I was always the one at fault. Something was surely wrong with me.
By the time I was 13, I was so terrified of conflict and the way it was for me, I hid, I avoided it. My entire 8th/9th grade year (I was skipped a grade due to a school change), I spoke to no one. I stared into space and didn't look at anyone. I avoided people and conversations because I thought I'd get hit. I withdrew from people who moved toward me. I certainly didn't want to invite pain on my life from anyone at school, for if I did that, I would also have to face the rage and stress from my parents around it at home. I'd forgotten I could have fun. Conflict was something I turned the world off to avoid, lest it find its way back to my parents some how.
There were very specific incidences that took place for me at school, in the 4th grade and the 7th grade. Both amounted to resentment from my parents toward me. My brother, off being addicted to heroin, at least didn't make them deal with conflicts. So he was far better than I was in their view. When I really sit down and think about that, it's pretty damn astonishing. I was the problem.
Even in my college years in my early 20s. I lived with a roommate in a house I was taking care of for my parents' friends. The house was burglarized and they had entered using a key my roommate had lost, because she was busy partying on ecstasy, cocaine and booze that night. Because the house was not mine, I had to ask her to leave. Many of the owner's possessions had been taken. It was my responsibility to make sure this didn't happen again because of carelessness. She knew my mother was not emotionally supportive of me and could be quite mean behind my back, so this roommate called my mother and told her all sort of flat out lies about me. Out and out horrific lies. Stuff, that if my mother really knew who I was, she'd know I could never do, it just wasn't in me, I didn't have the courage.
(This speaks to the character of said roommate, by the way. And my clearly still making poor choices in friends. 'Nuff said there.)
My mother later called me, furious and panicked, yelling at me at the top of her lungs spouting these ludicrous lies at me as if I was supposed to answer for them. I was 24 at this point. I was actually stunned into utter disbelief and silence for a moment as I listened to her tirade against me. (Why at this stage I was surprised was because I believed in the Family Illusion and in the Family Illusion we were wonderful, and a mother would never pull a stunt like that. And yet she did it again and again.) Finally, I got the courage up to ask, "Mom, are you going to believe my roommate, or are you going to believe your daughter?" It shut her up for that moment. But it took me until was 24 to even consider saying that to her. And it didn't change the way she perceived me, as always the one at fault.
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And rather than accepting and apologizing, she begrudgingly accepted my word. Her response went something like, "Oh. Well....okay...." the hesitation to believe me never once leaving her tone. Never backing me up at all, she always stood weakly with any other "friends" who did similar things. When I say cowardice, this stuff is what I'm referring to. She also discussed my life with a friend I had at the time purposefully asked not to contact me. My mother was more than happy to connect with her to fill her in on the details of my life. There were no healthy boundaries in my house, none at all. And many people inside and outside the family knew this and took full advantage of it.
To this day, I feel I must apologize for simply being alive. I apologize if I am late, if I am right, if I am wrong, if I didn't do anything, if you are unhappy, even if I am unhappy, if, if, if… It is a burden my parents were oblivious to placing on me in order to create whatever character they thought it would create. But they were not creators when it came to me. They were more often destroyers. They force fed me what they wanted me to know and think about and be like. Who I already was wasn't even in their minds. Utterly unimportant, utterly worthless, not worth hearing, validating, or sometimes, even noticing. And certainly not capable of producing anything of value without their approval and condonement.
"We were born to tell the truth. Not to be shamed in to someone else's idea of reality so they can be comfortable." ~ Jennifer Davis Green
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| Source: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/february-13/why-love-literally-hurts.html |
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