A lot of processing going on in this blog entry, be forewarned. Repeating to myself the Truth of my experiences helps me to accept my own voice about them. I am rewiring my brain as I write this. To accept a new truth, a truth that I am enough. And already I have noticed some changes.
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And really... what are the odds?
Whenever something unexpectedly bad happens in my life -- a bout of severe chronic illness, a change in money input or what feels like money troubles (huge trigger there), when things don't go down as planned or scheduled, when jobs change or are lost, when a beloved animal gets sick, when my children have an especially difficult time in their lives -- my body and brain automatically catastrophize it. Adrenaline is released, and panic sets in. A toxic concoction of the chemicals that help make up the emotions of shame and fear pour into my body and brain like a poisonous chemical spill, they get everywhere. I shake, and I fall into an instant deep depression. I feel somehow I have earned whatever this bad thing is that has happened (even if it's not directly to me, I can feel the effects still). Shame and fear make me freeze inside like a deer in the headlights, unable to think or function beyond the thought of my next breath, let alone, the next day.
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| Source: https://www.facebook.com/BattlingChronicPainandMentalHealthTogether |
It is like climbing a mountain in the dark in wet soaking galoshes with both hands tied behind my back and a blindfold, to try to find my way through it when this hits. It is physically devastating, periodically even leaving me bedridden and weak for several days. Sometimes sleeping it off is the only possibility, and when I wake up, there is no guarantee it will have changed. I get stuck emotionally and sick physically, and while I get up to love on my children who deserve nothing less every moment, I want to dig deeper for even more patience for them, and I am cruel and mean to myself in my mind, not being able to connect to unconditional love for my own being.
Because I have been taught I am a shameful being, not entitled to the good things in life because I haven't earned them in the way my parents (and now apparently brother) see fit, I have to consciously remember why this is happening to me. I have to set up alarm systems, and intellectualize it so that when I take that big dip, I am able to cling to a rope that tells me there will be a way out of here, even if I can't see it yet. That I did not deserve this any more than I deserved being dry raped. That I am a deeply sensitive person, and that it is okay. That bad things happen to good people all the time. That my family isn't around to bring shame into the picture, or try to make me feel bad about myself. And that I am smart and capable and can think my way through most every problem that comes my way. I have to consciously, mindfully, purposefully remember that I am strong and able to get through this. And that it is not my fault that it happened. That's the biggest bit, right there.
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| Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/After-Narcissistic-Abuse-There-is-Light-Life-Love/114835348601442 |
And even then, it sometimes doesn't work and I fall, ropeless, into the abyss. I can intellectualize it, but my emotions don't believe it. Figuring out how to climb out from the bottom is a lot harder. That rope slips through my fingers because it has always slipped through my fingers. Sometimes the only way out is through. All I can do is wait it out until I'm well enough to help myself climb out. My husband, who I love more every day, also has his own pits he falls into and he sometimes tries to rescue us both. He is my hero, the quiet kind. And my chosen family, they can tell when it's happening and they are present for me. Without help, it can feel impossible, even when I am telling myself that I am strong enough to hold on to that rope.
The power of the chemical adrenalin stew is enormous over my body, my adrenals crash from the effort of having to expend extreme conscious energy just to remember those good things and the rope; and if that rope fails, then on top of all that, I have to mentally to climb out of the pit, too, with rope burn, no less. Half the time I am internally frozen in this process as I cascade downwards. It is horrible. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
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| Source: https://www.facebook.com/marilynwefel.schmidt?fref=ts |
This is the gift narcissistic and violent parenting has bestowed upon me and my siblings. This family model is dysfunctional. All the kids. 3 out of 3. The temperaments of each of us are different, so we handle it differently, but the rivers run deep, so deep, they are cold and dark and terrifying. Shame is our closest companion, even if we don't see it. I see it now driving the lives of my brother and his wife. I don't want it driving my life any more. I never wanted it in the first place, but it was ever-present in my life and a great tool for manipulation.
One of the wonderful comments on this blog mentions parents as narcissistic egg donors. I like that very much. My parents wanted their children. They wanted to have small people to control. They worked hard to get all three of us born, and then they proceeded with their plan to make us into reflections of themselves, undealt with pain and shame and blame included, in fact, prioritized.
The narcissistic parent is unable to give unconditional love. Instead they give steeply conditional love -- only. If you do, behave, choose and act the way I want you to, the way I think is acceptable, then I will give you love. If you deviate by offering your own unique observations, especially of us, or do anything I deem wrong or out of line with my observations, I will withdraw that love from you. And force you to apologize in order to get my love back. And even then, I will hold this event over your head for the remainder of my life to remind you of exactly how unworthy you are and how quickly love can be completely removed from your life.
They have complete power over a child. I am working hard to remove their power in my adulthood, but it is a daily struggle. There is never a time I feel completely able to cope with the hard things in life unless I have strong validating voices behind me. During the darkest times, I don't see any value in my life at all, and I know that's just not true. My emotions have been very well trained, and I have to pull myself back from those feelings as well.
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| Source: http://www.facebook.com |
Before anyone decides that I'm evil for refusing to "respect my elders," let me just say, elders who demand earned respect from their subordinates should expect the same in return. My parents never earned my personal respect. They were successful to the world outside, and, I might add, in a much easier financial and economic climate. But inside, they were a disaster and that disaster took place all over their kids.
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| Source: http://www.facebook.com |
Fact: it is never the child's fault, not ever.
Until I grew close to a lovely group of people who showed me by example how to love unconditionally, I had no idea that unconditional love even existed. It wasn't even on my radar. No child can ever hope to maintain stability on their own, especially in the darkness and confusion of conditional love alone, and without a steady stable support system, a cushion for the big emotions of being a developing human child. My parents gave us a stable house to live in, but not a stable love to hold within so that we could build ourselves into the people we were actually meant to be. And they did not provide an environment even close to violence-free.
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| Source: http://www.facebook.com |
What is the common denominator between all three of the Family children having such troubles and ending up so splintered and wounded?
My brother was out of the house for the most part by 14, a full blown heroin addict. My sister spent her years bitter and angry, and when she finally got her MD, she left, divorced the family, changed her politics so that they were opposite of the family, hid her number, her location (actual address) from everybody in the family and has found her own private path without any family involved. And now me, struggling with the truth of my experiences, a feeling of being unaccomplished and unworthy, and invalidated by family members at every turn. That what I do to gain status (money, position, etc.) is more important than the fact that I am alive at all. That my life is a failed competition, and that the things I have done aren't of value because some authority hasn't deemed them so. And I also have divorced my family.
What are the odds?
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| Source: http://www.facebook.com |
Apple and the tree and all that? My parents lived their own lives in panic and shame themselves. And they were clearly anxious to lay those things quite early on at our feet. The state of the Family is one of malaise. Families that love one another and do not incorporate shame and conditionality remain close. We will never be close. We are and will remain estranged, because nobody else seems to want to go on this journey of self discovery. And frankly, we are all too wounded.
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| Source: https://www.facebook.com/DomesticViolenceKills |
Those of us who have not examined what really happened to us as children will continue those patterns into the next generation. Well done, mom and dad. Here's your cookie. Go away now, get out of my head.
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| Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/After-Narcissistic-Abuse-There-is-Light-Life-Love/114835348601442 |
Even with the struggles, I think I was probably the luckiest of the three of us. I found loving people outside of my family. People who modeled unconditional love to their children. People who, by mere example, showed me how my family really wasn't loving at all. People who can love without using shame and who do understand how to help people resolve conflicts without blaming one another. These people have offered me love in ways that I never expected I could have.
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| Source: http://www.facebook.com |
As it exists, my family is not entitled to be in my life any longer. I am fully no contact, and should my brother attempt to contact me, I will require a third party moderator for us to interact in a way that more closely resembles a civilized conversation, rather than a list of shaming accusations. My brother and his wife are unable to have that with me, that has been more than apparent in our interactions since the death of my parents. And I am unwilling to provide them an audience for their threats of anger and judgment sitting around every corner, in every dusty shelf, in the cracks of their lives. They are not safe. They are now the picture of NPD. And they don't even know it.
What are the odds? Three out of three kids being dysfunctional is not a reflection of the kids. They are not responsible. They only become responsible as adults. Something my parents never came to terms with or faced even remotely, throughout the entirety of their adult lives. They were cowards in that they never owned any of their problems or even tried to look at them. And their beliefs were simply their own wishes, with no more validity than anybody else's wishes. (Lest we forget my father's prestigious position at UC Berkeley, which made him better than most people, certainly his children, at least to him.)
My father believed that children were blank slates and that you could imprint whatever you wanted upon them. He believed that forcing them to be taught to be, or think a certain way would make them become the people he wanted to see them become. While intellectually, he knew that each person was completely different -- he even wrote a poem about the lesson of snowflakes for me when I was 7, which he would later use to try to convince me that he was a great parent who understood individuality; it's that narcissistic gaslighting manipulative mental mind frack that he was so good at -- his writing and intellect did not match up with his emotional treatment, behavior and parental decisions. He was the adult, and yet he competed, lectured, forced, demanded, lectured, judged, critiqued, belittled, lectured, shamed, lectured, out-argued, lectured some more and asserted control in whatever manner worked, to get us to be the kids he envisioned. And it clearly never worked. Not once, in fact three out of three misses flat out. Yet he banged on and on as if he'd been making the right choice all along.
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| Source: http://www.facebook.com |
Until he got sick, and cruelty to his children began to insult his soul.
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