Below is something I wrote a little over three years ago, as a first-time mom to a three-year-old little girl and someone who had just come out of Severe Postpartum Anxiety and Depression.
I was a few months into intense therapy for what I had just been told was an emotionally abusive childhood – which completely shocked me, but if it had been anyone else’s life I would have seen it.
I now feel comfortable and compelled to share this.
Since I wrote the below piece I have been through more than three years of EMDR* therapy, my father has since been admitted into a Veteran’s home for severe dementia, and I am now in a strong space of healing and growth.
Why do I share this? It’s not so much for myself, but for anyone who might read it who can either personally relate or who might understand a friend or family member a little better.
Part of emotional abuse is feeling alone in this abuse, normalizing this abuse, feeling like YOU are the problem, especially when the abuser is a fun person to everyone else. So I write this not only as awareness for non-abused persons but also as a beacon for abused persons – to know it is NOT you causing this. It is all THEM. And you can absolutely (happily) live past this.
*If you or someone you know has had traumatic experiences of any kind, consider looking up a therapist who knows this kind of therapy. It was life-changing. (Click on the word above for a link.)
“You know that isn’t normal, right?”
This has sort of become my internal mantra as I work to process my way through an emotionally abusive childhood that I had normalized for 38 years. And yes, in the back of my little brain I always knew so much of my childhood wasn’t ‘normal.’ That my friends didn’t have to do the things I did or deal with the stuff I dealt with. But I also knew a lot of them weren’t as lucky as I was to have a great Mom who was home when I got home, who loved me unconditionally, and who would ‘deal’ with my issues without laying any guilt on me.
I also thought I was lucky to have parents who weren’t divorced and a grandmother nearby I could go ‘play’ with many weekends. But those last two, they weren’t so lucky after all. It’s amazing what a child’s brain can do to make their situation seem normal, lucky, appreciated. Sadly that also lends itself to much childhood shame and guilt as well.
From my earliest memories I was scared to death not to know where my mother was, either visually or audibly. My mother said I was a colicky baby and never let her leave a room I was in. My earliest memories involve always being by her side in stores or freaking out in a panic when I happened to get too far ahead and didn’t see her in the next aisle. I would hide behind her leg when someone tried to talk to me at church. I would have a panicked cry at the mere mention of going to Sunday School in the church I had always known, because Mom wouldn’t be there. I would have to call my mother each night I was at my Grandmother’s house and try to make it through the day and rest of the night without having to call her again or break down in tears that she wasn’t there to hug me and provide the sense that everything was ok.
She was my only savior in a trinity of guardians where the narcissists made up the majority. I never knew WHY I was so terrified to lose her but it was truly terrifying. Now I get it. She was IT. She was my only true loving and caring guardian. She was my life vest and guiding beacon. If I lost her I would have to live with the two narcissists. The idea of that makes me anxious even now as I type that, thinking about my little self with just the two of them. One of them has been deceased for 23 years and the other has absolutely no control over my life and barely over his own these days. But the instilled emotional terror runs deep.
How deep, you may ask? Lots of kids have separation anxiety. No big deal. Well, let me give you an example.
My mother used to teach piano lessons at home in the afternoon and evenings. One afternoon I had fallen asleep in my room and my mother had my older brother play the piano so that I wouldn’t know she’d run up to the store 1/2 a mile away. Why? Because if I had known I would have insisted on going with her since I could not deal with being in the house without her. Unfortunately she underestimated my incredibly finely tuned Mommy radar.
I woke up just fine, heard the piano, no big deal. However, I knew within 90 seconds that wasn’t a piano student. I knew the cadence of a piano lesson, the intermittent Mom-based comments, the type of notes and rhythms repeated in lessons, and this was not that. This was random music that didn’t even sound like any song I’d ever heard. So of course I couldn’t just continue my nap. I had to go see what was going on.
When I found my older brother and he told me what was up I had to contain my epic panic. Not only was Mom at the store and not here but she hadn’t TOLD me. At least if she had TOLD me I could time in my head exactly how long it might take and give her excuses as to why it might take longer until she returned. Now I had NO idea how much time to give her and my coping mechanisms would do no good. It was like flashing red warning lights went off behind my eyes and I just tried to breath and not cry in front of my brother – not because he wouldn’t like it but because I would see his empathy and that would hurt worse.
I went back to my room, looked at the clock, and wrapped myself up in my security blanket, calculating how much time it would take her to be back and how long she might have been gone. Did I mention I was probably 6 at the time?
I would see a visual picture in my head of the inside of that grocery store, United Super, and my mother weaving through the aisles. How she would pay, put the bags in the cart, roll them to the car, and start for home. Then I would painstakingly visualize every second of the drive back home as if I was in the car with her – my way of helping the time go by faster and recognizing how long it might actually take.
If she wasn’t in the driveway by that time I’d go back to that store picture and visualize impediments in her venture – having trouble finding what she was looking for, confused customers in front of her trying to pay with the wrong change, traffic on the road as she tried to turn towards home. It was a way to stop the tears so others wouldn’t hear.
It was a way to control my overwhelming emotions. It was a way to hold back the terror. It was a way to tamp down the hurt and pain that my mother ‘betrayed’ me.
Yup. I felt betrayed.
Because she simply made a quick trip up to the store for something she needed for dinner.
That’s not normal.
Family vacations were Shriner functions. Don’t whine to me about having to trek cross country to old historic sites or re-enactments. At least it was educational and familial.
However, I looked forward to these trips because it was the ONE time of the year I got to stay in a hotel, spend time with Mom and my brother without Mom’s focus on work, and Dad gone for a while most days. My biggest concern was whether the hotel had a pool or not, because that was where I would spend my time until Mom made us get out. Then cable tv, which we didn’t even have the option for at home – we lived outside city limits!
Other than that, these were NOT children-friendly functions. So when the Shriners were back there was a hospitality room where my brother and I would dig through the beer in the bathtub full of ice to get sodas – a rare treat. To do so we would wade through masses of fancy dressed men and women with fezes and jewelry, beer and smoke breath permeating a room with spurts of raucous laughter. Everyone treated us so nicely there was nothing at all egregious about it and it was my normal.
Vacation was time spent with loud people who liked to drink, watching grown men play in their little cars and motorcycles on the hot concrete for far too long, some rare quiet time with my mother and brother playing in the pool and watching cable tv. I always ogled the travel brochures in every hotel and asked mom if we could stop at some neat site or other but knew we probably couldn’t. The Shriners traveled as a convoy: CBs, appropriate Ray Stevens music and all. We were the only kids ever there, so my Dad would never break up the convoy to go somewhere we wanted to go. He would simply suggest some ‘great’ spot to visit to the rest of the crew if HE wanted to go, which generally meant some ridiculous Shriner museum, all-you-can-eat buffet, or giant truck stop.
It’s rather amazing how awesome we thought our vacations were when that’s all we had. It’s only when we got much older did I have any idea what most families did on a family vacation. The kids generally had more input than simply what travel games they wanted to bring or who gets to be the navigator and use the CB to relay instructions to the rest of the convoy. In our young minds those were super awesome unique things that only we had the random privilege of experiencing.
And you know what? Thank God that’s what we thought. Depression would have been far more rampant if our mother hadn’t instilled in us the ‘look on the bright side’ philosophy where you can always find something good in someone or some situation. To enjoy the little things in life.
That saved my sanity, to normalize in such a positive way. If our mother couldn’t stand up to the narcissists in our life and/or get out of the situation, she did what she COULD do and protected us physically and mentally as best as she knew how.
Only upon the return home would some sense of reality darken my mood as I thought about the neat water park or play area I had seen on the way to or from the Shriner convention and how easy it would have been to stop for half a day or stay one day more to do something my brother and I would have loved to do.
Only after the trip, when normality started to return to my father’s demeanor, did I ruminate over what an ideal trip to said locale might have looked like or imagine how my mother and brother and I would take a trip in such a place if Dad wasn’t around to say ‘no’ or let us keep the vehicle one day to explore while he did his thing.
But that was so obviously impossible that it never went very far before I internally chuckled and blew it away with a mental “Yeah right, kids don’t get a say. You can do whatever you want when you’re older with YOUR kids. Shame on you for not just enjoying what you got to do.”
Learning to take care of others is a valuable and respectable skill. One that children should eventually learn to not only appreciate as a skill but also utilize as a way of feeling empathy for others. However, eventually is key. Key also is the reason behind the learning.
To care for another because they need to be cared for and/or can’t care for themselves is part of being a loving human. To care for another because you simple want to is a beautiful choice. However, to take care of another in order to preserve one’s health, either mentally or emotionally, should never fall to a child.
Living with a narcissist is taking care of another in an effort to preserve one’s self.
I have NO memory of a time before I wasn’t taking care of my father and grandmother. I don’t mean tending to their physical needs, feeding them, or clothing them. I mean taking care of their narcissistic emotional needs in order to preserve my own.
My youngest memories still hold crumbs of controlling and tempering my emotions and reactions in order to maintain the least negativity. That’s even sadder – to maintain the least negativity was the most I would truly hope for. Daring to hope to impose positivity or joy, I learned, would often simply result in rejection or disappointment. So why hope for that much? Fly under the radar. Or, if you can’t, try to fly in a neutral zone so you can hope to land on a friendly tarmac.
Would my father or grandmother hit me if I upset them? No.
Did I know that for sure. No.
Would my father get loud, grumpy, and scary if I did or said something he didn’t care for? Highly probable.
Would my grandmother start a mopey guilt trip about being unloved and widowed if I did something she saw as difficult or anything but loving? Almost surely.
’No,’ was my father’s go to answer for just about anything I would ask him.
‘You’re fine,’ was my father and grandmother’s response to anything remotely upsetting to me.
‘Sure you do,’ was a go-to answer for a rare instance I garnered up the courage to say I didn’t care to do something they wanted me to do.
‘Come sit down,’ was the soul-deflating cue that I was to join them in watching NASCAR or something just as boring for as long as it took till I could find an acceptable excuse to leave.
‘Stop that crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,’ was the fatherly support I received if I couldn’t control the emotions I worked so hard to hide from him and it annoyed him.
‘If you’re good, then…’ or ‘we’ll see’ was the rare but often false hope given to my young self if I wanted to do something and didn’t immediately get shut down with a ‘no,’ particularly from my father.
Well you know what? I was almost always fucking good!
I was a god damn angel compared to the majority of kids who had the freedom to express their emotions, run and play in childhood abandon, and simply be a child.
I was quiet. I was smart. I was thoughtful. I was always prepared. I did everything I was told to do with no talk-back unless it involved leaving my mother, my one lifejacket in an ocean of toxins. My older brother was the same way.
My father had two (later three) freakin’ amazing, smart, loving, pleasant, funny, creative, and inherently positive children under his nose and couldn’t see what he was doing to them. In fact, he tried every day to break them, and you know what? He did. Over and over and over again.
I have wounds that no stitches will ever heal. They still ooze and leak and fester from time to time. I have the scars of ancient fractures and hairline cracks that I will carry with me forever. Scars never truly go away, they simply fade…and thank God, fade they have. It’s the deep, jagged wounds that I still have to tend to. Will they ever fully heal? I don’t pretend to hope for that. I do hope for them to eventually scar over like the rest. But I work every day to wear them like the tiger stripes and scars I proudly wear from the pregnancy and birth of my own child.
However, they are FAR harder to display proudly. Scars from narcissistic guardians come with complications: deep-rooted shame, desire for love and acceptance from an incapable source, and a toxic disease that attacks one’s self-worth. No matter how many people tell me how good I am, how thoughtful, how loving, how brilliant, how creative, how impactful, how necessary I am, the disease sits in remission like a cancer. It may be gone now but I can never be sure when or if it will surface again.
There is no miracle cure. The damage was done too long ago, every day, over and over and over again, for the first 18 years of my life and intermittently after. That kind of toxicity seeps into your bones and nearly every fiber of tissue.
HOWEVER, it did NOT fully break me! I am HERE.
I am a GOOD mother. I was a GOOD teacher.
I am a LOVING person to others. I fully LOVE others.
I am SMART. I am SUCCESSFUL. I am ME.
I am a confused me. I have social anxiety tendencies. I have an anxiety disorder. I fight EVERY GOD DAMN DAY against the recording in my head of my father and grandmother that tell me not to stand out, to do what I’m told, to fear the unknown, to fit in, to control my emotions.
BUT I FIGHT BACK.
I see therapists. I write out my story, bit by bit. I practice showing anger (can you imagine having to do that?).
I practice showing vulnerability with my husband and others close to me.
I LOVE my daughter and parent her DIFFERENTLY. I give her CHOICES. I show her SAFE spaces and methods to show emotion. I try to VALIDATE her feelings. I EXPLAIN nearly every ‘no’ I ever have to say to her. I let her ARGUE with me. I let her be ANGRY. I let her look WEIRD. I let her look DIFFERENT, bless her, when loud noises scare her or she needs to bring one of her safe objects into a class with her, or when she doesn’t want to say hello to a close friend. I try to make sure she knows she is OK just to be herself. My husband and I LOVE her just as SHE IS.
I NEVER want my daughter to have to manage her emotions and become neutral in order to feel on an even keel. I want her to feel safe expressing her anger, grief, overwhelm, joy, sadness. I want her to love on her father and look to him not just for physical safety but emotional safety as well. Her father and I are BOTH products of a narcissist father but damned if we are going to let that toxicity filter into our daughter’s childhood without a fight.
I see two therapists to work through this so I don’t pass on my toxicity to my daughter. EVERY time I leave her to see one of these therapists and she asks me not to go I question. I question the necessity. I question if I should just stay. But I DON’T. I GO. I GO for her. I GO for me. I GO for our family. It’s frustrating and hard and sometimes I swear it’s going nowhere. But I GO. I TRY. I TALK. I LISTEN.
These memories and feelings are repressed deeply and it’s SO hard to try to extract them from my internal fibers, but I try. And I must believe it helps. I must believe that every visit gets me closer and closer to freedom. Because at 38 I grieve for my childhood. I grieve for freedom and a lack of inhibitions. I grieve for a time without self-imposed controls. Yet I can HAVE those things through and with my daughter if I can purge the long-stagnant toxins of decades past.
My narcissistic grandmother is long deceased and my father has absolutely no say anymore. He is a gentle giant of age and dementia now. A father that only affects me if I let him. A grandfather who’s granddaughter does NOT accept his need to control situations and has NO fear telling him exactly what he can or cannot do.
My daughter is to my father what I wanted to be. THAT is a visual triumph for my emotional struggle. And my dad accepts it. A third child, a wife who found a voice, a daughter who left and learned to stand up, and the reflection of age have greatly tempered him. Dementia simply cleansed the memories and dulled his toxins on top of that.
Is he a different man? Hell no. He’s still the victim. Still the one that he can’t help but think about in the end. But the edge is gone. The unknown consequences are gone. The daily barrage is gone. I am gone. Not far, as I want my daughter to have her grandmother as much as she can. But still gone. I’ve been emotionally distant from him for a while now out of self-preservation. I doubt he even really notices. His constant fears are so much to attend to I doubt he has time to realize and notice.
But I need YOU to notice. He is the narcissist I never knew about. The narcissist I never would have recognized. The narcissist we often simply label as ‘needy.’ That’s part of his danger. He lurks out in the open, masked by charm, laughter, helpful acts, community involvement, and the seemingly doting family. He has to. He can’t stand to be dismissed or stop generating praise in his helpfulness. Gaslighting in an extremely attractive costume.
Don’t believe me? Think there is no way someone like this could hide in plain sight? Let me help you appreciate the incredibly attractive smoke and mirrors my Dad innately concocted as his own system of self-preservation. Not as an evil genius, mind you. But as a desperate, needy, self-involved man with a more than healthy dose of fear and anxiety, probably instilled from his own narcissistic mother.
Growing up, if you came across my Dad, you would generally encounter:
– A jovial man with a big smile on his face greeting you with a loud, boisterous hello.
– A well dressed man with a penchant for hilarious flamboyance via ridiculously colored socks, a silly hat, a costume of one sort or another, or simply a funny face or little jig.
– The man who would do ANYthing you needed help with, even if you didn’t want the help. Or bring you not one of something you needed, but two more extras just in case. (Which often meant his own family came in second.)
– A man who would brag on his daughter’s grades or recitals and his son’s latest Boy Scout achievement like a proud Papa. He’d even offer you one of his wife’s FAMOUS cakes, NO problem! (Though he would never have asked her first.)
– A man who loved his family SO much and they him that they went everywhere with him. NEVER was he without at least one child and often a spouse. (But that wasn’t the real reason.)
So there you go. A reflection on an abusive childhood shortly after it was pointed out to me, point blank, by a skilled therapist.
I am in a better place now than when I wrote this.
I have gotten angry, gotten therapy, and forgiven.
Do I visit my Dad much? No. But that is for multiple reasons. However, my daughter DOES visit him, with my mother, once in a while now that vaccinations have been distributed. BUT, that is my daughter’s decision – my mother simply asks if she wants to go and respects her decision. Something I didn’t have the luxury of as a girl except the few times my father was out of town or I was with my maternal grandmother.
So things are better. My Dad has severe dementia but in many ways he’s actually better because of it. He often can’t remember enough to be so incredibly anxious and controlling. He often can’t remember enough to remember his own trauma. And he has people to care for him and pay attention to him 24 hours a day. It’s a true blessing for all of us.
Because I DO love him. I love who I know he wished he could be. I love who he was at his best. And I love all the things he taught me about tools and carpentry and building and design that many girls often weren’t a part of. I also love that I learned to be weird and ridiculous and silly and embrace that…from him. But loving myself now means distance to focus on myself.
I hope this has helped YOU in some way.
Either in providing empathy for someone you care about, recognizing something in your own life, or simply gaining perspective on abuse.
Please, feel free to drop me a message or a comment…I’d love to hear from you.