As the children of narcissists, we are all familiar with that awful nagging feeling of guilt. If you were indoctrinated as a child by a narcissistic parent, you know not only the feeling of guilt for your behaviour, but guilt for just thinking about doing something the N won’t like and later, guilt that continues long after the deed is done—even if amends have been made.
One of the most powerful weapons
a narcissistic parent wields is that of guilt—but for it to work, we have to be complicit.
What is guilt?
Guilt is part of your conscience. Its purpose is to keep you
on the straight and narrow. If you are contemplating doing something wrong,
your conscience will send you a little pang of guilt to give you a taste what
you are going to get if you go ahead and do it. Then, if you go ahead and do it
anyway, your conscience sends you more guilt to punish you and to motivate you
to fix whatever it was you damaged with your wrongdoing.
In a person with a healthy
psyche, someone who grew up in an emotionally healthy environment, this works
exceedingly well. It is part of our internalization of morality, and occurs
gradually as we mature, moving from external controls on our behaviour to
internal. We grow into moral beings and do what is right for no other reason
than it is right, not because we fear consequences or expect reward: this is
normal, healthy guilt.
Unfortunately for ACoNs, we may
internalize the morality but, because we learn that morality from narcissistic
parents, it may be strikingly different from the morality learned by others who
had more normal, emotionally balanced role models. A normal parent will
encourage their children to strike out on their own when the time for
separation from the family draws near. They will facilitate individuation,
encourage kids to make their own decisions, move into their own quarters,
contribute when help is needed and solicited, and generally behave like an
adult. Such parents will try to keep their own separation anxiety at bay—or at
least hidden—lest it check the child’s forward impetus. Good parents,
appropriate, functional, emotionally healthy parents, want to see their chicks
successfully fly. Narcissistic parents, on the other hand, often want to keep
them tied to the nest with fear, obligation and guilt.
It is easy to see how an
engulfing or enmeshing parent binds their children to them with overwhelming
contact, expectations, and demands. But even ignoring parents prompt guilt from
their marginalised offspring, especially if there are other children in the
family who are not ignored and scapegoated. These ignored children often grow
up feeling inadequate, that they were somehow defective, and feel responsible
for the treatment they receive from their dysfunctional parent. They feel
stupid and further inadequate that they have been unable to figure out what is
wrong and fix it so their parent can acknowledge and love them like their
siblings. This makes them feel guilty—their sense of inadequacy, their apparent
inability to live up to the unspoken expectations of their narcissist parents,
makes them feel guilty for falling short of the mark—a mark they have not yet
been able to see but is obviously there and, based on the observed acceptance
of the siblings, attainable. This guilt is toxic guilt: it is guilt that does
not come from real wrong doing, it comes from the manipulation of your
conscience to see wrong doing—on your part only—when, in fact, you are not
committing any wrongs at all. It is a tool, implanted into your psyche early in
your life, to give your N a way to easily control you in the future.
How it works
Narcissistic parents raise their children to believe they
are wrong about anything that is contrary to the family party line. If mother
turns little Nell into a household servant, Nell is wrong to object because of
all of the sacrifices her Mum has made for her—twelve days of labour and a
gazillion stitches to produce a gargantuan infant who cried all of the time and
wouldn’t let Mummy sleep or have a life. But Mummy put up with it and bowed to
the overwhelming demands of the infant Nell and for that Nell owes Mum—and she
owes her bigtime!
The price is never finite nor
does it have an expiry date: the fact of being born makes Nell beholden to her
mother for the rest of her days. The specifics may be different for each
NParent and SG Child dyad, but the outcome is the same: the child becomes Fearful of the loss of the parent upon
whom they continue to depend emotionally (and sometimes economically) long past
the time they should have individuated and struck out on their own. The child
feels a deep sense of Obligation to
the NParent that goes beyond any logic or tit-for-tat accounting. That
obligation becomes an ingrained part of the child’s belief and value
systems—she owes her parent for her
very existence, as well as any investment the parent has made (food, clothing,
shelter, lessons, etc.)—and the parent, being the authority figure, gets to
determine how—and for how long—that obligation will be repaid. To keep the
child producing the desired product—Nsupply in whatever form the NParent wants
it—there is Guilt. Whenever the
child appears to be contemplating disobeying a parental command, guilt is the
weapon that will whip her back into line.
Why?
Because guilt hurts. It is a very
uncomfortable emotion that literally makes us squirm. People who lack a conscience
do not have to deal with guilt: they rationalize and justify it away. But
people who seek to avoid feeling guilty because of the discomfiting nature of
it, do whatever they can to keep it at bay. Narcissists know this but they do
not share it, so they can shamelessly manipulate others with no sense of guilt
on their part, and they manipulate you by inducing guilt.
As we get older, we internalize
the values our parents taught us, good and bad. So if your NParent heaped guilt
and punishment on you for violating their self-serving demands, over time you
will absorb that; you will come to believe that they are owed your fealty, that
your proper role in life is to sacrifice yourself for them, to care for them
even at the expense of your own life and other relationships. Their wants are
needs that surpass your duty to all others, including your spouse and children.
Once you have been successfully
indoctrinated, you may take on these values yourself. Some of us will pass
these values and beliefs and expectations down to our own children, while
others of us will recognise that something indefinable is wrong and treat our
own children differently, all the while submitting to our Ns ourselves.
You control yourself
for them
When you reach the point of internalizing the values of the
N, when you have come to believe that you are bad or wrong to not want to
continue to cater to them like a servant, when you reach the point that you not
only believe but act on those beliefs, you have been overtaken by and are trapped
in the F.O.G. (http://narcissistschild.blogspot.co.za/2017/02/trapped-in-f-o-g.html).
Your Ns no longer need to apply manipulation techniques to control you and get
you to do their bidding, your own psyche, so well trained by them, does it for
them. They express a desire and you provide it, despite inconvenience, cost, or
even detriment to your marriage and family. You become the taskmaster and they
need to step in and provide you with a refresher only when you show signs of
coming out of the F.O.G. and thinking rationally about the situation. But as
long as you independently capitulate to their wishes, be the person they want
you to be, all is good—for them.
But all is not so good with us.
We are caught in a vise, squeezed from both sides—our sense of obligation to
our NParents vs our yearning for the freedom to plot our own course without
being interrupted, side-lined, or co-opted by the parents we should have
outgrown years before. We feel anxious but don’t know why. We have glimpses of
dreams in which we are fully autonomous, able to go and do and think and say
whatever we want without guilt suffocating us and pushing back to where we
are—but don’t want to be. Guilt controls us and, because we don’t like the
feeling of guilt—it brings up mental images of abandonment which are
terrifying—we do whatever is necessary to send the guilt back to its lair,
waiting for the next time we have an independent or “disloyal” thought. People
who seek to avoid feeling guilty because of the discomfiting nature of it, do
whatever they can to keep it at bay—and if that means catering to the giant maw
of need that is our NParent, that is what we do.
If we are conscious of what we
are doing, we might feel bad about giving the short-shrift to our children or
spouse in favour of our ravenous NParents but that won’t stop us, it only adds
to our guilt. Often, however, we are not conscious of how our own families are
sacrificed to the demands of the narcissists in our lives, sacrifices made
solely because we are stuck in that F.O.G and we feel compelled to protect
ourselves from the overwhelming guilt that comes with resisting the N’s
demands.
If we have the audacity to open
our eyes and we screw up the courage to resist the toxic guilt, our Ns are
ready to drag us back into our roles through manipulation and heavy-duty guilt
tripping. They send in flying monkeys to reproach us and turn up the guilt in
an effort to push us into reassuming our roles as NSuppliers; they instigate
smear campaigns to shame us to people outside the family circle in order to
recruit them into contacting us with further reproach—toxic guilt is the hammer
with which they attempt to beat us back into the narrow confines of the role
defined for us by our Ns, that of their personal source of unlimited NSupply.
They can’t succeed
without your help
Like it or not, believe it or not, if your NParent
successfully manipulates you with toxic guilt, you are complicit in your victimization.
Why? Because as long as you are willing to avoid feeling guilty by doing their
bidding, you are allowing them to
manipulate you. You do have the option of saying “no” and refusing to be
manipulated, but like anything else in this life, it is going to have
consequences. In acceding to their wishes, you avoid the consequence of feeling
guilty by allowing yourself to be emotionally enslaved; by resisting their
wishes you invite the consequence of feeling guilty—either way, you will have
an unpleasant consequence to deal with.
Guilt, especially toxic guilt, is
an ugly, painful thing. It makes us feel ashamed, even humiliated. It can even
feel physical, with unsettled stomach, shortness of breath, muscle tension,
sweating, and a general feeling of revulsion—it is understandable that we would
want to avoid those feelings, to not have toxic guilt rattling around our
brains and generating the anxiety symptoms in our bodies. The easiest way to
avoid them is to capitulate to your N’s expectations, no matter how outrageous,
self-serving and disruptive to your life those expectations may be. It
works—but only until the next time.
The other way to avoid the toxic
guilt is to confront it. Deconstruct it. Take it apart, examine it, and come to
your own conclusions. Do you really, truly owe your N a lifetime of licking
their boots? At what point does your child’s obligation to you end? Did your
obligation to your NParents end at that time? Why not? By deconstructing toxic
guilt, by examining it minutely and finding and keeping only the kernel of
healthy guilt that the toxic guilt was built upon, you free yourself from toxic
guilt—and from the manipulations and machinations of your Ns.
Will that stop them from trying
to manipulate you? No. Will it stop the flying monkeys from pursuing you? No
again. It will not change anybody but you. It may have a knock-on effect of
improving your relationship with your husband and kids—and it may not. In fact,
if your husband or kids are on your NM’s Flying Monkey roster, it may make
things worse as you step out of the F.O.G. and they stay tightly wrapped in it.
So why do it? Well, if you are
truly happy as you are, if being manipulated by NParents and doing their
bidding and devoting your life to them and theirs really thrills you to your
toes, then I can’t think of a reason for you to change your current situation.
But if the manipulation and the drama and the expectations that you live your
life as an extension of theirs has worn thin, then perhaps it is time to give
the devil you don’t know a chance. You already know what the next 10, 20, even
50 years are going to be like if you stick with the status quo and if that
doesn’t make your toes curl with happy anticipation, your only alternative is
to make a change and not let the Ns control you anymore.
They can’t do it without your
cooperation, and you are under no obligation to give it.
