Every person I have ever known who was struggling with a relationship
with a narcissistic parent, partner, boss, friend, or sibling, was actually
struggling with feelings of fear, obligation, and/or guilt—at least one of
which was keeping them in a victim’s role.
Most often this F.O.G. originates in childhood, a childhood dominated by a
narcissistic parent or parental figure. And it doesn’t matter if your
narcissist was engulfing or ignoring, overt or covert type, malignant or not:
if you had a narcissistic parent, you were indoctrinated to feel fearful, obligated,
and guilty. It is one of those things that is part of the universal truths of
the children of narcissists.
All human beings are born with the instinct for
survival. From infancy, when the instinct prompts us to cry when we are hungry or
are too cold or hot, through toddlerhood when we cry when being left alone, up
to adolescence when we are supposed to being individuating and learning to
survive without our caretakers, this instinct drives us. Its purpose is to
ensure our survival through an inborn fear of being abandoned by our primary
caretakers, for without them, we would surely die.
Given a normal, functional upbringing, we begin to
individuate in our teens, losing both our physical and emotional dependency on
our parents and developing the skills and self-esteem to go out in the world
and make our own way. We begin grow away from our dependence, both emotional
and physical, on our parents. This is the way it is supposed to be, to grow
from total dependence upon our parents for every aspect of our existence to
being wholly independent and self-sufficient, to become the rock upon which our
own children will depend.
Unfortunately, for the children of narcissists,
this quite often goes horribly wrong. Individuation is discouraged, even
forbidden, as is anything that the NParent thinks will lead the child away from
dependency. These children grow up believing themselves to be hopelessly
incompetent, unlovable, unattractive, lazy, stupid, and generally a burden on
their parents and even on society. And even if they go out into the world and
make a success of themselves in the eyes of that society, internally they
remain dependent on the approval of others for their self-esteem and sense of
right and wrong, never having individuated and learned to rely on themselves.
The process of individuation often brings conflict
between the primary care-givers and the adolescent as the teen tries to take on
adult activities for which s/he is not yet prepared. But in functional
families, the mistakes are learning opportunities, the adolescent grows into
independence and self-confidence with the guidance of her parents. In
dysfunctional families, however, individuation is derailed. In order to control
them and keep them emotionally dependent, narcissists instil into their
children, very early in their lives, the grim triad of narcissistic entrapment:
Fear, Obligation, and Guilt—the
oppressive F.O.G.
Fear
A parent does not have to be overtly abusive in
order to instil fear into their children. Ask any adult child of a narcissistic
parent what she is afraid of and you will likely get vague, nebulous answers
or, if specific, answers that indicate she fears the narcissist’s reaction. Ask
the 40 year-old daughter of a 65 year-old narcissist what she fears and the
answer will invariably be the parent’s response, most often anger, and the
guilt it provokes. If you ask “So what if she gets angry? What is she going to
do about it? Ground you? Take away your car keys? Forbid you to go to the dance
Friday night?” And the narcissist’s adult child will, at that moment, have a
peek into the amount of control she has given to her narcissist.
Sometimes, however, the fear is well-founded. The
malicious malignant narcissist will fight dirty. Not content with an
intimidating Nrage or guilt-inducing pity party, the malignant narcissist (MN)
will spitefully retaliate, often overtly but sometimes covertly. Covert
retaliation might be undermining your authority with your children or
withholding important information under the guise of forgetting, or saying “I
didn’t think you cared/would want to know/were interested…” or some other
passive aggressive action. Overt retaliation has no limit: anything from trying
to take custody of your children to sabotaging your relationships (including
your job) to stalking you to stealing your identity and running up huge bills
in your name to accusing you of crimes such as elder abuse, child abuse, animal
abuse. The overt malignant narcissist’s repertoire knows only the boundary of
getting caught without a plausible excuse for their behaviour: if they think
they can get away with it, no matter what “it” might be, they will do it. And
they will not feel one iota of guilt, either, no matter how much harm they
cause.
If you are dealing with a malignant narcissist, fear
is an appropriate response to their advances, no matter how benign the advance
seems to be. The only way to effectively deal with a malignant narcissist,
whether overt or covert, is to cut all contact and disappear. As long as that
MN has access to you, you are legitimately at risk.
But most narcissists are not malignant narcissists
(even though it very well may feel like it to you). Most narcissists are simply
out to get narcissistic supply and manipulate people and events with that as
their goal: drama and attention and control to ensure a steady supply. It takes
real malice, an intent to do you serious harm, to make your narcissist a
malignant narcissist. MNs are rare: the average narcissist’s objective is her
Nsupply and if you get hurt in her pursuit of that, she doesn’t care. The
malignant narcissist’s objective is to hurt you, and she gets her Nsupply from
your pain and the difficulty she causes for you. The incidence of MNs in a
population of narcissists I once calculated at being less than 3%...and the
incidence of narcissists in the population is less than 6%...so the odds of
your narcissist being malignant are very low.
But malignant or not, narcissistic parents inspire
fear in the hearts of their children. And regardless of any superficial reasons
for our fears, there is a single common fear that unites us all: fear of
abandonment. This fear is rooted deeply in the subconscious of all humans as
part of the survival instinct. In prehistory, to be abandoned by parents or
tribe was to be sentenced to death. Survival was, by and large, a communal
endeavour. To be cast out alone, exiled, was to perish. From our very first
breaths we cry for the soothing touch of another, the sound of voices to let us
know we are not alone and we will not die.
The children of narcissists often suffer from
emotional abandonment and subconsciously fear physical abandonment. Long after
we should have individuated, we may cling to the fear of abandonment that makes
little kids cry when they lose sight of Mummy in a crowd—to be separate from
the nurturer is to be in danger of death. Those of us who continue, past
adolescence, to depend on our mothers and/or other members of our families of
origin (FOO), fear separation—whether by circumstance or intent—even if we are
not consciously aware of it. We are afraid, not so much of what they might do
to us, but that if they reject us, we will disappear.
The fear in F.O.G.,
then, is not a realistic fear of reprisal but a primeval fear of death by
abandonment—to the subconscious, emotional abandonment is no different from physical—and
narcissists instinctively play on this fear to control us. And this is why they
sabotage our efforts to individuate: they are unwilling to release us from
their control because we provide NSupply to them. With rare exception, our fear
is wholly unfounded because the vast majority of narcissists actually mean us
no real harm—they just want to get their Nsupply—and if we are harmed in their
pursuit of it, they simply do not care.
Obligation
Part of culture is obligation. The structure of
societies require certain things from their members in order for the society to
function. There is the obligation of supporting the society through such things
contributions (taxes) and obeying the rules (laws and customs). Then there are
social expectations such as respect and manners. Each sub-culture has its own
set of rules involving customs, rituals, and taboos. To be born into a society
or a culture of any kind, anywhere—including the microcosm of a family—is to be
born into obligation and that concept is inculcated into us early.
Obligation is what you owe to others or what others
owe you. It is a duty for which the obligated one is responsible. If you are
obligated to do something, you are responsible to do it. But obligations are
not immutable. Some obligations change with time and over time, and may even go
away. Your obligation to feed and shelter and discipline your child, for
example, diminishes with time until a point at which your child is an adult and
responsible for his own food and shelter and, presumably, no longer needs
discipline.
Narcissists, however, pervert the natural
obligations of the parent-child relationship, often completely turning the
tables such that the child feels the burden of obligations to her parent while
the parent feels none towards the child. In a true obligation you are bound either
by the laws of your society or the morals of your culture. You have no choice
in the matter unless you wish to risk censure by the society and/or the
culture.
But, again, narcissistic parents pervert this by
convincing that you are bound by obligation where, in fact, there is none. If
the entire FOO is controlled by narcissists, as is frequently the case, the
child may have an entire chorus echoing the narcissistic parent’s insistence
that the child is obligated where, in truth, she is not.
Children are hard-wired to believe their parents
and the other authority figures in their lives. Again, this is part of the
survival instinct: children learn about what is safe and what is not from
observing and listening to their parents and other adults around them. Until
they reach what is often called “the age of reason” (commonly thought to be 7),
children are quite gullible and easily led. Age and experience increases a
child’s reasoning power but, due to the strictures of his or her upbringing,
some topics may be forbidden for the child to apply logic and reasoning to. In
more functional homes it is often frowned upon for a child to apply her
burgeoning logic and reasoning skills to something considered sacred, like
religion. In more dysfunctional households, however, a child will be forbidden
to question virtually anything imparted to them by their primary authority
figures.
Narcissists, the ultimate in dysfunctional parents,
exploit this aspect of childhood by teaching their children, either directly or
indirectly, that they are the ultimate authority in a child’s life and that
questioning that authority was forbidden. Children of such parents were afraid
to apply logic to the pronouncements of their parents, even long into adulthood.
My mother, for example, used to tell me that there were three ways to do
anything—the right way, the wrong way, and her
way. The sheer illogic of that statement did not strike me until long after I
achieved adulthood: like most children, I simply believed it because my mother
said so.
It is no wonder, then, that when a narcissist and
her Greek chorus of Flying Monkeys (FMs) inculcate a child with the notion that
Mummy made huge sacrifices for her, and that she owes Mummy a lifetime of
gratitude and payback, the child accepts this as incontrovertible fact, just as
she accepts the existence of such things as the Tooth Fairy. Unfortunately for
the children of narcissists, nobody tells them the truth about the supposed debt
of gratitude owed to their narcissistic family when revealing the truth about
the Tooth Fairy and, as a result, it is a safe bet that virtually all children
of narcissists grow up burdened with a false sense of obligation to their
NParents.
The thing about these obligations is that, on the
surface, they seem so reasonable, so logical, so rational, that even as adults
we accept them as valid. We learn about tit-for-tat in the school yard and grow
up with an understanding and acceptance of the concept of reciprocity. What
nobody tells us is that where parents and their children are concerned, in
modern societies the children have no lasting obligations to their parents, nor
the parents to their children. The obligations of parenthood diminish as the
child grows and matures and reaches her age of majority; the obligations of a
child to her parents also diminish with growth and maturity: that is what
individuation is all about—growing up and away from the dependency of childhood,
dependency that includes those ever-diminishing obligations to parents such as
obedience and acceptance of the parents’ pronouncements.
Children who grew up in emotionally healthy homes
care for their elderly parents out of love, not a sense of obligation. They
visit, call, buy gifts and do other, similar things out of genuine love for
those parents, not because it is expected of them. For many years I drove from
San Francisco every summer to spend a week with my father because I loved him,
I loved being around him. Visits with my father always left me feeling renewed
and strengthened. It is telling that during these week-long visits, I went into
town to see my mother only on the last day, as I was leaving town, and then
only for an hour. And it was very clear in my mind that these visits were not
for me or for her: they were to prevent her from getting resentful about me visiting
my father—from whom she had been divorced for over 40 years—and not stopping to
see her. Was I doing this due to a sense of obligation to spare her feelings?
No—it was to protect my father and stepmother from being cornered by her in the
very small town where they all shopped and occasionally ran into each other—it
was to protect them from having her dump all of her resentment at my ignoring
her onto them. An obligation to protect my father? Again, no—an act of love on
my part that they knew nothing about.
What is salient here is doing something out of a
sense of duty versus doing it because you love the person and want to take care of him/her. It is free
will versus the shackles of obligation. If you interact with members of your
family not because it is your duty to do so but because you love them and
genuinely wish to do things for them, that is a healthy interaction, done out
of love for them. If your primary motivation, however, is one of duty and
obligation, then this may well be unhealthy and motivated by a false sense of
obligation implanted into you when you were a small child and then carefully
nurtured.
You do not have an obligation to your parents or to
any other adult family member once you become an adult. If you feel like you
do, then you have been brainwashed from childhood to believe that you owe a
debt to people who were, in fact, only doing their own duty and who very likely
did it poorly: if they had done it well and with love, you would feel no need
to be reading something like this. You owe them nothing but basic respect
unless, like Ns everywhere, they have managed to earn your disrespect—in which
case you owe them nothing more than civility. To paraphrase Anne Lamott: “If
people wanted you to [feel] warmly about them, they should have behaved
better.”
Guilt
Guilt is interesting. The ability to feel guilty is
our moral compass…guilt tells us when we have done something wrong and it
plagues us until we do something to redress the wrong. It is the angel on our
shoulder who tries to guide us to do the right thing. The ability to feel guilt
is absolutely essential in order to have a conscience.
Guilt feels bad. It feels bad in order to impel you
to right whatever wrong you may have committed, in order to make the bad
feeling go away. Some people don’t feel guilt, however, which can be a bad thing. I say “can”
advisedly because there are people out there who seldom feel guilt because they
are careful to live their lives in such a way that their guilt is not provoked.
Such people have learned the lessons that guilt is there to teach them: don’t
do bad things and you won’t have to deal with guilt feelings.
Unfortunately, such people are in the minority.
Most people who don’t feel guilt are personality disordered or otherwise
mentally/emotionally disturbed and the lack of a conscience is part of their
disturbance: people like narcissists who have neither conscience nor remorse.
Either they simply do not have feelings of guilt or they have rationalized and
justified their behaviour so that in their minds, they are not guilty of any
wrong-doing. Ever.
Then there are people who feel guilty and cannot
seem to stop. They just walk around with guilt hanging over their heads. They
feel guilty about saying “no.” They feel guilty about taking care of
themselves. They feel guilty for taking up space on the planet, for breathing
the air that someone else might need, for simply being alive. There are those
whose sense of guilt is not so pervasive but triggers each time they perceive
someone is not happy or whenever they recognize a feeling of need in
themselves. These are all people suffering from toxic or misplaced guilt and
much of this guilt is related to Fear and Obligation.
Guilt is the primary way we punish ourselves for
perceived wrongdoing. But from whence do we get our knowledge of right and
wrong? From our parents, of course. And if our parents are narcissists who are
constitutionally incapable of believing themselves wrong? If they believe they
are always right and they can do no wrong, then the blame for misadventure of
any kind, from a broken glass to a car accident to one of the children getting
in trouble with the law—these unfortunate occurrences simply cannot be their
fault, can it? And if the Golden Child can also do no wrong, where must the
responsibility for any kind of misfortune lie? With the family scapegoat, of
course.
It is amazing what a narcissist can blame on an
innocent family member and not only believe it themselves but draw others into
believing it as well. I was surprised to learn, at the tender age of 14, that
everything that was wrong with my mother’s life was my fault. Her unhappy
status at that time was not because she chose to drop out of school at 16 and
elope with a man she had known less than a month, nor was it because she chose
to have unprotected sex with this man. It was not even because she decided to
divorce him and be a single mother— No, it was my fault because I had been
born. Had I not had the audacity to force myself upon her unwilling person, her
life would have been “different,” a word she obviously took to be synonymous
with “better.”
Other narcissists are not as overt as my mother in
attempting to provoke guilt in their children. Each time a child doesn’t
measure up, each time a child is ignored or demeaned or belittled, that child
feels inadequate. And that inadequacy alone is enough to create guilt for not
having measured up, which can spur a child to greater and greater efforts to
please. Over time, it becomes a way of life as children sink into a state in
which they feel they have to earn approbation, love, even the right to live.
They become people pleasers and over-achievers—or they become depressed and
hopeless, convinced of the futility of effort due to their inability to measure
up. They feel fundamentally defective, unable to please their caregivers, all
giving rise to a pervasive feeling of guilt.
Infants and children are hardwired to please their
caregivers. Psychologist Richard L. Rappaport says “The desire to please…is
biologically instinctual, and when the parent is ‘pleased’ the infant coos and
smiles to ensure continuity of care and nurturance.” When a child is unable to
please the parent, she feels guilty for falling short—and, on a deeper, more
visceral level, she also feels a instinctual fear of abandonment and the
certain death that follows.
As adults we do not feel a fear of literal death
because, for most of us, we no longer depend on our parents to provide us with
food and shelter. But because we have not emotionally individuated, we fear a
kind of emotional death brought about by our inability to please our
caregivers. This makes their displeasure our fault—it means we believe we have
done something wrong or failed to do something right—and for this, we feel
guilty, even though, in truth, we have done absolutely nothing wrong.
Narcissists exploit this. We learn very young that
our narcissistic caregivers are difficult to please and, due to our hardwiring
to please the caregiver in order to ensure continuity of care and nurturance,
we go to ever greater effort to please them. Narcissists notice this…the worse
they treat us, the harder we try to please them, the more Nsupply we provide. And
the more guilt we take on for not pleasing them, the more power over us they
wield.
None of this
was your fault
The most difficult—but most freeing—thing for us to
realize is that none of this was or is our fault. We have been conned, and we
were conned at an age where we had absolutely no chance of resistance. The more
overt narcissists might inspire an early awakening in a child due to the level
of their brutality but for the most part, both overt and covert narcissists fly
under the radar when it comes to the emotional abuse of one or more of their children.
By the time the child reaches that critical age of reason and the ability to
begin thinking critically, she has already been sucked into the narcissist’s
vortex, already believes herself to be inadequate, already feels guilty for
things not of her own making. She is already engulfed in the F.O.G. of narcissistic entrapment.
The good news, however, is that it was not your fault—you were not inadequate,
you were not bad, you were not responsible for whatever is wrong with your
narcissist’s life. You are not a burden or a disappointment or otherwise less
than… What was wrong was your narcissist: she held you to impossible standards
and found you wanting, she set you up to fail and then blamed you and demeaned
and belittled you when you didn’t succeed against the odds that were stacked
against you. And even if she didn’t demean and belittle you with gusts of ugly
words, you knew what the sighs, the rolled eyes, the turned back, the silence meant
—you didn’t need words to know that you had not lived up to her expectation,
that she viewed your presence in her life as a burden, that you were not what
she wanted.
She was the defective one, not you. If someone
judged a cage of newly hatched robins by their ability to fly, they would all
fall short of the mark and be inadequate, wouldn’t they? If that someone
prevented them from learning to fly by clipping their wings when their flight
feathers when they came in, they would never learn to fly, would they? And if
set free at that point, they would be in grave danger, crippled and dependent
because they would not know how to fly to escape predators or to find food. And
if the person who caged them and clipped their wings pronounced them to be
useless, inadequate, disappointments because they can’t fly, would you agree?
Or would you put the blame on the caretaker who crippled them?
What makes you so different from these robins? Your
fear, your sense of obligation, your guilt—none of these belong to you. They
were given to you by a narcissist, planted in you like a crop, to ensure
Nsupply, to make sure you never individuated and took the Nsupply away. Your
narcissist has implanted obligations into your head that don’t actually belong
to you, beliefs that keep you chained and unable to fly just as the clipped
wings keep those robins grounded. You are stuck in a F.O.G. created by a
narcissist for her own benefit with no thought to you or your well-being.
The only way out of the F.O.G. is to be willing to
challenge those things you believe that keep you bound, to stay with the guilt
until you can come to embrace the reality that your Ns have kept from you—the
reality that you owe them nothing,
that your proper role in life is to learn to care for yourself, not them. Just
as you must break free and make your own life, so must they. They cannot remain parasites, grooming and manipulating
you to provide them with Nsupply, unless you permit it with a lack of
boundaries and an unwillingness to challenge their beliefs and values. You need
your own, you need to forge your own path, create your own sense of right and
wrong, one which that not include being an “ever-flowing breast” of
Narcissistic Supply to people who will exploit you for as long you permit it.
Your narcissist will never change and you cannot
change her. She will never let you go, never see the truth of herself, never
stop generating that F.O.G. in which you are stuck. It is in her own best
interests to lock you down and keep you shackled because if you individuate and
find freedom, she loses an easily milked source of Nsupply. The F.O.G. is
continually generated to keep you feeling guilty, obligated, and afraid of abandonment,
of losing your family, so that you will not see the truth. It is only by facing
your fears, shrugging off those obligations that are not truly yours and
refusing to accept the toxic guilt, only by admitting to yourself that your
NParent and her Flying Monkeys really care nothing for you, that they are manipulating
you for their own ends, to maintain their false image to themselves and the
rest of the world, only by acknowledging that you are feeling guilty for things
that were not of your doing—only then can you shake free of her toxic grip and
begin to step out of the F.O.G.
Freedom is within your grasp: all you need to
achieve it is to accept the truth.
Sources
http://law.jrank.org/pages/4175/Age-Reason.html
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7113.Anne_Lamott
Rappaport,
Richard L. Motivating Clients in Therapy: Values, Love
and the Real Relationship
