The “Identified Patient”

Over and over again I see it written: the scapegoat is troubled, the problem child, the troublemaker, even the household rebel. Psychologists and other writers, from the well-known like John Bradshaw to the most obscure blogger, publish works that make it look like the scapegoat, because of his or her behaviour, might actually deserve both the role and the disdain forced upon him.

My own experience does not bear this out. M. Scott Peck, in his book “People of the Lie,” references the “identified patient.” According to Wikipedia, “Identified patient, or ‘IP,’ is a term used in a clinical setting to describe the person in a dysfunctional family who has been subconsciously selected to act out the family’s inner conflicts as a diversion; who is the split-off carrier of the (perhaps transgenerational) family disturbance. The term emerged from the work of the Bateson Project on family homeostasis, as a way of identifying a largely unconscious pattern of behavior whereby an excess of painful feelings in a family lead to one member being identified as the cause of all the difficulties - a scapegoating of the IP.

“The identified patient - also called the ‘symptom-bearer’ or ‘presenting problem’ - may display unexplainable emotional or physical symptoms, and is often the first person to seek help, perhaps at the request of the family. However, while family members will typically express concern over the IP’s problems, they may instinctively react to any improvement on the identified patient’s part by attempting to reinstate the status quo.”

That last paragraph strikes a responsive chord in me. I was not only the first person to seek help in my family, I was the only one. NM’s one foray into psychology for me during my childhood—part of a custody battle with my father in which she wanted a psychologist to testify on her behalf—was abruptly cancelled when the therapist was more interested in talking about her than about me. I don’t remember this at all (part of that blank period in my childhood for which I have virtually no memories), but I clearly remember NM citing this as an example of the uselessness of psychology/psychiatry: she took me to a therapist because I was obviously disturbed (I wanted to live with my father, not her) and the therapist was focussing on her instead of me. NM, who had an agenda that had nothing to do with my emotional well-being, took me to that psychologist as the “identified patient” (a person who is taken to therapy by his or her family, as being a problem or having problems), but the therapist saw right through her. We never went back for a second session.

Peck says this child, the identified patient, is the family member who is identified as the source of the family difficulties. And while some of these children are, in fact, acting out, it is usually a problem in family dynamics that is the true source of problem, and if the child is acting out, it is in response to those dynamics. In other words, the child doesn’t really have to be a problem to be designated the scapegoat, although some children become a problem as a result of their being cast into the scapegoat role. Then, they are blamed not only for their acting out behaviours, but for the problems of the entire family system as well.

I read “People of the Lie” long before I had any notion of narcissism and personality disorders. But I was struck with the similarity between the “identified patients” and my self-identification as a scapegoat. I had come across the term in my reading and it immediately resonated within me: my brother, who was always in trouble at school, at home, even in the neighbourhood, was seldom punished for his misdeeds and his lies…often mind-bogglingly transparent…were always accepted as truth. For me, I was blamed and punished for not only my mistakes (which were interpreted as deliberate defiance) but for his misdeeds—his misbehaviour was my fault because I “allowed” him, I didn’t stop him, I was the oldest and he was my responsibility. This is classic scapegoating and, since I was already being blamed for ruining NM’s life by my very existence, it wasn’t much of a leap to lay everything wrong the family at my feet.

In “People of the Lie” Peck describes the parents of a little boy so deeply depressed he was hospitalized. That year for Christmas they had given the boy a .22 rifle, the exact same rifle his older brother had used to commit suicide. When confronted by Peck and the message their “gift” conveyed…that they wanted him to commit suicide, too…the parents became immediately defensive, dug their heels into denial, and refused to entertain the thought. They became angry at Peck, insisting their son was the sick person, not they. Peck defines evil as “militant ignorance” and the behaviour of these people, angrily defensive and unwilling to accept the truth of their actions and the message those actions conveyed to their grieving younger son, exemplify not only their ignorance but their militant defence of it. To remain blameless, to be able to see themselves as good people and good parents, they sacrificed their son, making him the sick one, the identified patient, the one with the problems, and completely absolved themselves of any responsibility for his depression. No, he was the sick one and the doctor needed to focus on him, not on them. They reacted to Peck’s rejection of their son as the “identified patient” in much the same way my NM reacted to that psychologist rejecting me as the same.

This is not to say that the identified patient is not suffering, does not need some kind of therapeutic intervention. Most likely s/he does. But critical is the understanding that the reasons the IP needs help is not because s/he is the centre of the family dysfunction. Often the child singled out as the scapegoat is the most emotionally healthy, most cognitively aware, most fundamentally balanced member of the household. The child may act out to draw attention to the family in a subconscious hope of getting help…or the child may be so successfully subdued that s/he simply goes along, not making waves, either biding her time until she can escape or becoming so imbued with the family mythology that she buys into it and accepts that she is at fault, even though she cannot figure out how. The identified patient has been damaged by the dysfunctional family system, but she is not the only damaged person and she is not the cause of the dysfunction.

Is it possible to have a dysfunctional person inside a functional family? I believe it is, using my NM and her FOO as an example, but I think it is rare. Perfectly normal families can have a family member who is substantially different from the rest of them. We are not blank slates upon which our parents write: if we were, all of us ACoNs would be the same and we are not. We each bring a unique personality and set of traits with us when we come into the world and it may well be that there is something in our particular make up that strikes a negative note in our NMs and causes them to single us out as the scapegoat.

Identified patient is a psychological term that, in my mind, equates to scapegoat. “A dysfunctional family needs someone to focus on, someoneto blame things on, someone to point to when things go wrong… It means that in a sick family system, the group has subconsciously elected one person to act out all the family sickness in a very overt way while the rest of the family acts it out in a covert way. Even if the IP tries to act “not sick,” the family will send messages to “get back where you belong” and set the IP up for failure.” How much does this sound like the family dynamics surrounding the scapegoat?

“It’s not that the identified patient is any sicker than the rest of the family, in fact they probably aren’t, but they are the one through whom the family channels all of its “stuff.” The family dynamic is to keep things status quo, to keep its eyes trained on the IP.” Have you tried going NC—or even LC—only to find members of your family going out of their way to suck you back into the drama? That isn’t because they love you and miss you (as they may well say) but because they need you to be there to take the blame, to be the negative focus, to be the disappointing one against whom they can all compare themselves and come away superior.

Some of us disappear from the family scene and we don’t get hoovered. This is the function of the “ignoring types,” the family dynamic that treats you like you are invisible until something is needed from you. In such situations “…the identified patient, or IP, is viewed as a troubled individual or, in extreme cases, as someone with whom the family would be better offwithout.”You are still the IP or scapegoat, but in this case, the family had decided that your absence makes them whole as they can continue to find ways to blame you even at a distance.

“Usually the one who gets help first in the family is the IP. They get out of the family and find out what is wrong because they are tired of being blamed for everything and everyone. Usually their acting out is a normal response to an abnormal situation and they want help.” Some of us seek therapy, others of us seek self-help through books, websites, on-line groups, journaling. Some of us don’t seek help at all and just escape the FOO but continue to replicate our dysfunctional emotional relationships with others, seeking to “get it right” this time…the next time. And some of us just get out and withdraw, licking our wounds and living in a cocoon of hurt.

But we all want that hurting to stop. “…part of recovery is identifying who you were in the family and how you have carried that role into adulthood. See how your role in the family plays itself out in your current relationship and ask yourself if it’s time for a change.

“Being the IP or the one that doesn’t belong can be a [hidden] blessing. If you’ve never belonged, it’s easy to take a step in another direction. Take refuge in exile. It can be a good thing.

“If you’ve been the IP, realize you’re never going to win their approval, so stop trying. You have a role to fill and they’re not going to be happy if you’re not filling it. If you’ve brought it into your relationships, chances are you will not be validated and acknowledged in those adult relationships either.

“Stop seeking approval from people who don’t have it to give. Throw off those old messages…get rid of the negative messages from the family…get rid of “get back where you belong” everytime you try to save yourself.”

Yes, you might fail. You might even fail repeatedly in your efforts to get away, to resist being sucked back into the drama by empty promises and your own broken heart. But if you don’t keep resisting you will get absorbed back into the drama and become nothing more than a broken gear in their dysfunctional machine. They aren’t going to change –there is too much in it for them to keep you in your assigned role—and nobody is going to rescue you. To escape and have your own life, a life of fulfilment and devoid of their drama, you have to shrug off the role they have imposed on you. You have to do it yourself. 

You have to be your own hero.

The Scapegoat’s Daughter Revisited

Back in October I published a guest post by a young woman named Eve entitled “The Scapegoat’s Daughter,” a post that very poignantly revealed the suffering our children can be subjected to when we allow our toxic FOO to be a part of their lives.

This morning I received a lengthy comment on that post, a comment that bears repeating here, so that no one who is struggling with the idea of cutting their kids off from their dysfunctional families has any doubt on what you can do to protect your kids from damage and why you should do it. Unfortunately, the commenter didn’t leave even a nickname for us to call her by, so we’ll just have to call her “Anonymous.”

Herewith our correspondence for your enlightenment:

Anonymous: Abusive FOOs are no different from poisoned wells. You wouldn't knowingly take your children to drink water from a poisoned well so why would you expose your children to your toxic FOO?

Violet: Your analogy is apt...but if you don't realize the well is poisoned, if your children keep getting sick but you don't recognize that the water is causing it, you keep returning to that well.

Once you know it is the water, you might still go there, because you are in denial. Or it may be just you getting noticeably sick...the effect on the children not so evident, so you don't think it really is the water...or maybe it is just you, there is something in that water that only affects you and everyone else is safe.

That is the kind of thinking Ns grind into their children: YOU are the defective one, not me. YOU are the one with the problem, not me. And if the child believes it (and a lot of them do), then they think the abusive relationship is their fault and the Nparent will be a lovely grandparent.

Even the courts fall prey to this kind of thinking: in a situation where there is an addicted or otherwise unfit parent, courts will award custody or guardianship to the very person who raised that unfit parent. It makes no logical sense, but it happens every day.

You only stop giving your children water from a poisoned well when you truly realize and accept that it is the well itself that is irretrievably poisoned and even though the children may be asymptomatic, it is still bad for them. And sometimes that realization takes a very long time to come.

Anonymous: Apologies for only posting the bit about poisoned wells. This was actually the end bit of my long post to give you a context for my remarks. I will make my post in several parts as it was too long to post in one go.

Part One

I was lucky to have moved away after getting married. It meant, when my children came along, I was able to keep them away from my FOO. I was the child born out of wedlock and my mother put all her shame on me. I was the child who had to be grateful she hadn't aborted me and had kept me after giving birth to me. My mother's siblings and their children all treated me with contempt. Things got worse when my mother got married to my stepfather. She kept threatening to send me away if I caused problems for her by not accepting her new husband. I ended up being sexually abused and raped and was too afraid to tell because I would be blamed and sent away. My mother only got out of that marriage when her husband started to abuse her. Lucky for me, she sent me to boarding school, to get me out of the way as she had nowhere to put me during the time she was hiding from her husband who was looking for her.

I forced the issue to connect with my biological father and met with the same shaming treatment at his hands. Turned out, he had been married the time he had an affair with my mother, with several children at home. In the time, I was being rejected and humiliated at my father's house, not just by him but his other children and his second wife, I met my future husband.

I thought this man wanted to marry me for me but later found out, it was because he wanted to be connected to my biological father, who had money and status. My saving grace was the fact that we moved away after getting married.

My husband picked up where my family had left off but having my babies woke me up. Watching a lot of Oprah’s abuse discussions and reading about toxic families and scapegoating provided me with the means to process my past and make some decisions about the future. I decided early on that I had to protect my babies from what I had suffered and I didn't want them to be poisoned by my toxic family dynamics. I kept my children away from having form of contact with my FOO and made sure my children grew up knowing exactly how mean and cruel my family had been to me. It was pretty clear my FOO were looking to recruit my children to join them in abusing me. My mother wrote a letter addressed to my SEVEN year old daughter, telling her how mean and horrible I was, for not allowing them access. Who does that? Sick and twisted people who can never change do such things. They don't know when to stop and cut the c*ap. They can never accept that their target of hate has woken up to their generational abuse, cut the cord and walked away. They want the situation to continue because it works for them. They will keep coming back and will destroy your relationship with your children if you let them into your life. Even now, when my children are now in their twenties, my FOO keep trying to establish a connection with my children. The door is firmly shut. One of my half siblings found my daughter via facebook and started trying to draw her in. My daughter put an end to that by no longer using facebook.

Part Two
PS: Lucky that my ex husband was mean really to me and our children during the marriage. Our children were relieved to finally be free of the misery he inflicted. He had his own difficult childhood but never got angry at the stepmother who had been so cruel to him nor his father who let it happen. Instead, my then husband turned all his hatred and mental/emotional cruelty on us, his own family. I thought he would see it as a second chance to have a loving family of his own but he never saw it that way. He kept chasing after everyone else's approval while saying horrible things about me where we lived. I only found out the extent of the lies he had told when I filed for divorce and his co-workers got themselves involved. The only way to escape him, and his lies, was to gather me children and move away to another part of the country.

Leaving my marriage enabled me to cut off any token contact I had with my FOO. My FOO took my ex husband's side in the divorce and encouraged him to not give me a thing. My own family wanted me to remain trapped in an abusive marriage due to lack of money or to leave and face destitution. Lucky there is such a thing as free initial legal consultation and being a joint owner in the marital property meant lawyer's fees would be deducted from the settlement.

My FOO's continued relationship with my ex husband has made it easier to leave him behind and not look back. When our children were at university, my FOO tried to use my ex husband to infiltrate our children by passing on contact details. He even tried to bribe them with money but again we were saved by his own damaged nature. He couldn't sustain being nice and his mean side kept taking over, making him someone whose intentions, our children couldn't trust. My FOO had chosen the wrong person to do their dirty work.

So far, we have had a few years of absolute peace, until last month when news came through that my biological father had died. My FOO sent a message through my ex but I never responded. All I felt was a sense of relief at the closing of that chapter and didn't want to get drawn back in.

Part Three

Sorry for writing all this but thought it might help someone else to realise, you can and you must protect your children, from the family dysfunction that blighted your childhood. Nothing good can come from playing nice and letting them have access to your children. I think it is Oprah who said, "when people show you, who they are, believe them". When your family of origin have shown you time and time again, they mean you harm and your pain is their joy, believe them. Nothing good will come from sacrificing your children to such twisted people. Your children are nothing more than pawns in their power games against you. These people want you to serve a life sentence of being c*apped on and will use any means necessary. Take a stand and refuse to have your children recruited into the cult of generational abuse. Draw a line in the sand, pick up your babies, keep walking and go make a life somewhere you can give your children a loving and supportive family experience.

Get counseling to help you get strong enough to do what is right for you and your children if you can afford it. If you can't afford counseling, start to self educate by reading online and using books about toxic families, narcissism etc. The more you know, the stronger you will get at realising what you need to do, to protect yourself and your children. If you are lucky enough to be married to someone who is supportive of you then you are truly blessed. Use this support to make a new life as far away from FOO as you can manage. Remember your children are counting on you to keep them safe from being emotionally and psychologically abused. Your children are also counting on you, to show them what it means to be a loving, protective, supportive and nurturing family. You can't do any of this if you allow your children to see you being abused and ganged up on by your FOO. Teach your children how to stand together and be united from those with "divide and conquer"

Part Four

agendas. Dysfunctional family dynamics depend on compartmentalised relationships. Bullies in families rely on the favoured family members treating the suffering of the scapegoat as something happening to someone else and therefore not their problem to address. Make sure your children grow up knowing it is not OK to ignore the hurt and humiliation of your immediate family member. Just so they can fit in with the bullies. If your children are older teens and you are moving towards waking them up to your FOO, have them sign up for anti bullying campaigns at school, so they can appreciate the damaging nature of bullying. Once a child has woken up to the injustice and dynamics of bullying, it does not take much for them to wake up to the same patterns in the family dynamics. The important thing is not to suffer in silence. Silence is not golden when your family is at risk of being destroyed by your FOO. You can't afford to experiment with your children finding out for themselves that your FOO are toxic people, whose main objective is to turn your family on itself, so the FOO can continue to abuse their chosen scapegoat.

Abusive FOOs are no different from poisoned wells. You wouldn't knowingly take your children to drink water from a poisoned well so why would you expose your children to your toxic FOO? Your children are your second chance to have a family of your own where you can love and be loved unconditionally. Protect your right to have a toxic free family because your future is with your children not your FOO. Your siblings will have their own families and their own lives and you are entitled to yours. I know everyone is at different points in their realisation, deciding the way forward and the process of recovery. I can only speak from my own experiences and from what I have seen so far, nothing good comes from allowing your toxic FOO, to have access to your children. If they can’t turn your children against you they will turn on your children in addition to whatever they have been doing to you. Never compromise once you get it, protect your children at all costs. Only you know how much your FOO has hurt you. Listen to your pain and refuse to allow your children to be corrupted by your FOO.

Sorry for the long post but hope this helps someone going through this

Part Five

Came back to add a clarification about when to encourage your children to sign up for anti bullying campaigns at school. It should be from pre teens and onwards. Mine advocated at their school from middle school until graduation. It is invaluable in teaching your children to see bullies for what they are and how the actions of those around the bully enable the bullying to continue. My children were really helped because they picked up the language to articulate what was going on when someone was being targetted and the emotional and mental coping tools to deal with bullies (toxic people). Support your children by encouraging them to talk to you and to each other about whatever is going on in their lives. Start early and the teenage years though challenging will be a lot easier on them and on you as a parent.

Each of us has our own unique story but we come together as the Adult Children of Narcissists because even though our stories are unique, there is a common tragic, dysfunctional thread that we all share. We are all comforted by knowing we are not the only person on the planet who has had to deal with the traumas and tragedies that are an ordinary part of growing up under the thumb of a narcissist. But there is more to it than that…coming together with other ACoNs gives us an exceptional opportunity to learn what has worked—and not worked—in the lives of other people who are struggling to cope with the same issues we are, and even issues we may not yet have become aware of. It is an opportunity not only for solidarity and comfort, but for raising awareness and learning. And Anonymous, in sharing her story, has given us much.

Thank you, Anonymous, for your revealing and heartfelt comments. I am sure I am not the only person who appreciates the effort you have expended on our behalfs.

Recommended Reading

I have added a new blog to the "Sites I Recommend" list and that is Caliban's Sisters. You may have seen some of CS's insightful comments on some of my posts...if you've enjoyed her comments, you are going to love her blog.

So often we feel very alone and isolated in our assigned roles in our dysfunctional families, but I have to tell you, we have legions of sisters (and brothers) out there whose lives and experiences are eerily similar to our own. Our NMs, even though they don't know each other, often behave like clones of each other, and this means that their children experience not only the same bizarre excuse for mothering that we did, those children grow up with many of the same doubts and fears and questions that we have. We are a vast community, we who were raised at the narcissist's knee. Caliban's Sister explores the experiences, the feelings, the doubts, and gifts us with the fruits of her insights and personal pain. She can also be extremely droll.

Some samples:

"...I think I'll keep her wondering whether or not I'll go, until maybe two weeks before the [wedding].  My niece [the bride] has told me I can make up my mind at the last minute, and that's what I'm going to do!  A few years ago, my sister blamed me because she felt stress about me being at her kids' graduation (that's right--I flew across country to watch her kids graduate).  I thought I was doing something nice;  she wrote me afterward and told me that I "was the source of all the stress in her life" (she and I have very little contact), and that the stress of it had made a bunch of her hair fall out. She blamed me for that.
Maybe if I wait long enough to decide about the wedding, she'll go bald...."

"I don't intend to make it easy for my sisters.  Their enabling behavior with my narc mother is inexcusable, and  I'm not going to just play along with their creepy Kabuki theater of silence."

"... the hammering over the head with the idea that you have to love these people NO MATTER WHAT is a lie that is imposed on us over and over again.  It is drummed into us as children, hammered into us as young adults;  the culture is complicit with its fetishizing of Norman Rockwell families who sit crammed onto a couch together, sharing popcorn and watching cable, with joyous smiles plastered on their faces.  Every product is sold as part of the familial "glue" that keeps the structure intact.  Generations of families who are conflict-free, overjoyed to be together, mindlessly blissed out as they gobble pizza, or mac and cheese, or drive along in their new minivan."

I urge you to pay a visit...you will be glad you did!

A Summary: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

The Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families: A Summary

The First And Great Commandment Is This:
“Be a ‘good’ person: Be blind, be quiet, be numb, be careful, keep secrets, avoid reality, avoid relationships, don’t cry, don’t trust, don’t feel, be serious, don’t talk, don’t love and above all, make everyone think you’re perfect...even if it makes you feel guilty.”

In other words, cease to exist as a separate, autonomous entity and exist as a cog in the wheel of the machine that is the dysfunctional family. Each child has one or more roles in the family, some of them assigned, others taken on by the child. These roles are rigid and, unless the child is an only, unlikely to change during the Nparent’s lifetime. The family is delicately balanced, its cohesiveness and continuation dependent upon each member playing his or her role. To attempt to change your role is to disrupt that balance and threaten the existence of the family itself.

And so you must don your role in the family like a burqa and play the role as if it were really you. And the real you must be stuffed down, silenced, and denied until she doesn’t consciously exist anymore and you become the creation of the dysfunctional parents, playing the role they need to enable their drama to continue. Your feelings are immaterial: ideally, you have none, but you must make a credible show of the feelings they allow or need you to display at any given moment.

You may not be yourself—you may not even have a “yourself.” You must selflessly be who and what they want you to be, what they need you to be, on demand…and like a good little marionette, be unobtrusive and out of sight, call no attention to yourself, make no demands, have no needs, just be ready for the next performance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Second Is Like Unto It:
“Since you're worthless and nobody loves you anyway (including yourself), don't try to change yourself. You're not worth the effort and you couldn't do it if you tried anyway. God won’t help you either. So get back where you belong. There’s nothing wrong anyway so what’s your problem! See, I told you that you were stupid.”

If you change yourself, you change how you work in the family dynamic, and in a dysfunctional family, that can destroy the delicate balance the parents have worked so hard to create. It is mutiny—insubordination—chaos—if you change yourself and thereby remove yourself from the role you were assigned...you destroy the family.

The rulers of a dysfunctional organization do not like change they did not create. Any change must be created by them so that it will benefit them…changes they do not initiate, like you removing yourself from your assigned or accustomed role, are threatening and frightening and potentially destructive. And so once you are performing your assigned role, you must be convinced that you have no options outside this role, that you are enslaved to it and cannot ever be released because it is who you are.

And so they convince you to stay as you have always been. That change would be futile even if you were able to change—but you can’t, a leopard can’t change its spots and you will never be more or better than you are today…or were yesterday…or that long string of yesterdays leading back so far you cannot remember.

You are not a person to them, you are a thing, immutable and unchanging, without feelings or needs, occasionally balking as machines are wont to do, but always there, always accepting and discharging your role so that their lives can continue as they created them to be. And if you try, you will fail because you cannot be anything other than what you are: just another cog in their machine.

You cannot even escape if you go No Contact because your absence from them doesn’t stop them from blaming you—they do it in absentia, behind your back, without your knowledge. But at least you don’t have to listen to them anymore.

These are the rules of the Dysfunctional Family and if you wish to be a part of it, you must play by those rules, play your role, don't try to improvise or improve your place. Just do as the directors say and you can stay...and they always assume you want to stay, that you are desperate to stay...

Next: "I Can't!"

No Forgiveness: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 10

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

10. Thou shalt not forgive yourself or others.

Sample Situation: “You're always in my way, child! Why do you keep asking me to play with you? Don't you know I played with you last year? Wasn't that enough?! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go to your room. Don't bother me.”

Lesson Learned: The only way I can be forgiven and loved is if I can earn it by being perfect. The guiltier I feel, the harder I must work to gain other's approval. If I make any mistakes, even a small one, they'll reject me or think I'm incompetent or worthless. I'm afraid I will make a mistake, I know I will, I feel so guilty. Therefore, even if I think I can do it, I won't. After all, I could make a mistake and then what would I do? Oh, I could never go back and say I'm sorry!

Motto: Since Jesus’ doesn't forgive me, I can't forgive you either.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is an entry on the topic of forgiveness on this blog but it addressed the subject in a different way. Here we look at forgiveness from another angle: not giving it but receiving (or “earning”) it.

When we transgress, we feel bad—if we have a normal conscience, that is. In dysfunctional families, this can (and often is) used against us, to manipulate and control us. In the example above, a child’s normal need for attention and interaction are viewed by a dysfunctional parent as being excessive, leading the child to believe that her normal needs are undue, making her a burden on her parents. She is shamed for wanting more than she is being given and punished for it.

This does not change the child’s needs, but it does change her outlook on them. She will go from responding to her body’s and psyche’s cues as to her needs and take her parents’ cues: what they are willing to give her is all that she is entitled to and anything beyond that is excessive, greedy, demanding, burdensome—bad. But because her internal cues don’t change along with the child’s understanding of her parental expectations, she begins to feel bad about herself and the demands over which she no control, save to choose whether to act on them or suppress or hide them.

When my daughter was six she was stolen by my NM and taken out of state where she was eventually adopted by my childless aunt and uncle, my NM’s beloved younger brother. My sunny-natured, free-spirited child came under the thumb of an NM, a woman who had failed to pass the home study for an agency adoption and whose only hope of motherhood lay in adopting in a non-traditional way. When my mother presented them with a pair of pretty children, especially a highly intelligent, well-mannered, good-tempered little girl with long blond locks and a bright smile, they gladly took both of my kids off NM’s hands. Eight years later the children returned to me, my daughter transformed into a sneaky, manipulative child who, believing the tale told her by my NM and my aunt and uncle that I had abandoned her, considered herself a burden on me (because I did not want her based on the “fact” that I had abandoned her).

I took her to Macy’s to buy clothes—the same place I shopped for myself. I took her to the cosmetics counter for Clinique because of her teenaged-skin—I also bought my cosmetics at Macy’s. I took her to decent stores for her shoes and school supplies and everything else and heard nothing but complaints about my spending too much, that she could buy twice as much at Kmart with the same money, and that she was a burden. Nothing I said or did could convince her that she was not, just as nothing ever convinced her that I had not abandoned her. She was convinced that she had no entitlement to my care, either emotional or financial, and therefore what I gave to her was either a burden to me or, the alternative, an attempt to “buy” or manipulate her.

What I did not realize at the time was that this was a child who was begging for forgiveness for her needs. Her very survival had depended on the largesse of strangers for eight long years, first as the pawn of my NM, then as the trophy show-piece at the Yacht Club for my aunt and uncle. Her sense of true entitlement—the entitlement to love and care from her parents, to have her needs met to the best of their ability—had been so warped by her role as the GC in my aunt’s household that she could only see our interaction as a transaction and I was setting the bar too high for her with shopping at Macy’s rather than Kmart. There were many other dysfunctional dynamics in our relationship, to be sure, but this was something she spoke out about: “I am a burden here, why don’t you send me away?”

What could I have said? “Of course you are a burden, every child represents a financial burden but it is one borne with love?” Believing that I had abandoned her when she was six, would she have believed it? Certainly no more than she believed my denial. Sadly, she carried this notion of a child being a burden over to her own child who was, on the one hand was spoiled shamelessly with material goods and an almost total lack of discipline or boundaries, but on the other hand, neglected shamefully in terms of emotional content and even basic teaching of such things as manners. He was a burden who was left to shift for himself, his protests silenced with stuff.

Can a child who believes herself a burden accept “forgiveness” for being so? Can they even believe that they are not nor ever were? Can narcissists simultaneously maintain the opposing sense of being a burden and being entitled?

Feeling like you are a burden makes you feel guilty, at least in the beginning. And when you feel guilty, you try to find ways to expiate that guilt. As children, we take cues from the adults around us who, in a dysfunctional family, are all too happy to tell us our shortcomings. We seek their approval and their forgiveness by trying to surmount those shortcomings, to earn their forgiveness for not being who or what they want us to be. It is, of course, a futile effort because the real shortcoming is not in us, it is in them, in people who cannot, will not, forgive a child for being just a child.

And so we grow up burdens, feeling guilty for our normal, natural needs, turning ourselves inside out to earn forgiveness for without being forgiven, we cannot earn approval or love. And we grow up with this warped notion, which ultimately we internalize, that we are not worthy of love, that we are fundamentally flawed and therefore unlovable. And we grow up thinking that we must somehow abase ourselves, to work for ways to earn forgiveness for our fundamentally flawed selves, in order to be worthy of love.

This is how we get stuck in a cycle of abuse, either going from one abusive partner to another or repeatedly returning to an abusive partner. We take responsibility for their abuse, believing our imperfections, our flaws, our behaviours are the problem, not his (or her) choice to respond to us with abuse and even violence. We do not deserve someone who treats us with respect and love, we must earn it because we see it as a reward for our performance, not as an entitlement of our humanity...and if we feel it is given too easily, we may even disdain it. But before we can begin to earn our rewards, we must first earn forgiveness for our flaws, and that forgiveness must come from a person who holds us in the same contempt, who views us with the same scorn, we knew at the hands of our dysfunctional family.

Without knowing that we do so, we seek forgiveness for simply being. We expect to do things perfectly the first time we attempt to do them, and our failure to do so just further convinces us of our worthlessness. If we continue to associate with Ns, any attempt we may make at giving ourselves props for the parts we did get right, get squelched. In the late 1970s I drove an English sports car and my NHusband and I decided to do a “time and distance” road rally. Or, rather, he decided to do the rally, saying he would navigate so I could drive. (This way, if we won the rally, we won—but if we lost, I was the driver so it was my fault.)

It was my first rally, so I was learning as I went along. Two of the other cars (of a field of perhaps 25 cars) had onboard rally computers—very unusual and costly for the time. I have to give NHubby kudos for not sabotaging me with the navigation (which he easily could have) and, to my utter shock, we came in third place, right behind the two cars with the rally computers. I was thrilled! Ecstatic! Going into the rally, my goal was simply to finish it without getting lost or otherwise making a fool of myself and I placed third and got a trophy!

NHubby quickly stuck a needle-sharp criticism into my balloon of euphoria—it was only third place, he reminded me. “So,” I asked him, annoyed, “It’s our first rally! Did you expect to win it, for heaven’s sake?” His answer? “Yes.” Turns out, third place was still losing in his book, and it was one more failure to add to my list of unforgivable sins.

When we play this game with narcissistic, dysfunctional people, we allow them to set the parameters of our lives. We allow them to define for us good and bad, right and wrong, and we give them the power to hold us to their standards by seeking their forgiveness, their approval, their love. But Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York says “A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.” We have a right to be wrong!

We have a right to make mistakes, a right to make errors, to screw up, to fall short of the goal, to err, to not measure up to standard—most especially, a standard set by someone else. We have a right to live without seeking the forgiveness of unforgiving others who would keep us lapping at their heels like pet dogs, forever seeking the forgiveness for our never-ending sins, the forgiveness that could lead to approval and from there, perhaps to that most elusive of treasures, love.

We have a right to be wrong, to live with pride in what we did accomplish without being dragged down by what we didn’t. We have a right to set our own standards and goals…and to fall short of even those! We have a right to be unapologetically human and to need no forgiveness for that most quintessential of human traits, imperfection.

When we realize that we do not need their forgiveness, that we have been set up and manipulated to keep us jumping through the hoops that keep them entertained and filled to the brim with Nsupply, we find our boundaries, our separateness, our autonomy. And we finally see that there could never have been any forgiveness given because there was never anything to be forgiven for.


Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families: A Summary

Be perfect: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 9

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

9. Thou shalt be perfect

Sample Situation: “Just because you got all ‘A’s on your report card doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have done better. You’re lazy. Now get to work and let’s see you get some more ‘A+s’!”

Lesson Learned: If it’s not perfect, people won’t love you. No matter how good it is, it’s never good enough...but keep trying!

Motto: You’re only as good as your performance and that’s still not good enough!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In a dysfunctional family, the standards of performance set by the parents often have no bearing on reality—or the performance of the parents, themselves, either. Narcissists are the masters of unreality—what they say is the last word, even if that last word should be “impossible.”

I recall a terrifying incident when I was somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10 in which my NM dragged me into the bathroom by my hair, slammed me against a wall, and turned on the tap full blast. She was furious with me for not completing some task I can no longer recall and she was enraged with me for attempting to excuse my failure by saying “I tried…” Screaming almost incoherently, she turned to that tap and told me that in the future I was never to “just try.” I was to do whatever it was she demanded of me, without failure. And then she pointed to the tap and said “If I tell you to tie a ribbon around that stream of water I don’t want to hear ‘I can’t’ or ‘I tried,’ I just want you to do it and no whining, do you understand me?” or something to that effect. I recall nodding my head and feeling utterly petrified, like I had stepped into an episode of the Twilight Zone.

I think I remember this so clearly because this was the incident in which I became truly, viscerally afraid of her because I finally understood that she was, beyond a doubt, out of touch with reality and in my child’s mind, that made her extraordinarily dangerous. She wasn’t just mean, she was crazy and mean, too—a combination I was to often fear might become a lethal one, at least where I was concerned. We both knew what she was demanding of me was an impossibility and yet she had every expectation that I would fulfil that or any impossible task that she might set me to, or I would suffer dire consequences. To say the realization was disheartening would be to understate it by several magnitudes.

I recall that at about the age of 10 I became responsible for mopping the kitchen floor every Saturday morning. The floor was a dull brown asphalt tile, literally impossible to shine (at least with the products available in the stores in the mid 1950s), and rather like the colour of mud. To my child’s eyes, the only way you could tell the floor was dirty was if you walked over it and your shoes stuck to the floor. NM didn’t bother to show me or tell me how to properly wash that floor. There was a string mop in the laundry room and a tin bucket, and a box of Spic n Span under the kitchen sink. It was from the back of that box I got my only lessons in mopping a floor—that, and the “hard knocks” I got for everything wrong she found once I announced I was finished.

Do you really expect a 10-year-old to know you have to move all the chairs away from the table and sweep the room first? Do you really expect a 10 year old to know what constitutes a “clean” floor when the floor is the colour of dirt? I could barely wield the mop, I was so scrawny, and was hopeless at trying to wring it out…my little arms simply did not have the physical strength to do so. And, since the floor looked the same to me, dirty or clean, I couldn’t even tell if I was getting it clean or not! But NM apparently could tell and each failure, from failing to remove the chairs to failing to sweep to failing to wring out the mop sufficiently to leaving dirty marks on the skirting boards, warranted a separate physical punishment, each one accompanied by angry, impatient, screeching insults to my intelligence, eyesight, and ability to reason. Nothing short of perfection was acceptable and, perfection being an undefined, unstated goal, the goalpost moved unpredictably and often.

When I was seven I was skipped, mid-year, from second to third grade. Nobody bothered to assess what educational fundamentals I had missed and give me some make up classes—I assume everyone thought I would do just fine. But I missed multiplication and when I entered the new class, the kids were doing long division and this was way, way over my head. I was afraid to ask for help—the one time I approached my teacher with my dilemma, she suggested I might want to go back to the second grade, but that would turn my already frightening home life into a war zone, with me at the centre of it. So, instead of helping me with learning multiplication, the teacher intimidated me (I met up with her again in the 7th grade and she rather snidely asked me “so, did you ever learn to multiply?” in front of the Home Ec class she was teaching—I had to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about) and I went away to struggle by myself.

This led to a lifelong problem with math—I became math phobic, silently weeping over homework I did not comprehend, unable to bear the humiliation of asking for help and having it thrown in my face. My grades fell…in the 4th grade I was assigned homework (not done in my school district for students below 7th grade unless they were having difficulty) and it plunged me into suicidal thoughts—if NM found out about the homework she would know I was failing math but if I didn’t do the homework, the teacher would call NM—either way, I was screwed and, at the tender age of 9, I began closing my bedtime prayers with a request to die in my sleep so I would not have to face NM when she found out. As this tender age I was brought nose-first up against my limitations and even my mortality, tragic when you consider that children this young should be looking forward to a limitless future rather than praying for deliverance through death.

Perfectionism on the part of parents puts an unwarranted burden on children, a burden that many children internalize and then grow to up put impossible pressures on themselves. If nothing less than perfect is acceptable, then the child learns to feel she is unacceptable because every day she finds evidence that she is not. This is devastating to a child’s self-esteem and just gets worse as she grows up and turns that pressure on herself. Media sets impossible standards of beauty, thinness, wittiness, coolness, setting before us role models who are genetically unlike us and who have access to unlimited resources to force themselves into conformation to the desired “norm.” If you are not thin enough, fair enough, blond enough, rich enough, blingy enough or whatever the current trend dictates, you are worthless.

At home, at school, at work, even at church, we are bombarded with messages of perfection, the barely disguised sneers for those of us who don’t measure up to standards of dress or style or grooming or knowledge or deportment; the fleeting approval when we hit the mark, only to have to do it again in an hour, the next class, the next day, the next Sunday. We are not OK just as we are, love and approval are earned, and we must earn them over and over again.

When we grow up and move out of our dysfunctional homes, we carry this message within us. We internalize it and now begin to beat up on ourselves, to relentlessly punish ourselves for our failures to achieve those impossible “norms” we have been trained to. When we cannot achieve something, it is not because it is impossible or unhealthy or beyond our grasp, it is because we are flawed. We are constantly assailed with more messages, from admonitions that pretend to be affirmations, to well meaning friends who urge us towards success, to our own inner voices who tell us “if you wanted it bad enough, you would make it happen,” whether it is realistic or not.

We learn to count ourselves by our failures, not our successes, and to judge ourselves not on what we accomplished but on what we didn’t achieve. Some of us learn to not try because if we never make an effort, we cannot fail…yes, if we don’t try, we cannot succeed, either, but if we try there is a possibility of failure and we will avoid that bitter taste at all costs. Some become compulsive, relentless, obsessed with their pursuit of success, never having enough because no matter how great the success, that brass ring eludes them…there is no love waiting at the end of each race, each merger, each buy-out, only the expectation that the next one will be bigger, better, more spectacular the last one.

Dysfunctional parents use the reward for performance concept dysfunctionally—they turn it into a carrot-and-stick affair in which the stick is constantly applied and the carrot never gained. Perfection is the key that opens the padlock holding that carrot just out of reach, but you never, ever seem to be just quite perfect enough. Internalized, you cannot love yourself, approve of yourself, feel good about yourself until you achieve that perfection and no matter how hard you try, there is always something you are not perfect about, something that makes you undeserving, something that keeps you from being worthy of love, either your own or someone else’s.


Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
10. Thou shalt not forgive yourself or others.

Do it yourself: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 8

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

8. Thou shalt not let anyone do anything else for you. Do it all yourself.

Sample Situation: Parents continually remind the child that no one is to be trusted. If they do something for you, they're doing it to manipulate you.

Lesson Learned: Stay aloof and don't make friends with anybody. After all, if you get too close, they'll use, hurt and abuse you. And remember this: nobody does anything for anyone unless they want something from you.

Motto: Do everything yourself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Any household in which one or both of the adults are narcissists is dysfunctional. You cannot have a narcissist at the helm of any kind of organization, domestic or otherwise, without dysfunction reigning. One of the things we can never forget about a narcissist is that they judge others by themselves. It is a type of projection kinda combined with rationalization: projection because they are projecting their own beliefs, feelings, values onto others, and rationalization because once they believe others are the same way, then they are “normal” and their beliefs, feeling and values—and the behaviours that issue from them—are okay.

Narcissists do not “get” altruism. If they do something for you, there is an ulterior motive behind it. That ulterior motive may be to gain them something (like Nsupply or even something more tangible) or it may be to disadvantage someone else…but whatever the motive is, no matter how invisible it may be to observers, it is definitely there. Narcissists consider altruism to be stupid: why put out all that effort and get nothing back for it? And they presume nobody else is truly altruistic, either…and if nobody is really altruistic, then apparently altruistic deeds are really, in their minds, some kind of manipulation they just haven’t been able to suss out (and adopt for themselves) yet.

Because narcissists view altruism in such a light, they are loathe to allow anyone to do anything for them unless they can clearly see (or create in their minds) the motive for doing so. If they cannot see or create a motive they can believe, then they will believe that the person is attempting to manipulate them, to take advantage of them somehow…because in their minds, nobody does something for nothing.

My NexH had such parents. Both were narcissistic, the mother of the “martyr” variety, the father one of those guys overstuffed with pride. In the mid 1960s, when his oldest daughter was ready for university, there was no money to pay for it, so she applied for student aid. Unfortunately for her, student aid was based on family income and her father was too proud to admit he needed some help sending his daughter to college. He refused to complete the required paperwork citing a litany of paranoid fears as the reason: nobody, including the university or the government, would loan his daughter, who was just 18 and had no credit rating, the tens of thousands necessary for a university education unless there was some kind of invisible string attached…a string that involved getting hold of his personal, private financial information. Because he couldn’t see himself lending that kind of money to an untried, unproven 18-year-old girl unless he had some kind of ulterior motive, he would not believe that anyone else would, either. Releasing that information would allow someone outside the immediate family know how tight their finances were, what a poor provider he was, and that was a humiliation he could not endure—not even to send his daughter to a fine university. The daughter went to university and she got her degree—but she had to do it herself, working and paying her own way: there was no money in the family to help her and her father, like a textbook narcissist, put his feelings ahead of her well-being...and Dee had to do it herself.

Children learn by example more than any other way. They are natural mimics but they mimic a lot more than the words you say or the body postures you display. Like little sponges, they soak up your fears and prejudices, your beliefs and values. And if you demonstrate to them that nobody can be trusted, that everybody is out to take advantage of you, that is what they will absorb and carry into their adult lives.

There is a multitude of ways to make this demonstration. Have you ever heard something like “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”? or “Do I have to do everything around here to make sure it is done right?” A perfectionistic parent can imbue a child with the sense that nobody else can do it right, a sense that in order to have something done properly, one cannot trust others. They are unforgiving of the smallest deviation from their rigid standards, not even flexing a little to allow for a learning curve or lack of experience. “If I can do it, you can do it,” is their credo, and your lack of perfection is seldom viewed sympathetically. Instead, it can be viewed as a manipulation: you screwed up in order to get out of it rather than lack of expertise or talent or time to perfect it.

Children who grow up in this kind of environment often either become rigid perfectionists themselves, beating up on themselves emotionally when they fail to achieve their own lofty—and often unattainable—standards of perfection. Or they may become underachievers, afraid to reach for their potential because they know they cannot possibly be 100% the first time and nothing less is acceptable. They cannot accept help…needing help is proof they are unable to perform to standard. “Anything worth doing is worth doing right,” my grandfather used to tell me, along with “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” My NM, on the other hand, used to say “Do it right or not at all—no half-assed measures!” The former allows for a learning curve, for repetition and improvement; the latter is irrationally perfectionistic, a set up for failure, and typically N.

A narcissist will shamelessly take advantage of anyone, even their own small children. And because they will, they firmly believe everybody else is the same. If they make friends, it is because they expect to benefit somehow from the friendship—and they believe the friends expect the same. The reason narcissists make such poor friends (and seldom can sustain long-lasting friendships) is because they take what they entered the friendship to get, but the narcissist considers herself too clever to be manipulated and taken advantage of, so when the friend needs something, the narcissist bails. “Friends” are people who want to take advantage of you, the narcissist believes, so you only make friends with people you can get something out of, and then if you are clever enough, you get out before the “friend” can get anything from you.

A good example of this is my GCBro—every autumn my Dad would cut trees from his woodlot and he and a bunch of friends would get together to cut them into logs and then split the logs into firewood. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: they all cut and split and stacked wood into the back of the pickup trucks and trailers, helping each other out. At the end of a day's work, everybody had a truck and/or trailer full of wood for the winter. My grandmother, who was in her 80s, even helped, operating a hydraulic log splitter. My GCBro showed up, everybody helped load up his truck and trailer with wood, then he went across the road to to Gramma's house where she made him a big lunch. When he was done with his lunch he said good-bye to Gramma, got in his truck and drove away without helping the rest of the people. He just took Dad's wood and the labour of his friends and went home without lifting a finger to pay them back in kind, getting what he wanted out of the association without the other guys “taking advantage” of him.

Some narcissists seem to be able to sustain long-term friendships but an examination of the friendship may turn up a dynamic that is anything but friendly. Think about a “mean girl” cluster of friends (which can occur at any age)…or, an extreme example might be gangs. Inside the group is a pecking order, one person clearly the leader, the others “minions,” and below the minions, the “wannabees” who are often targets themselves, but may serve as additional minions. This isn’t exactly what I, personally, would call “friendship,” but it serves the Ns, the leaders of these groups. If you look into the roles of the family members in dysfunctional families, you will find them replicated in these groups, with some of the roles—like the scapegoat who is responsible for all their troubles—sometimes assigned to outsiders.

Rigid rules surround the group to control their behaviour. Some groups are ruled by the strongest, most dominant personality while others, like outlaw motorcycle clubs, elect their president and officers—who are usually the strongest, most dominant personalities. But the narcissist cannot even trust the people within the group—he knows he is not trustworthy, so what would lead him to believe others are? So even if the narcissist belongs to a group and appears to have friendships within the group, s/he still remains alone because there is no one they can trust.

The inability to trust is devastating to personal relationships. Many narcissists marry—repeatedly, in some cases. But too often they project their own untrustworthiness onto their partners and become controlling, suspicious, accusative, and even violent. Only if the narcissist has chosen a co-dependent or enabling kind of person can a relationship survive the distrust. The relationship may survive, but it will inevitably be dysfunctional, producing yet another generation of children who cannot trust, who must do things themselves in order to assure they are not being manipulated or taken advantage of by others, and who must be loners in order to feel safe.

Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
9. Thou shalt be perfect

Hypervigilance: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 7(2)

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

7. Thou shalt be hyper-vigilant (there are actually two #7s in the original document!)

Sample Situation: A child is constantly reminded how dangerous the world is. People can't be trusted either. Therefore, stay aloof, don't get too close to anybody.

Lesson Learned: The only way to be safe in this world is to be careful and insulate yourself from others. Be careful. Always be on guard. They might hurt you. If you need help, don't ask for their help. Do it yourself.

Motto: Always be on your guard. The wise person is always over prepared and distrustful of everyone and everything.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Children are constantly reminded of how dangerous the world is and how untrustworthy people are not so much by dire warnings as by living a life in which the child constantly feels threatened and unsafe. Add being regularly and almost predictably betrayed by those who should love her most—one or both of her parents—she learns for herself that the world is a perilous place and that there are few, if any, who are safe to trust.

If you Google “hypervigilance” you get a lot of overlap with “paranoia,” an unfortunate circumstance since they are worlds apart, even though we sometimes inaccurately use the word “paranoia” to describe what is, in truth, hypervigilance. So what is the difference? Paranoia is “...a form of mental illness; the cause is thought to be internal, eg a minor variation in the balance of brain chemistry” whereas hypervigilance “is a response to an external event (violence, accident, disaster, violation, intrusion, bullying, etc) and therefore an injury.” Some people refer to it as a “psychiatric injury” like PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and, indeed, Complex PTSD can be caused by the kind of dysfunctional parenting we received. PTSD, however is something that needs to be diagnosed by a competent mental health professional so if you think you may have it, your best bet is to see a therapist for a diagnosis and treatment plan. But whether your hypervigilance is caused by PTSD or not, it is good to know what it is and what it does to you.

“Those who grow up in an environment that is not safe (whether physically or emotionally) develop a heightened sense of threat. They learn to scan the environment for potential danger, and react defensively. As an adult, this can continue as a chronic sense of fear and a predisposition to overreact and take things personally, especially in intimate relationships. We carry the war with us.” This is the kind of hypervigilance that children, especially the Scapegoat children, of dysfunctional families, learn and eventually internalize—and it gives us a lot of difficulty as we grow up and move into our adult lives.

One of the things hypervigilance leads us to do is to extrapolate: we take the facts available to us and project forward what might happen. I know I was doing this as young as 8 years of age because I can clearly remember an incident. NM left me and GCBro in the car while she went to consult with a lawyer—she and my father were separating…again. She said she would be gone for an hour but when the hour came and went, I began getting nervous. Although I was no longer consciously aware that she had abandoned me to the State for adoption when I was only two years old (but she kept my infant brother), on some level I retained those memories—and fears. The later it got, the more fearful I became until I was convinced she was never coming back. This made me hysterical which, eventually, led to me curling up in a ball in the corner of the car, sobbing uncontrollably. Of course, there was hell to pay when NM got back to the car—two hours late—but I had taken what I knew (she was gone longer than an hour), combined it with what I feared (being abandoned again), and extrapolated them into an abandonment scenario that completely undid me.

I didn’t “outgrow” this but I did learn to not buy into my “catastrophizing.*” Nearly fifteen years after NM died, I still fall into hypervigilance and extrapolation, particularly in times of stress, but I no longer allow it to control or paralyze me. My husband, who is diabetic, had a major seizure last year due to low blood sugar. When he collapsed, he fell into a position that blocked his airway and being unconscious, he was unable to move and allow himself to breathe…and I was unable to move him. I am ordinarily calm in medical emergencies, but I was widowed in 2000 and well I know that after 4 minutes without oxygen, the brain begins to die. I stuck my fingers into his throat and pressed down on his tongue to open his airway, frantically willing him not to die. He had had one of these crashes 18 months earlier and I knew from experience he would eventually regain consciousness (assuming I could keep his airway open) and be ok, but part of me was still extrapolating to having to make that awful call to his mother to tell her that her son had died. I control it, but it lives in my psyche like a cobra, just waiting for its moment to strike…

Another thing we deal with when we are hypervigilant is anxiety. Oh, not the hand-wringing, brow furrowing, looking over our shoulder stuff, but quiet, pervasive, persistent anxiety, like we are constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. We become sceptical to the point of cynicism at much too young an age. We cease to trust implicitly and begin to look for the “catch” in even the simplest, most obvious things. When I was a little girl I remember sitting on the floor with my brother, watching TV, when my NM asked me if I would like some peanuts. As a kid who seldom got enough to eat, I eagerly accepted her offer and she handed me a small metal can with the word “Peanuts” emblazoned on the side. As I reached for the can, my brother tried to intercept it, but uncharacteristically, she waved him off. That should have warned me but, truthfully, I was soaking up the “special attention” I never got from her—she was offering me a treat and she wasn’t allowing my rude little brother to take it away before I even got it. I struggled a bit with the tight-fitting lid of the little tin, but finally it loosened up. Suddenly, the lid flew out of my hand and out of the can leapt what looked like a snake—a long tightly coiled spring covered with a reptile-printed fabric. I shrieked, dropped the can and jumped backwards, bursting into tears. NM also had tears in her eyes…from laughing so hard. GCBro was rolling on the floor clutching his sides. I stood there, immobilized with hurt and humiliation, until I was able to pull myself together enough to run to my room. Later, when NM got out the real peanuts, I wasn’t allowed to have any because I “had a stick up my ass” and I “couldn’t take a joke.” You can bet that from that day forward I looked for the catch in anything unexpectedly nice anyone ever tried to do for me.

“The hypervigilant person often has a diminished sense of self-worth, sometimes dramatically so [and] is often convinced of their worthlessness and will often deny their value to others.” People who value themselves do not spend their lives looking over their shoulders, waiting for someone to attack them; we who have lived lives of being the butt of other people’s jokes, the object of their derision, of being invisible or punching bags or both—we know that we are not valued by those closest to us, by those who should see us as priceless treasures. And if our own families find us valueless, who are we—especially as little kids—to naysay them? We assimilate and internalize the messages our dysfunctional parents fed us every day of our childhoods and by the time we are adults, we not only believe those messages, we feed them to ourselves.

Another thing we may do is engage in disbelief and denial. “...the hypervigilant person is aware of how implausible their experience sounds and often doesn't want to believe it themselves…the hypervigilant person cannot bring themselves to believe that the [abuser] cannot and will not see the effect their behaviour is having; they cling naively to the mistaken belief that the [abuser] will recognise their wrongdoing and apologise…” How many of us cling to hope that if we can just find the magic key, we can unlock the door to the heart of the dysfunctional family member(s) who torment (s) us?

This kind of denial can be deeply rooted and almost impossible to eradicate. This is not the simple choice of weighing two versions of the “truth” and choosing the one you wish to believe, this is something buried deep in your subconscious and often out of the reach of conscious thought. Many of us go NC (No Contact) with our abusive, dysfunctional parents and many who do so eventually come to the realization that these people, who are our parents in name only, never loved us because they are incapable of the selflessness that real love requires. And yet, the denial and disbelief that our own mothers, the women who carried us inside their bodies and gave us life, could not love us seems to bury itself in our being, coming to the fore on occasions like the births of our own children or grandchildren, when we realize how much and how effortlessly we love our own. The love was simply there—we made no effort, we did not summon it—it was just there, with our own children. What was wrong with us that our mothers looked into our little faces and were not overwhelmed with love for us like we were for our own children? Despite decades of abuse and therapy and consciously coming to terms with the fact that, through no fault of our own, our mothers didn’t…and never will…love us, somewhere deep in our hearts there remains a feeble flicker of hope that one day she will wake up and realize she does love us after all, and begin to act like the mother we always wanted and needed.

Many of us stay hypervigilant to her behaviour, subconsciously (even consciously) picking apart her every action, looking for evidence that maybe, just maybe, she loves us. We try to find ways to rationalize those things she does or says that are, in truth, hurtful and insensitive. Some of us even redefine things like love to incorporate her unloving and compassionless conduct. The hope, no matter how tiny, that she loves us can be so strong that our hypervigilance picks up on the smallest implication that she might care. Coupled with denial and disbelief, we can be held in thrall to our NMs simply by that faint hope that sometimes we don’t even recognize exists.

I knew from my earliest childhood that something was wrong with my mother. I didn’t know how I knew, but meeting other little girls in school and hearing (and occasionally observing) their home lives made it crystal clear to me that my mother was different, and not in a good way. I, on the other hand, was not so different from the little girls I played with, having the same hopes and desires, beliefs and values as my peers. I was satisfied that I was a normal little girl and that my mother was strange. I knew before I started school that my mother was dangerous—by the time I started school I had long ago developed the hypervigilance that kept me as safe as possible, the knowledge that staying out of sight was safer than reminding her of my existence with my presence, the knowledge that swift obedience was more likely than dallying to keep me out of trouble. I was alert to her moods, her body language, her facial expressions, her tone of voice—all of which helped me to predict what was going on with her and the safest way for me to respond. What I didn’t know until I started school was that other little girls didn’t have to do the same with their mothers—their mothers were safe to be around all of the time. There was something wrong with my mother…really, truly wrong.

And I spent years in therapy coming to terms with this fact, eradicating beliefs and habits and dysfunctional behaviours, learning to be an emotionally healthy person, even learning how to “be my own mother.” And my life improved, my relationships improved, my sense of self improved and I was even able to be in my mother’s presence without fear (although that hypervigilance was awake and quiveringly alert the whole time!).

And then she died. It was an unexpected death and I had not seen or heard from her for several years—I had become invisible again, and my daughter had become the daughter NM had apparently wanted me to be…her Mini-Me. I had felt some vague unease—and a feeling of unfairness—when my daughter made it clear that NM was in regular touch with her, that she received a five-figure cash gift from my NM so she could put a down payment on a house, and that NM was planning to disinherit me in her favour. With her every phone call, with her every visit and reporting on NM and her activities, my hypervigilance grew…something was definitely wrong here and I felt I had to be on guard.

And then NM died and the expected sense of relief enveloped me—but something else as well. The death of a hope I had not even known I was still harbouring. For the death of that poor, feeble little hope I wept—for the death of my mother, I felt only a release from the bondage of apprehension and anxiety—the other shoe had finally, irrevocably, dropped.

We develop hypervigilance as a protective mechanism. We develop it to be like an “early warning” system, a subconscious process that instantaneously assesses threats and risks and projects their likely outcome based on our past experiences and our worst fears. And for some of us, it was a useful—even essential—tool in surviving our childhoods at the hands of dysfunctional parents, but it becomes a liability in our adult lives, where we are not daily living with and under the control of dysfunctional emotional predators. Hypervigilance, misplaced and allowed to rule our lives, makes us dysfunctional. As adults, it is time to put childish ways behind us, and hypervigilance is one of those things.

* Loretta LaRoche

Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
8. Thou shalt not let anyone do anything else for you. Do it all yourself.

No boundaries: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 7(1)

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families 
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A

7. Thou shalt allow your boundaries to be violated, especially by those who “love” you.
Sample Situation: A child trying to accomplish a task continues to persist and work on it, hoping to gain a sense of accomplishment and approval. “Don't be so stubborn!” mommy says. “Just give up. There’s more important things than that to be done! Now put that stuff away and clean the house so that mommy knows you love her.”

Lesson Learned: Anything you want is not worth protecting. Only those you love can tell you what is important and what’s not. Quit thinking for yourself and just do what makes everyone else happy.

Motto: Because others are more valuable than you, you don’t have the right to maintain your own boundaries or to make decisions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some of us aren’t clear on what boundaries are. According to Wikipedia, “Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify for him- or herself what are reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave around him or her and how he or she will respond when someone steps outside those limits. They are built out of a mix of beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning.

“Personal boundaries define you as an individual, outlining your likes and dislikes, and setting the distances you allow others to approach. They include physical, mental, psychological and spiritual boundaries, involving beliefs, emotions, intuitions and self-esteem.”

If you are the child of a Narcissist and/or grew up in a dysfunctional family, you have been raised to have no boundaries. Nothing you own is yours, not even your body, certainly not your thoughts and beliefs. If you have any boundaries at all, they are in your head and you keep them to yourself because letting your NParent know about them guarantees they will be immediately disregarded, trampled, forbidden. You are not an individual, separate person to your NParent, you are an extension of him, her, or them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change when you grow up.

“Having clear boundaries is essential to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. A boundary is a personal property line that marks those things for which we are responsible. In other words, boundaries define who we are and who we are not. Boundaries impact all areas of our lives: Physical boundaries help us determine who may touch us and under what circumstances— Mental boundaries give us the freedom to have our own thoughts and opinions— Emotional boundaries help us to deal with our own emotions and disengage from the harmful, manipulative emotions of others—”

“…boundaries are a healthy, normal, and necessary part of life. Boundaries are a way to manage one’s life and one’s interpersonal relationships—a way to set limits.”

I spent most of my childhood waiting to be 18. I really didn’t have any plans for my life after that, I was simply focussed on turning 18 because, I believed, once I was 18 I could move out of my mother’s house and she would not be able to hurt me any more. Somehow I expected that when I turned 18, not only would I have boundaries, but NM would be obligated to respect them.

I was wrong.

I had never thought of myself as being an extension of my mother until I learned about boundaries: the better your boundaries, the more autonomous you are…and I was not allowed to be autonomous, nor was I allowed to have boundaries. To even hint at having them was to invite a retaliatory rage; to give away the slightest feeling of dismay or displeasure at having my boundaries violated risked indignance, aroused suspicions, and punishment. Not only did I have to tolerate the constant and unrelenting violation of my boundaries, I had to pretend that it was ok with me, that it was no big deal, that I had no rights and that was fine with me.

Just what are we talking about here? Well, when I was a kid, NM would come into my room and “clean out” my closet, my dresser, my room…usually when I was not home. At the end of one her forays, I would be missing clothes, books, toys, cards from my grandmothers and drawings I did (“worthless trash” in NM’s estimation), and even pets. I had no voice in the matter, things just disappeared when I was not there. And I was expected not to object.

I was not allowed to have physical boundaries: if she wanted me to sit on the lap of a smelly old man who happened to be the producer of a movie she wanted me to have a part in, I was expected to do so (and I faced severe punishment when I refused). When punishing me, she would make me lay across a bed with my bare buttocks and thighs exposed. She had a thin leather strap, once a dog leash but with the metal clip removed, with which she would “spank” me. These were no spankings, they were whippings in the truest sense of the word, because The Strap left the same thin, raised red welts across my tender flesh that a whip would leave. I was not allowed to move during the whipping—if I so much as rolled to one side in my agony, I was given more lashes for attempting to get away—“defiance,” she called it. She could hit, slap, pinch, whip, push, trip, beat me and even pull my hair, but I was not allowed to even look like I wanted to protest. When I had boils (which I did during childhood—lots of them), I was not allowed to object or protest or even cry out in pain when she sat on me (to hold me still, she said) and squeezed them. I had no dominion over my own body whatsoever—any physical boundaries I might try to set were trampled with hob-nailed boots.

When I was an adolescent, she ransacked my dresser and my closet, searched my school books, coat pockets, handbag, even turned my bed out, looking for stuff. Nothing of mine was sacred, anything could—and did—disappear if she either disapproved of it or fancied it for herself. I cannot begin to count the sweaters, skirts, and tops she “borrowed” without asking and subsequently stained, stretched out of shape, or simply never returned. She snooped in everything, demanded explanations for doodles in my school notebooks, even beat the stuffing out of me one afternoon when she found some money in something of mine—I wasn’t allowed to have money until I got a job in high school, and then, only as much as she allowed me to have for bus fare and school lunches. Nothing was private, nothing was sacrosanct, and if I wanted something that she didn’t find necessary in her life (like a can of hair spray), I had to submit a justification for buying it. I could not wait to get out of there and have some privacy and autonomy!

I actually did rebel and set a boundary when I was about 16… We lived about a block from the beach and every afternoon I went down there with a towel, my books, and the dog, and did my homework while working on my tan. I came home one afternoon to find my two-piece bathing suits missing (they were bikinis by the standard of the day, but covered a great deal more than modern bikinis). Outraged—I knew exactly where they were and who took them—I went to NM’s room and searched her drawers and closet as she must have done mine to find my swimsuits. I found them, hidden under some of her lingerie, retrieved them, put one on and went down to the beach. When I got back, she was home and she was livid. How dare I go into her room without permission and go through her things? She had a yardstick in her hand and she smacked me on the bare thigh with it and I—very unexpectedly—went ballistic.

It was like I had split in two, one person standing on the sidelines watching, horrified, as the other put herself in deep, deep trouble. The other, seized by rage and indignation, snatched the yardstick out of NM’s hand and broke it in half, then put her hands on NM’s chest and pushed her, with short, sharp shoves, right out of the bedroom and slammed the door in her face. All the while this was going on, she was screaming her outrage, “Stay out of my room! Stay out of my things! And I’m too old for spanking—don’t you ever hit me again where the marks will show in my gym shorts!”

How pathetic is that? So brainwashed, so lacking in real boundaries or sense of personal power, that I couldn’t tell her not to ever hit me again, just to limit her beatings where I would not be humiliated in front of my peers with the evidence of her brutality. Not only did I not want to reveal to my peers that she still treated my like a little kid, I had come to recognize that those bruises were not badges of my mother’s brutality, they confirmed my culpability…I had gone unbelieved for so long, I no longer expected people to believe me, I just wanted to stop showing them marks on my skin that proclaimed me at fault for my mother’s volatility.

I was careful to keep my thoughts to myself, my opinions and my beliefs. Since my beliefs and values and convictions were pretty much always different from those she expressed, and knowing that she took disagreement as a challenge that she had to win at all costs, I forestalled confrontation with her by simply not informing her of what went on in my head. If she knew what my private thoughts were, she would have done her level best to change or eradicate them.

Before I reached that magical 18th birthday, I got pregnant and married and out of her house. And I expected that would be the end of her predations. She had told me that when times got tough, not to run to her for help—a boundary she set down and I never attempted to cross. And I fully expected her to respect my boundaries after I was on my own. But it didn’t work out that way. As much as she was an ignoring NM, there were times that she decided to visit me—always unannounced—for reasons known only to her. “I was in the neighbourhood” was as false an excuse as one could make, considering that she lived down by the beach and I lived a good 20 miles inland. During those visits she made it clear that even as an adult living on my own, I was not allowed to make decisions for myself without hearing her opinions on where I was wrong. I was supposed to live my life according to her dictates, even though I was on my own and a mother in my own right.

One of the problems with a dysfunctional family and boundaries is that we aren’t allowed to set our own. Someone else sets them for us and they tend to be pretty one-way: they get to set boundaries that keep you out of their business but you are not allowed to do the same. Your boundaries exist only insofar as you are admonished to keep silent about the goings-on inside the family. The problem with growing up this way is that when you reach adulthood, you don’t change: you don’t really know how to set and enforce boundaries and anybody who presumes him/herself your superior will set up the same kind of dynamic with you: your boundaries may be violated at will while you must respect the boundaries of those who have assumed a position of authority over you, be it a boss, a boyfriend, or even another family member like your sister or daughter.

Growing up in a dysfunctional family that tramples all over your boundaries sets you up for two distinct problems in adulthood: 1) an inability to set and enforce boundaries in adulthood and 2) guilt about boundary setting, viewing it as “rejection.”

Learning to set boundaries and enforce boundaries can be tough. We don’t know what is too strict a boundary, what is too lax; we are conditioned to permit any kind of intrusion into our privacy, any kind of control, and sometimes it is difficult for us to even recognize these incursions. After a 13 year marriage to a paranoid malignant narcissist I took a two year hiatus from men and just worked on healing and becoming a healthier person so I would attract healthier men. When I resumed dating I went out with a guy I’ll call Bill who, on the surface, seemed nice enough but I couldn’t quite pin down my unease. One day Bill and I were in a video rental shop and I asked to open an account. The clerk was asking questions and writing down the answers…the problem was, Bill wasn’t letting me answer, he was just taking it over. Finally I interrupted him and said “Bill, who is opening this account, you or me?” He looked puzzled and said “Well, you, of course,” to which I replied “Then kindly allow me to answer the questions, since they are about me, after all.” He sulked all the way back to my place. On another occasion, Bill and I took a car trip down to LA (we lived in Silicon Valley). On the way back, I got food poisoning at lunch and by the time we came into this quaint and romantic little inn he had booked us for the night, I was desperately ill. He was very unhappy with me that I wouldn’t “set it aside” and be romantic and sexual with him…he even complained about how much he paid for the suite and how much trouble he went to in booking just the right room…I was sick and was up and down to the bathroom all night while he sulked. My expectation that he would respect my feeling ill was stomped all over—he moaned and complained all night and in the morning assumed I was well and ready to be frisky when, in fact, I felt like death warmed over. We parted shortly after that trip, for I had seen that nothing, not even my being sick with food poisoning, put a dent in his sense of entitlement.

My brief relationship with Bill taught me a lot about boundaries—setting and maintaining them—and reinforced my resolve to kick to the kerb any man who could not or would not respect them. The next couple of boyfriends didn’t even last as long as Bill because not only was I noticing their boundary violations, I wasn’t sticking around long enough to let them stomp on my sensibilities. Eventually I found a lovely man who understood and respected boundaries and I married him.

We often find boundaries difficult to deal with because we equate them with rejection and we are conditioned to put the feelings of others before our own…and we therefore fear that setting a boundary with someone will be perceived as a rejection. “Dysfunctional families are often dysfunctional in large part because they don't set healthy boundaries. As a result, during their crucial years of development, the children of…dysfunctional parents very frequently are rejected by their loved ones. Children from dysfunctional families commonly develop a hypersensitivity to rejection as a result.” Because setting boundaries is alien to us and because we, unlike our dysfunctional parents, retain our compassion and empathy, setting a boundary may feel like a rejection to us. We feel like we are rejecting the person (or people) who would be most affected by our boundary and we feel guilty for it despite the fact that boundary setting is actually healthy for us and for the people we expect to respect it.

Even though we intellectually recognize the difference between reinforcing boundaries and rejection it does not mean that our emotional perceptions follow suit. This make it difficult to set boundaries for dates such that we end up being promiscuous not because we are lusty, sexual women but because we cannot say “No.” We have been conditioned since the cradle to let someone else be our boss and we know the sting of rejection…and we also know the crush of guilt. We say “yes” to spare the guy what we perceive as rejection and ourselves the guilt that comes from saying “No.”

This carries over into our marriages and our mothering. We agree, we permit, when we don’t want to in order to spare our husband or child the feeling of rejection that we would have felt—and to spare ourselves the guilt that comes along to haunt us when we hurt someone. It is neither good for our marital relationship, as it breeds resentment that our husbands can’t read our minds and just know we wouldn’t like something nor is it good for our children when we cannot set limits for them because we don’t want to bear the irrational guilt our psyches will visit upon us when we violate one of the old boundaries set down by our dysfunctional parents when we were helpless children.

So, for a myriad of reasons, it is important for us to close the door on people violating our boundaries and to learn to set and enforce boundaries in our own lives. It is the only way we can ever gain respect and maintain respect from those around us and teach it to our children.

Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
7 (2). Thou shalt be hyper-vigilant (there are actually two #7s in the original document!)