The Evolution of a Smear Campaign

I had one of my epiphanies the other night…in reviewing my last post—the one about closure—I found myself lingering on the paragraph about why my mother moved in with Nana to take care of her. I was surprised when this happened because my mother never liked her mother and was not shy about admitting it. She never stopped resenting her parents for not letting her run wild when she was a teenager and despite the fact that she snuck out regularly and finally eloped with a guy she had known less than a month, she blamed their strictness for those choices of hers, choices that ended up with my birth and the subsequent ruination of her life.

She never grew up enough, emotionally, to accede to the simple fact that during her adolescence, the social mores of the time included more restrictions for girls than boys and much different expectations. According to NM’s older brother, my Uncle Gary, my grandparents were no more strict than the parents of her peers, the girls she went to high school with, but to hear her tell it, they all but chained her to the house, they were so old fashioned and restrictive. But in reality, it was my mother who was different from the norm, not her parents. Where other girls complied with their parents’ wishes and restrictions, my mother did not. Where other girls stayed home in their beds and slept at night, my mother climbed out her bedroom window and went out and partied in places normally off-limits to the under-aged (she was 15 and 16 when doing this). In typical N fashion, however, she blamed her parents, particularly her immigrant father, for “forcing” her to such extremes in pursuing her happiness—“…if he had let me go out, I wouldn’t have had to sneak…” (An interesting aside: two generations later my daughter, beginning at the age of 14, was doing the exact same thing—without knowing about her her grandmother's antics—and also making it the fault of her parents!)

My mother never outgrew that resentment. When I spent summers with her parents and expressed a wish to stay there full time she told me that they were “different” during the summers and that if I lived there full time I would see that and I would regret it. But my grandparents were somewhat strict with me anyway and I didn’t mind because I interpreted it as a sign they cared about me. But my mother, while happy to dump me in their laps every summer, never stayed even overnight at their house. She was different when she was around them—like she was a kid again and compelled to obey…or dissemble… She had never truly grown up but remained a resentful, spiteful child, hiding her normal bold, brassy, bossy self from them the same way my daughter, at 14, hid the fact that she was wearing makeup from her adoptive parents.

When my grandmother was 69, my grandfather died in his sleep—they had been married for 53 years. For many years, my grandparents had been friends with a couple, Rob and Frances, with whom they liked to play cards and to go travelling in their Airstream trailers. Not too long after my grandfather died, Rob’s wife also died. Before long, Rob and Nana’s friendship went to the next level and soon they were married.

My mother was livid. Rob was a man of very modest means and NM was positive his only interest in Nana was her money. He had an Army pension and some income from his late wife’s estate so he could pay his own way, but that didn’t stop my mother’s projections. On each of my annual visits to my father’s farm, I would stop in and spend some time with Nana and after she married Rob, Nana introduced us. I liked him: I found Rob to be a gentleman who truly admired my grandmother—it was easy to tell by the way his eyes followed her when she walked around the room. I liked him and I was glad she found some companionship in her waning years.

When my grandmother was in her early 80s she fell and broke her hip. The surgeons botched the job, leaving her with one leg shorter than the other and her foot turned outward. The surgery had to be done again and during the second surgery, Nana had a stroke.

In the 1960s Nana and Grandpa built a large 2-story house where, after they were married, Nana and Rob lived together. But disabled by her stoke, the house wasn’t the best place for them, so they moved into a retirement village while Nana recovered from her stroke and her surgery. My mother, suspicious as ever, took it upon herself to divest herself of all of her meagre holdings in the Nevada desert and high-tailed it to Oregon, moving into Nana’s house to “take care of it” while Nana was in the assisted living facility. And that is when the real smear campaign began.

I am 70 years old—a couple of years ago I began seeing spots crop up on my skin, particularly on my forearms—that looked like purple-and-red bruises. They weren’t painful like a bruise but they were vivid and took longer than a bruise to clear up. These marks are called “purpura” and they are a normal part of aging. In older people who have sun-damaged skin (and Nana was an avid gardener in the days before the invention of sun screen), there is a thing called “solar purpura,” bruise-like spots that can be as much as 5cms (2 inches) across.¹ These are perfectly normal on aging skin and when I first saw them crop up on my own arms, I remembered seeing them on Nana’s forearms and on the arms of other elderly people.

But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to hear—even after I explained to her that this was normal (I worked in a nursing home when I was in my early twenties—I have seen plenty of elderly skin!) she wasn’t having it. My mother insisted they were bruises because Rob was abusing Nana and she couldn't speak up because of her stroke. Of course Nana could nod her head “yes” and shake her head “no,” so she could have been asked if Rob gave her those marks but my mother wrote that off saying “she’s been confused since her stoke,” and insisted Nana had to come out of that assisted living facility immediately. Rob could stay there, as far as she was concerned, just as long as he paid for it out of his own money, and not Nana’s. And there was my first clue to what was going on with this uncharacteristic “dutiful daughter” mask my mother had inexplicably donned.

She succeeded in getting Nana back to her house and she hired a home care aide to come a couple of times each week to give Nana a bath and a few other heavy-lifting type jobs. During this time NM wrote to me occasionally but wrote frequently to my daughter. The information I got was that Rob had been beating up on Nana, leaving bruises on her (the purpura), and that he was after her money but she (NM) had put a stop to it. Rob wouldn’t dare lay a hand on Nana while she was around to protect her!

Anybody who ever met the diminutive Rob would have had a laugh over this—he was a small man to begin with, and now shrunken with advanced age. He had severe emphysema and literally could not walk across a room without his oxygen tank, a little green cylinder on wheels that he towed behind him everywhere. If he had exerted the kind of energy necessary for assaulting my grandmother, he would have collapsed of oxygen starvation—the man barely had the energy—or air—to walk to the other side of the room!

But the accusations didn’t stop there. Mother scoured the house looking for Nana’s jewellery and other valuables, certain that Rob had a hand in the disappearance of anything she couldn’t find. His list of character flaws ran from marrying a rich widow and expecting her to make his final years luxurious to being a Catholic to being a wife beater to being a thief. And his whole family were no better, in her estimation.

And my mother wasn’t covert or even bashful about her voicing her suspicions and unkind thoughts. Knowing how confrontational and contentious she was, it would not surprise me to learn that she had even said some of these things to Rob’s face. After all, Nana’s stroke had rendered her speechless, so she could not silence her daughter’s poisonous tongue or lay her suspicions to rest.

This was very much in keeping with my mother’s modus operandi. In the past, my mother liked to create a crisis out of whole cloth, then swoop in as the rescuer, garnering appreciation and accolades from those who thought themselves rescued, and admiration from observers. These campaigns were invariably kicked off with a smear campaign, a series of lies that had known or observable kernels of truth but which could not be disproven. Nana’s purpura—having been robbed of speech, Nana could not refute NM’s accusations that Rob had injured her in a violent altercation. And nobody bothered to ask Rob if my mother was telling the truth: they could see the purple marks on Nana’s skin, and Nana’s daughter indignantly accusing him—not to his face, mind you—and people just believed her.

This tactic had worked for my mother on numerous occasions, as far back as the mid-Fifties when she ran a woman out of our neighbourhood by stirring up the neighbours against her. She also used the same tactics to turn the FOO against me in her campaign to take my children to give to her younger brother to adopt. It was a tried-and-true approach and she didn’t waste any time putting the accusations, inferences and innuendo to work for her.

My mother used her accusations of Rob’s abuse to justify removing Nana from the assisted-living facility so she could “keep an eye on things,” the staff’s lack of diligence, according to her, was the only reason that Rob had not been caught abusing Nana. But the only thing she was really keeping an eye on was Nana’s bank account. NM had spent the previous few years of her life living a hand-to-mouth existence in a run-down trailer in a dusty hamlet in the Nevada desert and suddenly she had a cosy, up-market roof over her head, access to endless supplies of cash, and an unprecedented opportunity for NSupply. The situation was tailor-made for her trademark MO, and she wasted no time setting the wheels in motion. She had found herself a comfy berth that was going to eventually pan out as her nest egg for the future, provided she could keep Rob’s fingers out of it.

During the time my NM lived with Nana—after Nana’s stroke—NM got Nana to make some changes to her will. Since NM is the one who told me about those changes, I will never know what exactly was changed, but at one time Nana asked me what, from her house, I would like to have as a memento of her—she wanted to put it into her will. But when her will was probated, I received no bequests. Uncle Pete also said that Nana had promised him something in the house but when the will was probated, that item was missing from the will.

My mother also told me that she had seen to it that Nana bequeathed her the house, its contents, and the money in Nana’s bank account, and that the investments and cars would go to my uncles. I have no idea what Nana’s will was before, but I know that neither Rob nor I received anything.

Like Grandpa, Rob died in his sleep one night. Fifteen hours later, Nana was also gone. When I came north for the funeral I was shocked to learn that Rob would not be buried near Nana—he wasn’t even buried in the same cemetery—that his funeral had already been held and no one from our family attended, and that his children were coming to collect his personal belongings and all they were getting was a single small cardboard box with his Missal, a Bible, his Rosary, some papers—like his military discharge papers—and a few bits of clothing. Everything else NM had already discarded or was keeping. She wasn’t even going to let them into the house—the box was on the front porch for their collection. I had liked Rob and I found it very sad that my mother treated him so shabbily but I was still a few years from the breakdown that pushed me into meaningful therapy so I was simultaneously loathing my mother, afraid of her, and yearning for signs that she might someday love me.

For the few years that my grandmother was married to Rob, my mother bad-mouthed him daily. By the time he was dead, nobody spoke his name at my grandmother’s wake. Nana had spent her last years with him, but it was as if he had never existed in her life. Nana’s funeral was well-attended with many people coming to the funeral home, the burial, and later to the church hall where each attendee had brought something to eat and a pot-luck supper was laid out for us. It was as if Rob had never existed, as if my grandmother had remained a widow until her own death. My mother had erased him for posterity, not even giving him a final resting place next to his wife. He ended up buried next to his first wife, which I can appreciate his children probably preferred, but that doesn’t undo my mother’s small-mindedness in essentially cutting him out of our family’s history like a cancer and assassinating his character from the day she found out he had booked himself and Nana into an assisted living facility when my grandmother became disabled from the stroke. He did the right thing—he was older than Nana and tethered to that oxygen bottle: he could not take care of her alone, and this way she would be comfortable with her own furnishings and possessions, but safe and professionally cared for.

But all my mother saw was the money going out of the account every month, her inheritance dwindling with each check. Better that money should go to her, but she couldn’t be satisfied with just saying “Hey, let’s put Mother back in her own home and I will take one of the guest bedrooms and be there 24/7 when you need me.” No, that would be too humble, too ordinary, lacking in NSupply—and some people might actually suspect what she was really up to. No, vilifying Rob and making him look like a decrepit version of Bluebeard gave her a plausible reason to yank Nana out of the assisted care facility, killing two birds with one stone: stopping the haemorrhage of funds that was diminishing her inheritance and covering her real motive for the move.

Smear campaigns are done for a reason. Often the reason is no more than to gain NSupply from listeners, but many times they have a much more sinister purpose behind them. I am sorry to say I did not suspect my mother’s character assassination of Rob for what it was until long afterwards. I thought it was just her nasty suspicious character in action rather than a deliberate way to discredit him in case Nana died first and she had to fight him for the estate. But through the clarity of hindsight, I can see now just what was going on, what she did it, and how well it succeeded: there is no doubt in my mind that if Nana had died before Rob, the very next day my mother would have put that little old man out on the gravel road in front of the house, a small box of possessions in one hand, his little oxygen bottle trolley in the other, and shut and locked the door.

I am sorry, Rob, that I didn’t stick up for you back then—but neither of us really knew, at that time, what she was really up to or to what lengths she would go to achieve what she wanted, which was as much of Nana’s assets as she could get her hands on. I am sorry she assassinated your character and created a bed of lies upon which she could rest a court case against you in the future, if necessary. She did the same to me, but I literally did not see what she was doing to you until it was long over—Nana has been gone more than twenty years and only today am I seeing what went down. I wish I had done more…

¹ https://www.disabled-world.com/health/dermatology/skin/bruising-limbs.php

Let’s talk about closure

The idea of getting “closure” for some kind of psychological pain is a fairly recent concept in the popular culture. When I was a young woman in the late 60s and 70s, it was a word you never heard (unless, perhaps, you worked in the mental health field), and a concept the average person had never heard of, let alone internalized.

The first time I ever heard the word “closure” used in this context was during a television interview. A crowd of people were gathered outside a California prison to demonstrate their support for the death penalty in general and for the execution scheduled for that evening in particular. A family member of the victim of the about-to-be-executed felon was asked by a member of the news crew if he thought this execution would bring him closure and the angry, grief-stricken interviewee said it would. He felt that the death of the person who killed his family member would bring him peace and acceptance of her death through justice being done, his loved-one being avenged.

But does it? PBS Newshour cites Marilyn Armour, director of Institute for Restorative Justice and Restorative Dialogue at the University of Texas at Austin, who has researched homicide survivors for two decades: “They’ll tell you over and over and over again that there’s no such thing as closure.”¹ Why? Because they expected the act of executing the killer would take away their pain and bring them peace—and it didn’t. They continued to mourn and to grieve and to feel angry and short-changed by life because they expected that carrying out the sentence would end their pain, and it did not. The killer was dead and they were still in just as much pain as they were the day before the execution—it didn’t bring them the closure they expected to find at the end of that needle.

Back in the day, before anybody really knew what closure was or even that they could look for it, we coped. We didn’t expect the pain of the loss of a loved one, whether through death or divorce or other circumstance, to go away and never hurt us again. The painful end of a romance was not something we sought “closure” from, it was something we coped with until we “got over it.” The death of a loved one we learned to live with—painfully at first, but with the pain diminishing over time until we could remember the joys of having known that person without continuing to experience the excruciating pain of new loss.

Today the idea of closure is on everyone’s lips and I am not so sure that is emotionally good for us. For one thing, looking for closure is to look outside ourselves for surcease from emotional pain—it is depending on others, whether it is the state or a family member or even the agent of our pain—rather than ourselves, and those others cannot always be relied upon to work in our best interests.

There are some things for which closure is simply not possible—it just isn’t there. The disappearance of a loved one who is never found, for example. The suicide or overdose death of a loved one. The senseless destruction of that which we hold dear through anonymous acts of violence and malice. There is no closure from those things: there is no clear perpetrator, there is no one to blame and to punish and from whom to exact retribution. There is only grief and, ultimately, making the choice between acceptance or intractable, unending grief, pain, and resentment.

This is where I find the concept of closure to be a problem: we have come, as a people, to think of closure as an entitlement and when we don’t get it, we get stuck. And for those like us, closure with respect to the predations by the narcissistic members of our Family of Origin pretty much is not going to happen. No narcissist worth his or her salt is going to give you closure if it means admitting any kind of wrongdoing on their part or doing something they don’t want to do—it just isn’t going to happen. And how do you get closure any other way?

Many of us have a subconscious expectation—a sense of entitlement, if you will—to get closure when we begin healing from the abuses of our Ns. We have been acculturated to the idea that if we do the work, we are entitled to the reward. In dealing with our Ns, in doing the hard work of repudiating denial and facing the painful truths and realizations of our NParents and other family members, after we go through the hard and painful work of facing those ugly, hurtful truths, we expect our reward—and in today’s world, the reward we expect is closure: the Ns are banished, we are whole, and we turn the page and enter a new chapter in our lives in which we are no longer plagued by them or their dreadful legacy.

But the fulfilment of this expectation depends on the cooperation of your Ns and their flying monkeys and sycophants. And while you may be done with them, that in no way guarantees that they are done with you. How you find a sense of closure when you have closed and locked the door and they keep prying it open? How can you feel the satisfaction of a problem being solved and over with when they pop out of the woodwork at the most unexpected and inopportune moments? How do you get closure when the other side of the equation simply will not leave it alone?

You don’t. And that is where we get stuck. We are going after something that is unachievable and we are so fixed and focussed on it that we never even look for another goal, another reward. The world around us chants “Closure! We want closure!” and we join right in.

One of the people in the PBS article indicated the whole idea of closure was a source of pain and frustration for her because she couldn’t have it. The murderer of her brother was never prosecuted due to insufficient evidence. She felt that the justice system’s bid for providing closure to some victims of crime—those whose perpetrator had been caught and convicted, but not to others, people like herself who lose a loved one to murder but no prosecution or conviction issued forth—indicated that the justice system considered some lives to be more valuable than others, because people in her situation are not offered an opportunity for closure. She felt she was suffering a double blow, one from the killer of her brother, the other from the state.

But if she had no expectation of closure, wouldn’t she feel differently? She was depending on the state to give her closure, to take actions to close the door on her pain. She imagines that those who saw the killers of their loved ones die got something she didn’t—their pain eased and a door opened to a life in which the pain of her brother’s death and absence would stay behind. And she doesn’t realize that they have no more been relieved of their suffering than she has.

Why? Two reasons: 1) she is looking for the wrong thing and 2) she is looking to the wrong source for her surcease.

The way to most effectively deal with emotional pain is to not look outside ourselves for others to do something (or to stop doing something) but to look to ourselves. As infants and children we had to look outside ourselves to get our needs met because we were incapable of meeting them on our own. But we are not children any longer, and the means to handling with our emotional pain is within us—each of us.

If we go looking for closure, we are bound to find disappointment because until they die, our Ns are not going to give us what we want unless it happens to align with what they want. If our needs don’t align with their wishes, we are disregarded: what the N wants is what is paramount and the only goal the N will pursue. This, of course, is diametrically opposed to what we need for that closure.

The problem with relying on others to provide us with what we need for closure is that every one of those others have their own agenda, even if they aren’t narcissists themselves. The woman from PBS who was so bitter about her brother’s killer not being tried: in her case the prosecutor’s focus was on having a winnable case—not only is his track record at stake (his professional reputation) but he also has to answer to the bean counters who don’t want him to “waste” limited resources on unproductive cases. People meet their own agenda, not ours, whether it is financial, legal, social, or personal. You cannot hang your hope of resolution of an emotional issue on someone else because their own issues will inevitably take precedence.

So, if closure is not available, what do you do? Suffer forever?

No, you do what we did back in the olden days before “closure” became the holy grail of emotional pain resolution. You go inward and you learn to cope. You learn to work through that pain not by waiting for someone to do something to somebody else, but by processing it, by feeling it, by dealing with it. You cry, you grieve your loss, you mourn the permanence of it. And you do that until you are purged of it to whatever degree you can achieve.

Does that make the pain go away forever, so that you can go forward never hurting from it again? No—but the brutal truth is, nothing will do that, not even this elusive “closure.” Unless you have the memories of the events that caused your pain wiped from your mind, there will always be something that can trigger the pain. And when that happens, you just go back to whatever helped you to cope in the first place: tears and feeling the pain until it stops again. It will stop but it will never go away. IF closure is available to you, this is the only way to truly get it.

My mother stole my children 45 years ago. I got them back 37 years ago. My mother has been dead almost 20 years. I have all of the closure I will ever get. I don’t hate her—I don’t love her—she was my mother in a biological sense, but she never mothered me. She had power over me, control, for too many years, both directly and indirectly, but that has been over for a very long time and I control my own life to the extent that it is humanly possible.

It really doesn’t matter anymore how I feel about her or the things she did—it is what it is and the past is written in indelible ink. What matters is how I feel today because I live in today. I cannot change what was done to me and even if she was still alive and magically un-narced, she would not be able to change it either.

What gives you closure, if that is what you want to call it, is acceptance of reality. It is not the attainment of some fantasy you have built up in your mind—“I’ll be happy when…”—it is the acceptance of what has happened in your life, good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong, and the decision to not let those past events dictate your future. It is accepting that people will do bad things, they will do what we do not want them to do. It is knowing that we must do what we must do in order to to deal with them. It is the acceptance that our lives may never be what we want or hope they will be but that is still ok, because we are still breathing and functioning and we can find ways to accept that which we did not ask for and integrate it into the fabric of our lives.

Back in the olden days, when birth control was unreliable and The Pill was not yet in the marketplace, most babies were unplanned. Today I see people tying themselves in emotional knots because they were not a planned baby and they therefore believe they were unwanted. They put themselves through ten kinds of unnecessary hell based upon on the irrational belief that unplanned=unwanted. But nobody of my generation would have made that presumption because we did not expect every baby to be planned: we knew that unplanned but desperately wanted and joyfully celebrated babies happened all of the time. Our expectation, our assumption, was that we were wanted and loved until and unless something happened to give us reason to doubt it.

And so it is with closure: the expectation drives the experience. If you stop expecting the magical cessation of your pain through closure and seek, instead, the acceptance of your own reality, acceptance of the truth, mourning your losses, and learning how to cope when your world is not what you wanted it to be, you ultimately find the path to your own peace.

¹ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/death-penalty-bring-closure-victims-family/

Are you doing what you need to do?

As most of you know, I am an insulin-dependent diabetic. Unless you are also an insulin-dependent diabetic, however, you may not know what that means in practical terms.

As a child, I was so petrified of needles that, should an injection be prescribed, I would literally climb under the doctor’s examining table (actually a real table, with four wooden legs) and wrap my arms and legs around a stout wood table leg and scream like I was being tortured. It would take two adults to unwind me from the table leg and hold me down on the examining table so that a third party could give me the shot. Today, 60+ years later, I get at least five needle pokes per day, four of which I do for myself.

Like most diabetics I know, at first I was reluctant to accept the diagnosis but as long as the treatment consisted of pills and diet, I was mostly ok with it. Where I was not ok was with the requirement that I stab my finger at least once daily and squeeze out a drop of blood to check my glucose levels on the little machine the doctor gave me. The fingertips are one of the three most sensitive regions of the body¹ and I was expected to stab myself there at minimum once per day and to do without qualm or niggle.

It was a nightmare. Even though I was not yet injecting insulin, this felt like a massive violation of my body autonomy. While no longer as petrified of needles as I was in childhood, I was still uneasy about them (I faint when I have blood drawn if I watch the procedure) and the idea of willingly poking a sensitive fingertip until blood ran just seemed ghoulish and too much to ask of a person.

I will admit that I tried it…and for my troubles I got bruised fingertips, insufficient blood to make the machine work, and frustration trying to “milk” my poor abused finger for more blood. It was not a happy experience and I soon stopped altogether. Then came time for my semi-annual HbA1c test—the diabetic’s tattletale test—and the news wasn’t good. I do not remember what my level was at the time but this test, which gives a reading of your average blood sugar level over the preceding six months, informed my doctor that my blood glucose was not well controlled and earned me a scolding.

So I had to give it another try. I had to find different ways to try to get blood, I had to chance lancets more often (sharp lancets are less likely to cause bruising and pain), I had to put my kit where I would see it so I would remember. And I had to steel myself against those old childhood terrors of needles and poke my sensitive fingertips with a needle every morning. Because you can’t effectively control your glucose intake if you don’t know what you blood glucose readings are.

Then it was discovered what we thought was some kind of grim intestinal disorder was actually a severe reaction to my diabetes tablets and it was announced that I needed to be on insulin. One of my Worst. Nightmares. Ever. come to life. Multiple shots every day…that I had to give myself. In the stomach. For the rest of my days. It was a worst-case-scenario come to life.

I had a choice to make. The doctor would no longer prescribe the pills that made me so ill, she would only prescribe injectable insulin, so my choice was to take it—meaning learning how to inject myself multiple times per day with a—horrors!—needle or forego treatment altogether. There was no middle ground here, it was one of the other.

The choice I had to make was, for me, very difficult. My diabetes was not severe, I could live a number of more years with it, without treatment—but not without side effects. Without treatment I would eventually lose feeling in my feet and be at risk for amputation like my great-grandfather. I would have increasing difficulty with my vision until blindness set in, like my cousin Mike. I would eventually have kidney issues that could land me in dialysis on a regular schedule, like my husband’s auntie. The risks I was contemplating were huge—and pretty much assured to come to pass—was I willing to end up blind, with no legs, strapped to a dialysis machine two or three times a week, just to avoid sticking myself with a needle? Did that seem rational? Of course not.

But acknowledging the irrationality of it didn’t do anything to alleviate the fear or the pain of the needles. It was a very difficult choice to make because on the one hand, my very life was at stake—and on the other hand I was looking at a life of inflicting pain on myself multiple times a day. My definition of a “good life” did not extend to self-torture.

The reason I tell this story is that the adult children of narcissists often face similarly difficult choices, choices between maintaining an unhealthy status quo and making a change that may very well be painful. Narcissistic backlash against us for finally standing up for ourselves, Ntantrums and rages and retaliations, smear campaigns and undermining and more, all loom before us when we contemplate taking that first step into autonomy. It follows us as we begin the journey to becoming fully independent beings, and depending upon the determination of our Ns, may follow us right up to the point that we have gained the strength to say “No more!” and enforce strict boundaries against their incursions into our lives and our peace.

But are you actually doing what you need to do to achieve your individuality, your independence, your autonomy? Or are you doing what I did with that blood glucose monitor—give it a few tries, focus on the negatives, then quit, going back to the old avoidance and pretending that things will be ok, hoping things will work out without any effort or input from me?

You have to make the hard choices, not the easy ones. You have to feel the pain, whether it is a needle stick or facing the fact that your own parent has betrayed you and felt no remorse for it. You have to confront the pain, feel it, weep over it, acknowledge that it sucks and it hurts but that you have to do this in order to get where you want to be.

If you are not making the hard choices—saying “no” without excuses or reasons and sticking to it in spite of backlash from the Ns—then you aren’t doing what you need to do to root them out of your life and your psyche. As long as you take the easy way out—placating, agreeing, hiding, making excuses, or allowing yourself to be shamed or browbeaten into compliance—you cannot progress, you cannot heal, you cannot become your own real self.

After that disastrous HbA1c test I got serious about monitoring my blood sugar. A high morning reading means “easy on the carbs” for the day, a low reading means toast with breakfast or two slices of bread on the lunch sandwich, or pasta for dinner. Those readings dictate what comes out of the freezer for dinner and how I will prepare it: nothing dredged or crumbed or battered on high reading days, ice cream for dessert on low sugar days. They also dictate how much insulin I will need to take: if the morning reading is high, then the breakfast insulin injection needs to a bit higher than usual. Any way you look at it, I need those readings…and that is the hard, the painful part.

I looked for ways to make the blood sticks less painful. Sometimes my entire fingertip would be bruised—sometimes I could barely get enough blood for a reading, other times I dripped blood on my nightgown and sheets because I couldn’t stem the flow. Sometimes I had to poke two or three times to get enough blood for a reading. It was hard, it was painful…I had to do it every single day and on high morning reading days, multiple times a day to make sure the glucose level was coming down. It hurt and I didn’t want to do it but I realized, after that test, that it was time to grow up, to stop being that child so afraid of a little needle poke, and to be the adult who does what is necessary, even if it causes pain.

And so I got creative, asked other diabetics, even a doctor in my family, for hints on how to get blood without the bruises and tenderness and eventually learned that sticking to the side of the finger pad still provides blood but avoids the concentration of nerves in the centre of the tip. I learned that pinching a bit of flesh and squeezing it before inserting the insulin needle made the injection less painful. I learned ways to reduce the pain, if not eliminate it, and by doing it over and over and over again for several years, a painful finger prick is a warning to me to change the lancet, not an excuse to quit doing what I need to do t manage my diabetes. I had an appointment with a cardiologist this week and when he asked “How is your sugar? Is it controlled?” I was able to answer with a confident and true “Yes, it is under control” because my morning readings have been within the acceptable zone for months, now. I am doing what needs to be done in order to adequately and appropriately deal with my diabetes.

What about you? Are you doing what needs to be done in order to adequately and appropriately deal with the Ns in your life and the inappropriate coping mechanisms you have developed over the years? Are you facing the hard and painful stuff and working your way through them? Or are you like I was, giving it a couple of half-hearted (and unsuccessful) stabs, then backing away with “this is too hard” or “I can’t do this” or “this hurts too much”? Sometimes what you need to do to fix a problem is painful—excruciatingly painful—do you think having my gall bladder removed was done with a magic wand or with a scalpel and a lot of blood? But as painful as the procedure was, it put an end to the unpredictable and excruciating attacks of biliary colic that awoke me in the middle of the night and sent me screaming to the ER. That surgery was painful and it took weeks for my digestion to get used to the constant stream of bile from my liver but eventually everything normalized and I was permanently relieved of the recurrent and increasingly painful gall bladder attacks.

Healing from narcissist abuse is like this. It hurts. Let me repeat that: IT HURTS. But like my insulin needles or the gall bladder surgery, they are the hurts that eliminate or prevent greater or on-going hurts. It is the cautery iron that stops intractable bleeding, the labour you suffer and endure in order to look your new baby in the face. Avoiding it, avoiding the pain of confronting and mastering your fears brings you nothing but more and deeper fear.

And nobody can fix this but you.

¹ http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/intro/cafe/wort/olc/18375.htm

The B-Word: Betrayal

When we first wake up to the fact that we have an NParent, it can be either emotionally devastating or it can be the first of many epiphanies—AHA! moments that explain what was, up to now, inexplicable. Regardless of our initial reaction to the discovery of parental narcissism, however, that discovery opens the door to a growing realization of what we are really dealing with and who our parents really are.

Initially, many of us cling to our denial because we simply do not want to believe the awful truth that inevitably accompanies enlightenment, the truth that our Nparent is incapable of love and that which we have heretofore perceived as love is nothing more than self-serving manipulations designed to provide the parent with a reliable source of narcissistic supply. When our denial begins to fade, we are overtaken with a crushing sense of betrayal, a feeling of having been duped and used, and an emptiness where we once held the belief that our NParent loved us, despite a paucity of recognizable expressions of that love.

Some of us learned, as children, to accept other things as being symbolic of love: she gave us lots of stuff, or no restrictions, or didn’t interfere in our lives, so she must have wanted us to be happy because she never said “no” to us. We could not wrap our minds around the concept that we were neglected. Others, controlled and manipulated, perceived that control as evidence of love in that she went to great lengths to keep us safe, to make others admire us for our appearance or talents, or simply for how obedient and well-behaved we were. She loved us enough to teach us how to keep house, cook food, mind young children in preparation for the day when we had our own homes; she loved us enough to not make us go out into the big world alone, where we might fail or live poorly, or be without her ready guidance and if we did go out into the world, she was always there for us, ready with advice and suggestions, even commands for those times we were foolish enough to think we might know more than she did. That, we believed, was love—the faithful execution of her obligations as a parent because she loved us and wanted only the best for us—even if we were too young and selfish to see it.

And so we felt guilty for perceiving it as interference, for not wanting her help, for wishing she had been more engaged or involved in our lives, or for anything that intimated even the slightest hint of a lack of appreciation for all that she did for us… And that guilt kept us not only from revealing our discomfort to her, but to ourselves as well. It was unthinkable that she might not have done all of those things—or failed to do all those other things—for any reason other than for love of us. And yet, it didn’t feel loving…

One of the guilt issues we bump into as we begin healing is a feeling of betrayal—that we are betraying them, the narcs who were our parents or parental figures—when we start shedding our cloak of denial. There exists within us a sense that we are doing wrong when we peel the scales from our eyes and begin to see, recognize, and name the many truths we have held in abeyance. Even if we were miserable in our childhoods we, like them, often laid the blame on ourselves, even if we failed to see how we created our despair—we just took it to heart that it was our fault because it couldn’t be hers—she was our mother and mothers just automatically love their children—everybody knows that!

Those negative thoughts that crept in, the feelings of being unloved, the discomfort when shining a light on the truth—the guilt they invoked, came from feelings of betrayal. We felt like we were betraying them, after all they had done for us—and how little we had done for them, even when it was them who were actually betraying us.

Just what is betrayal?

Betrayal is inextricably entwined with trust, expectation, and entitlement. According to the dictionary, “Betrayal has to do with destroying…trust, possibly by lying;” it is “an act of deliberate disloyalty.”¹ To be an act of disloyalty, however, there must first be a legitimate expectation of loyalty, an entitlement to loyalty. In some situations that entitlement is constant over time: the expectation that you will not betray your government to an enemy, for example. But in other situations, the entitlement changes with time: your entitlement to goods and services from your parents diminishes with time, for example, while your parents’ entitlement to your obedience and deference to their wishes diminishes as you grow older and more independent.

Individuation is a normal developmental stage that begins in the teens, a stage in which children begin to break away from dependence on their parents. This stage normally completes within a few years, culminating in a physically and emotionally independent adult. This is how it is supposed to be, and it is supposed to occur without feelings of disloyalty or betrayal holding us back. But with personality disordered parents, this can go terribly wrong: they work against our individuation, making us feel guilty for following the path laid out for us by Mother Nature and we, inculcated with their self-serving values and not knowing any better, go right along with them. We allow ourselves to remain enmeshed—even with ignoring parents, we remain enmeshed emotionally—and to continue in the one-down position of the child when we should be emotionally individuated and no longer need approval or emotional succour from or parents.

We may even take this belief that we belong in the one-down position to our parents—our primary authority figures—out into the rest of our lives, accepting subordinate roles as our due in work, friendships, and romantic relationships. This can manifest as a belief that this is where we belong, that we are not entitled to or capable of leadership—or even peer-level—roles with others; it can manifest such that we believe that we deserve nothing better, even though we want more and chafe at the limitations the subordinate role in life places upon us. It can manifest in a feeling of incompetence to run our own lives so we hook up with people who will take an authoritative role in our lives, rescue us from having to be responsible for ourselves, and assume a pseudo-parental role so that we can remain in the role we know so well and are comfortably familiar with: the subordinate, dependent, pseudo-child. This is how so many of us end up in romantic relationships, friendships, even work relationships, with other narcissists, with people who take over our lives and keep us where we have always been: bit players on the stage of our own lives.

It feels impossible to change. We know we are not satisfied with this supporting role but don’t know anything else, have never been encouraged to grow into something more. Our NParents, needing us to remain subordinate so they could remain superior, needing us to be needy ourselves so that we could remain connected to them and remain a source of NSupply, our parents created this for their own benefit. To achieve this goal, our individuation had to be derailed and our natural drive towards independence and willingness to strike out on our own, be thwarted. Whether the parent was engulfing or ignoring, they did nothing to encourage and guide our attempts at individuation, either turning them into opportunities to gain more NSupply or squelching our attempts to increase their sense of control. My mother, for example, allowed me to take the classroom portion of Driver’s Education and to get a permit—but she never allowed me behind the wheel of her car, nor did she permit me to take the driving portion of the class: she did not want the responsibility if I ran over somebody, she told me. Other NParents, however, can’t wait for their Scapegoat Child to be a licensed driver: now the kid gets to run all of the errands, pick up the younger siblings from school, pick up prescriptions, and generally expand her role as personal maid to the NParent.

This, whether you recognize it or not, is the ultimate betrayal. The deliberate choice of a narcissistic parent to keep their adult child tied to them so that they can benefit, is the ultimate betrayal, not only of the child, but of the natural order of things, the natural process of maturation that we are all supposed to go through. By keeping you shackled to her with guilt, a false sense of obligation, or a fear of doing wrong, your NParent betrays the actual purpose of motherhood: to raise and give to the community a productive adult member who will do the same—raise and give to the community another productive adult member—so that the society can continue. It is the ultimate betrayal, to prevent you from completing your journey from childhood to fully functioning adulthood, just so they, your NParents, can keep a ready source of NSupply on hand.

Curiously, when we realize how we were used and betrayed and begin to feel a normal, natural sense of unhappiness with the situation, it is we who feel like we are betraying our parents by recognizing and embracing the truth of what they have done. It is as if we feel the entitlement of our parents extends to lying to ourselves and allowing them to exploit us to whatever degree they wish. This is toxic guilt in action—normal guilt exists to teach us right from wrong, to make us feel bad inside when we do wrong in order to encourage us to avoid that bad feeling by doing right. Toxic guilt occurs when normal guilt is perverted by our learning a false definition of right and wrong, by being taught by our parents that black is white, good is bad, and wrong is right. They define right and wrong in terms of what serves them, not in terms of what serves us (the truth serves us) and this, then, is the penultimate betrayal: teaching us to sublimate ourselves and our needs and even our normal developmental processes to their greed for NSupply, and teaching us we are wrong and bad to resist, even in our minds, doing so. They teach us that, unless we betray ourselves, we are betraying them and committing the single most heinous act possible: disloyalty to them. That they have sacrificed us on the altar of their greed and selfishness is simply never acknowledged. That they have taken from us our birthright and perverted our natural emotional and sociological development in order to benefit them simply does not come under consideration. The obligation is a one-way street—your obligation to them—including the obligation for loyalty: they feel no sense of loyalty to you, only outrage when they suspect a lack of loyalty on your part to them.

This, then, is the betrayal: your legitimate expectations of love, support and dependability from your parents unfulfilled. Your reactions to this betrayal do not, in any way, constitute a betrayal on your part. When one person betrays another, the loyalty contract between them, whether formalized or not, is broken and the betrayed party is entitled to take action, be it filing for divorce, charging the betrayer with criminal charges if applicable, or just walking out of the traitor’s life.

Make no mistake, if your parents are narcissists, they betrayed you and they betrayed you in one of the most fundamental ways humanly possible: they put their desires ahead of your needs. They taught you to serve them rather than how to become a strong, confident, independent and autonomous human being. They taught you to fear, to be afraid of being “in trouble” not just as an 8 year old contemplating doing something forbidden, but as an adult contemplating doing something healthy and independent. They taught you that failure or less than perfection would cause a withdrawal of their approval—which you had learned to interpret as parental love—rather than teach you that failures were the essential stepping stones to mastery and success. This was your birthright and it was the responsibility of your parents to raise you to be confident, independent, and autonomous. When they sought to turn you into the family scapegoat—or golden child—when they assigned you a role and a destiny that did not have your own best interests at heart but their own, they betrayed you and every day that they continue the charade about what you owe to them, they betray you again.

So what can you do about it?

You can recognize that you are being ill-used and have been from your earliest days. Rather than being an autonomous being to whom they were obligated to prepare for an independent life, you were to them a nascent servant, someone to eventually provide them with that which they so dearly desired: narcissistic supply. Rather than use shackles and chains to bind you to them, they chose the invisible fetters of fear, obligation, guilt and began to bind you with them so early in your life that you cannot remember when it began. You can see that is was wrong, that they were wrong, and that you were wronged, and you can walk away from the abuse by recognizing that you are now the one shackling yourself to them. The fear is an illusion: they cannot stop loving you because they never loved you in the first place. The obligation is a lie because the real obligation was from them to you, not the other way round. And the guilt is just a house of cards, constructed to keep your chains looking too strong for you to break. They betrayed you, took from you your birthright, your entitlement to be loved and guided into a successful and confident and independent adulthood and instead, gave you a lifetime of servitude to their dysfunction.

You can speak the words forbidden, think the thoughts not permitted, take the illicit steps from bondage into freedom—you can liberate yourself by simply recognizing that you are being betrayed every single hour of every single day—and have been since your earliest days—and withdraw your consent, your complicity, your participation in your betrayal. It takes but a single word—“no”—or a single action—refusing to accept abuse—or a single step—away from the abuse—to set your feet on the path of freedom and ending the abuse.

You have been betrayed since you were a tiny child—don’t let them get away with it any longer.

Source

¹ https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/betrayal