Not all parents love their children. Love shouldn’t be hurtful and harmful and painful -without ever an ounce or sliver of feeling good. You shouldn’t have to count that as love.
In times of need, some parents are the worst fallback. When parents have a long track record of harming their children’s mental health, they are not the ones to turn to for help. Society likes to perpetrate the false notion that in times of need, you should rely on your family. If you have no spouse, no partner, go to your parents they say. It is their duty. Not ours.
Some parents harm more than they help. Some parents only harm rather than help.
Abuse doesn’t have to be physical or sexual – emotional and verbal abuse don’t have to be with the most inflammatory language. Abuse hurts and damages and traumatizes. Abuse and trauma are on a spectrum, just because you know someone who has experienced far worse trauma or abuse doesn’t mean you have not.
Experiencing trauma, feeling triggered, being retraumatized, should be met with compassion and not self-righteous anger. “I didn’t do anything to warrant that!” No one should judge you for emotional reactions that you can’t control, that there are things that have been said and done, that even if wanted to forgive and forget, your body won’t let you.
It is not your responsibility to forgive in order to not hurt the people who have hurt you. Manipulative people will vilify you for setting boundaries, for being angry, — they will cry and crib to try to force you to apologize for getting upset and assure them that you are okay. They will make you believe that your hurt was irrational, oversensitive to good intentions, but their hurt, is justified, because they are being unjustly punished by your pain/anger.
You are not a bad person if you don’t want to speak or talk to people who make you feel bad, who make you want to self-harm, who make you suicidal. Even if it’s your family. You should not have to hide your mental illness to make people feel blameless for how their abuse harms you and puts you in danger. You are not being dramatic, you are being real. They will say “abuse” is an exaggeration and overstatement, they’ll say your therapists don’t know what they are talking about, don’t believe them, they keep your business by convincing you that you are more fucked up than you are, and I mean, clearly they aren’t doing their jobs or of any benefit if you keep talking about suicide. YOU DON’T NEED TO LISTEN TO THAT. YOU DON’T NEED TO SECOND GUESS YOURSELF. You can try to explain, but they will never understand. YOU DON’T NEED TO QUESTION the validity of the experiences you’ve lived through that are real to you.
Even your friends will not understand stories of familial abuse when it’s not conventionally extreme. Patterns of chronic emotional abuse, gaslighting, invalidation are hard to describe. With any one incident, your friends will downplay it, minimize it, normalize it (all families are like that), invalidate you. They will urge you to be measured, engage in direct communication, give them benefit of the doubt, seek more clarity, mediate a solution.
There is no successful formula for communicating with narcissistic abusers who lack all empathy — they are always blameless, never apologize, and will react with rage at any attempt at you standing up for yourself. In your gut you know this. You’ve learned this. You’ve lived this. Engaging, will once again make you the the villain. But your friends will make you for a villain for not being open-minded. Your family taught you not trust yourself but it’s okay to trust yourself. You need to trust yourself.
Even if you are up against a million voices of disagreement, you know what hurts.
Protect yourself from hurt.
You have every right to protect yourself from hurt.
Inside My Madness 