The Abusive Family
"It seems a little strange to me that I logged onto these boards in response to a threat from my XP only to find I am discovering more about my childhood than anything else!!"
"I come from a dysfunctional background. My mother is a raging N, and, quite honestly, I have great difficulty understanding as an adult when I'm being treated in a way that is just wrong."
"I now know that my dad was a high functioning Narcissist. Extraordinarily manipulative, and an expert on pathologizing his victims, i.e. wives and children. He temporarily modified his behaviour if his control was in danger of slipping. E.g. a child was leaving home and letting go. But having won back loyalty and dependence through some short term act of kindness and generosity, he would revert to his normal behaviour. We all "hung on in there" hoping that he would mellow, change, become the loving father or husband we craved for, and of which we got glimpses when he was manipulating, but it never happened."
"I am grateful that I am away from him. Grateful that my children are away from him. The whole pity thing? Yeah, I pitied him. I also pitied his children. But the victims advocate that helped me through a lot of this told me that it is too late for those kids. And it is not my responsibility to save them. Or him. I am learning to live with that."
"I handle my Nfather this way: Only Christmas and Birthday Cards. No visits unless it's for a specific purpose e.g. meet him at a family wedding. Never leave my children alone with him, ever. I am always polite and if I'm ever baited I ignore him."
"He (father) goes in fairly predictable cycles, where he'll push, not get what he wants, rage a bit, then disappear. It would almost be amusing, were it not for the fact that I have better things to do with my time and my emotional energy."
"When you are little and defenceless, around 6 years old, you need the safety of a mother's loving arms when you get frightened. You are sent on an errand by NPmom and you are walking on top of the levy, you are getting close to where the town's hobo is standing in the middle of the levy.
Since it's winte, he has his big coat on, and as you get near him, he whips his coat open, and his privates is hanging out. He grabs it and starts waving it at you, while walking towards you. You've never seen one before, you don't know why the hobo is shaking it at you, you get terrified. You turn around and run like hell home to your NPmom. You arrive breathless, crying, and tell her what happened. NPmom gets very upset, hollers at you, because you shouldn't have looked, you are a bad, dirty girl because you looked. She is so frustrated by you, so upset, because no matter how hard she tries to make you into a good, obedient, nice child, you go ahead and do something like this. She tells you it's all your fault, if you were a good child, you wouldn't have looked. Only bad, dirty girls do. How she is overwhelmed with worry about you and your future. You just listen and try to understand it all. You feel guilty, you feel bad, you feel like a miserable failure and have no clue where you went wrong. And it hurts that no matter how hard you try to be a good little girl, you never succeed, you always do the wrong thing, you always upset your NPmom. Everything is always your fault. It hurts so much to know how bad you are.
"How to demolish a child for life, lesson 101." 65 years later you sit with your therapist and cry over it. It still hurts."
"I read the suggestions in Verbal abuse book that Patricia Evans wrote and try to follow them. One of them is to say... "Well, there she goes again, just mom being mom, no big deal.. sure am glad I know she has NPD and this isn't about me, this is just the way she is." I find that by doing that it makes it less of a big deal in my mind."
"One thing that I have learned is to be bulletproof. Mom can say anything she want but she is not the authority. It is only her opinion. If I don't react to her insults she has no ammunition."
"From 0-14 I thought he was the bee's knees and mum an awful burden to him when it was the other way round. Objectively he never gave us time, support or pulled his weight financially but I wasn't adult enough to see the problem and forgave the charismatic brilliant one all. Next he encouraged me to rebel against and hurt mum and to leave home prematurely. In my 20s I realised his self promo was false, that mum had had it hard but put it down to him being a little unbalanced and was forgiving. As I got more sophisticated I could identify the seriousness of his emotional abuses to us all and acknowledge now that he is a pretty goddamn evil bastard."
"He only managed 3 days with the kids ... they got in the way of his life... they saw the truth and he was exsposed... cant believe this paragrph took seconds to write yet 10 years to achieve."
"This is truly the one thing that makes me purple with rage: we're adults and have the ability to walk away. Children can't: they're just stuck with their N parents."
"The look on his face, The blade of the knife, forced me to face REALITY- my own father!
Always trust your inner feelings if they tell you to RUN then RUN!!!!!!"
My son's teacher is totally under his charm and gives him passing grades when he doesn't do his homework and fails his tests.
"I have spent many hours reflecting on the things that happened in the 9 years since I had him arrested and I have concluded that he was and is a coward. He was all threats when he didn't know I would take action, then once I did it was he who walked on eggshells I remember the first time I stood up to my Mother N. I must have sounded like Katherine Hepburn's most shaky voice but I overcame my fear and did it. (And my Mother N was a truly violent person) And you know what, she was stunned into silence."
"With the passage of time I am increasingly aware of how much a miracle it is that any of us here are able to talk about this toxic material, to process it and heal from the damage done, feel the anger, the loss, the disgust, the disappointment, the feelings we weren't allowed to express as children and can more safely do here in the camaraderie of recovery friends. It was a nightmare to be around her as a child and an arduous task to work on recovering from the residual damage. My loving thoughts go out to the child you once were. You deserved to have a real childhood. It was your social right to be allowed to be a child, with real, loving parents. Since that loving childhood experience was not once the case I wish that you are able to lovingly reparent your inner child now and comfortably share the journey with others reparenting themselves. I have been doing that for some time now and it helps a lot."
"I have 3 daughters between 7 and 13. I'm so glad I've told everyone about their Ndad. And i am taking legal action to hold him accountable for his actions, violent and mental. After reading your post i see it is important to stand my ground while my kids are young so i can protect them."
"At 7 at school we had a lesson about types of families. Heard about divorce, went home excited about this "solution", suggested this new concept being certain parents would go for it, waited and waited. But after about 2 weeks of anticipatory excitement I was privately surprised to realise that the penny of my suggestion hadn't dropped."
"I'm at the 4-year point of no-contact. I don't believe there is hope for my momster. It really is quite tragic, because she actually is spectacularly talented and fun to know. Like you, the thought of seeing her makes me sick to my stomach."
"Here's a therapist's advice" Knowing what you know now, suppose you could go back in time and talk to that little you when you were 6 or 7 years old and living with such dysfunctional parents. What would you want to say to her?"
"Makes me wonder if those of us raised in 'evil' or dysfunctional homes have lost that radar to spot Ns. Shortly after our marraige my N and I visited a couple, the female clearly spotted the N in him and promptly ended all contact between N and her new husband, I see now she had the radar that I didn't."
"The friendly but wrong things 'civilians' say about Nabuse can feel so exasperating!!! It can be horribly aggravating, invalidating, crazy-making. People I've loved who are unfamilar with Ns or who don't comprehend Nabuse at all, have said simply awful things when I was at my most vulnerable. Like about my momster (who was violent, perverted, rageaholic, to say the least), "She did her best." LOL!!! That horror and child abuse was somebody's best?!! Not! "She did what she could at the time." Oh puleeeez. These trite attempts at placating my jagged pain with cliched BS really hurt me! It further guilted me! It kept me enmeshed, feeling guilty, trapped in the labyrinth, isolated from any self-protective clarity! It threw me emotionally back in the tank with the blood-thirsty shark!"
"Dysfunction breeds dysfunction and mental illnesses are passed on to other family members. It is a cycle that only a healthy person can break."
"I know how much you would like a real Dad, so did my H. He never ever got one, the old guy was malicious and spiteful to the end. And no doubt yours would like to get you back on the hook. Ours used to fall out with us and then drag us back so that he could torture us again. Try not to contact him, and having been where you are, I wouldnt hesitate to change numbers. We did, and it worked, we returned to sanity. Its hearing him on the phone that hurts, and you know what, they don't care whether contact with us is good or bad, any attention is better than none."
"I see it, many others see it, the therapists know it, and the only one that doesn't is his STUPID FATHER, who clings to the fantasy of his perfect son."
"I know that any contact with my parents will only serve as an invitation for them to inflict their misery all over again. In the next few weeks I will cross the 2 year mark since any contact with them. Contact has to be THEIR choice at this point, even if this means I next see them at a funeral parlor."
"I have no contact with my brother who is a P he still tries the manipulation through emails and my mother is a P. She tries through letters, same words, same game. It is very hard not to respond, you just have to keep reminding yourself what would happen to you if you did respond. It is though they still have part of your mind and it takes a lot of strength as you have seen from the postings, to break free and not respond."
"There is no use wasting your breath. Having N parents myself, I have come to the same conclusion and given up. I humor them now, just to keep peace. I listen to them talk endlessly about their recent vacation or other triumph. I don't know if this is the case with your parents, but my mother will actually interrupt a person mid sentence and start another subject entirely. It's as if she didn't hear a word I or someone else were saying. I am still a little shocked every time she does this because it takes such colossal nerve! Anyway, I just let them be the star of the show, so to speak, then I make my exit as soon as I can. I am finished trying to get through to them. Nothing will, so why bother?"
"I grew up with a narcisstic, abusive father whom I ran away from at the age of 18. Looking for love took the place of looking for my true potentials and strengths. I ended up with the wrong partners."
"I see my boy now 18 who is so detached from me as a result of the jealousy of my ex towards my son. I cannot believe I allowed this to happen to my little boy. He is scarred for life and abandoned by someone he once called Dad."
"I too have had incredibly guilty feelings for staying in my marriage as long as I did especially when after the divorce my kids really opened up to me & told me things about how they had felt that I wasn't all the way aware of. I was devastated. I just try soooo hard to be there for them in every way now more than ever."
"My father is psycho N, and he had a habit of beating all of us. I don't blame my mother for his actions, I now understand what she was dealing with. Educating your sons about this disorder will help them to see that none of what they experienced was their doing, it was the N's. I know they are still very young and probabley unable to grasp it all. It will be like putting a puzzle together, just one piece at a time."
"Your family may be N too (I know my mom is). Sometimes we tend to marry what we know."
"Your children are probably more aware than you realize. And the bad thing about that is, your sons are watching to see how their father treats his wife, and your daughters are finding out how men treat their wives. And they will learn that is how marriages are."
"Strangely, all the depression and panic attacks I used to have on a frequent basis have disappeared ever since I've cut them all out of my life."
"I do think my childhood has much to do with my choice of partners. This is changing for my mental health is on the line."
"I'm beginning to understand now that we should not expose them to themselves. If we tell them we know what they are and how they think, the backlash is awful. The reason is that they would look in the mirror at themselves and not like what they see. They would withdraw from us even further, but come back at us or those we love with a vengeance."
"Over a financial matter, my brother accused my mother of lying, not trusting her children, thinking only of herself, maniuplating us. All stuff that was totally bogus, and freaked her out, because she had never seen this side of him, but had only heard about it from me and my wife (who my brother also treated poorly and alienated. Again,her fault, according to him). So my mother now understands what I've been going through, and the rest of my siblings have gotten a taste of it, and I feel vindicated, as N's can be very charming and "normal" when they need approval."
"It would be terrible to let this P kid break up our marriage. Since he has been gone, the anxiety attacks I've been having (daily) have stopped. I have never threatened my husband before...but I have had enough."
"It nearly killed me to stand by and watch Pfatherinlaw destroy one daughter and son while building the other child into a false idol.""I have a N brother, and for years the family has always wondered what the deal is with him - we have always puzzled over why he has to be so difficult about everything. It has gotten much worse in the past few years, and after seeing more destructive behavior, and hearing from old girlfriends, it became clear that he had NPD. A real "A HA!" moment, and it has put everything in context. Unfortunatley, it has also made it clear that I can't have a relationship with him any more, and he is slowly ruining his life by alienating his family and friends. Of course, it is always their fault."
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