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1) I came here and remembered that it's good to be supportive and encouraging to myself. I'm trying my best in a tricky situation, and I've mostly just got to rely on myself. Good on me for what I've done so far!

2) I'm going to try getting to sleep a bit earlier tonight.

3) I've processed a lot about my M, and I shouldn't beat myself up for not having all the answers yet.

Hello everyone, I don't know how to go about rewriting this in a way that conveys the necessary information concisely, so I'm largely copying from my journal. Sorry for the length. If you want to read the longer but slightly different journal post, that might shed some further light on my situation. I have an NPD-F who I'm NC with, and a CPTSD-M who I live with and am financially dependent on. Now it turns out I'm also enmeshed with M, and there's an emotionally incestuous side to it too.

Both of us have raised concerns about being unhealthy for each other at different points in the last few years, but M always and immediately jumps to the drastic solutions of living in different houses (with her paying the rent for both, out of a finite and constantly shrinking amount of money) OR 'never seeing each other again' as a way of dealing with it, instead of a less drastic and more practical and constructive plan - that I now realise would have to involve working to build better boundaries and learning to live as separate individuals under the same roof.  We both have our own private spaces, so it's not like we're stuck in the same room all the time... however, she responds negatively to my spending time in my own room beyond sleeping (even reacts to my having the door closed - NPD-F didn't let me close my door so she doesn't see it as normal, I think).  She frequently complains of missing me, and as we used to live in cultic/isolating environments I'm the only person she has any real contact with.

Like I said, she has CPTSD too, but has lived with it and further abuse for a much longer time than I have.  We both attempt to support each other, but I'm beginning to question how much of this 'support' is healthy... there's so much to be said on it, more than any one post could contain.

My immediate concern is this:

1) Since an incident during my early/mid childhood when my rage was stifled (M couldn't deal with me asking her why she didn't protect me from NPD-F's abuse, she defended him, I said I hated her, she broke down in tears, and I felt so guilty I abandoned my own feelings in order to make her stop crying) I have largely been either 'happy' (beginning to work out that it's artificial, but it seems real when I'm in it) or depressed.  Outbursts of anger and pain paint the gaps between those two feeling states.  There are some memories of what must be real happiness(?).

2) Both parents glorified my 'happy' state and referred to it as my identity and true state of being, at all times - M still does.  NPD-F hated me being aware of my pain and would hound me back to being happy - M does something similar but more covert/passive and seemingly caring? Both parents have particular pet names/pet phrases they sometimes use to refer to me that solidify my identity as 'someone always happy'. M has long denied any comments I have made stemming from my occasional awareness that I'm nearly constantly miserable, in at least some part of my soul.  Instead she insists that I am a happy person.  (She says this, despite having at many points acted as my support and heard a great deal of how I've suffered.)

3) The 'happiness' (I refuse to give this state of numbed suffering the title and status of actual happiness as FOO chose to) is an automatic state of being, or mode, that triggers upon interaction with M. My true feelings disappear like mist when it fully activates. As far as I can tell, it isn't a dissociated part, but perhaps it is?  I've noticed that my voice can change to sound happier when I talk to her, even if the mode doesn't fully activate.

4) This is the worst bit. M either can't or doesn't want to deal with the discomfort and stress it causes her when she loses our 'connection' AKA enmeshment and loss of boundaries.  In other words, she can't cope with me leaving the Automatic Artificial 'Happiness' Mode (I guess that's AAHM for short - there must be a way of making a joke about 'an AAHM and a leg'). She responds by being timid, crying sporadically, asking me what's wrong, assuming (rightly, in one sense) that I'm upset with her, trying to 'fix it' so I go back to being 'happy'.  She can progress to being angry or outright rageful, and making threats about throwing me out.

What's happening now, is this. I left the 'happy' state out of a reaction to M refusing to change her stance on something I didn't agree with - it was a personal belief that should have had no impact on me, yet because of the enmeshment it does (I can feel my brain shifting my opinions to match hers, so the abusive dynamic of it is that there are some opinions/preferences/beliefs that negatively impact my mental health and in order to avoid them, I think I have to convince her to avoid them - distancing myself from her for the last few days has helped me to see this behavior and identify it as unhealthy and abusive.)

So I am now perpetrating the same abuse that she and NPD-F have inflicted on me - not allowing someone else to have their own preferences.  I refuse to do this going forward, and will work hard (not just for her - I really need to find myself and be myself!!)

Number 4 describes today.  M's been faking happy herself, as though to solicit the same response from me (to get me back into being what she thinks is 'me').  She told me I'm being distant - yes, I am. Because I don't know how to stay afloat in a sea of automatic reactions that threaten to steal away my independence and identity.  Usually the rage takes a while to show up, the acting nice has to fail at getting me back into enmeshment for that to happen.

For most of my life, I have sporadically had the urge to withdraw from her (interesting that John Bradshaw, in his book 'Home Coming', refers to withdrawal as the only weapon a child has... I may be paraphrasing). I can't tell if the withdrawal is the right way to deal with this or not, I'm quite physically tense and feel guilty about not talking to her - but I don't know how to broach this topic with her in a constructive way, and any harmless dialogue seems to trigger the AAHM (same thing used to happen with my F).  I've spoken to her a bit today because  of the guilt, but I can feel the AAHM starting up.

Any advice and support is greatly appreciated right now - this feels like a lot to wrap my brain around, and I don't yet have anyone else to talk to about it, apart from her.  For further clarification, M thinks she is codependent and faun/freeze.

Edit

Children are often anxious to please their parents and a Parentified child will often take their responsibilities very seriously. They may even feel honored initially by being treated like a 'grown up' and entrusted with responsibility for other family members or their parent. However, the child will generally suffer from having his or her own emotional needs neglected and from being compelled to live up to the burden of expectation.
Parentified children may struggle with lingering resentment, explosive anger and difficulty in forming trusting relationships with peers, issues which often follow them into adulthood. Forming close, trusting romantic and spousal relationships may be particularly difficult.

Just read this on http://outofthefog.website/top-100-trait-blog/2015/11/4/parentification - that's definitely me.

I know you said you don't know what Narcissitic Personality Disorder is and aren't very interested in finding out, but you could find it worth looking into.

My father was very difficult to deal with - seemingly affectionate, but wanting to control us (he just saw us as extensions of himself, we belonged to him, we weren't allowed any boundaries and neither was anyone else). If we didn't allow him to control us, he'd blow up. None of his behavior made sense, and it was incredibly difficult to deal with.  When I read up on NPD it felt like being given a guide to my life, suddenly I there were techniques for dealing with him, explainations of how exactly his manipulations worked and his attitude to other people.

Thanks saturnine, interesting to hear how you've started with developing assertiveness. I think I can recall reading that shrinking the inner critic and somehow angering are both important to gaining our self-protectiveness.

I've had a little look at the DBT DEAR MAN thing, seems helpful! Thanks for the tip. And yes, here's to being more assertive.

1) I did chores.

2) I journalled further about my ongoing enmeshed/codependent relationship with my M - she isn't taking my attempts at gaining space well.

3) I'm trying to allow myself to feel miserable and protect my right to be unhappy.

If it's acceptable, I shall send you a hug! 

I think my boat is most like Woodsgnome's, a lot of my CPTSD comes from the so-called Christian stuff I lived through. I say so-called because there's many different ways for abusers to twist the Bible into something that lets them get away with literally anything, and if one is not lucky an entire church can get behind them.  In my experience abusers (and enablers to a maybe lesser extent) look much more like super-duper perfect God-fearing Christians than the honest people in churches do.  My NPD-F was beloved by our cultic church... and I am rapidly losing my ability to say semi-nice things about them all. Quite angry. Would like to call them names. Horrible people giving kids forced baptisms and exorcisms.

Anyway, onto something less triggering.

I always tried very hard to be a devout believer, but I've come to realise that the foundation for my 'faith' isn' faith. It's fear of doing the wrong thing, being punished, being 'bad'.  So I came to the conclusion that I'd need to let go of it, because if the God of the Bible IS real, then as a God of love he wouldn't want me to be living out a fake relationship based on fear.  I also can admit now that I don't really have any sense of a relationship with him, although some pretty miraculous things happened that helped me get away from FOO and at the time I used them to bolster my sense of God being there. But remembering them doesn't really help me much now, in somehow 'making' a spiritual relationship happen.

I'd quite like to build a stone circle, or something like that... but I'm scared of facing spiritual doom for 'doing the wrong thing' and engaging in something 'pagan'. This is all very engrained in me.

Anyway, best wishes to everyone.

  Rainagain, thank you for your funny comments - they made me smile. Bash the unkind, indeed.

I'd advise being very cautious of your 'friend' - had one similar who called themselves an undiagnosed PD, turned out they weren't joking and enjoyed flaunting the truth of who they were right in peoples faces without anyone believing them.

I really wanted to say WELL DONE!!    To walk into a room like that, feeling the way you did, that's a big deal!  Good job you. Things like that are scary.

Not having people you care about show up to view your work is disheartening, even if they have understandable reasons. <3 I've been a smaller version of that boat.

Hello everyone, 

I've wanted to make this post for a little while now. I'm gaining more awareness of the fact that I feel quite physically vulnerable and like a bit of a sitting duck.  For a while now I've tried telling myself the same things that Pete Walker suggests in his Flashback Management Steps, that I'm in an adult body now and can better protect myself... but no matter how much I tried to tell myself that, I can't believe I'm physically safer now than I was then.

*Slight TW, for physical abuse*


Actually, as I'm writing this I realise that when I was a child I was powerless to stop myself from being dragged about, but as an adult I'm not guaranteed to be physically helpless in the same way.  So that's good, if I can hold onto it - struggling with dissociation/flight/critic a lot at the moment, makes that difficult. But if I've got it written here then I can come back to it.  Though it's not enough.

Anyway, I'm a mostly freeze/dissocation type, and assertiveness seems to be a common and particular issue for people like me.  I have wanted to learn self-defense since I was very young, to protect myself and my family, and I keep wondering if that would help me learn to be assertive (in a healthy way) and further my recovery. I've heard people saying that it has brought up strong emotions that were difficult to deal with for some people, so it might be a bit tough.

I'm interested in hearing what other people here have experienced regarding assertiveness, what your journeys with it are like, what you've learned about it, and what has or hasn't helped you.

Thank you!

[He won't leave me alone until we "talk", and if I try to leave he'll block the doorways. I can't get mad and yell back. I have to sit there trapped in my room while he talks and respond with "ok Dad" and "I'm sorry you feel that way". That's the only way he'll fizzle out.]

I realise that this is quite an old thread so forgive me for resurrecting it, but I felt compelled to comment on what you described here:

He later apologized, but I find I don't want to open up to him anymore. This isn't the first time this type of thing has happened. During fights like these I remember how it felt with Mom - not flashbacks, but fear. I feel the exact kind of fear I felt with her and I remember those moments. He won't leave me alone until we "talk", and if I try to leave he'll block the doorways. I can't get mad and yell back. I have to sit there trapped in my room while he talks and respond with "ok Dad" and "I'm sorry you feel that way". That's the only way he'll fizzle out.

And now I'm upset because this wasn't supposed to happen to me again. The manipulation was over. And I don't know if this is all in my head because of everything that happened to me or if it's justified. He's trying now. He's finally getting me a therapist and he's not physically abusive like Mom. He's just reminding me of her a lot and I'm noticing it more. And I want to stop having panic attacks. And I want to be okay.

That freaked me out. My NPD-F did exactly the same kind of stuff. The fact that he doesn't let you leave the room strikes me as rather disrespectful - the one good adult member of my FOO would never, ever, ever do that, she respects me and respects my right to leave or avoid the conversation if I wish to. Respect has to be mutual, has to go both ways. 

I'd say if you feel like you're being manipulated then you need to trust that - your dad being 'okay' the rest of the time doesn't excuse his behavior when he isn't.  If that kind of trapping you/manipulating/controlling stuff is recurring, then to my mind he's abusive and apologies don't cut it.

And the thing about the self awareness... I have to be. It's a tightrope to walk because if I go too far and crucify myself for the things I've done I spiral back into depression and that fuels the fire that probably explains that night.

To me that sounds like you might be experiencing what Pete Walker describes as the 'inner critic'. I've learned since reading his book 'CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving' (one that many of us here have found deeply useful in understanding ourselves and learning tools to recover) that my downward spiral of mercilessly self-attacking thoughts of how terrible I am, how ashamed I should be, how much I'm failing etc all stem from this aspect of CPTSD. If I don't thought-stop the critic then in my mind everything just seems to get worse and worse, very depressing.  Pete talks about us identifying with the critic and losing objectivity regarding ourselves and the things it has to say.

On a different note, I'm not sure how best to put this but I think emotions - not matter how unpleasant they might feel or be - are valid and deserving of respect, even if they're not pleasant ones. Even if they're not 'nice' emotions, self-acceptance is a big part of recovery and part of that involves giving ourselves permission to 'own', understand, and have our feelings (not the same thing as acting them out abusively). Anger has it's place as our protective/defensive emotion and if it's been bottled up and not felt then it makes sense that it can then spill out uncontrollably.

For myself I'm trying to accept and validate my own anger, because otherwise I'm up against myself. Accepting and validating it isn't the same as giving myself permission to behave abusively, both because I don't want to be abusive and because angering directly at the people who caused my anger to exist doesn't seem to heal anything - for anyone.  But I need to come alongside myself and accept my rage as a valid response to what I suffered, or I'm my own enemy and the anger won't diminish.

Best wishes for finding your way through this, and as the others have said - hang on in there, you can get through it.  Maybe giving yourself a safe space to rage in would be helpful? I know that recently helped me not to explode at the people I cared about. Maybe you'd find Pete Walker's stuff helpful too - he's actually written a couple of good guest posts on the OOTS blog recently, so that would be one way of getting a feel for some of his writing without having to get your hands on a book first.

I hear you, mourningme.  I don't think I can ever forgive my father for abandoning my family, or my mother for the emotional abuse we endured from her afterwards.  How do you forgive someone who never acknowledged the harm they did?  Who never apologized?  Who never changed? 

It was a great relief to me, after being raised and imprisioned in cult-like Christian environments where I was forced to 'forgive' abusers for every. single. thing. all the time. no matter how much damage they'd caused. because THAT was being 'Christian'...

to finally realise that absolutely no where in the Bible does God, the biggest forgiver of them all, EVER forgive someone who isn't genuinely sorry and who hasn't acknowledged what they've done.

That freed me from the last bonds of feeling like I had to forgive the worst of FOO and others inspite of them wanting me to suffer.

Edit: Oh, and I had it validated that someone just saying the words 'I'm sorry' doesn't count as an apology if they're just saying it to get you to shut up! I had to hear 'I'm sorry IF you felt that way' so many times, it felt like it tore a wound in my soul.

For me at least, verbally sharing (often compusively and inappropriately in my case) my traumas with others has been a source of pain since it's usually compulsive and feels hard to control.  Like it ties into my lack of healthy boundaries, among other things.

I had some pretty devastating traumas as a kid and tried to cut myself off from their impact on me (dissociate).

However this just seemed to have the effect of making me compulsively share my trauma with total strangers. Like you I think, I've had too many painful instances of giving away TMI, with seemingly little way to stop it happening in the moment. I've worked out that part of it is that I have a dissociative traumatised child part that can partially take the wheel at times in social settings (don't know the triggers yet but I've got better at spotting it and being as deliberate and self-controlled as I can be).

This child part of me seems to originate in the times of deep trauma, and wants comfort/support/safety/love/for the pain I can't even feel to stop, but has no healthy or safe guidelines for interacting with people in order to get any of those things.  That leaves me with no boundaries, no contact with anything much internally to stop the oversharing, and a driving neediness that can be very hard to deal with.  I used to attack or shame myself for it, too, it's hard not to - but I think whatever lies at the root of 'too much talking' for anyone is something that probably deserves and needs to be treated with compassion and acceptence.  Maybe easier said than done but I'm finding it's nicer than attacking myself for oversharing.

How do I let go and shut up? I just want to learn to shut the faucet off and not feel any pain.

Maybe you're talking because you and/or some unconscious part of you needs to talk, because the pain/trauma isn't being resolved?  Talking may not be the path that leads to resolution, but in the absence of another option sometimes it might be the best we've got for desperately trying to resolve what we've gone through.

I used to have never-ending tears and talk repeatedly about some things, trying to heal them and get to feeling like I'd actually resolved and healed something, but it's taken gaining a lot more understanding in order to make progress from that point.  For me it partly seems to be caused by not fully knowing what any particular pain and grief is about - I thought something was about my FOO, and maybe part of it was, but the gaping chasm of pain definitely relates to something else I've only just identified. 

On another note, I definitely hear you on seeing too much of an N parent in yourself as a person.  No one else seems to notice it in me, but sometimes even when I look in the mirror I see an echo of my NPD-F.

Don't know if you'll find any of that at all relevent to your own journey, but best wishes for getting through it all. <3

1) I didn't give up on my work or myself when everything seemed to be in a mess, and things went really well!

2) I made the decision to work with a competent, helpful person.

3) I realised that my parts are struggling with internal conflict that's difficult to resolve... I've been doing a lot of inner reflection lately.