What exactly is NPD and narcissistic abuse? What does it look like? There is no strait answer and probably the hardest type of abuse to detect. Often, male physical abusers will posses many of those traits along with the physical harm but this type of abuse is typically chosen by women abusers, common in child abuse cases because it's less physical but can be far more damaging as they are master manipulators. Often society misuses terms and renders them meaningless and narcissist is one of them and no the definition isn't someone that takes too many selfies for the internet. Some may be born with a chemical imbalance while others are a product of abuse themselves and grew toxic traits to protect themselves and never healed the damage done and just went downhill. Most of them don't even understand the damage they do because they live in a fantasy, like their heads are just a separate fucked up creation and they recreate it in reality by projecting onto others. Not all others, just the ones they have a vendetta with even if it doesn't make any sense. Jealousy is a good trigger for that. How did I end up different? I have no idea, maybe growing up I knew in my heart something was wrong even if I didn't know what it was.
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-disorders/narcissistic-personality-disorder.htm
So what does it look like? They appear functional on the outside and in front of most people, they probably appear as pleasant and helpful towards most outsiders because public perception is their most important priority above anything else. For example, "mommy dearest" would be how society would define a female NPD. Like making their child sick or ignoring the actual symptoms and running to the hospital with made up symptoms that throw doctors off on a different trail with the ones they can manipulate their perception. As a nurse, she held some sway in that department. Then telling the world how time consuming and pitiful and resilient they are caring for such a sick child meanwhile they are the ones causing it. Is she guilty of committing a crime? Yes one that is nearly undetectable. How so, instead of following doctor's orders, they change them until one fulfils their demands and then claim ignorance of the actual problem. So one, they truly didn't know., by their own faults but it's not what you know, it's what you can prove. If they can manipulate doctors, psychologist, social workers, police, all people trained to detect this stuff, trust me they can con Mr. Joe Public pretty easily like it's a walk in the park even if you live with them or next door. Their plot is pretty thin, it's easy to manipulating them into revealing their tru colors but I think one only knows that if they have gone thru similar abuse, they see thru the fakeries.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/toxic-relationships/201709/how-spot-narcissistic-abuse
They do some physical harm themselves at times when they can't control themselves but mostly putting the child and creating situations where harm will certainly come your way is their specialty. Their conscience is fucking weird to put it mildly. In private, they will trigger trigger trigger until you explode when everyone shows up so you look like the degenerate and they look like the victim for simply standing up for yourself and not being a doormat. They will do this constantly until it breaks you down. They will create situations that trigger you to justify their own bad actions against you as in "they saw it coming" as a justification, like creating a self fulfilling prophecy that continues feeding their toxicity.
https://www.yourtango.com/2016296195/15-signs-hes-not-caring-hes-just-controlling
Misery loves company, it's an understatement with someone with NPD. They feel mostly inadequate on the inside and project that on other like their chosen one. To compare it to a situation most of you could compare easily with, the partner that always accuses of cheating day in and day out to find out they were the ones cheating the whole time. Or other scenario, being accused and get in trouble all the time , ya might as well do it. Once again creating a self fulfilling prophecy. Except these people do this about EVERYTHING , even silly things. Like accusing a small child that was caring for their younger sibling to make up for the neglect and doing all the household chores so step dad doesn't come home angry beating my ass just cause the messy house pissed him off to be called a narcissist and the most selfish person in the family...I was 6 and 7 years old....Really? Are you fucking kidding me? So NPD individual will to this to their chosen person all day long and nothing you do for them is ever any good.
Along with creating volatility at home, they create circumstances in the community that you can't go for help because you wont be believed as establishing the abused victim as a liar, over sensitive, attention seeker, remembering shit wrong, troubled child (troubled yes but of her own fault) along with many other gross miss-conceptions they create to make sure their abuse remains undetected. Often, they don't even treat the other children the same way. I always assumed my stupid bastard child that should have been aborted status (yes they would both say this to me pretty often word for word) was the reason why I was always excluded from any family activity besides dinner time. They truly enjoy seeing their chosen one's demise in all aspects of life. These mis- conceptions created the ideal conditions for opportunist abusers to do what they please, especially within small communities. Who am I gonna tell anyway right? No one would believe me and they can just shift the blame, most likely being NPD themselves, are also master manipulators and most of them well go to any lengths to create evidence they need to justify themselves.
As far as my step dad, that was a tragedy in the making. Having temper issues and loving her more than what she ever deserved, came home from work and was fed a bunch of bullshit lies about stuff that I supposedly had done and manipulated into terrorizing me for being a brat to his wife meanwhile I was locked outside in the cold all day until about 1/2 hour before he came home so I did nothing to her. Could relationships ever be restored there? Maybe if the anger issues were dealt with but they remain so no thanks. After being locked outside in a blizzard, the cold or heavy rain or blistering sun for 10 + hours being accused of all kinds of made up bull shit and insulted over it, was pretty volatile myself...rightfully so...Therefore creating the perfect storm for stuff to go real bad in a hurry. I wasn't afraid to tell anyone to get fucked even as a little kid, yeah they tried washing my mouth out with soap but I just took a big bite out of it and ate it looking her deep in the eye with every chew, that was then end of that strategy. In case anyone is curious because I would be the dumbass that would ask what kind...It was a Jergen...Yuk. It did taste pretty foul but made my point across nicely that there was no cleaning this mouth up and I wasn't afraid of the soap. All the insults I hurled at them were the same ones I heard all day from them but How dare I! I certainly didn't learn this in the grade 2 school yard ya'll! I think to survive this shit you have to become one of them to fuck with them the same way they do with you. Trust me that really doesn't help anything but if you are truly stuck like I was for being a little kid well, yeah gotta do something and the options are pretty limited.
Was all of my childhood nothing but a pile of crap? Not always. I could play the out of sight out of mind game of GTFO before anyone got out of bed if I wasn't punished for something stupid like existing. I had a few friends where their parents saw the toxicity I was living in, probably having been abused themselves or maybe just being decent adults they saw it but it was an awkward situation to get involved in so they would just let me stay at their house a lot just so I didn't have to go home. To the NPD abuser, isolation is one of their tools so that could only last so long at a time, I was mostly banned from playing with anyone I enjoyed. During those times, I would just disappear into the woods, living in a rural mountainous area... Good luck finding me! I guess now you can better understand my obsession with doing trails that remain today, it's probably where I have always felt the safest, even with all the wilderbeasts. School was a good place until high school, not fun at any time, don't get me wrong but it was safe-ish for the most part, I could settle for that. Obviously, in high school, that story changed pretty fast.
I'm no psychologist but I have been analyzing society and behaviors my entire life to gage the safety of the risks I had to take to make it this far. From the little pieces of information and my observations, I could be wrong. I know my mom went thru some shit herself and it messed her up. I come from a family of arranged marriages and dishonor was a big thing. Rather than dishonor an elder, unhappy toxic marriages were kept for far too long until the elder in question passed away. That created a situation of alcoholism and who knows what else. Being the eldest. She probably took most of the garbage as the black sheep. That sucks, I get that but not an excuse to repeat the cycle. Long story short, she never got the dad she deserved. When I came along, he felt pretty damn guilty and that was his way of making up for it with me. That fucking triggered her. I'm sure of it and I would be willing to bet that was the start of her resentment towards me. I had the dad that she deserved but didn't get. All the Catholic stereotypes she was subjected to just aggravated the situation. She resented me for many things, hard to pin point them all. I think just existing kind of did it.
https://cptsdfoundation.org/2020/06/22/the-neuroscience-of-narcissism-and-narcissistic-abuse/
The fact that she wasn't taking care of me for the probably the first 2 years of my life and the fact that I almost died of unknown conditions and potential allergies auto-immune related swelling in the brain for like a year during that time should have been a huge tip off to everyone about her inadequacy to raise me. But hey, close your eyes and you wont see the red flags right!?! She moved away so my gramps couldn't be there for me. He would treat me special because he knew how she was with me and it was probably his fault, and it angered her even more that I got the attention meant for her in her eyes. She left me in the middle of a fair in a strange town to bake in 35 celsius sun at 8 years old to meet a strange man (biological dad, and he didn't even show) with no water and no money because she wanted to go thrift shopping elsewhere with her sister on one of our visits. She left me there for like 5 hours. Somehow nobody saw any red flags, only my mad bubbly sunburn to make fun of, my face was blistered so bad and I got really sick from heatstroke and dehydration. I don't know if my gramps addressed any of that with her later in life but we had conversations about it. He didn't do much about the situation but at least he was always honest and helped me understand the situation at no matter what age.
When foster care came, that was weird in itself, lot of mental gymnastics required to understand that one too, I don't think any 10 year old can come close to grasping. Relived to be out but ouch, they didn't speak french. I didn't speak english. Besides being bullied because I was being cared for by the only english family in the village, it wasn't so bad. Made friends with some bad ass bitches at the campground over summer as my foster family realized I was a fucking mess, maybe a super long vacation can fix me... at least a little bit. She was lied to for my being there but she saw thru my mom's bs. She though she was a demented bitch, she didn't know her but knew her type. I never understood until I was an adult, those words were a little too real for me at that specific time and I didn't really know what they meant.
Not her first rodeo, she fostered kids for a living with part time job at the hospital on the side(thru the grapevine, she still knew them, small world). That was her gig, she was retired having a young child of her own as a mature mother but came out of retirement because nobody else would take me and after hearing the stories, she had a hunch that I wasn't the trouble, I was the one in serious trouble. After that summer, I was mostly left to my on device. At least I wasn't being messed with and allowed to just relax, that in itself was all I really wanted. I never wanted parents of the year I just didn't want my mind messed with anymore, at this point I didn't really trust any adults anyway even the ones trying to help me. I couldn't tell the difference between someone genuinely trying to help me or someone pretending to help me as bait to harm me later. To this day, I still can't tell most of the time, why I mostly keep to myself with a few exceptions obviously, we all need people.
I never knew how to handle them, they scared me, in reality I was just scared of everyone so I still don't really know what to make of them. In hindsight I asked a lot of hard questions that a kid should never even know , bad stuff about my situation, I think deep down she knew if she told me the real truth, that alone would probably break me even more. She probably wasn't wrong. The fact that we spoke different languages probably didn't help the disconnect. Their daughter was grown and bilingual, I related to her pretty well, she helped understand some things about her parents, it helped. I realize now the situation was equally fucked up for them as it was for me. I was one of the worst cases they had fostered and they were pros. At this point, they didn't really want to take care of me, they just couldn't leave me there either and the extra cash was a good incentive.
A lot of what contributed to the distrust with my foster parents is they said a lot of messed up things about my family, not understanding at the time that they were 100% right. At that point I still loved my family and thought I was defective not really understanding I was defectives because of them until much much later when I became an adult. My mom saw that she couldn't manipulate her so she would fill my head with garbage about her during our occasional week-end visits. She seemed nicer than she was and was no longer neglecting my siblings so when the 2 years was up, I had to be moved or fully adopted by my foster family and they would stop getting paid. The alternative was a new family or back at my parents. There was no alternative families. They had plans on moving to Florida, the stuff they would say about my family, not understanding a lot of things, I got scared and freaked out, in my head it was the makings of a horror abduction movie. The decision was mostly mine. My mom would have fought it but she would have lost cause foster mom knew how to trigger her at the right time and she was pretty good at manipulating social services and court perceptions herself.
They left me the choice but somehow I had some messed up attachment to my family. She told me strait up they were going to fuck up my life and the ones that were nice to me were only pretending to be polite and "good Catholics". To this day it's probably the most hurtful words I ever heard and I decided then and there she was a hateful bitch and I was TFO of there. The sad part, she was right. She told me like it is and a pre-teen can't really grasp that sort of stuff yet even if we are facing it. But to be right, she was right. My only regret in life is not choosing to stay and get fully adopted even if I didn't particularly like them, they weren't harmful. All of the 13 to 16 years old crap wouldn't of happened. In fact, I probably would have stayed there until adulthood and finished school and college under their roof. Would I encounter the same teacher in high school?... yes but they would have allowed me to switch school where my foster dad worked and listened to me so the situation would have stopped quickly instead of blowing up into what it did also sending a strong message to the network that was later after me rather than having to get involved with gang members for protection from them. Obviously the fact that I had been in foster care was used as a tool against me ever since with any of the abusers I encountered.
That's where trying to escape is tricky. Because she had a lifetime of manipulating everyone's perception of me and had all the tools to make me look bad, since nobody analyses the stories of the abuser, only the one of the victim, my side never mattered, hers was already the narrative repeated within a small community like an echo chamber for over a decade by the time I was a teen. Any gig or anything I would try to earn cash or try to get help or help myself, she would make a bs story to them of how terrible I was and they shouldn't let me in their businesses or their house or near their children because I tried to kill my sister, that is what she told my foster mom and the social worker she replaced the old one with, I'm sure she said that to many more people as an excuse as to why I was in foster care to gain sympathy and avoid judgment. That was her favorite lie about me. Nobody ever questions that. They create a reality for you that just make you want to scream and for whatever reason everyone just seems to go along with it, it becomes maddening.
Every attempt at helping myself even while I lived outside the home, she would crash in and sabotage it all to make sure I couldn't get away and I was left with nothing. Obviously, the overall culture around me partly created by here, partially just the natural culture of the area made it exceptionally hard. They will do anything to maintain their grip even after being out of the home. Why community is important. Your reality becomes so messed up, it's hard to understand or explain unless you go thru it yourself. It completely breaks down a person and now there are studies that it actually physically alters the brain especially at a young age.
I moved around to a few towns trying to get away but they were just never far enough and kept getting sucked back into the madness. At that point everything around me was toxic and was getting worse and as long as the culture is the same, the problems are the same. Some of it my own doing trying to protect myself and having no other choice, some of it being so confused and toxic myself with no trusted adult guidance thru stuff I never understood myself so I could I even attempt at resolving any of this. Who was I gonna ask for advice, the people that created this for me? Even I knew that was probably not a good idea.
That's when I freaked out and moved out west to Alberta, surely this has to be far enough. That was my last move thankfully, but even here she was finding ways to fuck with me and almost got me fired from the oil industry to make me fail and pull me back under her grips. She pulled some wonky shit with my brother and his career prospects around that time too. Used my grandfather's death as a tool to turn the family against me and suddenly I was getting hate mail and messages everywhere. So obviously, most family members had to be cut off too. That is something else they do, when they lose grip on their victim, they manipulate the family's perception and guilt trips to try to sucker you back in and make you have to defend yourself. Sad to say it, there is no easy way out from Narcissistic Personality Disorder abuse. You just have to get a new life altogether as far away as you can and cut all the strings at once. It hurts and there are a lot of casualties that don't truly grasp what is happening because they have been manipulated too and are also victims of the NPD abuser to a lesser extent but there is no other way and it hurts less this way over time as you find peace to heal your own toxic traits developed to survive and constantly having to defend yourself will just be damaging to the recovery, even if your honor deserves it. Some relationships can be mended but some just can't, tough pill to swallow sometimes.
Reality is NPD are generally abuse victims themselves, live in an alternate reality they create and bring to life. Only what they perceive is real. They are sick individuals that are in dire need of professional mental help to unpack their own baggage and stop being toxic but cannot recognize they are sick themselves because of they manipulate their own perception to avoid guilt or facing their own self perceived shortcomings . What is staying going to do for me? Noting. It's hard to beat up and be a jerk to someone that is sick even if she took pleasure in dong it to me but lets be honest, I deserved much better. I often hear the excuse from relatives that they were doing the best they could. LOL THAT'S FUNNY. Coming from first responders...ouch. I prefer to just stay out of it altogether. I don't want to spend a life time defending myself, it's a recipe to bitterness, I have better things to do with my time. Most of you think if you saw child abuse you would react. No you wouldn't, in fact you will be easily manipulated by them into thinking it was no big deal or the child deserved it. It's a slippery slope and you have probably already seen it and looked away because it's a friend or relative or a trusted person. Maye it's a child in the neighborhood that looks a little off, reacts weird to praise. That's a generally a good tell. If you think something isn't quite ight, it probably isn't.
I suppose now that I made it this far, I might as well write one last one after this focusing on what getting a new life is like and the aftermath. Can one ever be normal after this?
I know a friend, a former school principal (you will know who you are 馃槑) that has been waiting for this but I was never really ready to talk about it. No time like the present. I don't think there are many perspectives from kids that grew out of it that are willing to talk about it. It's quite a taboo subject in society actually because of the shame that comes with it along with the constant dismissal of our experiences, it's simpler to just keep it quiet really. The rest of you, I see your lovely comments and I will respond to them when I'm ready. I do appreciate them, I'm just unpacking a lot and trying to be careful to word this series properly.
