This blog is about learning to understand all of our feelings and learning to consciously face, feel, and experience all of our feelings within the context of our own childhood.
Everything we become and everything that happens to us is connected to childhood. Not every victim becomes an abuser, but every abuser was once a victim of abuse. These are facts. Violence is not genetic; it’s learned.
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-dance-to-freedom-book-reviews.html
They want to rob you of your freedom and happiness. As they say: misery loves company. They want others to have the same fate as them.
I know!
WHEN A NARCISSIST NO LONGER HAS THEIR WAY WITH YOU THEY WILL GASLIGHT YOU AND BULLY YOU.
THEY WILL RAGE AT YOU MAKING YOU WALK ON EGGSHELLS UNTIL YOU GIVE IN. THIS AFFECTS YOUR WHOLE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND YOUR CORTISOL LEVELS RUN HIGH. THESE PEOPLE CAUSE EXTENSIVE DAMAGE AND DO NOT CARE.
Reactive abuse is when the narcissist deliberately provokes you. They poke, poke and poke until you react and then you look like the abuser.
Yes, it is pure evil.
I wasted 10 years of my life with a very handsome, charming, and charismatic covert narcissistic.
It made me face my own childhood repression so I would never again fall for this type of person.
I published my memoir A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions, sharing my life experiences and psychological discoveries in hopes that would help others to resolve their childhood repression so they will not endlessly reenact their own childhood dramas with people symbolizing their parents or childhood caregivers.
"Narcissists don't want honest relationships, they want cheerleaders. They want people who always give them the right. They want blind loyalty. They want unconditional acceptance, no matter what they do. As long as you don't question anything they do, or give them the wrong on anything, they might just leave you alone. But watch out, if you disagree with them, or go against them in any way. In their eyes, this is the deepest betrayal. And it never goes unpunished. Narcissists are spiteful and vindictive." Yes, I know!
"Empathy without boundaries is self-destruction. Unconditional love doesn't mean unconditional tolerance. You gotta train your boundaries to be stronger than your soft heart and your mind to be stronger than your feelings. Otherwise, you'll be drained. So be kind and take no shit."
"You are not their partner, you are a SUPPLY. You are not an equal. you are something they OWN." Very true! I want someone to stand next to me, not to compete with me to feel superior or inferior.
When dealing with a narcissist, you don't have to accept their version of events, especially if it makes you the villain:
Baiting
Narcissists may deliberately provoke emotional reactions to distract from their manipulation and shift blame. They may use accusations, even if they know they're the ones at fault, to make you feel wrong. Don't accept their false accusations.
Blameshifting
Narcissists may use "crazymaking" arguments to distract you from their true selves and manipulate you.
Narcissistic supply
Narcissists may try to get you to react emotionally to "bait" you. Don't give them anything, as anything you do can be used against you.
Public shame
Narcissists may become enraged by public embarrassment and lash out.
Calling them out
Experts say that calling someone a narcissist, even if true, can cause more harm than good.
Narcissists can be sly and manipulative, using lies to alienate their targets
COVERT NARCISSISTS
are very difficult to recognize and even more difficult to expose. They appear wounded and gentle, even vulnerable and humble. They portray themselves as dedicated to a path of "enlightenment." but don't practice what they preach. They reel you in by appealing to your sense of empathy. The lack of overt arrogance will derail your fears and suspicions. they epitomize; a wolf in sheep's clothing. Beware.
- Author Unknown
Just because a person doesn't put hands on you, that doesn't mean they aren't abusive. Abuse is control, blatant disrespect, and also hurtful words.
Don't settle for emotional abuse thinking it's ok because it's not physical.
Just like Alice Miller wrote: "We are all prisoners of our childhood, whether we know it, suspect it, deny it, or have never even heard about the possibility. The realization that we can free ourselves from the consequences of old wounds will gain ground as more people prove it can be done. Inevitably, resistance to following this path is great, as we all fear our repressed past and the experience of how helpless we once were. We have had good reason to be afraid; if we did not, there would have been no need for repression. Yet the more we encounter our fear and dare to see its causes, the more it decreases." Read more here
In my book A Dance to Freedom, I prove that it can be done! And once you break free from the emotional prison of your childhood, not even a mob of sociopaths, like I had at my job of nine and half years, can trap you and take you back to the emotional prison of your childhood.
As I wrote In My book pages 84, 85, and 86 " Children are like sponges. They absorb everything their
parents repress. And because children are such perfect
mirrors of their parents’ repression, they’re also powerful
triggers that put parents into panic mode to keep repressing.
No one can trigger in us what’s not already in ourselves, but
many parents don’t want to see that because it would force
them to feel the painful truths of their own childhoods that
they try to avoid at all costs.
Instead, parents force their
children to feel what they themselves can’t feel. They use
their children as scapegoats or “poisonous containers,” and
endlessly punish them for their bad behavior.
Most parents
don’t take responsibility for the fact that, on some level,
they’re the cause of their children’s bad behavior, due to their
own repression.
This is one of the biggest injustices I’ve ever witnessed in
this world. And when this happens, parents lose the
opportunity to nurture their children and heal their own
hearts.
This is very sad and tragic. Parents don’t realize that,
in most cases, their desire to have children comes from their
compulsion to reenact their own childhood dramas — not as
victims again but as the oppressors, the ones in control.
After
all, that’s what they were taught when they were children
themselves.
I believe that the idealization of one’s own parents and
childhood is a major obstacle to the betterment of our whole
society. Since so many people believe that their parents are
always right, it’s much easier for them to follow other people in power positions, who cast themselves as mother or father
figures disguised as educators, healers, cult leaders, therapists,
gurus, and government officials.
We become extremely vulnerable when we refuse to face
the truth about the people who raised us. Someone with a
false self is an easy target for exploitation, which can threaten
not only individuals, but also society as a whole.
The only
thing that can save us is to make sure that more people are
true to themselves. We need more people who can fight the
power, starting in their own homes. Alice Miller describes
these individuals as “people who had the good fortune of
being sure of their parent’s love, even if they had to
disappoint certain parental expectations. Or people who,
although they did not have this good fortune to begin with,
learned later — for example, in analysis — to risk the loss of
love in order to regain their lost self.”51
According to Alice
Miller, these people so appreciate their freedom from trauma
and tyranny that “they will not be willing to relinquish it
again for any price in the world.”52
When we idealize our childhoods we become just like
our childhood abusers and the vicious cycle continues. And
we keep holding on to the false hope of eventually gaining
love and acceptance from our parents, or from those who
stand in to symbolize our parents.
Idealizing the people who raised us puts us in danger,
physically and emotionally. Alice Miller believes that the
body knows our traumatic history and remembers the cruelty
we had to endure as children without being able to really feel
it, process it, and move beyond it in a healthy way. “… As long
as we are compelled to protect our parents we pay our loyalty
with our depressions,” she writes. But “…by discovering and understanding the pain of the former neglected child you
start to love and cherish him, perhaps for the first time in
your life.”53
She expands on the idea in For Your Own Good: “If the
tragedy of a well-meaning person’s childhood remains hidden
behind idealizations, the unconscious knowledge of the actual
state of affairs will have to assert itself by an indirect route.
This occurs with the aid of the repetition compulsion. Over
and over again, for reasons they don’t understand, people
create situations and establish relationships in which they
torment or are tormented by their partners, or both. Since
tormenting one’s children is a legitimate part of childrearing, this provides the most obvious outlet for bottled up
aggression.”54 This is how the vicious cycle of repetition
compulsion has been going on since the beginning of human
history."
”Poisonous Pedagogy. The pedagogical conviction that one must bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child’s great plasticity flexibility, defenselessness, and availability made it the ideal object for this projection. The enemy within can, at last, be hunted down on the outside. Peace advocates are becoming increasingly aware of the role played by these mechanisms, but until it is clearly recognized that they can be traced back to methods of child raising, little can be done to oppose them. For children who have grown up being assailed for qualities, the parents hate in themselves can hardly wait to assign these qualities to someone else so they can once again regard themselves as good, “moral,” noble, and altruistic. Such projections can easily become part of any Weltanschauung.” Alice Miller
“…unwanted children are usually mistreated. But there exist as a rule also a huge amount of people who were "wanted" indeed, but only for playing the role of the victims that their parents needed to be able to take revenge on. They were wanted to give their parents what the parents never had gotten from their own parents: love, adoration, attention and so many other things. Otherwise, why would so many people have five or more children when they have no time for them? Why do they adopt children if their body refuses to give them what they apparently "want? The never acknowledged, never felt pain of their childhood calls for being avenged. They go to church, they pray, they honor their parents, forgive them everything – and they mistreat their children at home, often in a very cruel way, AS IF THIS WERE THE MOST NATURAL THING, because they learned this so early. Their children learn this perverted behavior, also very early, and will later do the same; and so this perverse behavior continues for millennia. Unless people are willing to SEE the perversion of their parents and are ready to consciously refuse to imitate it.
You are not being "sickeningly sarcastic," you only dared to speak out the truth that most people are afraid of seeing or talking about.” Alice Miller
Just like Alice Miller wrote in the introduction of her book The Body Never Lies “ As long as the children allow themselves to be used in this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one’s personal truth and without any illness ensuing from this protracted form of self-deception. A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she may try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words. But I believe that it is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of the claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they need most, and at the same time will allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception.”
Here are some signs that you may have been raised by a covert narcissistic mother:
Gaslighting
Covert narcissists may use gaslighting to make their children doubt their perceptions of reality. This can include denying past events, distorting facts, or blaming their children for family problems.
Intermittent reinforcement
Covert narcissists may offer validation, such as praise, gifts, or caretaking, in an inconsistent way. This can create a dynamic that keeps children coming back for more.
Sensitivity to criticism and rejection
Children of narcissistic parents may be highly sensitive to criticism and rejection. This can lead to self-judgment and shame in response to feedback at work, criticism from a partner, or even innocent comments from a neighbor.
Preoccupation with others' emotions
Children of covert narcissistic mothers may become good at anticipating or reading the negative emotions of others. This can lead to a preoccupation with trying to contain those emotions before they appear or turn on you.
Other signs that you may have been raised by a narcissist include:
Conditional love
A focus on themselves
Difficulty distinguishing between reality and imagination
Sit or lie down when intense feelings are triggered by present events, and let yourself feel the fierce, repressed emotions of the child you once were. Once our painful feelings are understood and consciously felt within the context of our childhood, they start to subside and are replaced with love and compassion for ourselves and others.
Otherwise, you will be driven by the repressed emotions of the child you once were to hurt others, yourself, or both. Just like my enlightened witness wrote: “Should we as adults be treated in the same way as our parents treated us as children, many of us - especially if we have been through therapy - can become aware of the cruelty endured before. But the knowledge of the whole amount of cruelty can still rest repressed because the terror happened when we did not yet have a name for it.
For this reason, we need what we call "the transference", hating, for instance, another person instead of our mother or father. The transference is unavoidable if we were once abused as children. It can also be highly confusing. But it can be liberating as well if we are ready to see it as a consequence of our early life.
If we have summoned the courage to look our outraged, hateful YOUNG parents in the eyes, and to feel the fear of the small child we once were, then the misleading, confusing, and defensive role of the transference disappears.
We can then strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever.
If we don’t want to become like them, we must strive to SEE them as exactly as possible. We can use in this way the transference as a means for discovering the feelings of the small child that we once were and to deepen our understanding of him or her. At this moment the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW its whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this.” Alice Miller.
Here is where most of humanity is stuck. Unconsciously and compulsively looking for scapegoats or poisonous containers to temporarily alleviate their own childhood repression. Repeating exactly what their own parents did to them, and this vicious circle goes on endlessly...
PS, this is one of the reasons the demagogue Donald Trump won the presidency, because he gave his followers "MAGA" a very dangerous political cult, the scapegoats they desperately needed, like the "illegal immigrants."
A narcissist will be angry at you for finding out the truth about them
THE TRUTH TRIGGERS THE NARCISSIST'S RAGE
These words by Alice Miller go right to the heart! Yes, the amnesia of politicians or leaders of sects does afflict countless people. We are witnessing how Putin's amnesia of his childhood repression is hurting the Ukrainian people! "Kafka was hardly aware of the fact that the main sources of his imagination were deeply hidden in his early childhood. Most writers aren't. But the amnesia of an artist or writer, though sometimes a burden for their body, doesn't have any negative consequences for society. The readers simply admire the work and are rarely interested in the writers' infancy. However, the amnesia of politicians or leaders of sects does afflict countless people, and will continue to do so, as long as society remains blind to the important connections between the denial of traumatic experiences in early childhood and the destructive, criminal actions of individuals.”
