“You are overreacting, out-of-control and crazy. You should just go along with this and be OK with it.”
When you are on the recieving end of this for your formative years and more, it makes you lose connection with your inner compass, costs you your faith in your ability to perceive and discern. You become lost, all that you lose makes you a loser. Worst of all, you lose, first trust in yourself, and then also trust for and of others. What a sad mess.
Shamey gaslighty maneuvers which communicate the message: “You have failed me so drastically and I am now revoking every right you have within this relationship and family. Including your right to expressing your needs and your feelings about it.”
“So not only am I going to be righteously abusive and shaming. You don’t get to have or share your reaction to that.” I will see to it that you are neither heard nor believed. Your experience and feelings are inadmissible.
Decades of this dynamic leave me in obsessive rumination: Was I born awful- bad at a cellular level? Do I really make no sense at all to anyone and am I so confused and confusing? Is my inability to please you due to my lack of capability, strength, and worthiness- purely defective and perpetually unreasonable? Really? Or was it maybe never actually my job to PLEASE and satisfy you??? I remind my boys constantly that it is not their job to be pleasing. Only to be honest, kind, helpful, and seeking to know their gifts and strengths, and even their struggles. And then to honor them. Displeasing a person is not the same as disrespecting them, except to a narcissist.
I observe in horror as my boys’ father relies on this style of managing and messaging with our sons, accusing them of “not getting it” “not making sense” “not having common sense” when their initiatives or inquiries are not inline with his own agenda and desires. He is attempting to train them to fear his judgment, doubt themselves, to first prioritize his approval/acceptance OR PAY. I am sickened. It is familiar(like literally of the family) and vile. We will disrupt the cycle, if we cannot break it.
Living that way did make me very out of control. I lost my shit, but I am getting it back one day at a time. Efforts have been made to silence me here. If what I say is crazy, who even cares who might see or read it, though?
