A Narcissist’s Flying Monkeys

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

A narcissist, or other Cluster B type, can do little mind manipulating without flying monkeys’ help. If the narcissist acts alone, in all likelihood, he or she will be found out sooner or later; but a team of helpers to validate the narcissist’s ‘version’ of the truth can create a powerful illusion that it really is the truth.

Everyone plays a different role in the narcissist’s game, and these roles can even be swapped from time to time, in order to fulfil changing elements in the narcissist’s agenda. In families headed by narcissistic parents, children are put into the roles of golden child, scapegoat, and lost child.

It may be assumed that the golden child is always spoiled, the scapegoat exclusively abused, and the lost child the only one neglected. The relationships in such a dysfunctional family, however, make up a tapestry far more complex than that. All of these children are abused, just in different ways.

The golden child is favoured, but this favouritism comes at a high price, since the only reason the narcissistic parent favours this child is that the child has given a steady amount of narcissistic supply to the parent. The pressure is on to keep providing that supply, and if the golden child should, for any reason, fail to provide it, there will be hell to pay.

The scapegoat suffers the most…on the surface, but there are hidden blessings in disguise here. There’s far less pressure, on average, to provide narcissistic supply. Also, there’s an ‘accelerationist’ element, if you will: the scapegoat may get sick and tired of the abuse, and repudiate the family forever (!). The golden and lost children, in contrast, may feel a lifelong addiction to the conditional love a narcissistic parent gives. Their hope is their despair, and vice versa for the scapegoat.

The lost child may not so much be abused in the overt, blatant sense that the scapegoat is, but neglect is an abusiveness in its own right. Constant emotional neglect, like any form of recurring neglect, is in essence a lack of love; and such a parental failure is a terrible thing to put a child through. These bad parent object relations form the basis for all of the child’s later relationships, thus perpetuating the neglect.

The narcissistic parent juggles these three kinds of children in a cunning way, to create maximum conflict for his or her own personal entertainment, while–in the best of circumstances–being careful enough to keep the family just reconciled enough to each other to ensure the family unit stays together, however scarred they all remain. This cunning method, which mixes division with togetherness, involves a tactic called triangulation, in which two sides of a family fight often don’t speak with each other directly, but through the narcissistic parent as a mediator who deliberately mixes half-truths, fabrications, and calculated omissions of fact to create the illusion of reconciliation while actually keeping the conflict alive and in limbo, to be fought another day.

Why does the narcissist do this to his or her family, whom he or she presumably loves? Cluster B people have little, if any, empathy for others, including even family members. With their fantasies of power and greatness, combined with their exaggerated sense of their own abilities, narcissists will hardly pass up the opportunity to play mind games with their own, far-too-trusting children, to revel in the feeling of power over others, to prove their superiority.

When I came to the ineluctable conclusion (see my post on Emotional Abuse, particularly section 3–The Dawn of Realization–to get the whole story; that post, along with these sequels, form the must-read basis for understanding the current post) that my mother had been lying to me about having an autistic spectrum disorder I’ve never had, in my rumination, I found myself arriving at a series of sequiturs, if you will. It didn’t make sense to me to believe that an otherwise mentally healthy, loving, and well-intentioned mother would ever deceive her own son in such a monstrous way. The enormity of such perfidy obviated the possibility that she’d had the best of intentions on every other occasion, when she wasn’t busy squirting her poison in my ears.

There had to have been something wrong with her…but what? She didn’t display examples of overt criminal behaviour, so she didn’t seem to have Anti-social Personality Disorder (ASPD). My speculation that she had at least a mild case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) seems the best explanation, though, to be fair to her, I have no way of knowing for sure, since she’d never been diagnosed with NPD, and much of my speculation’s cogency depends on whether her private thoughts involved an exaggerated opinion of her abilities, fantasies of power and greatness, and envy of others (projected onto them). It’s highly possible that she had such traits and hid them from the public, but I’ll never know for sure. (This is the crucial difference between her and me: I admit that I’m only speculating, whereas she, never able to admit she was wrong, insisted her fabrications about me were bedrock facts, proven as if by science.)

With this understanding that she was a liar who had no qualms about using lies to hurt her own son, I did what anyone who’s been lied to would do: I started doubting the veracity of anything she said, especially if a) there was no corroborating evidence of her claims, b) her version of events contradicted my understanding of the situation, and/or c) she seemed to have secret motives behind why she was representing things the way she was. Call it confirmation bias if you will, but I started finding many of the things that she was telling me (during the 2010s up to her death in 2016) were easily reconfirming my growing belief that she was a pathological liar.

There is a scientific case to be made that liars become increasingly mendacious as they continue lying over the years; and so, too, my mother’s lying may have grown more and more habitual over time. Though my mother was good at hiding her narcissism, there were ways I could see past her mask of humility and altruism to get at her true self. Was my mother a malignant narcissist? I’ll never know for sure, but she could have been.

I briefly described a few of these lies in my post on Emotional Abuse. Many of these lies were directed against my youngest cousin, whom I’ll call G. The nastiest of her smear campaigns (to my knowledge) were against him, and there never seemed to be a valid reason for her meanness. For though G. is a bit socially awkward and puts his foot in his mouth from time to time (Don’t we all?), he isn’t half as disagreeable as my mother tried so hard to portray him. He has a caring, human side, too, as he proved to my satisfaction during a visit to my home, showing deep sympathy for my sister J. over the then-recent death of her husband. You’ll recall from my original post on my mother (link at the top of this paragraph) that I wanted to show compassion for J. by making a visit to see her and her terminally-ill husband; but Mom didn’t want me to come, because I’m too ‘tactless and insensitive’ (The family had always justified their emotional abuse of me by complaining of my not showing enough concern for them, and when I do, instead of being encouraged to show more caring, this is how I get treated?). If my mother didn’t want to see good in you, that good apparently wasn’t there to be seen at all.

On one occasion, in my parents’ restaurant back in the late 1980s or 1990, my aunt and uncle were visiting, having brought along G. At one point in the conversation they were having with my parents and me, G. wanted to complain about someone (presumably a bully that my family couldn’t care less about) he felt was “a real prick, a real asshole.” My parents and his immediately stopped him, gently chiding him for his bad language; my mother pointed out that constant swearing only indicates a poor vocabulary (a nonsensical idea in itself, but anyway…).

At the time, my mother spoke in a calm, reasonable way; but later, she relayed this story to other people in a manner that suggested she was totally (and, in my opinion, artificially) scandalized. When he said “prick” and “asshole,” he said it in a conversational voice, not loud at all; but my mother made it sound as if he’d shouted ‘cunt’ and ‘cocksucker’ at the top of his lungs, for everyone in the restaurant to hear. Remember that this happened around the end of the 80s, when “prick” and “asshole” were still rude enough to raise eyebrows, but hardly shocking to hear. Had this happened in the 1940s or 50s, being scandalized would have been understandable. Furthermore, my mother used words like those all the time (sometimes on me). G. was in his teens at the time: it’s not as though he was an innocent little kindergartener or something.

Added to this near-hysterical recounting of what happened, which I saw her do on at least two or three occasions, my mother claimed I’d told G. off “good and proper.” THIS NEVER HAPPENED. (I, in my late teens at the time, was actually pro-profanity and would have found it out of character to tell G. off.) When she’d told this fable to my sister J., who like a good flying monkey, bought the whole story without a trace of critical thinking and even complimented me on my “assertive” response, I scratched my head later and wondered, “Did I tell him off? I don’t remember.” I assumed my mom had been a little scatterbrained at the time; but knowing her bias against him as I’d seen it played out over so many years now, I realize she was simply embellishing her ongoing smear campaign against him by including me in her ‘team’, to validate her animus against him.

Speaking of teams, my mother was all about defining her clique as opposed to other factions…within the family; and J., along with my brothers, R. and F., Mom’s flying monkeys, went along with her every step of the way. In my post Emotional Abuse (section 4–Abusing My Cousins), I touched on the following (as well as the above “prick/asshole” story); now I’d like to go into the “scoring another point for the team” story in more detail. During a phone call she’d given me in the early 2010s, at a time when I’d already found myself broken-hearted about her autism/Asperger Syndrome lies, she was resuming her long-standing smear campaign against G. She discussed the funeral of my father, who died in September of 2009, among other things involving my cousin. He’d developed a bad habit, apparently, of stopping people (including strangers) in their tracks and chatting with them about whatever topic interested him at the time, without showing any consideration for the feelings of the accosted person. (Again, I have no independent corroboration of this story.)

During the funeral, Mom claimed he’d accosted my niece in this way, when she needed to use the washroom; then my brother R. intervened and stopped G. from bothering her, and afterwards told Mom he’d “scored another point for the team.” I don’t know what R. said or did exactly to ‘rescue’ my niece (I don’t even know if–or how much of–the story is true, since my mother was telling it!), but I find it easy to believe that, given R.’s haughty personality (his narcissism is comparable to Mom’s!) and the family’s collective contempt for G, R. probably spoke to him in the snottiest language he could muster. If the family’s upset about something (e.g., grieving my father’s death), they need someone to attack; I know this all too well from personal experience with them. Living in East Asia, I wasn’t at the funeral in Canada, so they had to pick on G. instead of me.

Other complaints my mother had of my cousin included a fight he’d gotten in with his eldest brother (whom I’ll call L.) over my uncle, who was in hospital. She related the matter in her usual unsympathetic way. The argument between the two brothers escalated to the point where G. said it was L.’s fault that their dad had had an aneurysm. L. punched G. Now, granted, G. shouldn’t have provoked L., but L. shouldn’t have punched G., either, and who knows what L. had said to provoke G. to accuse L. in such an uncalled for way? In any case, no sympathy was shown G. for having been assaulted.

Included in Mom’s anti-G. rant on the phone, she threw in how my brother F. “would like to punch both of them out.” [That is, punch out both L. and G.] She said this in a tone of voice that showed total sympathy with F. I can understand the family’s frustration with L. and G., but how was any of this cousin-bashing a contribution to a solution to these problems? It seemed the opposite to a solution, and I’m convinced that an escalation of the problem is exactly what my mother was aiming for, for her own personal amusement, all the while playing the role of the ‘concerned aunt’.

Her bad-mouthing of G. reached a crescendo where, having mentioned his penchant for accosting people randomly to discuss whatever was on his mind, she complained, “I think he has Asperger Syndrome!” (Rambling in lengthy monologues about whatever one is obsessed with is an Asperger’s trait, one that I, too have; but it alone isn’t enough to prove that one has Asperger’s [AS]. One has to have a clinically significant level of autistic traits, that is, many of them, to qualify for AS. All neurotypicals have a few autistic traits, though not enough of them.) I suspect she said this to push my emotional buttons; whatever her intentions, in saying this, she gave me insight into the inner workings of her mind, not those of G.

During her anti-G. tirade on the phone, my mother was linking her obvious contempt, and lack of love, for G. with AS, the very disorder she’d been so preoccupied with making me believe I had! If people with AS are so disagreeable, and R., F., and J. (the last of whom, in an e-mail she later sent me, expressed how “dismayed” she was at how not even one of our cousins was “normal”) also find G. to be disagreeable, what does this say about the family’s attitude to me, who was falsely labelled an autistic from childhood, bullied by R., F., and J. from then until I left Canada, and never protected from them by Mom except for three or four occasions (when F. got physical with me, and she knew about it)? It’s far easier to believe she’d been engaging in smear campaigns against me than not to. I may not have eyewitness evidence of these smears (which she’d have been careful enough not to have me see), but I have mountains of circumstantial evidence pointing unswervingly in that direction (including all the times she’d bad-mouthed me to my face, sometimes in front of others, including the family). People who gossip to you often gossip about you, remember.

My mother was probably much subtler in her smear campaigns against me, the scapegoat. She probably tossed harsher slurs at me, with R., F., and J. within earshot, at a time (the early 70s, when we were all little) when they’d have assumed her words were unshakeable truth, before they were able to develop critical thinking; and when they had gotten old enough to think critically, the negative attitude had already been ingrained in their brains too deeply to remove, with my childhood awkwardness and normal, human faults apparently ‘proof’ of how ‘right’ Mom was about me. As we got older, though, she had to smear me in a softer way, to suggest it was just the criticisms of a ‘concerned, loving parent’.

I discovered a hint as to how she could have been so cunning in something she said to me on the phone just before she died: she claimed, just after listing off all my vices, negatively generalizing about me as usual, while R. was standing by her hospital bed and listening to her side of the conversation, that she’d given me “the most love” of all four of us! No examples were given to demonstrate this mythical love, of course: I was just supposed to take her at her word. She was my mother, so ‘Poof!’ she had oceans of love for me, and the usual duties (feeding me, clothing me, providing shelter, etc.) she performed were proof of this love instead of just proof that she’d regarded me as a job to do. Her gaslighting, enabling of my bullying siblings, and other ways of emotionally abusing me, apparently don’t establish any doubt of this love.

After she died, and I’d failed to communicate with any of the family (as detailed here, here, and here), R., furious with me after cyberstalking me and discovering this video I’d posted on YouTube, under my original name, claimed that Mom “loved me more than anyone else on the planet.” This wild hyperbole got me thinking about the true nature of her smears.

Had she been combining smear campaigns against me with false claims of loving me the most? Such a combination would create the illusion of her having no personal bias against me, thus making her smears seem objective and truthful. It would also arouse jealousy in R., F., and J., giving them a motive to bully me, while my mother sat back, allowing the bullying to go on, as if I’d deserved the grief I was getting. If this is true, then far from favouring me over my siblings, Mom was being especially cruel.

Cruel not just to me, but also to R., F., and J., though cruel in a different way. As I said towards the beginning of this article, scapegoats aren’t the only victims of narcissistic parental abuse. Golden children and lost children get their own versions of it. If it was in my mother’s nature to gossip about and play mind games on my cousins and me, why stop with only us? It logically follows that it was in her nature to want to mistreat other people, too, including my siblings and even my father!

The family always used to tell me, “Not everything is about you,” echoing Mom’s projection of her (and their) narcissistic egoism onto me (claiming, falsely, that it is an autistic trait; the use of ‘autistic‘ to mean ‘egoistic‘ is an antiquated use of the term from about one hundred years ago). I must say, after speaking so ill of all of them now, over four blog posts (including this one), that actually, they’re right: it isn’t all about me. My dad and siblings suffered under her, too.

I remember her being verbally abusive to Dad on many occasions over the years, as well as giving him the silent treatment (an oft-used tactic of narcissists) for doing such things as forgetting her sacred birthday; she, on a few occasions, would even go so far as to park the family car far away from our house, leaving it parked there over a period of several days, to create the illusion that she’d left him. Small wonder my father was such a grumpy man: he’d been enduring her emotional abuse and manipulation, too, and he had no outlet for the pain he felt, having been raised to believe that talking about feelings was a sign of weakness.

As for R., I remember, if vaguely, the pain he felt as a teen, sometimes with tears in his eyes. As I mentioned in Emotional Abuse, he left home as a teen, refusing to move with us from Toronto to Hamilton after fighting with my father about his bad grades at school. Granted, my father could be verbally abusive if any of us kids got bad marks, but surely a problem like that won’t be serious enough to escalate into one of us leaving home! It was just bad grades that R. had!

Something else had to have been going on. I know the roles my father and R. played in all of this…but what about the role my mother played? If she tried to de-escalate the problem, but couldn’t…why couldn’t she? It was just bad grades. She had an indomitable will; if she wanted something to be done, it was done. If she couldn’t do enough to fix the problem, why couldn’t she? Maybe she didn’t really want to…

If the problem was only between R. and my father (i.e., she had nothing to do with the problem), that’s tantamount to saying she did nothing to intervene. If so, why? She was the other authority figure in the family, in fact, the major authority figure, as evidenced by how henpecked Dad often was around her. Didn’t she care enough about R. to be motivated to help resolve the fighting between him and Dad?

Or, did she contribute to an escalation of the problem? Did she whisper ideas in R.’s ear to increase tensions between him and my father, and did she whisper in Dad’s ear nonsense about R.? To be fair to her, I have no way of knowing for sure; but given what I know about her needless mendacities against me, my cousins, and my aunt (see below), that she was poisoning R. and Dad against each other is far from impossible. Furthermore, as I’ve stated above, it’s hard to believe that a teen would leave home merely because of bad grades and a shouting father.

One time after R. returned home (in the early 80s) and I’d gotten into a fight with him over his emotional abuse of me (I was a teen, and he was in his early twenties), he rationalized his prickly, arrogant attitude by ranting about how our father apparently loved us more or less based on how high or low our grades were, an idea so absurd that I doubt Dad ever thought that way. (Yelling at us was just Dad’s primitive, dysfunctional way of correcting bad behaviour.) Did R. just assume that our father based his love of us on our academic performance (you’d think that, being a young adult at the time, R. was mature enough not to believe such a ridiculous idea: Dad just imagined he was rewarding good behaviour and discouraging the bad), or did our mother put that idea into his head when he was little, ingraining it there before he’d matured enough to be able to dismiss it as nonsense?

In his lengthy rant, R. also claimed that we regarded him as “the idiot of the family” (Really, R.? You should try being told that a psychiatrist once said that you should be locked away in an asylum with the key thrown away, one of Mom’s lies about ‘autistic’ me!). Now, there’s little doubt that our father, to his discredit, shamed R. about his bad grades by calling him ‘stupid’, in an indeed stupid attempt to motivate him to work harder at school; but could my mother have reinforced the idea in R.’s mind, that he was somehow by nature a bad student, to create conflict and rancour for her entertainment?

I’m convinced that she enjoyed stirring up conflict not only in her bad-mouthing of my cousins and me behind our backs, but also in her lies about my aunt. In Emotional Abuse, in section 5, ‘More Elaborate Lies’, I wrote of how Mom had claimed in an e-mail to me that my middle cousin, S., had yelled at her about me on the phone during one of his visits to Canada, a story with no independent corroboration at all. When I replied about my wish for him to get help, she suggested I write an e-mail to my aunt, telling her about S.’s mental instability. I did, sending it to an e-mail address of Mom’s choosing; but instead of getting a direct reply from my aunt, my Mom replied, telling me my aunt wouldn’t read my e-mail, claiming she’d received a series of crazy e-mails from me, e-mails so “over the top,” with content so “disgusting,” that she’d decided never to read anything I sent to her. I NEVER SENT ANY SUCH E-MAILS TO MY AUNT; though I had done so to my mother, and only because Mom had provoked me so outrageously over the years, as she was doing right at this time. Her lie about my ‘crazy’ e-mails to her was a projection onto my aunt.

My immediate reaction was to think my aunt was crazy, something Mom had suggested she was before (Mom claimed my aunt had had suicidal thoughts, because of my cousins’ impossible behaviour, among other problems–again, there was no independent corroboration of this). In an e-mail following the bombshell she’d sent me as described in the above paragraph, my mother claimed that my aunt had said I must have been quite a “burden” for Mom to raise, and Mom said my aunt’s attitude was “insulting” to me. My aunt had no more reason to think I was a burden than to delude herself that I’d sent her a bunch of crazy e-mails. The far likelier explanation is that my mother was lying again, and encouraging bad feelings between me and all of my cousins’ family, now including my aunt. If she was morally capable of such ugly deceit in this and her other lies about my mental state as a child, she was certainly capable of spreading lies among my siblings and father, too…all for her own personal amusement.

R. must have felt like the scapegoat at the time of his leaving home, and when he’d returned, thought of J. and me, those who got better grades, as the golden children. J. was definitely a golden child, and R. would have been able to see I was never a golden child if he’d opened his eyes and seen what was really going on in that family. F. seemed to be the lost child, to an extent, the one given far less attention, but he was a golden child compared to me (I heard Mom on two occasions say he was her favourite, though I can never really know for sure). Once R., in the 1980s, had proven himself a capable student and was seriously working towards a career in computers, he shared golden child status with F. and J., and the three of them had been programmed by Mom to be her flying monkeys, regardless of (or more likely, because of) her past manipulation of them when they were kids.

The three of them hungered for Mom’s love, since my bad-tempered father gave them so little affection; much of the reason for that being, I believe, because my mother was ruling over him as I described above. Little do they know that her nastiness to them, when they were kids, was more a form of manipulation than just parental discipline. To get her love, they had to give her the narcissistic supply she craved. They gave it to her, and thus became her flying monkeys. She’d rewarded them for their loyalty with ‘love’, for helping her bully me, and for being on her side when she was mad at Dad, or when she was bad-mouthing our cousins or any of the staff she didn’t like (but were too capable as workers for her to fire) in our restaurant.

I’ll now give a number of instances of the bullying that R., F., and J. subjected me to when I was a child. You, Dear Reader, can decide for yourself if all of this constitutes mundane family conflicts or emotional abuse.

1) When I was about eight or nine, I was in my bedroom, arguing with my sister, J., who would have been about thirteen or fourteen. We were raising our voices, and making a huge racket. I’d been so caught up in my quarrel with her that I didn’t notice my brother, F., about fourteen or fifteen at the time, enter the room.

Suddenly, he was there before me, slapping me hard on the left cheek about four or five times. The sting of those smacks was no pain at all when compared to the hate I saw in his eyes, something I’ll never, ever forget. Remember, I was only a little kid.

2) I was about eight or nine when my sister and I started playing games that were…let’s just say, inappropriate. She was about thirteen or fourteen, so certain urges were beginning to blossom with her body, and I was conveniently available.

I will not go into graphic detail about what we did, but suffice it to say, I was required on one or two occasions to lick, ‘only once’, a certain hairy region. For any man to do this with a woman, it would have been a thrilling moment; for a child, to do this with his teenage sister can only be described as disgusting.

3) Once, I was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with F. across from me. He spat on my face and laughed to himself. This wasn’t the only time he’d ever spat on me. I was a pre-teen.

4) In the family restaurant, I was about to sit at one of the tables in the guest room, when F. pulled the chair away, making me fall on the floor. One of the dishwashers was there, laughing at me.

I rushed over to the kitchen, where my mother was cooking. I shouted, “Mom, will you do something about that F.?” She, of course, did nothing. Instead, another dishwasher came by and mocked my words. I was about twelve or thirteen at the time.

5) When I was about eight or nine, F. was trying to get me to play baseball, as opposed to the maladaptive daydreaming that I was engaging in. He would take me out beside a townhouse, to a small area with grass stretching out before me, where he stood as a pitcher, with the brick wall of the townhouse behind me, the batter.

While in hindsight, I can now see his good intentions, which were to get me interested in playing with other people, what he neither understood nor could accept was that I simply wasn’t interested in baseball. Furthermore, his constant bullying of me made it impossible to see this ‘baseball training’ as anything other than just him imposing his will on me, as everyone in the family was always trying to do to me.

My continuing lack of interest in baseball, and resulting reluctance to cooperate with him, aggravated his frustrations with me, making him want to bully me all the more.

One afternoon, we were in a field near our home, with him ‘teaching’ me how to play baseball again. A girl about my age was with us, and he was bullying me and bad-mouthing me to her, right in front of me. Uncritically believing everything he was saying about me (she’d met me that very day, for the first time: the only things she ‘knew’ about me were F.’s slanders), she judgementally said to me, over and over, “If you were my brother, I’d…”

F. would threaten to hit me with the ball if I missed a swing or made some other mistake. In other words, he hit me several times (remember, I was only about eight or nine). And that girl would repeat, “If you were my brother,…”, scowling at me.

I went home crying. My mother, who never approached me, let alone comforted me, just snapped, “Take your bath!” from another room. I sat in the bathtub, quietly sobbing and contemplating the hostile environment I was trapped in.

Needless to say, neither my skill at, nor love of, baseball grew by even as much as a millimetre.

6) One time, when I was fourteen or fifteen, my mother ordered a pizza for us all to eat. She, R., and I were in the basement den, watching TV. The pizza box was on the coffee table, ready to be eaten, but it hadn’t been sliced.

Not wanting to make a trip upstairs for a knife, I suggested, foolishly, tearing off pieces of pizza for us.

“Go get a knife,” R. snarled at me. Then, with a mean look in his beady, brown eyes, he told me to “Think.” (He often growled at me like that, as if thinking was alien to me.)

Abashed, I said, “Well, I just didn’t want to go up and get a knife.”

My mother contemptuously said, “We know that.”

I suppose that the possibility of either of them offering to get the knife wasn’t in the cards.

After all, it was my birthday.

7) One winter night, when I was a teen, there had been a heavy snowfall, and our walkway and driveway was covered in snow. No clear path was available for the family to walk in or out of the house.

I was in bed. F. decided to wake me up in the middle of the night, make me dress up in my winter coat and boots, and go out and shovel the snow (with him, or alone? I don’t remember for sure).

When R. learned about me slaving away with a shovel at night when I, half-asleep, barely had the energy to do the work, he laughed with F. about it.

To this day, I fail to see what was so funny. I suppose one has to be a bully to see the humour in it.

8) The slurs against my intelligence that the family subjected me to were almost as constant as short steps when walking: one almost immediately after the other, frequently. They called me “dork,” “dip(stick),” and many others. Now, these first two were ‘just innocent banter,’ of course: J. was kind enough to call me “dip,” as a joke, ostensibly, on my thirteenth birthday; she wrote “Happy Birthday! (You dip!)” on my birthday card. R. especially enjoyed taunting me with the “dip” and “dork” name-calling: he once ‘joked’: “To dip is human; to dork is divine.” I’m sure he thought he was being clever with that quip.

None of this would have been quite so sinister except for how my mother had already associated my ‘autism’ with mental retardation (“We didn’t know if you’d make a good garbageman when you grew up.” “The psychiatrist recommended we lock you up in an asylum and throw away the key!”). I had so thoroughly internalized all this emotional abuse that sometimes I actively participated in the “dork” joking. As long as I was the ‘bad one’, I needn’t have ever considered something far worse: that the family were simply uncaring.

Now, whenever the family had reason to be angry with me (a teen at the time), the name-calling tended not to be so jocular: I’d be called a “little shit” by R. for slamming the door too often, for example. Or if, while playing with our dog, I accidentally hurt her within earshot of R., he’d enter the room and shout “Asshole!” at me.

9) One of F.’s favourite ways of tormenting me, when I was a little kid, was to grab my hands and make me slap myself, then say, “Why are you hitting yourself? Why do you keep hitting yourself?” (Smack! Smack!) “Stop hitting yourself!” Laughing at me the whole time.

10) My weekly allowance when a teen–first a dollar, then two, then finally five--was used as a pretext for making me the family servant. My chores were supposed to be washing the dishes and taking out the garbage, but my mother decided to expand that to making me serve the family tea…every day.

I’d bring the tea on a tray to her and my brothers, who gloated at my degradation. If I defied them, they bullied me all the more. One time, I was called into the kitchen by F., who snarled “Dishes!” at me, his eyes gleaming with hate, and him baring his fangs in a power-tripping grin. When I replied with a “homework” excuse, he shoved me hard. Once again, that vicious look in his eyes hurt much more than the intimidating shove to my back.

On one occasion, I brought the tea while my mother and R. were watching “Murder, She Wrote” on TV. As I set the tray on the coffee table, R. made an idiotic joke: “Tea, He Brought,” with a gloating smile, again proud of his seeming wit.

On another occasion, I defied them by refusing to serve the tea; instead, I just unplugged the kettle, which had been boiling to excess. When I told my mother this, she angrily refused to take me on a promised trip to an amusement park that summer as punishment. When I tried to stick up for myself, they, as usual, didn’t want to hear it. I had to cave in, again.

Once, when F. noticed that I hadn’t washed the dishes, he went down to the TV room to tell our mother with a smart-ass smirk on his face. She looked up at me, who was standing on the stairs, and with a frown showing ‘parental firmness’ on her face, told me to do the dishes. F. was still smirking, of course.

It isn’t so much that I had these jobs to do as it’s how the family used these jobs to degrade me. When Christmas came around, and there was a huge number of dishes to wash, the family tended to be rather lax about offering help. I did get the help every time, to be fair to them, but it tended to come with dragged feet.

Once, J. said with a snobbish frown, “Maybe if you ask, you’ll get some help.” Of course, dear sister! I should beg…on Christmas Day! That no one offered to help (hint, hint, J.) was not even contemplated by those people who always professed themselves to be so much more selfless and considerate than I. I did get help, but why didn’t the Christmas spirit inspire any of my ‘loving’ family to come right away? Why did Mom have to delegate (instead of herself offering to help)? Perhaps because it involved helping…little old me?

R. once helped, though in a very minimal way. He washed, I dried; but he would leave the washed dishes in the rinse water in the sink instead of taking them out and letting them dry on the drying rack, so I could towel them off and put them away in the cupboards. This meant that I had to take each plate, cup, or utensil out of the water, wetting my hand, which then got my drying towel wet, making it increasingly useless. There was no way I could get my sneering, arrogant bully of a brother to see things my way, of course, so I had to deal with the situation as best I could.

After all, I was the family servant, not he.

Now, these are only a few of the many stories I could tell you of what my mother’s flying monkeys used to do to me to make my life miserable. Again, as with my mother, R., F., and J. had their good moments sometimes, too; but again, those good moments don’t come close to compensating for the bad. And my mother stepped in to stop F. only about three or four times, while letting him and the other two get away with mistreating me scores upon scores of other times, rationalizing their behaviour and speaking nonsense about how they–with some “reservations,” implying that my imperfections justified those reservations–nonetheless loved me. I was expected to believe this horse-shit.

As Nick Cohen writes for The Guardian, “Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers.” He was writing about the liars in the Trump administration, but this idea applies equally with narcissistic parents and their enablers, their flying monkeys.

People who want family harmony must learn to think for themselves and consider that if one of the family is bad-mouthing another family member to excess, is it because the latter is as bad as he’s being described, or is it because the former has an axe to grind? R., F., and J. never considered the possibility that our mother had an agenda, not only against me, but also against our cousins and our aunt. That’s why not only did they lose our mother last year to cancer, they also lost me forever due to their own thoughtlessness.