Courage in the Face of Psychological Abuse

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

One of the many ways the family kept me in control was to denigrate me as weak and cowardly. This, of course, is a common bullying tactic, to keep the victim from fighting back by making him or her believe that sticking up for him- or herself is a useless gesture.

What must be understood about bullies and emotional abusers, though, is that they are, in fact, the real cowards. I was put in a situation with a power imbalance in which my probably narcissistic mother used her golden children–my older brothers R. and F., and her #1 golden child, my older sister J.–as sticks with which to hit me. As the family scapegoat, or identified patient, I rarely, if ever, got sympathy from my parents against those three.

People get their strength and encouragement from other people’s support. That’s how they get the confidence they need to face the challenges of life. R., F., and J. got ample support from our mother, in exchange for having given her narcissistic supply; J. got by far the most support for having sucked up to Mom the most, since R. and F. did less ass-kissing…but those two still got much more, overall, than I got.

Mom was nice to me only in so far as I gave her that coveted supply, which I–tending much more towards bluntness and honesty–gave in limited amounts; but even the amount I gave was in larger proportion to the kindness I got back from her. I was to remain the scapegoat no matter how good I tried to be: recall her rejection (<<< Part VII) of my wish to make a visit to see J. and her terminally ill husband.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, Mom enjoyed stirring up division in the family: between my siblings and me; between our immediate family and our cousins, denigrating my youngest cousin G. in a manner eerily similar to the family image that had been cultivated for me. Almost ten years ago, I’d come to the painful realization that those four people I had a ‘relationship’ with (our father, the closest I’d had to a real friend in the family, was already dead) weren’t really a family, but instead were a clique, an exclusive social club…and my membership in that club was shaky, at best.

It’s easy to pick on a little kid, as my siblings did to me when they were teens, and later young adults, and when I, younger than R., F., and J. by eight, six, and five years respectively, was a little kid, and then a teen. It’s even easier to pick on such a person when your mother not only allows the bullying–fully aware that it’s happening–but also rationalizes it, and even encourages it, by smearing the victim behind his back.

What’s particularly slimy about all of this is that family is not supposed to treat you that way. Being angry with a family member for his frustrating faults is one thing; verbally abusing him for those exaggerated faults–as well as hurling insults at him, just for the sheer fun of hurting him–is totally different.

What must be emphasized is that the abusive golden children–under the undue influence of their ringleader, the narcissistic parent–aren’t bullying the scapegoat because of what’s wrong with the victim (however much they try to rationalize it that way), but because of what’s wrong with the victimizers themselves, who are projecting their personality problems onto the victim instead of dealing with what’s wrong inside themselves…a truly cowardly thing to do.

Take my brother R., for example. I’ve written before about the time, when I was a teen and he was about 22 or 23, he and I had a fight. He ranted on and on about how mad he was at our father for favouring J. and me, because we got higher marks at school than he did. He childishly imagined Dad loving us more than him for our academic performance, too. (Read in the passage–link at the top of this paragraph–about my speculation that our mother could have planted that absurd, invidious idea in his head back when he was a kid.)

What should be noted is that R.’s beef was with Dad, not with me. That cowardly brother of mine took his rage out on his kid brother instead of taking it up with our father (and, as I see it, our mother, too–i.e., my speculation from the preceding paragraph). F. and J. also had beefs of their own with our parents, but found it easier to take it all out on me, a kid at the time who was already suffering from bullies at school, than face our parents with their pain. Cowards, both of them.

And look at our mother’s cowardice. I’ve speculated that her disturbed personality was formed when she was a little girl in England during World War II. Added to that, her father died (major trauma!), and her life–her whole world–was disrupted by a move to Canada sometime in the mid-to-late 1940s, when she would have been around seven to ten years old. We can sympathize with her pain from what had happened, but that didn’t give her any special right to do what she did to me (scroll down to where I list her eight outrages against me–<<<Part VII: Conclusion). Her actions were a cowardly evasion from dealing with those childhood traumas.

My father always doubted her nonsensical–and as I’d eventually learn, mendacious–attributing of autism to me (something I found effectively discredited [<<<part 1] after two psychotherapists told me, back in the mid-90s, that they saw no autistic symptoms in me at all, then when I scored a mere 13 on the Autism Quotient test [^^^part 3]) years later; still, Dad never made an effective resistance to Mom’s nonsense. Well, he’d always been henpecked.

R., F., and J. never contradicted our mother in any significant way. Oh, how J. used to fawn over her! I, in direct contrast, did speak my mind to her on several occasions over the years…gee, could that have been why I was scapegoated?

Telling her what I thought of her (often in the form of lengthy emails), though I was scared when I did it, took more guts than R., F., and J. had combined. For I knew, instinctively, how evil our mother could be, especially just before she died: I knew she’d smear-campaign against me those last few months (parts 4 and 5 here), but I stood my ground. I went NO CONTACT with the family, and even gave up my portion of the inheritance from Mom, knowing full well that I was now on my own–even if I do say so myself, that’s real courage.

I have increasingly come to know that I am none of the things the family used to stain my name with. I feel more and more justified in attributing the dialectical negation of every vice they attributed to me…and that includes their slander of cowardice against me. I have the right to regard myself as the opposite of all their vicious epithets against me.

All those vices they threw on my head were really just projections of their own faults. I now feel free to reject them all as being no part of who I really am.

You, Dear Reader, can do the same with every bad name your abusers have sullied you with. They don’t deserve to be dignified with your allowing them to label you with faults that are far more likely theirs.

If you need help healing from your abusers’ wounding words and manipulations, maybe these posts of mine, which include meditations/auto-hypnoses you can use, can help. In any case, given how much you’ve already endured in your struggles against your tormentors…and you’re still here!…you evidently have plenty of courage in the face of psychological abuse.