Loving Families Don’t Drag You Down

One thing that the family scapegoat, or identified patient, may find remarkable–when comparing his (or her) relationship with his toxic family to other people’s relationships with their far healthier families–is the conspicuous lack of affection the former has for his or her family, as against the healthy affection felt in normal families.

Now, something that the scapegoat has, which the flying monkeys of the toxic family don’t have, is an honest view of the lovelessness of that family. The narcissistic parents and their flying monkey sons and daughters boast of how ‘loving’ they are as a family; but such boasting is really just reaction formation, used as a cover for the family dysfunction that is their reality.

We scapegoats know that love is not just something in words–it’s mainly in actions. The toxic family can say they ‘love’ the scapegoat over and over again until they’re blue in the face, but the scapegoat who is wise to them won’t believe a word of it.

The reason we don’t believe these empty professions of love is because those who have ‘loved’ us so much keep dragging us down. Yes, even the best of families have their share of conflicts and frustrations between members, but there is no systematic degrading of one member by the others.

One way I often got dragged down by my family was that I was constantly infantilized by them. They would talk down to me as if I were an idiot, speak condescendingly to me as if I–for a long time already an adult–were ten years old, and treat my attempts to stick up for myself as if I was being ‘mouthy.’

This is one way a toxic family can retain power over the scapegoat: by making him or her feel like an eternal, overgrown child. This way, the victim feels overawed by the victimizers, never able to see past their illusory authority, and never able to fight back and free him- or herself.

If your family truly loves you, they want to help you rise as high as possible. They celebrate your every success, and they empathize with and comfort you whenever you experience a setback, failure, or otherwise heartbreaking moment.

When toxic families do these good things for you, it’s the exception, not the rule, which is, as I’ve said above, dragging you down. Healthy families dragging you down, on the other hand, is the exception to the rule…which is raising you up.

No, no family is completely good or completely evil; but the healthy ones are predominantly good, and the toxic ones are predominantly evil. So, when in an argument with your toxic family, if they mention their good moments with you, which they’ll do to manipulate you, confuse you, and guilt-trip you into falling back in line and believing their b.s., remember that those ‘good moments’ are the minority, and that they fade into insignificance compared with the many more bad moments.

Instead of celebrating my successes, my late, probably narcissistic mother tended to find ways to drag me down. Back when I was in grade four, and I was getting my first As in school, I was naturally proud to tell my parents about my new achievement; but this was around the time she started spouting off about my supposed autism. (Read here to learn about my mother’s autism lie in detail, and how I came to the conclusion that my childhood ‘diagnosis’ was all a fabrication of hers.)

In the form of a kind of back-handed compliment, she would claim that my new academic success was a manifestation of a “miracle from God” that I’d been pulled out of a state of extreme retardation (associated with ‘my autism’) to become a reasonably intelligent person. Her plan had always been to make me feel, somehow, behind everyone else. It was gaslighting at its most brutal.

Even if I really had an autism spectrum disorder, be it a mild one like Asperger Syndrome (AS) or the more severe kind she’d claimed I had, any reasonable mother who loves her child would never tell him or her that this academic success was a “miracle”: she’d just say she was proud of him. She wouldn’t prate on and on about psychiatrists recommending locking him or her up in an asylum and throwing away the key (as my mom did to me), even if the shrinks had really recommended that! My mother would have known that the psychiatrists were wrong in their judgement, and she would have tried to encourage me as best she could.

She wouldn’t have said that she wasn’t sure if I would have made a good garbageman, as she did (I’m actually a teacher). She’d have had the common sense…and the love for me…to think to herself, He doesn’t need to know what they said about him. Telling him what they said would be harmful to him.

But none of what my mom said to me was about love (though she certainly pretended she was speaking out of love!) or about common sense. It was about tricking an impressionable child into believing he was inferior to his siblings and to everyone else around him. The “miracle” had just made me a little less inferior…and I should be thankful to God for that, apparently.

Her intentions were all about dragging me down, for she didn’t want me to get any higher.

Now, that one time in my childhood was the first major time that my mother dragged me down when I was rising up. The second major time she did this was twenty to twenty-five years later, when I’d proven myself a successful, capable English teacher in East Asia, and I was about to marry my Taiwanese girlfriend, Judy. Mom decided to revive discussion of ‘my autism’ in the form of AS.

Since my life had already improved to the point where she couldn’t reasonably sustain an argument that I had ever been mentally incompetent, and since talk of miracles from God would have sounded inane to the ears of a man in his early thirties, my mom knew she had to modify her lies to make them plausible in the context of my new life situation. Hence, she shifted from talking about classical autism to the mild, socially inept form of Asperger Syndrome.

Still, it had the same effect of dragging me down: she could remind me of how awkward I was as a kid, reawaken those old feelings of pain and insecurity in me, watch me get upset, then enjoy her new source of narcissistic supply.

God forbid that I should ever cross the line and build self-confidence! The very idea that I should ever feel as though I fit in with other people was anathema to her. Small wonder she smiled like a Cheshire cat when she said that I, as a teen, had the maturity of a small child, as a young adult, had the maturity of a teen, and as a then-33-year-old, had the maturity of a 23-year-old. I was infuriated; but I’ll bet she thoroughly enjoyed making me feel that way.

The fact that I was going to marry Judy and never go back to live in southern Ontario must have been at least a huge part of Mom’s motive to drag me down like that. By no longer living near her and the rest of the family, I would no longer be controlled by them, the way they’d once controlled me, back when I was a kid living in Canada.

Mom wanted that power and control back, as did my older sister, J., Mom’s golden child and ‘mini-me,’ so using AS to stir up my old insecurities and make me feel emotionally dependent on them was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to hoover me back into the dysfunctional family relationship.

Mom, of course, wasn’t the only one in the family to drag me down. As I said above, J. was a huge contributor to the problem, always rationalizing her attitude, as Mom did, with claims that she was ‘only trying to help‘ me.

During a visit to Canada that I’d made with Judy back in about the late summer of 2001, we were all at a picnic. I had made a preference of drinking one particular drink (orange soda, as I recall), and J. decided to nag me for drinking so much of it that there’d be too little left for anyone else. I don’t think anyone else there really cared, but J. couldn’t resist making 31-year-old me feel like a 10-year-old.

As I discussed in a previous post (scroll down to Part VI), on that day at the picnic, J. also expressed distaste at the idea of me marrying Judy. Did J. think her disapproval was going to deter me from marrying the woman I love? Does J. think my marrying Judy has been the decisive factor in my not returning to Canada, when it is my family’s toxic nature that is the real decisive factor?

By hoping I wouldn’t marry Judy and would return to Canada, J. was trying to drag me down. She failed.

Another dragging-down that I experienced, back in my teens, was because of my eldest brother, R. I’ve written before of the long rant he gave about our father supposedly loving us more or less based on our academic performance. It was an absolutely nonsensical belief R. had (he having been in his early to mid twenties at the time, so one would have expected a more mature attitude from him), one I suspect our mother planted in his head when he was a kid; Dad was just trying, in his dysfunctional way, to push us to work harder at school (by shaming us, sadly, if we failed), and getting disappointed when we didn’t do better.

Anyway, as an ego defence against R.’s belief that we all thought he was “the idiot of the family” for having quit high school back in the mid-70s, he claimed that he’d known many who got high marks at school, and who were “absolute idiots.” Now granted, it was a fault of mine at the time to allow myself to be unduly influenced by the opinions and flippant attitudes of others, but I was just a kid then. R. made me believe that there was no reason to take any pride in my academic success, so I lost much of my motivation to work hard at school, thus limiting my job prospects after graduating.

My doing well at school was one of the few things I had in my teens to feel good about, and this was with Mom’s nonsense about ‘my autism,’ and her supposed worries of having to continue to take care of a ‘forty-year-old moron’ (yes, she described me with that last word) in the far-off future. R’s bruised ego was more important to him than his youngest brother’s already fragile self-confidence, and he dragged me down even further, as Mom had been doing.

The times that my other elder brother, F., dragged me down were too numerous to count, and so varying in their bullying and sadism that I hardly know where to begin listing them off. Trauma tends to make one forget many of the bad memories, so I tend to repeat the same ones over and over again. Suffice it to say, along with all the verbal abuse he (as well as that of Mom, Dad, R., and J.) had subjected me to on a regular, almost daily basis, F. was the one who got physical with me: hitting me, spitting on me, threatening beatings or (on one night) to throw me outside in the Canadian winter cold (remember that I was a kid at the time: he was much bigger than I), and so many other degradations that to him were “fun.”

The long-term psychological effects of bullying and childhood adversity have been extensively studied. The research shows that children subjected to this kind of emotional abuse suffer all kinds of problems, not only a lack of self-esteem, but also from problems relating to other people, trust issues, emotional dysregulation, and escape in such forms as maladaptive daydreaming.

The family would attribute these problems of mine to ‘my autism,’ with no empathy for me, but instead with a judgemental attitude, never taking any responsibility for the huge role they played in causing these problems. (To be fair to them, no, they weren’t responsible for all of the problems, but they were responsible to enough of an extent that they should have, but of course essentially never, acknowledged their role, and should have shown a sincerely apologetic attitude.)

My father, though not really part of the narcissist collective that the other four made up, was a seriously flawed man who dragged me down in other ways than they did. He rarely defended me against the attacks of the other four, and rarely sympathized with me over the problems they caused for me. His biggest fault, though, was his right-wing thinking, with all the attendant bigotries; and he taught me, in my youth, to think in those ways, from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s.

So while I didn’t directly suffer narcissistic abuse from him, I did suffer emotional abuse from him in the form of psychological corrupting–in this particular case, him teaching me his prejudices. Though I, in my initially liberal attitude, resisted, I eventually succumbed to an agreement with his mean-spirited attitude, through having heard an ongoing repetition of his slurs on blacks, women, socialism, etc. Those fifteen-odd years were truly lost years for me, his having dragged me down to such a base way of thinking that I now deeply regret.

His death back in 2009, I must say at the risk of sounding terribly unfilial, was a liberating moment for me, since I no longer felt I needed his approval for my beliefs. Consequently, I did something I never thought I’d ever do: go from the political centre-right to the far left, as you can surmise from my other blog posts.

So my message to you, Dear Reader, is this. Do you find yourself sitting on the fence with respect to your relationship with your family? If you feel frequently hurt by them, but you’re still not sure if the bad times are such that you consider the good times not worth putting up with the bad, ask yourself if the times they drag you down are the majority, or just the minority. Is their dragging you down more significant than their raising you up, or vice versa?

The answers to these questions should determine whether or not to go no contact with them.