She’s very secretive, a characteristic of almost all abusers (“Don’t wash our dirty laundry in public!”) and will punish you for telling anyone else what she’s done. The times and locations of her worst abuses are carefully chosen so that no one who might intervene will hear or see her bad behavior, and she will seem like a completely different person in public. She’ll slam you to other people, but will always embed her devaluing nuggets of snide gossip in protestations of concern, love and understanding (“I feel so sorry for poor Cynthia. She always seems to have such a hard time, but I just don’t know what I can do for her!”) As a consequence the children of narcissists universally report that no one believes them (“I have to tell you that she always talks about YOU in the most caring way!). Unfortunately therapists, given the deniable actions of the narcissist and eager to defend a fellow parent, will often jump to the narcissist’s defense as well, reinforcing your sense of isolation and helplessness (“I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that!”)
This is the tragedy of people who have been subjected to a narcissist’s abuse: nobody believes them. After years of trying to share their experiences and meeting with the uniform response of, “I just can’t believe she would purposefully do something like this! You must have misunderstood. You are probably exaggerating. Are you sure you are interpreting this correctly?”, victims learn to keep silent.
Any form of self-expression becomes difficult to them.
They feel tongue-tied and anxious in front of any audience.
They find it extremely difficult to open up to friends and loved ones.
Even just having friends or loved ones is either very difficult or outright impossible for them because they feel a basic mistrust of everybody else.
It’s easier not to love anybody than to face the possibility that the person you care about will tell you that your experience is a fantasy.
The victims are likely to experience stage fright, writer’s block, all kinds of speech impediments. They have to work very hard to bring to themselves to the point where they can write down their ideas as researchers or formulate their thoughts in any verbal format.
Eventually, the victims learn to mistrust their own experiences. They will wonder if they are crazy, if something is wrong with them, if they are, indeed, inventing these stories of abuse.
In more extreme cases, the question of “Are you sure?” in relation to absolutely anything will lead them to experience a dissociative episode. They don’t trust any of their memories, and any doubt as to what they did or said or felt makes them feel like they are losing their mind.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yeah, again, too familiar. My mom’s favorite thing to say is, “I like your hubby better than I like you.” And she laughs and thinks this is cute. It may be true, but it’s certainly not cute. Not only is it a put down to me, but it sets up this weirdly inappropriate thing for my hubby, and he’s creeped out by my mom. And yeah, my therapist always thought I was just taking my mom the wrong way. Whatever. I stopped going to therapy.
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The linked article talks precisely about this kind of therapist and the danger they cause. Good for you that you stopped going.
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And emotionally damaged fathers? And narcissistic (or dissociative) cultures?
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/part-3-section-3.html
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The next post in the series will have a father in it. But I won’t give any insights into cultures because I have none on this subject.
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Your blog doesn’t let me leave comments unless they are under my real name. Which I don’t want to do. This is why I never leave comments.
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Ok, so let me go and change that now.
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Your posts are a big inspiration.
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Glad to hear it. I am not sure if I am changing the settings in a way that will allow more people to post. WordPress doesn’t show me many options there, that look like making a lot of difference. I have almost a mirror site on blogger, so I will go and look there and see if the settings can be loosened.
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I was referring to the blogspot blog: http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/part-3-section-3.html. But if it’s the same one as the wordpress one, then that’s good.
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Yeah, the two sites are almost the same. However, it doesn’t seem that I can change the privacy settings much on either of them. I’m not sure why.
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“I can’t be blamed for things that are coming from other people’s minds.”
– THIS. This is what we should all memorize and repeat many times over.
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yeah, but it wasn’t so easy, because I’d been uprooted just when I was about to become an adult, so I had to learn a whole new cultural system and get some cognitive and emotional mapping of it. That meant I was in a double-bind, because I HAD TO play close attention to my surroundings (to adapt) and they would accuse me of ignorance and aloofness if I didnt’. But at the same time, they were just yanking my chain. There was a lot of poltical and psychological hostility going on against people of my origins, so I was stuck in a difficult place. A mantra would not have been any good to my in those days.
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