Don’t you be so selfish
You were such a spoiled child, I had to get that out of you
Don’t you even dare even ask for that
You need to think about things from my point of view
Ultimately there is no avoiding this, with psychopathic, emotionally immature parenting, or a situation of emotional abuse, it’s the shame and accusations of selfishness that will get you in the end. The above applies to parents too, though you cant divorce them.
They got me.
Its funny when I think about it, The very thing the abusers cant do (think of others) is the very thing they accuse you of not doing, when you do it all the time.
So what are they saying.
Don’t you dare think about your own needs
Or
I am going to control you into doing what I ask, by making you feel shame.
Emotionally immature people want you to jump when they call.
They want you to rescue them.
I was the rescuer, as I’ve written before.
Terrified to say no as a child if that parent needed me.
‘No’ was harder than pretending.
‘No’ was harder than going through the motions
I was accused of selfish if I didn’t meet their needs
They were jealous if I met the needs of others. Furious even.
They came first. It was their right and entitlement.
A Childs dependency often irritates the self-involved parent. Preoccupied with their own issues, Emotionally Immature Parents can be short tempered and react to their Childs needs as if the child had done something wrong. Those parents make their children feel bad for having needs and thereby making the parents life harder.
Lindsay C Gibson, 2019, pp41
Surviving meant not having needs.
It meant not disrupting the apple cart, or daring to crunch the eggshells
It meant not asking, not requesting.
Which is funny. Because unless we asked we didnt get, but often shame for asking (because I was at risk of being spoiled)
This meant going without. Because there was no point in asking.
I didnt go to them. For anything.
I acted as though I didnt need them.
I didnt even need them or go to them when my marriage fell apart.
Better to hide.
If you were treated in this way as a child, you may still feel ashamed for having problems or needing help
Gibson, 2019, pp41
Yup.
Survival of the least neediest.
Survival Alone.
Knowing that any request to ask would be met with accusations.
Knowing that any gift would be attached with manipulative strings
Because they didnt give without strings, or give at all, then the threat of the accusation meant not going to them.
Shame devastates.
I didnt bother going to them, my task was to comfort them.
There was no way I wanted to be thought of as selfish.
Especially someone who wasnt selfish at all. For some reason I had already learned to put others peoples needs first. Strange how I might have learned that.
Such powerless anguish impels children to do something -anything- to make their parent respond to them. Thats why young children so often have meltdowns over seemingly insignificant things. They cant keep themselves together in the absence of supportive parental attachment.
Gibson, 2019 p42
I held my breath aged 2-4. Those were my meltdowns. ( I wrote more about these in the last part)
Surviving Psychopathic parenting meant accepting the accusation. It meant accepting it and getting on with life without. It meant being learning to cope completely alone. What parent would give a snake, when a loaf of bread was asked for, said Jesus in Marks Gospel, well, some evangelical psychopathic parents shamed so much that I wouldn’t have even ask.
Its ironic then that when they shamed for asking, they just take.
Thank you for reading, this is part 13 of my story, parts 1-12 are here
Please do like and share this, and my other posts if its the kind of message you know will help others, there are a number of resources in the menu above too, and if you’d like to support me on this healing journey, please do click the link to the right too, thank you.
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