Gratitude, forgiveness. These are big themes as the end of the year ramps up, it’s all about forgiveness, family, food, and for survivors of familial narcissistic abuse, those of us who are estranged, this time of year can be incredibly triggering.
Because when we as adult children of narcissists leave and go no contact, the world around us does not understand. When we become estranged it makes our remaining family - if there is any- uncomfortable, it makes our friends uncomfortable, it really just makes a lot of people feel really uncomfortable. But and this is a big BUT. When we continue to put ourselves in situations where we don’t feel good, which is basically how I felt when I was around my parents and siblings, it literally kills us from the inside out. It’s called a soul death. Survivors of toxic relationships often have anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, we struggle with food, we struggle with self-esteem, body image, thinking we’re good enough, because most of us grew up in environments where everything was always our fault.
I was scapegoated, blamed, shamed, abused, harassed, humiliated, threatened and stalked. But when people find out that I’m estranged from my family of origin, their mind never goes to a place of oh my god, I wonder what her parents or siblings did to push her to a place where she felt estrangement, going no contact was her only option. Its always some kind of messaging about you only get one family, you only have one mom, one dad.
And part of why I’m sharing this with you right now is because in November and December there is what is known as the holiday hoover. It’s when narcissistic parents, narcissistic siblings and other flying monkey abusers reach out to estranged targets of abuse and pretend to have an illness or to be dying of cancer.
They prey on our fears and our compassion to test how much control over you they still have. In other words, when they say jump, will you reflexively respond “how high” or will you have taken the time, done the healing work, the inner child work, the self love work, to know that if an elderly parent wanted you to stick around that they should have been kind to you and treated you with respect.
You don't owe your parents your sanity because they birthed you, fed you, sheltered you, clothed you, helped you acquire an education - none of it. That’s what parenting is all about. But unfortunately, just like society has really muddied up what a narcissist is, what it means to be triggered or to suffer from anxiety, culture has done a real number on forgiveness. So much so that we now have a warped definition and idea of forgiveness.
What we’ve done in society is we have made forgiveness step one in terms of healing. So we tell our abuser or whomever we’re mad at that we forgive them -even if they haven't apologized. We buy into this understanding of forgiveness because we believe that others are allowed to harm us if they were hurt or had a traumatic childhood.
Usually we’re rushing into this forgiveness phase because we’ve been fed some bullshit line about being a bigger person and forgiving someone because “you have a bigger heart” or some crap like that. We think that we have to forgive in order to move on. But in truth it’s the other way around. We have to move on and get to a place where we’re no longer irked and triggered by this hurt.
So this Holiday Season, if you feel pressured internally or externally to forgive anyone, narcissistic parents, an ex, a friend, remember to take your time when it comes to forgiveness. If you’re not ready to forgive someone, if you’re not ready to move on and let go, don’t push yourself to forgive before you’re ready.
Do what’s right for you.
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