I've been toying with the idea of writing about the effect that narcissistic parents have on their children for quite a number of years now, as it is something I have a personal mission in getting this subject more widely known and recognised.
The number of people I have met in recent years that can relate to having a difficult childhood due to parental abuse has made me come to realise this is very common in our world, yet we seldom choose to mention it, let alone warn our kids that this kind of mental behaviour is not acceptable. It seems fine to mention bullying in school these days, but mention the bullying that may go on at home and suddenly we have stumbled on society's nerve: Parental abuse is far is phenomenally damaging.
I will begin with coming clean: I am the victim of a narcissist parent who terrorised me. This is not an easy thing for me to write, because it is something I have learned not to talk to people about over my life. Basically, to keep the appearance of a normal happy family, even the kids become part of the lie to maintain that false image that everything was perfect. They cannot see the monster that they are protecting and facilitating.
So my childhood would seem idyllic on the surface. My parents owned a horse ranch with a pool and lots of land and got me into a good school. I had my own horse, dog and I was even given a broken landrover disco when I was about 14 or 15 which took me a year to fix... it then became a work-horse vehicle which we only drove around the ranch to aid in work. I even re-built a trailer so I could tow mountains of garden waste and building material - it was a constant job to maintain the place!
However, people occasionally got a glimpse of what life on the ranch was really like. My mother insisted the place was always supposed to look like a show house. We couldn’t leave drinks on tables, glass couldn't have the slightest smear on it (the house had a lot of windows), and lord help you if the floor was dirty (white tiles inside a ranch's house... not the easiest t keep clean). As a child, I had to run the stables which involved looking after many horses; I had to maintain the two roads on our land which the rains would destroy once a year (nearly a kilometre of tracks). I had to clean apartments that my mother rented out to tourists as well as maintain a lot of the gardens with chainsaws, mulchers, strimmers, drills and pretty much any other power-tool you would find in a handyman's wet dream. I was essentially used solely to maintain the property: or more accurately, I was used to maintain my mother's false image.
For someone who owned a horse ranch, my mother couldn't even ride a horse, let alone tack one up or lead it. But so long as people thought she could when she was showing them round the property (glass of wine usually in hand), she didn't care... the only thing that mattered was that she kept her false persona as an active ranch wife and people believed it. Every morning I was in that stable before school cleaning and feeding – in fact I was seemed to be the only one that maintain her lifestyle at the cost of my own.
Behind closed doors though, she was a raging abusive alcoholic and it didn't take long before people deemed her as mad. She would smash up the house if it wasn't tidy enough taking a crowbar to every window -the clean up would last days sometimes. When I was really young, she'd threaten to send me to an orphanage in Romania... and when that threat stopped working, one night she told me she'd slit my throat in my sleep. That was the first night I ever ran away. I snuck out my window and tip-toed across the gravel to the stable where I kept my bike. I cycled up to a forest and the next thing I remember I woke up thirsty on a bench to a glorious sunrise and tear-glued eyes.
I can't remember when it got physical, but it was must have been a year or two after I got to that ranch. To date, I have been knocked out with a cast-iron frying pan, had bottles smashed on me, hit with the odd broom, had boiling water thrown on me, and even stabbed by my mother. She tried to run me over, had me arrested/sectioned, got rid of my dog, smashed up my room and scared off a few people that I cared about. In fact she made having any kind of relationship or friendship hard, if not impossible to the point where I had given up... to this day I struggle so hard with relationships in ways people (or myself for that matter) simply do not understand.
I tried to balance my school life and did reasonably well until I couldn't hack my home life anymore. I stayed out, started smoking weed and slowly I began to fall behind academically. I just wanted to avoid my own home because it was a place of abuse. I would be screamed at to get out of bed at 5 or 6 in the morning sometimes and the only bit of peace I would get was when she passed out from too much wine. I would be reminded hourly what an idiot I was and that I would never make any friends/find a woman of interest. I would be spoken to in a harsh raspy voice like I was constantly being talked down to in that angry tone. She would shout and jeer at me for hours, sometimes days through the wall from her bed.
Before I knew it, I was becoming shy and I started taking less interest in people. I had no confidence and I became constantly anxious... some would say I was just a loner. I would try my best to please people, but at the end of each day I would feel empty. By the time I left home, I was suffering from extreme depression and suicidal thoughts, but leaving gave me a temporary boost. However, I failed and had to move back at 18 years old and it took me another 2 years before I'd leave again. Those two years are a bit of a blur, but I remember crying a lot (yes, I am male) and breaking down next to one of the horses that used to lie down beside me. She said some nasty stuff to me, but one of them which still sticks with me: "If I can't love you, don't expect any woman you meet to." I managed to move out again... briefly moved back for a few months before moving to England. I got a shitty job in a shitty restaurant with the hope of going further or just getting a better job, but it never happened. Because I was under 25, I couldn’t earn the minimum wage, so I had to work an extra 10 -15 hours a week just so the landlord couldn't turn round and say: "You don't really earn enough to rent my place." And even then I struggled. I spent years applying for new jobs trying to get something better or just working my way up my job at the time, but none of that happened.
I got burnt out and was ready for a breakdown until I started looking at why I am the way I am. I am a product of mixed messages and abuse. I had been messed with psychologically to the point I was terrified of people and still am. I got hurt physically too often when I was a kid, that now I don't even understand my own anger or feelings properly. I can't say: "I love you," without a feeling of being sick - I've grown up hiding my emotions that now they are all bottled up inside and there is no way I can express them out of fear... or sadness, I don't really know.
What I am struggling with the most with is the fact that no one did anything when I was growing up. No one tried to gain my trust or ask "Hey Ponyboy, why do you always hang out alone?" People knew what my mother was like, but no one reached out to try and help me or give me that safe space. Instead I was referred to as: "That’s that mad mother's son." Parents actually told their kids not to hang out with me, further alienating me from people my own age.
So now, I am in my mid-20s and science is now proving people have more narcissistic traits than ever before... and I see it. I see kids that escape into their own world on a tablet or Smartphone while parents are just as ready to threat-post unfavourable articles and memes about their kids. Kids these days have so many mental problems, that I am beginning to see that it might not be them and the unhealthy online environment they put themselves into that causes it. Parents have gotten less empathetic; stressing their children into people that they don’t want to become working jobs that they don’t really want.
I really wish there was someone there for me when I was growing up, but there wasn’t. But we all know the signs of an abusive household, there is no reason we can’t do better and watch out for these warnings so children don’t have to go through life feeling like me. If you’re a teacher and you think one of your students is being abused, please don’t let their life be ruined by your silence. If you hear your neighbours screaming on a regular basis and there are kids in that household, maybe get a few neighbours together and offer a genuine safe place (and tell the police first!). If it’s that bad, go ahead and call the police, just don’t be that selfish thoughtless person that lets those kids suffer. They’ve been trained to lie and say: “Everything is dandy,” but they are only protecting their narcissistic parent because that’s what they have been conditioned to do.
I hope this article reaches someone that can use this to help someone... even if it’s just one person out there that reads this, I sincerely hope you keep this in mind, because we all know that “troubled family down the road.” Thank you for reading.