Hi again. It's been about a week, ish? Since my last post? I know everything I write here is exposed to the open internet, but there's still a reason I'm writing this. I'm currently making a complete overhaul of my site, and one thing I'm changing is I'll hide venting posts like this by default. So, this post will be hidden in the future.

Anyway, tonight's topic is my home, and especially my mother. I've never openly stated this on my blog before, so this is the first time I'm putting this out there.

I was raised by narcissists.

CW: domestic abuse, descriptions of manipulation and gaslighting, aggression, deep-seated emotions, intense hurt and anger, threats

Don't read if you're sensitive to this kind of content.

There's a... certain blend of parent, that happens to be unbelievably self-absorbed and stuck up, unwilling to empathize even a little, puts on a mask to appear kind but mistreats their children behind closed doors. Who acts absurd, outrageous, defies explanation, all for their mental kicks, at the cost of their family. The things they can do range from verbal abuse to gaslighting to physical harm to even crimes.

Thankfully, my parents weren't extreme... but that's not saying much. While everyone else in my family is part of the narcissist mind games, my mom is really the driving force behind it all. She influenced my father into becoming a cruel, bitter man, and poisoned his sense of judgement and self. She turned my younger brother into the golden child, raised him on a pedestal to taunt me, constantly pampered and gave him any objects he wanted, but nonetheless was malignant to him as well and did untold psychological damage that he could only survive by joining the abuser's side.

That leaves me. In "raised by narcissist" terms, I'm what you'd call the "scapegoat" of the family. While abuse isn't as rampant as it used to be now that I'm an adult, I'm still constantly put down and insulted for offenses I did not commit, for speaking my mind, or simply because my mom decided she needed a punching bag today. There was a time where I joined the abuser's side, took on all her toxic traits and behaviors, and passed it on to my online friends, hurting several. But someone slapped me out of it, and with time, I completely undid my corruption and freed myself.

Anyway, all this is very vague. Let's talk specifics.

My mother is a very neurotic and deeply bitter person. Ever since I was young, she's had certain behaviors and conversational habits that she always employs. She never lets her guard down or shows real vulnerability, not even for a second. She openly masks in front of other adults, pretending we're a happy family, while taking veiled jabs at me and my intelligence or independence so she can laugh with her friends at my expense. She's never showed real emotions. In front of others, she wears the mask of a sweet old lady, but behind closed doors, she's constantly on the verge of anger, lashing out over nothing, verbally abusing me on a daily basis. She gaslights me into forgetting what I've actually done so she can insist on her own version of the truth.

She guilts, blames, lies, attacks, over the slightest offense. She used to ritualistically humiliate me over my hair and push this narrative that I was an adult child who needed to be nurtured by my mother, that I was a helpless child who couldn't care for herself. While she never violated my body explicitly, she does have a very suspicious insistence on "massaging" me if I mention pain in my arms or shoulders, and for years she guilted me into letting her brush and wash my hair, which she does in a violent and harmful manner.

Any time I've confronted her, put up boundaries, asked her to stop, tried to compromise, or had a heart to heart with her, it's never lasted more than a few days. She promises she'll do better, fingers crossed, and immediately falls back on her abuse, insisting that she's doing nothing wrong. She defends and justifies everything she says and does. She can never be wrong about anything. She will literally waste money on things that don't work - over-the-counter pain meds for my sinus headaches, essential oils, and in tonight's case, shelling out hundreds of dollars on a new modem because she believes our modem is broken when it's really an xfinity outage - and any time I explain to her what she's done wrong, she insists till her last breath that she is correct. I've confronted her with giant lists of everything she's done to hurt me, and everything I point out is countered with an argument for why it's okay to crush her teen child's self image or invalidate and harm them for their eating disorder.

There's a particular game she plays that I want to shine light on. In "raised by narcissists" terms, it's called DARVO, or Defend, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. She plays this game where she tries to provoke me on purpose. Whenever I leave my room for any reason, if I see her, I'm already bracing for impact. She talks to me any time it's inconvenient, asks me useless questions, just to get a response out of me. Then she closes in for the kill - starts hammering me with questions and accusations.

"Why don't you clean up after yourself?"
"You need to learn to be more independent."
"You didn't wash your clothes."
"If you make dinner, you need to clean out the sink afterwards."

Each of these, and more, is either wrong or exaggerated. There's always some kind of story. But here's the catch. I can never explain myself to her. She wants me to interject and explain that I did clean my clothes, I always clean up the sink when I wash my dishes, that "being more independent" is very vague and it accomplishes nothing to say it to me. But this is what she wants. Every time, as soon as I've spoken up, phase two begins. She talks over me, she interrupts me, she prevents me from speaking. She starts creating a new narrative where I didn't take care of myself because I was oh so helpless and I need to learn to be better, and I will never be an independent adult at this rate, and I'll be trapped here forever, depending on her.

If I tell her to stop, or to let me speak, she continues anyway. She seems to have this down to a science, and she picks the exact right words to provoke me and make me speak up, to tell her to stop, to put a boundary and let her know this isn't okay, to lash out myself at the abuse. Now the finale.

"Oh, because everything I do is wrong, isn't it?"
"Because I apparently can't do anything right."
"Of course, according to you, I don't know anything, do I?"

Said with a scorn, an angry glare right into my eyes, the words slip out of her like a growl. It's complete and utter manipulation. Blatant guilt tripping. Of course I never said these things about her. But this is all part of the game. She wants me to protest, to really fight her over this waste of breath. She is so goddamned stubborn that no matter how long I've fought with her before, it's gone nowhere. She never concedes anything. Every single one has ended with me walking away and her acting all smug that she was right and I was "wrong."

 

Okay, I talked for quite a while about her favorite mind game. I got carried away, in fact. So, I want to talk about the other things she does...

There are some things she does do right. She lets me live with her. She doesn't hammer me to get a job (she actually refuses to help me look for a job, that's a whole other story). I've had medical issues for most of my life, and she's always footed the bill and drove me where I needed to be. She was with me for my darkest medical hours. And, while she is aggressively stupid about it, she does try to buy me medicine, food, drinks, especially when I didn't ask for it, no doubt to try to appease me.

That's about all I can say.

She's drilled several "trigger phrases" into my skull by repeating them ad nauseum for many years. This is part of her mind games, too, I think, because I get unreasonably upset any time I hear those words.

For my eating disorder ARFID, it's "you ate more as a baby," or "you need to eat more," or "your body is going to eat itself".
When talking about learning to cook or drive, even when I've asked her to help, it's always "you need to learn to be more independent," "I won't always be here to help," "one day I'll be gone," or "you need to let me teach you sometime."
And when she runs out of ammo, she always falls back on the classic "if you would just come out of your room more, you would know X..." which she says even if it doesn't apply, like when I've asked her how our health insurance works or if we're out of some food.

Another upsetting thing she's always done is turn the rest of the family against me. When I was little, she always threatened to "call dad" if I didn't listen to her. She essentially weaponized him into a threat, and he played the role to a T, dishing out random needless groundings, banning friends from visiting me for no reason, forbidding me from leaving the house seemingly at random, insisting I'm lying and secretly goofing off when I was trying to meet my friends for a group project, or literally just doing homework.

My brother is turned against me too, but in a different way. As the golden child, he's expected to play the role of the perfect sibling, despite all the abuse he suffered too. His spirit was crushed and he was made to play his role, something he still does to this day. Any time I have some kind of disagreement or fight with mom, or she believes I've "done something wrong," she tells him. It could be incredibly minor, like I didn't clean the dishes exactly right, or it could be an exaggerated story about how she thought she was going to die in the passenger seat while I was learning to drive (under her instruction might I add). I don't talk to him much, but whenever I do, he always knows more about my time with mom than he should. He's become something of a "judge", given all these tasteless rumors and defamations by my mom, and he gives me scornful glances as he passes by me, but never says anything.

My mom also has this habit... she seems to think if she throws enough money at a problem, it'll go away, and she doesn't put any level of thinking into it. When I had issues with sound sensitivity in the house in 2024, she bought me two really expensive sets of noise-cancelling earbuds. While they are great and I've kept them, they are not a feasible solution - I'm still forced to live here with all the noise. Any time in the past I've had problems with food, she randomly goes to the store and buys tons of food I've never had before, supplements, vitamin drinks, anything that she can think of. And when I predictably can't ingest them, she throws a fit and pulls out her bag of trigger phrases and insults.

And just tonight, the reason why I'm writing this, we've been having recurring internet issues, which I know for a fact are not our fault, and she went to the comcast store and bought a new modem "because he told me to", despite all of my explanations and directions to just call a technician over and report the outage. I can't report the outage on my own because the internet is under her name and account. She wasted a lot of money on a new modem, when the old one was fine and had all my customizations on it. I have a pre-pandemic smart tv that can't connect to these newer modems because it needs the older "b/g/m" mode which they don't support. Worst, this is the second time she's done this, the first was a mere two days after my recent nose surgery, so I had to deal with setting up all my services and changing my ip again, while in intense swelling and pain.

Xfinity is really the one at fault here, because their shitty app always reports "no outages found" for our area, and there's no way to report an outage without using their site. However, my mom believes she's right, unmistakably right, and refuses to listen to me as I explain over and over that it's either some kind of cable problem or an internet outage, it persisted between both modems we used recently, it's not our fault, we need to call someone, and the modem is functioning perfectly fine. She even said to me, "the app says there's no outages," and when I exclaimed "the app is unreliable!" she scoffed and turned her head in that really passive-aggressive way she always does when she knows she's wrong or has to put thought into something.

But because she's a fucking idiot, she refuses to do anything, and doubles down on the wrong answer, and now my site won't be accessible for who knows how long. You're only able to see this now because it's been a while.

 

So, yeah... There's like a million other specific incidents I could get into here, but the gist of it is, while she isn't physically abusive, my mother is emotionally, verbally, and psychologically abusive, and has trapped herself and her family in a demented mind game where I'm an incapable adult child who can't do anything and needs her constant supervision and "instruction." She has caused an unfathomable amount of damage to my life. I have dozens of mental wounds I'll never be able to fully express to anyone, possibly forever, even more so because some are buried so deep I might never find them.

I was about 11 years old when I realized she'd completely morphed into this terrible shell of a person, this demon shaped like a mother, this mockery of safety. I had to essentially have my "real" childhood on discord in my late teens and early twenties. I've only become mature now through teaching myself to be mature, thoughtful and kind. I was raised by my discord friends somewhat, but especially by myself.

She is a pathetic excuse for a parent and I can't wait for the day I leave her forever. Whenever that is... seeing as how she's hell bent on not raising a finger to help me leave, even after I pointed out the extreme danger coming to trans people, especially in Texas, in 2025 and beyond.

When I showed her my website before, she only looked at it for about ten seconds, said "it's nice," and closed it. She doesn't give a crap about anything I do or the effort I put in or the money I've earned through commissions. So, I'll put this here, in my safe place, where she can never find it:

Mom, I've always fantasized about finally being the one to shout you down and put up an impassable wall, ever since I was little. You've manipulated every argument and fight and provoked me into being ground under your heel. But you can never crush me, not anymore. You can't stop me. I will fight tooth, claw, and nail, until the day I never have to see you again. And then I'll tell you how I really feel. I'll cut contact. I'll never speak to you again. And when you die, I won't be there.

You had every chance to prevent this. Over decades. But you never took it. You did this. Your demented game has always been more important than your own goddamn family, including your husband as he was dying. Even then, my emotions were always secondary, a hindrance, background noise to your staged drama. I begged him not to die so he could keep me safe from you, and all he could say was "I'm sorry."

Fuck you.