Dear faber castell,

I’ve just read some parts of your story, and it seems you’ve been gaslighted a lot as a child (and later), and told that you shouldn’t be angry when in fact your anger was justified because your needs haven’t been met. You also said you’ve realized that some members of your family are narcissistic:

I now realize that the pattern of emotional abuse in my family is very complicated and sneaky. Now, after many years, I’ve realized they’re pathological narcissists, which is the reason why I don’t count on them for any of this. The way they treated me when my mother passed just did it for me and I could finally connect the dots and free myself.

You earlier said that your mother left your emotionally distant father at a certain point, but she took you to an even worse place:

I was never too conscious of the amount of anger I felt towards my mom mostly complaining about this but never quite leaving, and when leaving, taking me to the most violent of places, although, she always gave me the love that others didn’t. IT WAS confusing. I was angry, a lot, and my family, much to their own fitting just reproduced the idea in others that I was a difficult teenager.

Did she take you to her own family, which was “the most violent of places”? Are those the people who are pathological narcissists, who treated you poorly after you mother died, and with whom you are now in a legal dispute (I now have some legal issues with my family cause she did try to leave it all clear for me but my family has legal rights over her stuff)? Are those the same people?

It seems that later, you were involved with some narcissistic people, e.g. that yogini boyfriend of yours, who used you for sex although he knew he wanted to break up with you.

You also had a negative experience with therapists, whom you said denied your reality and retraumatized you:

I totally need therapy but I’m tired of others judging me for whatever blame they always find in my story.

many therapists have also told me, or told me back then, things like “don’t victimize yourself”, etc., which only made things worse,  whenever I felt the true need to value myself and speak up, which at the same time requiered for me to recognize unfair treatment, I got really discouraged.

It seems you did experience a lot of gaslighting, not only from your family and romantic partners, but even from your therapists. Unfortunately, there are therapists like that, e.g. in a couple’s therapy they often end up being charmed away by the narcissist and start blaming the victim. A famous expert on narcissism, Dr. Ramani, talks about it in her youtube video: Gaslighted by your therapist. I highly recommend it.

As Dr. Ramani suggests, you’d need a therapist who understands narcissism deeply and can see through narcissistic tricks. There are such people out there, so don’t get discouraged.

I think it would be very important that you can finally tell your story to someone – the story of how you were abused and how it was denied and you were blamed for it instead. Your truth needs to be seen and heard – it needs to be validated – so you can start healing and trusting yourself again.

If you’d like to share some more about the abuse that happened in your family, you are very welcome.