The Defining Line

Tags

child abuse, Cruelty, good vs. evil, murder, narcissistic personality disorder, sister, sociopaths

I have all my life been deeply fascinated and intrigued by evil, by its sheer existence, its diabolical methods, its sinister purpose, its complex functioning, its hateful motives, and its intricate inner workings. I imagine my fascination is like a child born in the tropics wants to literally and figuratively grasp the concept of snow. 

I’ve finally realized the line. The actual line! It seems simple and obvious and most of my “eureka” moments of epiphany ( like in this revelation of The True Face of Evil ) were all pointing directly  at this line, but I hadn’t figured out the very specific equation that differentiates between good and evil, bad choices and bad people, selfishness and pathological narcissism, etc., etc…

It’s definitely not just that evil feels nothing when it lashes out to inflict pain on others. True evil, actual pathology, literal sociopaths and narcissistic disordered people ENJOY it! 

Here it is in all it’s simplistic glory: the ultimate defining line between the two: 

                     They. Enjoy. It.

                     They feed off it.

          It brings them actual pleasure. 

Now, I was raised by a cruel mother who’s “mothering” tactics easily represent something like Samuel Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction as displayed in the “say what again” scene here:    

The last severe, pants and panties around my ankles leaned over the bed, beating I received was at 14 years old. I was in the 8th grade and my actual crime was I said “I promise I didn’t do anything mommy” one too many times while being questioned of something I had, in fact, not done. Thus, I had no other options for a truthful response to her raging hot-breath-in-my-face interrogation. I was 14. I didn’t know what other answer to give except the truth and lying, even just the perception of lying without any actual lie, brought down furious and lengthy punishments. I couldn’t lie.  So when she shrieked, IF YOU SAY ‘I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING ‘ ONNNNEEEE MOOOORRRREEE TIMMMMEEEE, I WILL BEAT YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR LIFE, I truly had no other honest answer to her question.  Believe me, I desperately wanted to give her another answer and I’d gotten pretty good  over my short life at learning how to guess what answer she was looking for and wouldn’t stop berating and accusing me until she got it out of me, but in this specific situation I truly had no idea what the “right” answer was.  I was clueless as to what magic reply would satisfy her and make the threats and screaming stop. 

Yup, I defied her demand and gave the only answer I had available to me and yup, she dragged me into her bedroom made me pull down my pants and panties, lean face down over her gigantic red velvet bedspread, and beat me up and down from my ankles up to my lower back (wherever the flesh was naked and exposed) with the buckle end of one of my step-dad’s big leather belts.

This time was different for me than the others tho. Usually I would cry and beg and plead for her to stop. My brain would frantically try to understand whatever I had done wrong so I could be sure not to do it ever again. And no matter how confusing and truly innocent I’d felt, I could find a way to blame myself and accept responsibility for something… anything… to justify her punishing me. 

This time, just  like I had no other truth to give her no matter how badly I wanted to give her the “right” answer; this time I knew absolutely I had not done anything wrong. I mean not even a “sassy tone” or a “salty face”. For the first time ever in 14 years of life, I truly knew I had done nothing wrong.

So I couldn’t cry. It hurt… yeah, it burned and stung like millions of wasps attacking my bare naked backside. And as she went back over the areas she’d already hit once or twice, it felt like my skin had been set on fire. I couldn’t feel the specific sting or cuts into my flesh anymore. It merely felt like she’d set a match to my ankles and I was drenched in gasoline. It just burned with wild painful fury . 

Yeah, it hurt like a mother fucker. But I couldn’t cry this time. I just couldn’t. My faith in my innocence was too solid to beg and plead and cry and wail like a toddler… not even at the pain of it. I just was unable to cry. I just lied there silent and patiently waiting until she might  run out of fury or energy or motivation… or whatever it was that was driving this senselessly harsh furious red hot beating.  

I lost time waiting. So I can’t  know for certain how long the beating went on before she paused to snatch my head back by my hair and glared rage directly  into my face, and snidely screamed,  OH YOU THINK YOU’RE TOO BIG TO CRY NOW, HUH? WELL, I WILL JUST KEEP GOING UNTIL YOU DO. 

So I knew I was really fucked this time. Just fucked. I would have gladly given her the pleasure of me bawling my head off to make it stop, but I literally could. Not. Cry. I just couldn’t.  I realized she would keep going until she killed me. And that I would lie there docile and quietly accepting it until my death. I definitely knew better than to fight back or try to run. So she dropped my face back down in the red velvet bedspread and continued beating me with a new gust of furiously determined energy. 

I have no clue how much longer the beating went on. I lost time completely and removed myself from my body in order to tolerate the pain and accept my inevitable death. Until at some point, I came back to present awareness when it suddenly stopped and I heard my sister say, “Mom, stop. You’re going to kill her.”

I remember those words vividly and they snapped me back into the present moment. No one had ever dared stand up to or stop my mother!! I instantly became afraid for my sister. Even though she was the golden child, mother’s fury once at this level, could unleash on anyone. I couldn’t believe my sister was willing to risk her life to save mine and I was petrified because I was scared I couldn’t save her like she had me. 

This, made me cry. I sobbed both  in gratitude and fear for my sister. Tears of shame came running out of my desert-dry eyeballs worried that I wouldn’t have the same courage to stand up to mother if she chose now to direct all this fury onto my sister.

She didn’t though. And the rest of the night is a blur. I only remember trying not to bleed on the sheets when I went to bed that night. I slept face down without any covers  trying to keep my wounds from staining the sheets. I prayed the bleeding would stop before I fell asleep in case I turned over in my sleep.  I remember how excruciating it was trying to put pants on for school the next morning so I wore an old pair of my sister’s sweatpants. 

After everything, one wouldn’t think I’d be so dense and slow to figure this definitive line out, but I’ve come to understand that those without this evil really are blind to understanding something so thoroughly foreign to their own nature. I have spent my life desperately looking for reasons why some behave this way; looking for understanding rather than pinpointing the definition. I’ve always believed if I could just understand why they did this, then I could choose not to let it affect and traumatize me or maybe I could even help them overcome their pain and love the cruelty out of them. Good souls will never understand its definitive opposite. It doesn’t have the ability to accept evil and cruelty for the mere sake of being evil and cruel. This is another way some are repeat victims. The light can’t see darkness for what it is. Once light shines to look and see the face of darkness , the darkness is gone. We can understand logically that darkness and evil do exist, but we can’t actually ever see it. Our vision and sight flow first  through our soul spreading lights of compassion and kindness into our very eyeballs and sprinkle it over our logic a little as well so that good can’t truly see the face of evil or understand it for what it is. By the time it reaches our eyeballs to see or our mind to understand, it has already  been touched, tainted, and altered somewhat by the light of  goodness  from our soul before we ever gaze upon it or attempt to sort through it for the understanding light souls want to have for everything and everyone.

My previous assessments were mistaken. These people don’t just “feel nothing” as they hurt and destroy others, it actually gives them pleasure.  

I don’t understand enough yet to know exactly which aspect pleases them enough to motivate the cruelty, though. Is it your actual pain and suffering? Is it the control they feel knowing they can inflict such pain and agony onto another person? Is it the satisfaction they get when they’ve taken bits of your soul and crushed them in their hands laughing until they’re dust ?  Is is the sense of accomplishment they get knowing they’ve completely snuffed out all the tiny desperate-to-survive slivers of light inside your spirit? 

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Toxic Air

Tags

art, evil, innocence, Jean-Baptiste Mouton, narcissists, nature, no win situations, photography, punishment, scapegoat child, sociopaths, solitude

Photo by Jean-Baptiste Mouton

Since it is Mommie Dearest’s birthday week, I’ve decided to focus on sharing some experiences of growing up with a Narcissistic Personality Disordered mother. 

I’ve fallen in love with the artwork of Jean-Baptiste Mouton. He is a talented genius! So many of his photos resonate deeply for me in depicting the sense of grace with horror in a way that makes me feel as though he can see the defining conflict and depth of misery of a life with a pathological narcissist. I get the sense of innocence defiled and a horrific mental hell that is the playground of  narcissistic sociopaths. I think of the innocence of children living in times of war where the very nature of it all goes against all things  childlike and sweet, portraying a definite contradiction that simply is no place an innocent mind and heart can function or survive in tact.

The need to breathe. The desperation for safety when the very air you must breathe every day is toxic with confusion and bitterness. 

For 16 years, I lived in toxicity, desperate for fresh air, love, and security to just be…. to be me.. to be silly…to be happy… to feel what I felt, whatever it was… to like whatever color I liked best in any given moment without snide comments about being a liar because yesterday I liked a different color best. 

Once around the age of 7, I had gotten in serious trouble for not closing the kitchen cabinets all the way. I had left them just barely open, as close to shut as I could get them without them making a clicking sound and waking up Mommie because the Saturday prior, I had gotten a pretty severe spanking for closing the cabinets after taking out cereal, a bowl, and a spoon to eat it with. I hadn’t tried to be noisy. The cabinets had magnetic closures which pulled them to shut when the door was at all close to the frame and the click they made was inevitable. 

Mommie always slept in so it was up to me to get my own breakfast in the mornings, I would never dare to wake her just because I was hungry!! So after getting a spanking for the sounds the cabinets made when the magnetic piece clicked against its frame, I was scared to close the cabinets all the way at all this morning.  I very carefully closed them as close as possible without getting in range for the magnet to pull it shut the rest of the way. This took some effort, but I was happy to do it and felt proud of myself  that I was being so quiet getting my breakfast for myself.

It backfired though. As I was finishing my  cereal, Mommie woke up anyway and came into the kitchen. Feeling confident I had been the perfect angel of quietness, I smiled my most cheerful smile and said, Good morning, mommy! 

Mommie was furious! You left every GOD DAMN cabinet in the kitchen open! What the hell is the matter with you?  And she yanked me up from the chair by my arm and started spanking me as she screamed this at me. At 7, I already knew better than to answer her furious questions. I knew that I never answered them right and somehow I always made it worse by trying. I said nothing about how I’d learned my lesson the Saturday prior about how noisy the magnetic cabinet closures were. 

I cried though. I wouldn’t learn not to cry at being spanked or being frustrated or being scared until I was exactly 14. I didn’t yet understand how my tears fed her fury like a steak thrown into a pit of ravenous wolves. So yes, I was 7 and I cried while she spanked me. 

A few hours later when she was back in her room applying her makeup and I had calmed down from crying, I ventured cautiously into her bedroom to ask if I could go for a walk outside in the woods behind our house.  Even as a very young child I was drawn to the serenity of nature and solitude. And I knew it was a good idea to reflect on the error of my existence and my every choice in order to try to understand and hopefully realize wisdoms and how to make good choices that might make Mommie smile and be happy with me.  Nature and solitude were like my gas masks of safety, the only place I knew where I could breathe easily.

This was my intent today now. To spend my Saturday quietly in nature, alone, where I couldn’t make mistakes or annoy Mommie  at all, so I bravely asked her even though I knew she was furious with me and my stupidity,  if I could go for a walk in the woods. 

Mommie flipped out again. Screaming at me that she WASN’T STUPID!, she HADN’T BEEN BORN YESTERDAY!, and she demanded to know WHAT BOY I WAS MEETING IN THE WOODS?!

These questions really scared me because I didn’t have any plans to meet any boys in the woods. And I also was wise enough to know that denying the accusation was equally dangerous because it would be considered the same as “calling her stupid”. 

There was no right answer to this line of accusatory questioning where she “already knew” the answer/the truth / whatever.  So I said, I’m not meeting a boy Mommie. I just want to go for a walk outside by myself because I’m sad that I didn’t close the cabinets this morning. 

Ohhhh the rage! I was not allowed to go for a walk, I would go “STRAIGHT TO MY ROOM “ because I was “giving attitude ” and “insulting her intelligence ” and she was just “tired of looking at my face already”. 

I went to my room and wished I could be like my older sister and sleep til noon so that I could have avoided making Mommie so mad twice already before 11 AM.  At least I didn’t usually provoke and infuriate her while I was sleeping… not usually at least. 

Cleaning by candlelight aka the “snowy suicide”

Tags

child abuse, confusion, mental abuse, mental games, mind games, Monmie Dearest, reality, sister, sociopaths, torture

Okay, so this isn’t literally about “cleaning by candlelight”. We had electricity!! It isn’t even actually about my mother’s lifelong and excellent private performance of Mommie Dearest. This is actually a memory about my older sister. One that haunts me to this day when something triggers it. An experience/event that in all my vast research on various types of mental and emotional abuse, this event still perplexes me.

It’s all enmeshed with a Mommie Dearest event though, so it all sort of entwines itself together into a surreal, confusing, “WTF” kind of experience.

One evening my mother arrived home late at night, well after dark. My step dad had built her a big beautiful home on 20 acres of land out in the country. I never once saw my mother clean a thing… That was our job. That was “what children are for”.

I was around 11 or 12. It was a pretty large house, so the cleaning was a time consuming, constant activity. I had cleaned late into the night after school one day, hoping to get mother’s rare and unlikely favor to ask if I could go to a slumber party that weekend with a friend from school. I cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned… the very best I knew how from my 6 vast years of experience as my mother’s live-in housekeeper.

The evenings she stayed late at my step dads’ business working were always my favorite. The house was temporarily safe from screaming and my constant unintentional, inadvertent “transgressions” when she wasn’t home. ( by the way, mother worked because she wanted to, not because we needed the money or because my step dad insisted. She insisted.) So I cleaned fairly joyfully and hopefully with all the optimism and excitement of a pre-teen hoping and praying… Wordlessly begging even… for a normal childhood weekend experience like a slumber party with friends. All the girls at school did this every weekend and often week nights too. I had had one sleepover before in the 4th grade. Mother’s answer was always no, so I’d become often too afraid to even ask as the years of no’s went by.

I’m cleaning into the darkness every moment I can until she gets home. So excited to surprise her and hopeful for the favor I may get in return .

Around 8 PM, her car headlights come shining into the house as she drives down the driveway. Only then, do I start to feel afraid and nervous. I’m very proud of my hard work cleaning though, so my hope outweighed my fear for a rare moment.

She comes in the door. I excitedly hug her and ask how her day was …quietly waiting for her to notice how especially wonderful the house looks tonight. I see how she glances around. I knoW she sees the hard work I’ve done, but she says nothing.

Absolutely nothing. My surprise is ruined! She goes in her bedroom to change (I KNOW she’ll notice my hard work then!), and comes back out silently pretending not to even notice!

Hmmm… I wait a few minutes for her to sit down and relax (my fear is growing exponentially by the silent seconds ticking by without the acknowledgement I had counted on) and I finally muster the courage to excitedly (but timidly) say, “Mommie, I cleaned the WHOLE house tonight for you!! How does it look?”

She looks around as if she’s searching for something hard to see for a few seconds. My stomach is now on pins and needles, scared and confused, but still trying to hang on to a semblance of confidence at how hard and thorough I had worked on every nook and cranny.

She looks around in silence for those excruciating few seconds and finally very quietly and carefully says, “Oh, you did? Well I don’t know…. I’ll have to have a closer look around and see how you did .”

I’m flabbergasted ! It was obvious everywhere how especially spic and span, tidy, and shiny everything was!???  How could she not have already noticed?!

These were always the most uncomfortable and confusing moments for me. I was just a child, yet I had always had the deep intuition of a wise old woman . My gut told me without a doubt that she HAD noticed. But my youth and worship of my mother the goddess couldn’t fathom WHY she’d lie to me about this after I’d clearly worked so hard to surprise her. I mean, of COURSE she didn’t lie! She was the queen of the world! The one who “hated liars of any kind” and insisted on truth down to every detail like what fabric you were wearing. And if you happened to leave out that kind of thing you were “A LIAR!”. No, this perfect woman of truth and knowledge would never lie, would she?! Yet, from a ver young age, my gut often sensed she lied chronically, she just simply hated being lied to. Here, was where the beginnings of my disconnect with myself and my spirit started. Chronic contradiction and things just never seemed to add up somehow. …just more proof in my mind  that I really was a “crazy problem child”. Survival instincts insisted I tell my intuition IT was a liar, not my beloved mommie dearest…!?  GAWD, the mass internal conflict and chronic confusion this brought into me!

After she “looked around” a bit , it was clear what a total failure and disappointment I was as usual.  At first, she just seemed disappointed and maybe frustrated..? However, as she began pointing out just how awful the house looked, she began to rise into the frenzy I was familiar with and terrified of…

She’s got ahold of my arm, pulling me around the house to show me how horrible it looks, how unacceptable it is, how worthless I am… Her voice is rising quickly and this “disappointment” is fast turning into rage. I’m secretly wishing I hadn’t even tried. After all, she hadn’t asked me to clean the house today. I had just wanted to surprise her,delight her (and maybe go to a slumber party Friday night). Clearly, I should have safely stuck to only doing what I was told to do when I was told to do it . What was I thinking rocking the boat like this? I knew better!!

So on to the real event of this story………

Eventually after enough shrieking and screaming and raging, my sister ventures calmly upstairs from her private oasis in her seclude bedroom on the first floor. I’m sure she’s just curious what I did to set mother off this time… I had told my sister on the walk up the hill from the bustop after school what I had planned to do and why. My sister of course wisely took no part in my “big surprise” and had just stayed in her room all night.

Unfortunately, this mistake was SO egregious and disgusting  that this time mother chose to punish HER for my horridness as well. This rarely happened, but once in awhile, it did.

Mother is shrieking that we will ” BOTH CLEAN THIS FILTHY MESS UP TONIGHT IF IT TAKES US ALL NIGHT”. Like I said, rarely did my sister get included in these tirades, but even as the favored golden child, she knew better than to argue for justice while this level of rage was occurring .

Every light in the house was on from mother tearing through it to point out the mess I’d left . It was late, maybe 10 or 11 PM at this point. It was almost eerie with the whole house lit up bright as day and the windows were black from the complete darkness outside.

We both quietly began cleaning. I loved my sister for not seeming too awfully mad at me for getting us into this mess on a school night when we’d have to wake up for the bus at 5 AM.  As disconnected, favored , and quiet at home as my sister was, she was still my ONLY hope and  source of holding onto reality and sanity in this house. I looked up to her and desperately wanted her to love me…even from her quiet shell…

We had been cleaning a few hours into the night when my sister sat down on the piano bench looking upset. I sat down on the blue plush carpeted floor beneath her and in a quiet voice (mother was in the next room) asked her what was wrong.

Here is what she said…..

“I just feel awful about what happened to you and I’m really worried about you!”

What? I’m confused and really scared that here is when I’m going to find out how mad at me my sister REALLY is. I say, “Dawn, what are you talking about? This is my fault. I’m sorry you’re being punished too! I really wanted to go to that slumber party!! I’m so sorry!”

My older sister, Dawn, just looks super  sad and shakes her head kinda pathetically toward me like I’m just crazy, clueless, ignorant…. I don’t know… I’m VERY confused…and for some reason, afraid too. She says, “no no no …. You don’t remember anything that happened, do you?”

Huh?? I’m soooooo confused!! I know what happened! I cleaned the house all night and made mother mad and now we were both being made to clean everything over again in spite of the fact that it was all already spotless. I knew EXACTLY what had happened!!?? What was going on here???? Was my sister finally losing  her mind?

Very quietly my sister starts telling me what has “really” happened.

She says, no. You tried to kill yourself by taking a bunch of mom’s pills  and you were unconscious in the snow outside. I found you and mom and I had to take you to the hospital. You were dead but they brought you back to life. That’s why you don’t remember anything of it all. I’m just very worried about you.

This was creepy as heck!! WHAAAAT???? None of that had happened!!! NONE OF IT!! What was she talking about and WHY was she saying this and insisting it was true??

I started crying and saying over and over and over WHAT? No I didn’t !! Why are you saying this?? Stop saying that! PLEASE tell me the truth?!

She kept insisting and sticking to this story of my “snowy suicide” which had led to us being punished into cleaning the house in the middle of the night .

I was getting so upset and confused at this point I was no longer whispering . I was crying, scared, confused, and hysterically trying to force my sister to tell me she was just mad and playing  a silly joke on me with this bizarre random story .

Mother came in to find out what was happening of course.  I desperately asked mother why we were cleaning in the middle of the night.. ???? If I had tried to kill myself and been found in the snow ..??? if I had died and just didn’t remember any of it…????????

I was too confused and scared I was actually maybe crazy to even be afraid to ask mother these wild questions while sobbing hysterically, desperate to hold on to reality..

Mother shook her head at Dawn and said with a smirk, “don’t tell your sister that stuff Dawn. You know she can’t remember it. Quit confusing her”.

And we were allowed to quit cleaning for the night and go on to bed.

Does anyone know what this was? Any ideas? This eerie insanity from my calm, wise sister still makes my head spin today!

WHAT was that mental game? And why?????

 

 

 

What does it do?

Tags

abuse, hatred, narcissists, sociopaths

What does it do? It’s not so much the physical abuse… The ptsd duck-n-cover deer-in-headlights chronic stance. No, it goes so much beyond that.

I remember vividly hearing about how if “my daddy hadn’t been so poor I’d not even be here “. I remember my sister telling me I was never anything but a “germ trying to kill our mom”. I remember these and so much more, but I guess I always thought they were just mad at me because I’d been bad or something. As a child I couldn’t imagine I was something that awful .

But I was.

I recently found out from “mother’s” relatives, that she went around begging for the money for an abortion.

Ok . Yeah I always heard I “shoulda been a aborted” but I actually always thought that was just a mean thing to say when you’re mad at a child. After everything, I still didn’t believe that was true. Even after she TOLD me it was true…

I didn’t believe. No way. Even though my mother was odd and unloving, there was no way! I’m a little girl! NO one hates their littl girl just for being born! There’s no way!!

Well, it’s true. I’m a meant to be abortion without the money for one. 

It gets crazier. According to my mother, she was in three car accidents while pregnant with me ! I’m not sure how I survived. I’m certain I wasn’t supposed to. After all my mother took the anti abortion pill???) and had three car accidents, begged for abortion money, and hated my financially “poor” daddy.

Hmmmm…

What do you do when you know you were never supposed to be?

When you know your daddy was just “too poor” for the abortion your mother desperately wanted? I don’t even know.

Why would anyone care? I get it. Shouldnt matter. Yet it does to me.  

I miss my daddy . He was the wealthiest human being I’ve ever known, wealthy beyond measure by my standards!