Narc/Ambient Abuse: Your Self-Esteem takes a HIT and you may not know it

Growing up being raised by 2 covert narcissists/sociopaths has more lasting damaging effects than I realized.  Hindsight provides a lot of AHA moments, things I see now that were foggy or just completely blind to before.  Growing up, I wanted to be an actress, singer and dancer.  Practicing routines for drama class, dancing around the house, and constantly being mocked and laughed at by my parents, them calling me stupid all the time they watched me.  Abuse really does change you as a human being.  Abuse changes the outcome of who you were supposed to be.  You lose yourself in an abusers image of you.  You are mentally molded into what THEY think you are. 

Let me tell you a story of part of my life.  I was 27 years old, with a 3 year old daughter.  Her father, a sociopath and physical abuser, dumped me for a married woman because, in his words, "I acted like a man, I wouldn't cooperate, I couldn't be controlled". He also told me that no one would want me since I had a child, and that I was a piece of shit, and that I had a welfare mentality.  I didn't understand it, it didn't sound like that was the way I was.  I was shattered! I believed that that's how I was.  I went into a deep depression feeling unloved, unworthy, ugly and worthless. I felt like garbage, unwanted garbage.

After that I started forcing myself to do things to self improve, to make myself feel like I was worth something, to anyone.  I had no self worth to me.  I finished an associate degree in paralegal studies, and went on to work at an advertising agency, then left there to go work at a bank.  All of which had nothing to do with being a paralegal.  Why?  Because I was scared to death I couldn't do the job.  Again, a blow to my self-esteem.

Now working locally, close to home, I met a guy.  A great guy.  I was deeply attracted to him, and him to me.  He treated me like I mattered to him.  Like my opinion mattered, like my thoughts mattered.  He would introduce me to his friends and coworkers like I was important to him.  I truly could not handle it.  I was not used to being treated that way.  I knew I loved him and I knew he loved me.  But I did not feel worthy of his love.  The creeping brainwashing kept slipping into my mind, no one would want me because I have a child, I was worthless, ugly, I had a welfare mentality, I acted like a man, feeling unwanted.

So what did I do?  I broke up with him to go back to being abused by my daughters father, because I felt everything he said about me was right. I allowed the beliefs of someone who innately hated me to destroy what could have been the love of my life.

So now I see in hindsight how ambient abuse can destroy a victim from within.  You carry around all the nasty things they've said to you as firm subconscious beliefs all the time as regular operating procedure, and not even know it.  Like the snake in the garden of eden, they push you ambiently to do their bidding, and you wind up taking the hit and the blame.  They'll say, you did it to yourself.

Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry? Why, yes!

🎤Give me time
To release my crime
Let me love and steal
I have danced
Inside your eyes
How can love be real
Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to
Make me cry
Precious kisses
Words that burn me
Lovers never ask you why
In my heart
The fires burning
Choose my colour
Find a star
Precious people always tell me
That's a step
A step too far
*Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to
Make me cry
Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to
Make me cry
Words are few
I have spoken
I could waste a thousand years
Wrapped in sorrow
Words are token
Come inside/and catch my tears
You've been talking
But believe me
If it's true
You do not know
This boy loves without a reason
I'm prepared
To let you go
If it's love you want from me
Then take it away
Everything is not what you see
It's over again 🎤

Is it me? Or is it the mercury retrograde?

I dunno what's happening here, but my thoughts have been haywire for the last few days.  Is it me? Or is it mercury retrograde?  People, and by people I mean family members, extended ones who really don't need to know any of my personal business to use as dinner table gossip, have been getting on my nerves.

It reminds me of a meme that had been floating around on the internet, "Before you diagnose yourself with depression, make sure you're not surrounded by assholes"

Recovery from narc abuse, mentally, psychologically, and financially for me has been a serious struggle.  Yet, I'm questioned daily about me progress or lack thereof.

For me, the process is deeply challenging in every sense because I went from discovering my disordered ex-husband had me on a whirlwind emotional and psychological rollercoaster that for many years I accepted as normal.  Well why is that?  It became clear to me after my separation and subsequent divorce, the way I was raised was the reason why my life in relationships have always been abusive; physically and mentally.  I was groomed for it.

Learning about ambient abuse, narc abuse and cluster B disorders was a real eye opener for me.  I had no idea what I was dealing with, and not only that, not understanding that I had been dealing with it my entire life.  I was surrounded by it, groomed by it, taught by it, and raised by it.

Having lost everything I worked so hard for and having to come back home because I had no other option, I realized I had come back face to face with the very people who taught me to accept abuse as normal. And now, instead of empathizing with my experience, they victim shame me.

Its like being abused all over again under the guise of, "I'm just trying to help you" bullshit.

I try to remain calm and explain my point of view to understand that I didn't choose this, it chose me. Trying to bounce back from narc abuse is tough.  Since being here, nearly 3 years, I've cried myself to sleep in silence many a night.  I'm fighting depression daily, and sometimes have thoughts I have no business of having, just because I feel isolated, alone and not heard.  My health is on a decline, I look like I've aged about 20 years older, and I feel like I have nowhere to start over.  I feel robbed with no witnesses, the thief got away, and no one called the cops to help me.  That's what it feels like. All over again.  By the people I thought I could trust, the people I thought would protect me.

I'm here, back where it all began, being abused again with my eyes wide open seeing it for what it is.  And it hurts just as much when I discovered my ex husband is a narc as it does to know I was raised by 2 of them I call parents.

I will mold you to do as I say, not what you feel or believe

People think being "emotional" or "sensitive" is a bad thing.  Being emotional gets a bad rap these days, and I struggle to understand why.(Me being an empath, I'm proud I'm "emotional")

I've always been a thinker, an analyzer of sorts, I question everything because I want to know the how's and the why's.  I want the truth.  Even when I'm in pain, all I want to know is why.


Growing up I've always been a people pleaser.  Always trying to please people, even strangers, especially strangers, because I was taught that being nice, and giving up your dignity makes you look good.  My parents were always concerned with "how" the picture looks rather than the content.  So as long as you look the part of a cohesive family to outsiders and extended relatives, the content of how my parents typically would triangulate us siblings against each other for their sick amusement shouldn't be questioned, the way they would watch us slam, bully, belittle, humiliate and violate each other didn't matter, the fact that my parents never guided, nurtured or encouraged us in any way didn't matter but as long as we can fake it, we were safe until the next family get together.


I began to see this is the criteria of how I would choose to attract and be attracted to narcissistic people; for boyfriends, friends, co-workers, I could see how they showed up in my life because that was the foundation laid out for me from the time I was a child.  It's all I knew that I thought was right.  If I picked out a boyfriend my father would like, I felt like I did good.  Even if he would mistreat me, physically abuse me, verbally abuse me, I felt like I did good, because my father liked him. My father would even engage in conversation with my boyfriends about how "difficult" I was. Like he was encouraging them to abuse me, like giving his permission.

Early on, without realizing it, being a people pleaser started with always trying to please my parents. Getting praise for some of the most simplest things means the world to you, but means not much to very little to the narc.  Them seeing you break your neck to please them, pleases them. And break your neck you will, because you can never do enough for a narc to be completely pleased with you.

You will always be mediocre at best, no matter how hard you try.  Narcissists' take sick, twisted joy in your pain, your agony, your distress.  If you are a family member, its easier because you are a personal doormat and proverbial punching bag.  Particularly within the nucleus(immediate) family, this is where the most damage takes place.  No one outside the family can see the ambient abuse going on, but they do see the effects of it, when they see your siblings and yourself haven't evolved or have not had any personal growth and maturity, and wonder why your family seems strange and no one can quite put their finger on, "whats up with these people."  Believe it or not, that's what I used to get from the neighbors, relatives, many people asking ME why are my parents and siblings so strange.

Like how would I know at 13 years old why anyone is anything?  I never questioned it because its the only template I had, its all I know.  But, I did have a "feeling"about it.  I always had a feeling, but because its my family I'm loyal to them just because.  Not that they were loyal to me, but I had an innate instinct to be loyal and compliant.


Eventually, that changed.  It had to change.  Change always comes when you least want it and expect it, but always right on time.  To wake you up, to enlighten you and guide you to your inner most thoughts.  To answer those questions, and take you where you are to afraid to go and confront. To say wait a minute, this doesn't feel quite correct, I need to know whats wrong with this picture.

Change makes you face it and deal with it.  When you're an empath, you feel before you react or speak.  You always know what you know, but you need some kind of confirmation, a way of affirming you're on the right path, a way of knowing yeah, thats right, thats it!  You gotta know for sure so you know.


But for the majority of my life, I never questioned but always looked up to my parents, for worse and never better but because they were my parents. Even when I felt belittled and emotionally hurt by them,  I was groomed to.  I believed all that they told me, even the little lies and half truths, the stupid rationalization of things they just made up because they just didn't know an answer to a question, but faked it to make themselves looked like they knew. Many times I felt very alone, unnurtured, like no one understood me or even cared to listen to me.  I felt invisible.  All I wanted was to be understood, you didn't have to agree with me, just understand me and my feelings.  Hear me.

So, based on that foundation, that's how I choose partners.  I chose subconsciously, being attracted to the same thing I was used to; men like my dad, misogynist, verbally abusive, emotionally cold, a numb exterior and a know it all, I'm a fake expert at nothing but I'll pretend I'm grand and better than  most, uncaring of others and laughing at others demise type of men.

That's what I chose on a consistent basis.  I never knew my self worth because I was never taught to have any, so I always chose according to what I innately believed was right.  I followed the perceived pattern.  It wasn't until I got married to a covert narcissist that I started questioning things, the whys of things, because his behavior, or my perception of what I believed what a marriage was supposed to be like, didn't match up.

It was confusing and I did all I could(the people pleasing) to make it work.  I gave all of myself, lost my dignity for a marriage that was never meant to last. From day one it never stood a chance. And realizing that any relationship that I ever had in the past would never last because the foundation of my belief, expectation, perception was distorted because of the template of my relationship foundation.


It was that marriage that was pivotal in my enlightenment.  The defining experience that would change everything.  It was the worst yet the best thing that ever happened to me because had I not been so emotionally and psychologically broken to the point of destruction, I probably would have continued seeking and embarking on relationships like that until it consumed me to the point of suicide.

No one said enlightenment is a positive experience, its an eye-opening experience.  One that makes you see things with new eyes, opens your mind to view things differently like you hadn't before.  It forces you to acknowledge the real truth in front of you and stop making excuses for it.  It helps to create a new you from the inside out.

Breaking free from the mold you perceived as being the template of a false life is freeing.  Its like finally being able to breath and appreciating each breath without any anxiety.  Without feeling like at any moment you are going to be put down and judged, told you're stupid and that you're crazy. Truly like a weight off your shoulders.

Being abused by covert narcissist, literally helped me make a real new me, one that I was proud of, with no validation needed.  I was forced to break through the abuse in order to break the mold I had known my entire life.  I was forced to take a good hard look at what I thought I loved and know that these people have deep rooted hate and projection of all that they aren't and never could be.

Once becoming enlightened, it shattered everything I tried so dear to hold on to.  I went through all the stages of grief, the cognitive dissonance, and now I'm here.  I'm no longer attached to things that hurt me.  I no longer try to seek happiness in places it can never be found.  My happiness now comes from within me, no mold necessary.

And He said, "In The Beginning, Let there be Confusion". And so it was...

To try and organize an experience of being groomed and abused in thought and writing by narcissist parents and go on to form relationships with narcissistic men, is like trying to organize a landfill that's the size of 5 football fields and you're all alone with no help, no tools, no garbage cans and no garbage bags.  You don't know where to start and you don't know how to ask for help with such a mess you can barely decipher what it is or why you need to organize it.

Its confusing(by design) and you know there's something that just doesn't feel quite right about it, but you have no baseline to whatever the hell it may be that you are organizing for or why, but for some reason it has to be done.  So, without thinking and believing its the right thing to do, you do it.  And you do it, and you do it, seems like no end in sight.  You'll be doing this forever.  Youve been doing this for months now and finally you get up the nerve to ask, why the fuck am I doing this?


The simple answer is, you've been groomed.  Groomed to not ask questions and operate on the principle of being a people pleaser because it makes your parents look good.  It makes you look like you've been raised acceptable.  It'll make the family look good because you do without questioning it, but it makes the neighbors think youve been raised right, like your parents know what they're doing.

If you don't, when other people get out of ear shot, you'll be called all kinds of stupid, you'll be ridiculed and be told you're good for nothing, your siblings will be told to ignore you because you're stupid, you'll be triangulated with them and they will be incited to fight you.  There's no allegiance amongst narcissist and family members.  Family is just as usable and disposable as anyone to the narcissist, family members just happen to be enablers and conveniences to the narcissist.  They maintain a soft place to fall to the narc.  This is better known as supply.

But here in this example, we are talking about the beginning of the end to a new beginning. How did I get from there to here to back there and now back here again?  From childhood through teenage years to my 20's, 30's, 40's and now 50's, what the hell has happened to my life?

Abuse isn't always seen as bruises and broken bones, but broken people, whose mindsets have been left in pieces and chips, people who seem to have no clue on how to interact when they've been hurt in the mind, when your belief system from the time you were born is that you are worthless and not worth listening to.

When you are 5-6 years old, playing outside of your house with the neighborhood kids, and the block teenage bully grabs your hand and tells your mother who is standing at the door, that he's taking you for a walk, but she does nothing. He then  walks you down the street, far away from your home and directs you into the driveway of a house.  He then lifts you up to peak in a window, lifts up your dress, and begins doing something you don't understand but your bottom and legs feel wet.

He then walks you back to your home and discards your hand in front of your house where your mother is still standing in the doorway.  I'm not crying, I feel numb because I don't understand what happened or why my mother would let this happen to me.  Was I supposed to let this happen to me? Did my mother think this was ok? I didn't know what to feel, my mother, didn't react.  She did nothing.  And so it was, nothing.  Nothing happened, she didn't ask any questions or what he did to me, just nothing.  Like nothing ever happened.  At 5-6 years old, I wondered, why?  Over time I didn't understand what I was supposed to feel. I knew I felt an anger toward my mother, but I didn't know why.  I was confused of my place, what it all means and biggest question, why?

When a child is damaged in an adult way, it changes who they are and who they are to become.  It changes the direction they take in life, it muddles the choices they make based upon the worth and value established in them from a parent's guidance as a child through adulthood.

When a child is damaged from a stranger while a parent is apathetically looking on, what is a child to think when the parent is supposed to be the protector? What happens within that child from that event moving forward when no action or resolve takes place?

The confusion sets in, bit by bit anger and sadness develops, little by little you feel hopeless, you keep being told you're stupid, the acting out and rebellion ensues, all because I didn't know, why.

In an article by Dr Bruce Lipton called Happy Healthy Child; A Holistic Approach dated February 7, 2012, he states,

The moment a child is born, its function is to recognize the faces of the mother and father—first thing he does. Within a couple of days, the child can clearly distinguish the mother’s and father’s face from all other faces. The child also learns to distinguish the characteristics of the face. Is the face happy or scared or afraid? The child learns this within the first couple of weeks. Ever after, in the early developmental stages of this child, any time he has an issue or concern or comes across something new in his environment, there’s an instinctual pattern where the child looks at his mother or father and observes what their face says. So, if the child is in front of something dangerous and then looks at his parent and the parent has a look of being worried or frightened, the child immediately knows that whatever he is looking at, according to the mother or father, is dangerous. The child will instantly avoid that thing. On the other hand, if the look on his parents face is happy, smiling, conveying that everything’s wonderful, then the child will experiment and play with whatever the new thing is in his environment. The child observes and gauges the world through the parents’ responses, and uses them as a reference point. If the parents are living in fear or concern or anxiety, the child is learning exactly what the parents’ fears and anxieties are, and this becomes the behavioral program in that child’s subconscious mind. The child is learning his fundamental habits, not from his own personal experience, but from observing and downloading the habits and experiences that the parents are presenting to him. Again, this is nature’s way of downloading a tremendous quantity of data about our civilization at any time. You can’t put this in the genes; if these behaviors were programmed in the genes and evolution and the development of civilization changes, then the genes would not install the optimal programs.

He further states in his article called The Biology of Love dated March 6, 2012

In fact, Lipton reports, “medicine has acknowledged that illness is

seeded in the first six years of life when beliefs are downloaded by the

family into the child’s subconscious.” During these years, children’s

minds are primarily in a theta brain wave pattern, which creates a

hypnagogic state of mind. This trance state explains why children easily

blur the boundary between fantasy and form. Walking around in a

trance, young children absorb their parent’s beliefs into subconscious

memory without question or discernment.

Lipton explains how these subconscious downloads work by comparing

them to an iPod. When you get a new iPod, there are no recordings,

so you can’t play anything. Once you download songs to memory, you

can play the downloaded songs. In fact, they are the only songs you

can play. There are plenty of other choices for songs, but you can’t

play them on your iPod until you download them. Similarly, whatever

has been downloaded into our subconscious memory and stored in

our cells is the only choice available to be heard and seen in the body.

Other choices are not possible until they are downloaded as beliefs and

perception into the subconscious. Thus, we automatically act out our

parents’ beliefs, unless we are exposed to other beliefs or intentionally

seed new beliefs.

Lipton points out that the biggest problem is that people don’t believe

they can change their minds and beliefs very easily. He suggests that

if we teach our children in their first 6 years that they can change their

minds and thus their bodies, an empowering shift to love and vitality

can become easy.

So, the key phrase for me in the article is, "unless we are exposed to other beliefs or intentionally seed new beliefs.  I have no idea or recollection what triggered me some 30+ years later to realize something was off about my childhood, my parents and their apathy responses to things that required action.  No idea what made me think of all the rotten relationships I've been in and why I chose them, why I let my ex partners abuse me, why I felt like a doormat, and eventually, where I found any crumb of self worth to abandon all I had to leave with not so much as $60 in my wallet and over $500k of debt dumped on me by an ex husband.

We don't know what we think we know, and when you know better you do better.  All my life I've been guided by a convoluted subset of rules and beliefs, I didn't know my ass from my elbow, because who guided me didn't know theirs or much less cared.  I had no idea what purpose or what I was meant to do or should be doing in life.  I had the worst guiding mentors available, and not by choice but by fate.

With more than half my life over, I think I finally figured out the problem, and now I'm starting over.  Trying to begin again, in love with myself in a healthy way where I know I have value to humanity,  I have a goal greater than myself, to give service to others who may be in a fog like I was, to help them stand up on their feet, to not be ashamed of their experience, but learn from it in a way that allows the real you to shine through proudly, with strength.

Being ambiently abused distorts your own reality, where you have no idea whats real and whats not. The haze is so thick, trying to understand whats normal and whats not.  You're left feeling sad and broken, you can't figure out how to explain how you feel or where it all began.

I had been seeking help since something was triggered in my awareness in 2006.  I had been researching ever since to figure out what was going on and why I had been attracting all that has happened to me.  There's much more to my story, so much more. I'm finally getting to purge myself of the shame and let it all out.  My truth is setting me free. After the beginning, in the here and now, I am confused no more.  And so it was...