Breaking the Chains of The Narcissist Family's Lies and False Expectations.

 

 

 

There is one insidious the way, narcissists damage us.  Narcissists abuse us with their endless expectations especially if we are dealing with high achieving narcissists. They lead us to set up false expectations about life, and if life does not measure up, then we can be thrown into severe depression.  Part of healing is dealing with reality and the way things really ARE, not the way we want them to be. Part of the healing process is tossing out their LIES ABOUT LIFE.

 

The other day the revelation came to me, that it was insanity for my family to expect a woman with serious Aspergers and severe physical disabilities to achieve their same upper middle class lifestyles. This was completely utter stupid cruelty.

 

This happened to me:

 

"One of the most frequent themes of rumination that I see in patients suffering from depression is a gap between who they feel they should be, and how they actually experience themselves. This discrepancy leads to painful self-attack, which can eventually become emotionally deadening."

 

Coming out of this stuff, is finally getting rid of a lot of my depression. It's like I am FINALLY getting an OBJECTIVE view of my life replacing REALITY with the LIES they told me.

 

What are some of those LIES?

 

The false judgments on me as a person

 

The refusing to see my circumstances

 

Telling me I'd never get married

 

The upper middle class assumptions and prejudices.

 

Their views of people who have less as lesser. Even if I never personally judged the poor myself and always had compassion for them, their judgments of the poor became part of how I saw myself. My husband always worked hard. I worked hard before I got sick.

 

The belief in the system and in selling out to it.

 

This includes believing the politicians, belief in globalist wars, belief in "some animals are more equal than others" if you understand my Animal Farm references.

 

The belief that bad things happen to bad people which has actually taken over far too many Christian churches as a whole but that will take a whole other article.

 

The belief that only success counts.

 

The belief in competition at all costs. This is one reason families are breaking up in the USA, they are competing with each other. There's no more semblance of a families who stand by each other.  Do we need more proof that Americans have become a hardened crazed nation then to glance at the possibility of Trump being president?

 

I think of how all the LIEs have HURT ME and hurt me bad.

 

The other day I thought someone as disabled as me did deserve some care and help. I have met people with disabilities like my own even SINGLE ones like Aspergers who had families who cared for and helped them. They did not throw them away or call them a loser. They knew they had challenges to face the rest did not share. I think of young me even gasping for breathe and gaining weight I did not want, facing so much utter pain and fatigue and never one ounce of mercy and I came to the conclusion, "These were people are/were evil. It wasn't you! It wasn't you!"

 

I  needed to have a bowl of hot soup given to me, a pat on the back, medical help, and to be told "We will be here for you if you need us". If strangers and professionals can give me the soup, the smile and tell me "You deserve care". Why couldn't my family?

 

Since I have been busy taking out the narcissistic trash in my life, all of the people who are gone now, had no empathy towards health and money challenges, I felt relief. I do not feel alone, I feel more RELAXED. I feel HAPPIER. I feel some semblance of a light ahead and a breaking up for YEARS of depression.

 

I think about how the heavy expectations weighed on me, and how the expectations themselves were BASED on LIES.

 

There seems to be a growing expectation that we should be able to secure the perfect spouse, the perfect career, the perfect home, engineer the perfect children, and so forth to be happy and if that doesn't happen according to our plans then something is wrong that needs fixing. While we all likely believe that we should have high expectations for ourselves I wonder if unrealistically high expectations are counterproductive and destructive.

Maybe Hollywood is to blame. Perhaps watching the lives and fortunes of the rich and famous influence our views of what kind of life we should expect. For example, are we likely to feel better or worse about our lives after watching the Academy Awards later this week?  Perhaps our increasingly self centered and narcissistic culture plays a role too. If it's all about me (i.e., my needs, my pleasures, my success) then we may never secure what we feel we deserve and are entitled to. So many people seem to have unrealistic expectations of what they can expect from a spouse, a career, their children, and life in general. They want it all and they want it all perfect.

 

After reading this article I thought, Why not just be happy with WHAT I HAVE and stop listening to those who have chained me up with the chains of their narcissistic and perfectionistic codes? Poverty still stinks, but I am done blaming myself for being low on money. I believe perfectionism is a poison used by narcissists to destroy so many. Both of my parents would brag about how they were both perfectionists and that it was a positive on their life. All I saw it leading to was people who were never satisfied with anything. Even though both parents were far wealthier then me and lived easier lives, they never were good enough. I remember my father being angry he only made over 6 figures a year and not a million. My mother was never happy either. She constantly cleaned and redecorated. Seriously. It was crazy.

 

The unrealistically high expectations that the article refers to are indeed destructive as hell.
When my parents expected a young woman with Aspergers who had severe physical disabilities to make 6 figures too, they entered the realm of insanity. They left reality far behind and they took me along on their crazy tour. I was lied to about myself, about my life and even about what reality was. My view of myself and my life was put before an insanity mirror of "you can have it all" and that to be a success, I had to fulfill these endless tenets. Don't forget she even showed up at my blog to call me a "loser". Who does that? It's insane.

It is so cruel how I was set up. My health was destroyed. They almost succeeded in totally breaking me and destroying my mental health and then they kicked me in the face for not "succeeding" and not "doing" enough.

The illusions are being vanquished, and it is taking time here, but I have worked through these things step by step.
 

This is a major one I am facing now. I was TOTALLY LIED to and under severe pressures. I have realized most people who were sick and as Aspie as me were taken care of by their families, some even for their entire lives. I had a friend once tell me, that even me becoming an art teacher in the shape I was in was rare and extreme. For a person who was sick most of my life, early on, I worked hard to stay alive. Facing reality is where forgiveness of myself lies. Facing reality is where even understanding and admitting truth about loved ones lies too.

 

My mother was cruel to my husband, putting him down for being laid off from and losing his jobs. She ignored reality in her cruelties. She ignored the economy. He got older, he was a caretaker for years to a severely disabled woman who almost died multiple times especially early in our marriage. Our marriage was vastly improved when I was listening to litanies of my husband's shortcomings by people who had no understanding what he faced.

 

This was their prison and prison bars. Their lies about REALITY and their prison bullwhip, can and cat-on-nine tails to whip me into submission. "You are a loser!" "You aren't good enough!" etc etc. All based in their Disneyland fantasy view of the world and love for the system.  Accepting reality is what is needed. For many ACONs we suffer under the lash of the narcissist's delusional worlds.

 

Once we see reality, we can relax and no longer beat the crap out of ourselves, just like the narcissists loved to watch us do. We do without or innovate. We do what we can do and realize that is all we can do. We know we do not control everything and that many things happen beyond our control. We do not live in constant fear feeling that we have angered and disappointed these narcissistic overlords. We make our own choices, and live life for what we deem is important and see ourselves as normal people in a world that is not easy. A world that many times can be difficult. We understand and acknowledge that many live under severe oppression, many who are judged and exploited by the system.

 

I've been beating head on wall too long. No pressures to fulfill long lists or to dos or measuring up. Come on in this body even them judging me by the rules of their psycho contest made them literally insane. Now I can be free of this garbage and deal with reality and be more prepared to deal with life. It has changed my view of myself and allowed for more self-love and care to come in the door.

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