The First Time I went No Contact

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The first time I went "no contact" I didn't know what no contact was but I disappeared from my family for around three years. Just like a domestic violence victim hiding from an abusive ex-husband, I went into hiding.

I was twenty one years old and went POOF! leaving false flag information of moving to a different town east when my actual town of residence was west-ward.

I knew I was the scapegoat too since my journal of 1989 still in my possession states...

"I am the black sheep of the family, they use me as a scapegoat."

This was during college but soon I would disappear from them.

Was that a normal thing to do? Even therapists at the time were in shock that things went so far. My year of student teaching and later while living at home was a nightmare. Days that lasted from 7:30 am to 11:00 pm, were not smart, but at that point in my life, self-care was not part of the picture.

My parents wanted rent even though student teaching didn't pay anything whatsoever. This meant working basically a double day-student teaching plus telemarketing at night with a weekend job latched on too to meet all my bills. Lesson plans for hundreds of students also were necessary. With no rest, this was also the time my health started to break where asthma, breathing problems and migraine headaches came in full force. My weight was getting harder to control though, the start of the huge weight gain was 4 years away.

My abuse worsened when I went home for that year and half at the end of my college sojourn. They were angry about money they had borrowed for part of my college education even though my mother used a lot of that loan money for shopping. In those days, pre-insurance and lawsuit payoff-my parents weren't as well off and decided to blame me. My brother was in the same college too on their dime totally just a year ahead of me but for some reason I was the focus of their ire. With my cafeteria job over every semester and summer jobs, many of the bills were covered by me including some dorm bills. The me of today wouldn't do college again, but would have exited their world upon high school graduation and gone to Vo-Ed in high school. The pound of flesh for every dollar was not worth it. My suburban high school drumming on the college dream had done me a great disservice.

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My rage-filled father screamed and yelled daily and even threatened me with violence. His anger and hostility was always present but that year it was upped a few notches. He didn't know I could hear him talking about me through a heating vent in the corner upstairs bedroom I rented for 120 dollars a month. Shouts of "that prima-donna is a burden around my neck", cuss words I can't write here, and that he wished I was dead. The fear alone led me to barricade my door at times. My mother voiced her agreement. Often their conversations centered solely on their superiority, and everyone else's failings including trashing people they smiled in front of at their respective offices.

My mother would egg my father on, complaining about me, getting him to grow more angry. At times I feared homelessness as they threatened to throw me out or destroy my things. The criticisms flowed, "You're too fat, too messy, too weird, too ugly, too slow, have your nose in a book too much.". I think back to some of those years, and know this year where my college friends had moved home, where my future no longer seemed as bright as it did sitting in class when I started having a life-long problem with depression. What would the outcome otherwise be for someone who had no love in their life? One close college friend who I still have weekly phone contact with to this day, literally kept me alive, as we called each other crying, wondering why our families hated us and nothing was ever good enough.

My mother and sister worsened in their symbiotic narcissism and joined together to call me a "loser" and discussed my faults openly while planning my sister's $25,000 plus wedding. She was never yelled at or abused for the costs of her wedding which actually was more then any money given for my college. This was the one I was left out of where they told me I was too fat to be in the wedding party and that the pictures would be messed up. There was no celebrating of my college graduation. One thing that will happen with scapegoats is their achievements will be ignored as well.

This is the year that my low status in the family was intact as those two poured out every negative emotion on me. Looking back I look at the rejection of my sister, and how my mother instigated it telling her I was not good enough for her. A pattern got set for years that was never broken with too many wasted tears on my part where my sister showed no emotions. I hadn't yet admitted to myself what she had become. Now I have. Back then I still loved her, but it was love wasted on someone who could not love just like my mother.

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 If I had not been large and standing up to my father, who knows how bad things would have gotten for me. They were angry that I seemed to be having difficulty finding a regular teaching job this being the recession of the early 90s. Student teaching would end and somehow I would scrounge through managing to graduate from college. I would return just to sleep even doing all my eating away from their home because of the constant barrage of complaints, criticisms and screaming. Working three-four jobs consisting then of day care, substitute teaching, restaurant work and factory temp jobs, I saved every penny knowing another better car and money were needed to escape. Escaping was my focus. I knew I had to survive, emotionally and even physically.

 

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It was very hard to try and maintain confidence as a teacher in the class room, one ding on a review was for lack of confidence but no wonder! It was weird to maintain classrooms even later in rough inner city schools where substitutes were considered cannon fodder then going home and being abused. There was no more hitting because few years earlier, my father had started to punch me in the arm and being a few inches taller then him, I grabbed his arm and wrenched it behind his back and said, "You aren't going to hit me anymore".  So my abuse was all emotional, and verbal with narcissistic game playing added in but that was bad enough.  Unlike some ACON's, my knowledge of being abused was there but I was in denial about it's severity. The fog still surrounded me. I simply did not know what normal was.

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The insults never ended. Being midsized around 70lbs overweight at the time, my weight was made fun of, I was offered money to lose and look normal and so I would get a husband like my sister. My father would threaten to pack me away to the convent because I was "too ugly and weird for any man to want to marry me" and would state, "You better lose weight to get a better  job!".  Another time when cleaning the basement out with him on one of my rare days off, he would approach me and say, "I hate your personality, it's awful.". I think back to that time wishing I had fought back more, the feeling was mutual after all. My life was one of nothing but criticism. In college, I carried a 3.4 GPA, worked, stayed out of trouble. What would have this family had done to someone who slide even more through the cracks? They deserved a crackhead as an offspring for all their whining and abuse.

My chosen career field of art education was insulted, "art hippie, you arty farty!" and there was a day I brought home paintings from college where I remember my mother and father saying "Your paintings are ugly." The class I did the paintings in, I received a B+/A-  One of these paintings I would sell years later for a hand-sewn wedding dress that was valued over a 1000 dollars. My love for art was a place of salvation for me, a place of refuge, they tried to even take that away but failed.

Even my brother had one of his moments with my father in the garage, standing up to him to end the physical abuse we both experienced for years. However even with this I still felt physically afraid especially of my father. I was not treated like a girl at all and never protected. There was no proms, or Daddy-daughter dances in my life but housework, fixing cars, raking and digging holes in the yard with my brother. Next to the mother who never bought me a dress or showed me how to paint my nails or do make-up, feminine things were left for nice, sweet petite girls not me. I never went to any school dance or had a formal dress bought for me or went on a date in high school or had any friends for that matter outside of my freshman bowling league. I was too abused.

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My father never touched my mother, he wouldn't dare but she stood by and even joined in on the physical abuse pulling strings to increase his rages. They never beat us enough for any of us to be hospitalized, they had to keep their upper middle class life and jobs intact, but being hit was at least a weekly occurrence. My father until I stood up to him even into late high school had no problem with pinching me hard or kicking me in the butt to make one of his points. His eyes would shine and show glee upon humiliating others. His perfectionism and other traits were extreme, to this day I would peg him as one of the most miserable people on the face of this earth. Ironically he'd go to work with a sweet smile on his face, all his employees loved him, but no one knew what happened behind closed doors. Mr. Rogers at work and Hitler at home.  He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, same as his psychopathic, narcissistic wife. Both prided themselves on their hardness and ability to "get over" and disdained empathy and sensitivity as weaknesses.

I did start standing up for myself in college. Both narcissistic parents would complain and say, "We don't know what that college did to change you but it changed you for the worse". I went from quiet, withdrawn, beating down and afraid to finally talking back a bit. Rebellion for ACONS isn't always a bad thing, for many of us it means survival and drawing one's boundaries. I didn't drink or party or date or go looking for fights but I started fighting back against the parents who saw nothing positive in me whatsoever.  Cipher-hood for me would have meant absolute destruction. It also means I did not become a replica of my Aunt Scapegoat who in essence never left home, living next door to my grandmother in a broken down trailer into her 50s. She is still there. This is when I began my "goth" years, though I toned the dress down at jobs to keep employed. I awaited the day though where a good job as a teacher and independent life would "save" me but considering the health and financial problems that awaited, maybe it's better I didn't know at the time.

A few months after the grand production of my sister's elaborate wedding, one day I came home from work, and found a box in the mail addressed to me. It was from a company known for knickknacks. I was suspicious opening it because I had not ordered anything. Opening the box, I found a paper within it, and saw that it was addressed to me, and a credit card number I did not recognize in my name.

Then I realized, I had sent away for a credit card in the mail a few months earlier!

My mother had taken the credit card when it arrived in the mail, and used it without my knowledge. At the time I had forgotten about my application thinking I had been turned down.


So my mother had stolen my identity!


Calling the credit card company, I found out over $1700 dollars had been charged under my name. No one asked for this financial help, no one talked to me saying "We are short on funds could you help us out?"

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I knew then I had to leave and do it quick. I was employed and had some money saved. I was too afraid of my parents to report her. The statute of limitations is long up. I confronted her and she said because of the money borrowed for some of my college, she said, "You owe me!". Crying I said, "Why did you lie to me or just not ask?" But she refused to respond. She never would apologize for this or anything else in her life. My father simply refused to believe she did it even with the evidence in front of his face and simply threatened me.

I took a day off from substitute teaching and went to go rent a room in a woman's boarding house in a neighboring town. By then I had my juvenile home art teaching job too which was second shift and weekends, part of the recreation program for the incarcerated youth. I choose to commute a distance three times a week, rather then even live in the same town of my parents.

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The day I moved out, my mother was at work but my father went ballistic, screaming and yelling. Trying to tell me I couldn't even take my clothes because he had "bought them" actually by that time, all the clothes outside of gifts were purchased by me. Screaming about a blue chair, he had thrown away but decided I was "stealing", my escape was very frightening. I ran out to my car, that was thankfully mostly packed with him cussing me out, grabbing at me and throwing pant cans at me, some full, some empty and clattering on the drive-way. I was lucky to get away without being hurt.

I wouldn't talk to any of them for three years.

Why did I go back?

The therapists I voluntarily sought out, even though they admitted I was seriously abused told me to reconcile with my parents, the pastors--UU at the time--I'm now a born again Christian told me to "forgive" and let by gones be by gones. I heard that my parents were "under stress", to "honor" my parents, to realize "everyone makes mistakes", to "not hold grudges". 

Other relatives joined the foray, telling me "that's just the way they are", "you have to accept them for who they are". "You don't want to live your life angry do you?" Others told me it was simply wrong to cut off one's parents no matter how badly they had treated you.

I never heard anything about narcissistic personality disorder, or how severe emotional abuse can affect a person life long or about protecting myself or boundaries.  For years I would blame myself. I was a "bad daughter", "cost too much", "shouldn't have gone to college", "didn't get along with people", "didn't make enough money", "messed up the relationships". I worried that I was everything they told me I was, unworthy, fat, lazy, and worse. For many years I dreamed of the day I would be thin or average sized and have great job making lots of money where my parents would finally love me. That was a wasted dream.

But I had enough fire in me at a young age to cut the chains, once upon the time. This time I will stay free.

Looking back on this all from the vantage of a 40 something, I am literally horrified. The abuse I suffered was immense and I believe high on the scale. To be frank, I lay at their feet the breaking of my health and almost the breaking of my spirit.  Keep in mind, I was getting already sick, in and out of the hospital for severe asthma, showing terrible signs of PCOS. My periods completely stopped. Today I have faced their cruelty, medical neglect, and devaluement of me as a person head on. There was no excuse for the way I was treated and the me of today, wishes I could go back and hug young me and say, "You don't deserve this, stay far away from these people they only wish you harm. The word family means nothing when you are treated this way."

Tiny Houses and Fat People

People suckered by this stuff, don't realize it is the doing of Agenda 21 and elites who will still want 1500 dollars a month for your "green" micro-apartment. The biggest place I have ever lived in as an adult is 830 square feet and my other apartments and rented rooms were far smaller. At least 6 years of my life, I lived in one room or two rooms. It's amusing to me to watch liberals "sell" downgraded lifestyles. Surely the elite in their tens of thousand square feet mega-mansions are laughing at the riff-raff. Shacks are now in vogue. Unlike the last depression where people glued on newsprint on to their shack walls, now they are "saving the planet" to build their new home out of shipping and milk crates.


 

One thing I think about, what about being fat in one of those places? Half of those "homes" I wouldn't fit through the door, or in their mini-kitchens. Not all of us have the mobility to climb up 10 feet to a sleeping loft. Already the hallways of my apartments are too small, I have to walk sideways to get through my bathroom already. My wheelchair and walker get banged up just going around the corner, so they want us living in even smaller places? As much as these folks glamorize small house living, I've been involuntarily downscaled the majority of my life. The living off the grid part is a positive, and some other attributes--no mortgage, but the tiny house movement is suspect to me, also for us fat people, we definitely are not going to be living lives of quality squashed into a house the size of a trash dumpster.

Assumptions

found on Pinterest

Aspie Giftedness

From the The Girl With Curly Hair.

Aspergers can bring gifts, I could read by age 3 and half and devoured books. There were times I was reading 10-15 books a week. My gifts are one reason I slid through the cracks, the executive function and focus problems were always there, but for me there was joy in intellectual pursuits. Aspies have to go live in the life of the mind because the social world doesn't work the same for them. In my case, I can find close friends here and there, but when I am around a group of people, half of what they are talking about flies over my head and even now social rules and rituals still confuse me. With my Aspie friends and a few Aspie friendly neurotypical friends, they love intellectual pursuits and pursuing learning. This is a trait I value in people.  Growing up, I was not raised in an crucible where learning was loved, but it was a way out and a place where I could be me.

Advice Columnist Gets It Right! {Narc. Family Dynamics}

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This was my life, the poorer, disabled daughter who got closed out. My list includes my mother and sister visiting each other several times a year, driving by my apartment within a mile and never stopping by or visiting me or including me, secret family/ and other parties my mother would hold and not tell me about, shopping trips, extended vacations to Florida where even another disabled member got a trip all paid for to go, being disinvited from weddings and more. Often I was told, "You don't have the money", or "You can't do all the walking" the few times I found out. Most of the time, the response was "We are busy!".  My mother would visit every third cousin in a 1300 mile radius but would never see me. My sister once told me, "I don't travel" when I asked her to stop by on the way to see someone else, and in the next breathe mentioned a Florida vacation. In my family the same "class dynamics" apply, the poorer are left out and ostracized, sometimes dealt with so they can come pay homage but basically left out of the lives of many others.

It saddens me to hear of her sister crying. If these people do not repent, there isn't a hot enough place in hell for these types but these were the kind of people I was dealing with too. All they care about is status, and image. The advice columnist is right she did not learn much in church. All of mine too attend church playing pious.

One thing as you know I confronted both for many years, but all I got told was that I was a liar and gaslighted to death. The path of healing for the sister being written about by this would be narcissist is to be done with all of them and find "sisters" among friends. That is what I did.  She can then be free of the pain of her broken-heartedness. It will take time but it can be done.

Spring Has Sprung

Took some pictures of flowers yesterday when I was out and about. May can be a very pretty month before it gets too hot. Added in some birdwatching time too and took more pictures.

Am I Adopted? The Questions of My Origins

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What if you looked like no one in your family? or just partially like a few?

I ran this by a few friends, some online ones so they could be objective showing pictures of relatives. All said, I did not look like my family members.

I come from the land of skinny legs and even skinnier people. I am not talking average weight people either who may have a little belly or anything like that but ultra-thin folks who match model thinness.  There are a few overweight people but they never reached my extreme weight or health problems. They are healthy for larger people and can work. No one has anything resembling lymphedema. There were no thinner people with bigger legs and hips.  No one ever reached my extreme size.  One thing I figured out doing this blog is that there was serious genetic origins of weight and especially for the super-duper sized. In other words, every ultra obese person I encountered had some severe family history regarding obesity.

What if no one had your same personality or same intellectual interests? What if you were born into a family where your desire for the arts, book reading, and intellectual pursuits were decried? What if you were tested as having a higher IQ as a child and realized most of those around you were not just average but far below it? What if you were a sensitive Aspie among mostly Neanderthals? [some cousins, and their families exempted]

What if you realized you were shut out in endless subtle ways? My maternal grandmother left my photo off her family wall of pictures, leaving me off. One day I gave her a painted frame and wedding photo, it was still left off.  Every cousin, grandchild, and child was on this wall. What if you were uninvited from family events?--this in the days before you left the family church?

What if you felt rejected and like you were not a "fit" whatsoever, you were co complete and utterly different from all your relatives [even the few nice ones]? What if you noticed gifts being given by other relatives to siblings but not to you? What if you noticed some relatives not coming to your wedding or not inviting you to theirs, as if you really are not related to them? What if you felt that something simply didn't add up? One thing, people called me crazy for 17 years for knowing something was more wrong with me then just being fat and the already few discovered hormonal disorders. Same here, inside I know and feel like something is wrong even if I can't put my finger on it.

What if you got diagnosed [and it's a sure diagnosis] with a rare disorder [lipedema] which is genetic and autosomal dominant like Huntingtons? What if you join boards for support for this disorder, and they discuss how they know which side of the family it came from and how at least a few relatives were shaped like them and all of them know which and what relatives had it or what side of the family it came from?

What if you felt something was wrong from childhood? Where you remember crying that you were adopted and getting in trouble for it? Yes I know this can be a fantasy of abused children, but this lasted for me for years and years. My brother remembers me musing aloud constantly if I was adopted or if they had lied about where I had come from. He also remembers the time I came home from living with the Aunt that Loved me for some months, and not wanting to come home though I said I missed him. I didn't look like her and her children though they were all very kind.

I know it's odd to be this old wondering about my origins. These were things I was too scared to give voice or thought too before I went NC. The lipedema stuff really triggered this. I asked even a medical professional if Lipedema is genetic and they said YES. The severe obesity to the extreme made me wonder for YEARS, no one else was infertile either, but this one made me really wonder.

The fact of the matter is I felt completely alone in my family system to the point I always felt like I never belonged. Everything was about the narcs. I even find myself wondering if I was so medically neglected because they did fear some genetic disorder being found. What information was I denied? I paid a huge huge price for not having early medical intervention even from the PCOS alone! With lipedema, puberty brought it on, I gained 100lbs right when I hit puberty, and went from near normal to midsized which is where I sat until the giant weight gain hit.

One thing discussed on lipedema boards is how trauma will trigger a worsening of the condition and the year my second weight gain began, that was available in spades. One thing I considered is if I had gotten help, I never would have ended up at stage IV, and may have been a more manageable stage 1 or II, but with the narcissists no one was paying attention and no one cared. Much of the reason I had to go NC, was the medical neglect alone and protecting myself.

I almost made a fatal NC mistake,  the desire to know the truth about my origins, almost had me very stupidly take narc mother bait. I don't know what I was thinking to think that woman may admit anymore or admit the truth and it led me to almost make a huge mistake.  I've had to cut things off at the pass.

The constant hoovering I am facing is shocking me. I never expected it. I was so ostracized I thought my narc mother and sister would be glad I was gone, and would wash their hands of me for good, but it didn't happen.  Remember in my case, they were ignorers not engulfers. There seems to be an extreme desire to regain control, and "keeping track" of me that is extreme. I have to draw the boundaries tighter. They both despise me and avoided me as much as possible for years so why is keeping contact with me so utterly important?

I could be wrong and know there is the possibility I am biologically related too. Plenty of people had narcissistic egg and sperm donors who treated them like trash, but there are a lot of things not adding up in my mind too.

Late Discovery Adoptees

The Definition of Gaslighting

My mother's emails used to drip with endless gaslighting. Here is an example if you have a hard time grasping the definition of it.

Since I became hearing impaired in 2001, I have seen this ditty written about 4-6 times in various emails, usually during arguments.

  "I'm sure you could not have misheard anything I ever said since you have perfect hearing. Kind of reminds me of someone else who has a hearing problem."

One thing with malignant narcissists is they are always innocent and your reality is always wrong. They will always do whatever they can to tell you what you think, feel and know isn't reality.

Double-meaning Mother's Day Card?

Maybe an ACON [adult child of a narcissist] at Hallmark Enterprises covertly came up with this one.....[well if we are to just look at the front cover here.]  Of course the same emotions or feelings aren't even there. If you are a ACON contact or no contact, this is a day I know can be hard for you, and I'm praying.

The Rest of the World Makes Fun of America for Fat

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Language warning on these.....

I've seen people on message boards and websites, talk about how fat Americans are and how disgusting. Many make fun of us. Thinness is such the norm for many countries, they do not understand how easily obesity comes here and that includes Europe where they have all the modern technology, cars, subways.  Sadly they blame us instead of realizing how badly our food is being adulterated and filled with chemicals that are leading to obesity. If they are developing nations their obesity rates will be skyrocketing the more they let the same thing happen to their food. No one asks the obvious which is why on earth would people in one country get so fat? It's not like the passage of time and history meant for more would be gluttons, and same for the countries which are now fattening up where American food corporations have imported their products.

If you look at the pictures of what the world eats, the bulk and volume of the food for a week for each of these families seems to be about the same amount except for the poorest of the poor. There is a lot less processed food but even with the processed food in Europe, they forbid a lot of things being put in food here. I have even read the ingredients lists for the processed food in the international aisle, at my local large grocery store and seen a massive difference--this food from Britain, Israel and other countries.

On a message board recently, an American man wrote that he had gone to Europe for a year and lost 50lbs without even dieting. I believe him.

Study: Fat Shaming Young Girls Makes Them... Fatter

The stress is probably what helps put the weight on, the girls who are called fat. Also if you are self-conscious and it creates problems with the eating and more. It seems to me all the fat hatred in America is not making anyone thinner just fatter in general. What do they consider "emotional eating"?  The stress by itself can increase weight. Too much focus on food is messing everyone up.