When I was younger I grew up with a known learning disability from birth my life was centred around receiving presents not presence to be precise. I had many hospital appointments and care needs growing up my mum wanted to just go about her day after each appointment not acknowledging how I felt about said appointments. When I was making appointments my parents hated bringing me I had nobody else I could trust in the family to ask even my sister, aunts, uncles or cousins.

It was always a bother when my condition would flare up I would have to call the hospital myself, nurse myself and support myself I was not allowed to let any support in. Last year was the last straw Christmas day was a fight I had a friend to stay for a second Christmas and my family hated her because they did not like seeing me having any close friends. They thought because I did what I wanted that I had been brainwashed by said friend but that was not the case. All I wanted was a calm and reasonable Christmas that year I was mentally abused through text message my mum looked up on the internet and said that she was looking my friends up on the internet.

I left for a better life but I struggle with my health and need to ask friends from time to time to help me as I have no family now very recent because they think I am not right in the head. I am blamed for leaving because people do not understand what I have put up with for decades. I still say the word mum at night before I fall asleep because I am trauma bonded to her I cannot shake any bonds between family because I feel I was there too long. My friends say I do not have PTSD but I am throwing myself into distraction after distraction so that I forget.

I had almost six sessions with a private therapist I am in Scotland by the way sadly I had to leave because of financial constraint.

It gets worse I borrowed money from dad and my mum only sees a way to make a profit with further disruption to my independence when she visited my last house she said I am here to visit my investment. I was only an investment to her not a person she also blamed me for getting her into gambling and losing almost £10k on a gambling site. My dad wanted to lend me money to be independent. Now I have a twenty year mortgage which I hope to pay in less I am thirty four years old. I feel lucky to have some independence back but it is very difficult and a lot of complicated math.

I am extremely lucky to have a roof over my head and a chance at the life I want but the truth is I do not know what that looks like right now it is very based around trying to continue to make a difference in people with learning disabilities life.

I had what I at first few years of research was able to armchair diagnose my NPD parent. There was still a piece missing. I later discovered this parent was in fact a malignant one and its horrifying to wrap the mind around the possibility of even worse – a true sociopath of sorts. I will not o into detail here, because there is no need to have to prove how I came to discover this fact. One just discovers this along the way.
One enormous flag that woud be easy for a victim to identify is this: To be so terrified of cutting contact with this parent is one flag. I knew there was more to it. The recurring nightmares, the relentless phobias that affected daily life, getting places almost quite literally were affected. Add to this severe neglect and trauma , abuses in childhood – the lies to the therapist upon getting help as a younger adult, EVERYTHING was about maintaining that false image (on the part of the pathological person) of being anything but pathological – in an immoral way I mean. Just incredible.
Therefore, these panic attacks and phobias that developed slowly coincided with the contact with this individual. (Used to be a parent.)
This ‘person’ hardly seems human to me any longer. The contempt with which this individual speaks of the deceased (family) for example is another red flag.
All the aftermath symptoms of CPTSD really ought not be there in the first place. All with one common denominator, relational ongoing abuse by a sociopathic parent. Frankly I believe it was ALL due to the neglect abuse and soul murder of a sociopathic parent. And watching this person not only destroy all interfamilial relationships but to witness people slowly destroy themselves (2 of whom were closest to her physically, and in constant contact) is an utterly harrowing decades long trauma that feels impossible to work through. All thats left is the malignant sociopathic narcissist. Cheese stands alone so to speak. Whether this was done with criminal intent or not, either way I purport that criminal neglect took place at the very least. I know because I lived it yet got out somehow intact, and I was once attacked by said individual.
And to climb your way out of the fog of knowing whats happened is a profound life altering experience. I wish anyone that has every had to untangle from one of these deviants success, Godspeed. Truly. Thats not a platitude. I mean it.
Im trying to succeed everyday because I’m simply not giving up. I feel empowered by knowledge and the love of the small family I have helped sow. Thank you for writing, this is VERY real.

The lasting emotional/psychological pain from such trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one’s head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of medicating, either prescribed or illicit.

I understand that my own brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammatory stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines. It’s like a discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’ and simultaneously being scared of how badly I will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires. (Although I’ve not been personally affected by the addiction/overdose crisis, I have suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known and enjoyed the euphoric release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC.)