This is where you come from, this is who you are, and don’t you forget it. Let’s cut you (and whatever semblances of confidence and self-esteem you have scraped together since last we met) down to a devourable size. Then let’s be having you, again and again and again.

Just like old times. Only you’re no longer little. What makes this even more fun is that you are all grown up now, and back here out of your own free will. Things can’t have been so very terrible, can they, if you keep rocking up for more of the same, and to play happy families for all to see. For you are in your prime now, and potentially so very powerful.

There are no victims, only volunteers; my dear, dare I say you are asking for it?

Like the best torturers, we never left any marks (and will not have to answer to any court) but there is the danger of you realising your strength, and of you finding the words for what we have done, and for what we are. The truth to us is a like a red rag to a bull, and to keep it at bay we have to keep you discombobulated and uncertain of yourself at all times while with us: trapped in that painfully familiar, utterly false childhood self – lying, self-denying, desperately trying to please us, accepting that truth, love, confidence and happiness are unthinkable and unspeakable in this house.

You are what we want you to be, a nothing, a joke, a tool to be used at our convenience.

We will do whatever it takes. Words for us are deadly blades in this, your first home. Even after all these years, we can still take your breath away with our unfettered sadism and creative callousness. But we are getting on, and as we grow old and frail, we use your stupid morality against you: you would not want to upset someone weaker than yourself, would you?

Well, that’s a good one coming from unrepentant child abusers, but in this as in other matters, we take great delight in duping you. The past, of course, is for us to rewrite as we see fit. Go there at your own peril – we will call you a liar, a fantasist, a lunatic, whatever it takes to shut you up, and more.

Why go? Why yank your inner child back to the place it worked so hard to escape – they might have crippled you for life, but hey, it’s a holiday or a special family event, that somehow is reason enough?

You likely go because you need the approval and validation of the world in a primal, desperate way, and thus want to do right by its standards. You hunger for a healthy normality, but the thought of having a family of your own scares you senseless, as does the thought of a Christmas all by yourself.

And while the world out there pays lip service to the protection of children, it is all out of sympathy when it comes to adult survivors of child abuse – how bad can it have been, you turned out alright, be grateful, forgive … anything other than the truth will do, on this much of the world concurs with the predators. 

And yet, fortunately, the world has also begun to change over the last decade or so. 2025 saw the release of Eamon Dolan’s excellent book, The Power of Parting, Finding Peace and Freedom through Family Estrangement – one of many powerful experiential and academic contributions to a thriving field focused on legitimising cutting abusers out of one’s life.

Alice Segell is a pseudonym. The author is a wife, researcher, writer and survivor.

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Alice Segell

Alice Segell is a pseudonym. The author is a wife, researcher, writer and survivor.

Centuries later, the myth of Cassandra lives on in contemporary culture not as legend, but as the very real phenomenon of gaslighting. Gaslighting, a term that developed from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light,is a form of emotional and psychological abuse that manipulates victims into doubting their thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and memories.[3] Like Apollo, abusers use gaslighting to “undermine self‐confidence” and “cause victims to doubt their sense of reality and/or sanity.”[4] In particular, abusers use gaslighting to cause their victims to “back down, withdraw complaints, and assume responsibility for conflicts in the relationship.”[5] In Cassandra’s case, Apollo undermined her right to bodily autonomy (and moreover, her right to assert that right) by discrediting her ability to tell the truth and be believed. In doing so, he stripped away her power and her integrity. Ultimately, by driving her to madness, he turned her against herself.

If this dynamic sounds familiar, it’s because gaslighting is an ancient method of manipulation used not only by individuals, but by oppressive systems like patriarchy, racism, and capitalism (though that is by no means an exhaustive list). It is a darkly brilliant one–what better way to control people than by making them question their own self-preservation instincts? What evil genius, to make them believe there’s something wrong with them if they advocate for themselves!

The phenomena of gaslighting and, therefore, cognitive dissonance are especially present in pathological love relationships

Philosophy professor Cynthia A. Stark, in her article “Gaslighting, Misogyny, and Psychological Oppression,” remarks on gaslighting in the context of patriarchy: “[m]isogyny is enacted…primarily through the displacement component of gaslighting: men who are credibly accused of abuse by women (or the allies of those men) punish women for those accusations by ascribing defects to them to ‘explain’ their accusations…the stronger the evidence of abuse…the more sinister is the attribution of the defect.”[6]

She goes on to say that “gaslighters adopt the plainly immoral assumption that a female victim of grievous harm has no right to complain if the perpetrator is a high-status male.”[7] Today, this tactic remains effective and pervasive. People are willing to have opinions as to the reasons for why women come forward with alleged abuse (they’re needy, mentally ill, selfish, etc.). Other, that is, than the obvious one: they’re telling the truth.

With regard to racism, examples of cultural and collective gaslighting are equally infinite. Consider the psychiatric diagnosis drapetomania, or runaway slave syndrome, which was used to diagnose and pathologize runaway slaves in the Antebellum period, or the fact that psychiatrists in the Civil Rights Era used the concept of schizophrenia to portray Black Americans as “violent, hostile, and paranoid” (to this day, Black and African American people are diagnosed with schizophrenia more than White people).[8] These “diagnoses” represent just one of many efforts to pathologize and stigmatize the very appropriate fight or flight responses–the righteous anger and desire for freedom–that ensure black people’s survival in a racist society.

And then there is capitalism, which is “the biggest gaslighter of them all,” according to the science, psychiatry, and social justice journal Mad in America. In their article “Capitalism and Coercive Control,” they write that “most people recognize that the system is unfair and brutal, but authority figures of various sorts keep telling us how great it is, how lucky we are to have a job and how free we are.”[9] Personally, I have tried to opt out of the rat race as much as my circumstances allow–partly because of lifestyle preferences, and partly because my C-PSTD brain simply can’t take it. I am easily overwhelmed by highly competitive atmospheres, harsh or unforgiving communication styles, any real or perceived violation of personal boundaries, and authoritarian bosses who make me walk on eggshells. As such, I have chosen an untraditional, lesser-paying career path to protect my peace and mental health. This is a choice I often have to remind myself is the best choice for me.

In short, we as a global society feel the effects of structural gaslighting through oppressive systems like racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. But how are we affected on a personal level? What does the experience of being gaslit actually feel like? How does gaslighting occur in relationships? Why exactly is it so damaging?

In short, we as a global society feel the effects of structural gaslighting through oppressive systems like racism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

The most overarching answer to these questions lies in the term cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when one is faced with two sets of competing and dichotomous relationship experiences, memories, and opinions and/or emotions.[10] When an abuser gaslights their victim, they are causing that person to feel cognitive dissonance–a sense of deep, often surreal, inner conflict of contrasting perceptions about the partner, the relationship, and themselves.[11] This inner confusion and conflict, if ongoing, can lead to severe impairments to a victim’s functioning, including chronic second‐guessing and doubting one’s decisions, overthinking and analysis paralysis, extreme guilt about setting boundaries, and rigid expectations of self and others.[12]

The phenomena of gaslighting and, therefore, cognitive dissonance are especially present in pathological love relationships. The Institute for Relational Harm Reduction and Public Pathology Education revealed in their 2007 Aftermath Symptom Survey that cognitive dissonance is the number one symptom survivors feel after a relationship with a pathological abuser. Narcissists and psychopaths, who have naturally dichotomous Jekyll-and-Hyde personalities, force their victims to navigate their inherently contradictory and crazy-making behavior. In turn, survivors experience their pathological partners as sources of both immense validation and extreme punishment, of generosity and encouragement yet horrible degradation and cruelty, and of both the best and absolute worst experiences of their lives.[13] Victims come to expect extremes in a relationship, and often view themselves in similarly extreme and contradictory ways.

…

The myth of Cassandra parallels the gaslighting that oppressed and abused people face. However, there is a hopeful difference between the myth and reality. While Cassandra was never believed (her accurate predictions of the fall of Troy and the death of the Greek king, Agamemnon, went unheeded), victims of gaslighting can take comfort in the knowledge that, even when they feel most insane and alone, there is always someone who believes and understands. And sometimes it only takes one person to pull us out of the fog.

I recently finished Shari Franke’s memoir, The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom, which chronicles her adverse childhood under the control of her vlogger mom, Ruby Franke. In it, she describes one of these “being pulled out of the fog” moments. For the first time, an adult in her life, her therapist, tells her that her mom is emotionally abusive. The word “abusive” at first feels exaggerated and extreme to Shari, and she can hear her mother’s disdainful voice in her head telling her she’s being dramatic. But then…

“It felt like I was waking up from a long, hazy dream. The fog was lifting, and in its place was a blinding, brilliant truth: It wasn’t me. It had never been me. The dysfunction, the chaos…it was all Ruby. It always had been.”[14]

Shari’s epiphany in this moment mirrors my own experience, when my therapist became the first person to call my father’s behavior abusive, and when I finally realized that there was never anything wrong with me. When I started to distance myself from the lie that was causing me so much pain and suffering. It touched me that in both stories, one person had such an immense impact in relieving our gaslighting symptoms.

In her essay, “Testimonial Injustice,” Miranda Fricker defines testimonial injustice, a similar concept to gaslighting, as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower.”[15] I wish for every survivor that they can break free from the influences of gaslighting and testimonial injustice, and rebuild, with the help of those who believe them–their capacity as knowers.

[1] Rajan, V. G. Julie, and Sanja Bahun-Radunović. Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras. (Routledge, 2016), 1.

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Marlow-MaCoy, Amy. “Narcissistic Abuse for Therapists Empower Clients to Break Free and Recover from Gaslighting, Emotional Manipulation and Coercion.” (PESI), 22.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Stark, Cynthia A. “Gaslighting, misogyny, and psychological oppression.” (The Monist, vol. 102, no. 2, 9 Mar. 2019), 227.

[7] Ibid., 229

[8] Dr. Corey Williams, opinion contributor. “Black Americans Don’t Trust Our Healthcare System – Here’s Why.” The Hill, 25 Aug. 2017.

[9] “Capitalism and Coercive Control.” Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry, and Social Justice, 10 Aug. 2022.

[10] Brown, Sandra L. “Narcissistic and Psychopathic Abuse: Clinical Tools, Techniques, and Trauma-Informed Treatment Protocols.” (PESI), 23.

[11] Ibid., 26.

[12] Marlow-MaCoy, Amy. “Narcissistic Abuse for Therapists Empower Clients to Break Free and Recover from Gaslighting, Emotional Manipulation and Coercion,” 63.

[13] Ibid., 24

[14] Franke, Shari. The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom. (Gallery Books, 2025), 258.

[15] Fricker, Miranda. “Testimonial Injustice.” Epistemic Justice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), 20.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Sophia Rehmus

My father finally died a few months ago. Survivors will understand the word finally. I thought he would never die. Billy Joel’s song “Only the Good Die Young” was certainly true in this situation. I had gone no contact about seven years before, but the shadow of power this man wielded over my life continued, whether I was in contact with him or not. I even moved all the way across the country to put space between me and him. Space between the present and the past. The constructed reality he demanded everyone agree with, the dominating presence where no voice save his was heard, the judgmental pronouncements of doom and gloom over your life, the complete lack of understanding or empathy. These were just a few of the ways his brainwashing impacted me. 

These were just a few of the ways his brainwashing impacted me. 

And when he died, instead of the relief I felt at my mother’s passing, a terrible door that had been shut for over sixty years was opened. The parts of me from childhood that had split off and carried the load felt free to come forward, and it was hard. Hard to face them, hard to talk to them, and hard to become an ally to them instead of an enemy. 

There are no words to describe the damage and loss that occur when your parents choose the path of narcissism. To their very grave, my parents never had the slightest inkling of self-awareness or took any personal responsibility. In fact, my sibling and I were “disinherited.” The old threat to keep me within my father’s orbit finally came true. For me, I could understand it; I walked away years ago. But for my sibling who provided for my father financially and took care of his ex-wife, our mother, who otherwise would have been homeless, it was a low blow. Yet again, the narcissist showed his true colors. It did not matter what you did for the man; he did not know how to do anything other than hurt us. His final message? “You are worthless.” 

But I survived, and guess what? My father was wrong. It took everything I had to slog through the twisted spider web of lies he had spun. I spent decades trying to understand, reaching toward the truth that seemed to dissipate into mist at the slightest stress. To quiet the dissonance in my mind, heart, and soul. I used every technique and read every book I could get my hands on, but you know what? I made it. I have written a new chapter, established new relationships, and I walk in truth. What does the Bible say? The truth will set you free? Yep, that’s what it says. I can wonder at the joy in life, pursue dreams and goals I never thought reachable, and more than anything else, I can finish well, leaving a legacy of peace, encouragement, and kindness to my children. 

I pity my mother and father. They never knew how wonderful life could be. It is still hard sometimes, I suppose I will always bear the scars to a certain degree, but I made it. I made it out, and I am so thankful I did not give up. Defy trauma, embrace joy. It is worth it.

If you are interested in my newsletter or reading more content like this, please go to:

https://rebekahlaynebrown.com

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Rebekah Brown

Rebekah Brown, a native of the south, now resides in the Great American West. Surviving a complicated and abusive family system makes her unique writing style insightful as well as uplifting. Rebekah is the proud mother of two and grandmother of four.

• Gaslighting of the child(ren)
• Covert (sometimes overt) narcissistic abuse
• Denigration
• False claims
• Limiting and/or cutting communication

• The child may choose to break away from their abuser, and;
• Have the daunting task of reestablishing their relationship with a parent who has become a stranger to them

Paul Michael Marinello

Paul Michael Marinello serves as Chief Staff Writer and Blog Manager for CPTSD Foundation. Previous to this role he managed North American Corporate Communications at MSL, a top ten public relations firm where he also served on the board for Diversity & Inclusion for a staff of 80,000. Paul Michael grew up in New York and attended SUNY Farmingdale before starting a ten-year career at Columbia University. He also served as Secretary and Records Management Officer for the Millwood Fire District, appointed annually by an elected board of fire commissioners from 2008 – 2017.

Mushrooms are notorious for only being distinguishable as poisonous by the elite. It’s how they collectively protect themselves. If our individual and collective personalities continue to proliferate in such a disordered way, we would be wise to proactively develop a counter strategy. We must develop a new approach when compassion and flexible thinking are exploited. In no uncertain terms, when it is safe to do so, some of us need to hold the line in small ways—in this case, calling a horse a horse.

The lifeblood of language is only possible through relinquishing power: when a word leaves one’s mouth and reaches another’s ear. “Grey-rocking” and “no-contact” advice have their time and place; for me, they echoed the agency-stripping accommodations I’ve been forced to swallow too often. I couldn’t do it; I was filled to the brim. My body is metabolizing intense bouts of word salad: when someone says words in sequences that follow syntactic rules but rapid-fired so you can’t stop to notice they have no meaning. Word salad is strategic, a mechanism of misdirection. Direct language is an antidote to narcissism, a non-black-and-white intersubjectivity that never guarantees dominance or falsely proselytizes “truth” but is 100% honest. Exacting direct language is, at least, a surefire way to get a read on the person you are dealing with in flesh and blood at any given moment: Can they tolerate an external consensus that places restrictions on them? Can they accommodate others even if there’s nothing in it for them? Or do they balk at the request for adjustments? Is “no” enough?

I have read enough articles about triggers as superpowers for a lifetime, about sensitivity being like a carbon monoxide detector, and about how our bodies are trying to tell us something. I keep waiting for this steady collective strength to appear in all its terrifying glory, like the unveiling of a game-changing map. They say pain and fear are messengers; we are wise to listen, but I am no longer interested in protecting myself alone.

I’m not asking for compassionate or PC alternatives to official NPD naming, but ones that are precise and on the record. (After NPD abuse, my knee-jerk defense is to rename it “black-hole broken-cup disorder” or “soul-raping joker-faced syndrome.”) I am asking for suggestions on language that will distinguish the everyday usage of narcissism from when you realize too late that you’re deeply entangled with someone who doesn’t have the capacity to hold back harm. For when you require intervention more urgently than the time it takes to rewire every one of your childhood trauma responses.

Here is my call to this community of resilient deep thinkers: what do you wish was said instead? What language did you develop that you wish you had from the beginning to describe this bizarre exploitation style? Or are words offered by elders along the way that someone in the white-hot thick of it might not remember available? How do you explain this behavior to your children or prepare them for this dynamic in the world? During your recovery, did you feel a pit in your stomach as the word narcissist was casually thrown around? At the same time, maybe you calculated the personal-danger/societal-progress ratio of hearing the word aloud in public spaces. Hopefully, it wasn’t just in pop culture but in poli-sci theory, legislature, medical settings, schoolrooms, and good company with people learning to reflect on the first person and the collective impact.

Any suggestions on what else we might name it for those who find themselves in chat rooms at 3 AM, pouring over “dark triad”/cluster-B literature, drained, on the brink, watching their brains attempt to make sense of bizarre nonsense… clinging to lifelines of writings that use phrases like psychological murder and mental rape, praying that the accurate usage of this extreme language won’t be judged as “dramatic” by people from which they are asking for help and harbor? Suggestions for what to call it when this energy follows you (maybe because you’re now able to see what was always there) … but don’t know what to call it and can’t call it by its name… but can’t tolerate it anymore, either? We get to decide. Language is arbitrary, and form follows function.

Suggestions for alternative names to NPD are welcome in the comments below from experiences as affirmed by the victim of a fun house “love” that engaged in recon to target your weakest spots. “Love” that left you wondering how to compost your murdered self without accurate language. Relationships that whipped you in the same place twice when you attempted to describe them accurately.

Nuances in NPD diagnoses would benefit from reference manuals recognizing variants like covert, grandiose, or malignant, but a new paradigm could also be modeled off a five-alarm or def-com system. Could a renaming honor that little zombified ant? Or, maybe, in the tradition of Greek mythology, instead of Narcissus, Orpheus—master instrumentalist and enchanter? Orpheus lived out a tragic story: he loved, or at least he tried. He went to the depths of hell to rescue his beloved Euripides and succeeded because he was intelligent, charming, and determined. But it didn’t occur to him to ensure that Euripides was also in the light before looking back to unravel it all. From then on, he was a broken man. He was later cannibalized alive by the women to whom he could no longer connect while attempting to rest and grieve his losses.

I look forward to doing what the intersection of my life’s greatest griefs has brazened me with the capacity to do: metabolize how it is both about me and not about me with an understanding of consequences, object permanence, and shreds of compassion even after my most outlandish moments. (I am returning to myself.) I am curious about what language was harmful, helpful, or an absurd replication during your recovery from NPD abuse or what language you prioritize for the next generations. The more survivors I speak to, the more I realize that it irrevocably alters the way one sees. I aim to use my strange afterlife to call upon institutions (like mental health diagnostic manuals) to call horses by the name we gave them: to call pop stars and assholes “narcissists”; and call NPD something more nuanced amidst this evolution.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

We were perfect for each other. Or so I thought. His love for children, our incredible chemistry, he seemed to know how I was thinking, what I liked, he made me feel like I had “come home.”

I had no idea that this was his usual MO, like a game, for him to figure out what he could get from me and how he could get it. How he had to act to win my trust. By the time I had fallen in love with who I thought he was and after a year of knowing him, I agreed to move in together, completely trusting him with my child.

The first time he yelled at me viciously, I was stunned, I had planned a surprise birthday party for him and avoided telling him who I was talking to on the phone, trying to keep it secret. He blew up like a volcano, spewing profanities at me. Then he left, slamming the door. No one had ever treated me like that before. In my Swedish family, we’d talk things over calmly. I only heard my dad yell once in my whole life.

A short while later he returned, ashamed, flowers in his hand, tears in his eyes, begging me for forgiveness

A short while later, he returned, ashamed, with flowers in his hand and tears in his eyes, begging me for forgiveness. He was profoundly sorry and blamed stress at work. I forgave him.

It happened again and again more and more often; I wanted to believe in our relationship so badly that after a while, I was the one making excuses for him. Looking back at those times, I realize he actually got a kick out of it. Playing a game with me while I was desperate to hold on to those glorious, loving first few months.

Around the time I got pregnant, the abuse became physical. I was ashamed of how I was treated and didn’t tell my family or friends. I started to avoid them and their questions. How could I have picked someone to love who treated me this way? I blamed myself.

I never knew which husband would walk through the door: the charming, sweet, fun man I fell in love with, who I barely ever saw anymore, or the angry, abusive attacker, who I needed to stay away from.

Those days he would spew a swap-meet of emotions over me, whatever he’d built up inside during the day cascaded out in nasty words and false accusations. I had to make him see the truth, explain myself, and that’s how he drew me into his duel of anger. A joust he had perfected, but I hated and didn’t want to do. He would say and do anything to make me angry, so I’d yell at him, then he would have an excuse to demolish me.

The first few times, I was drawn in, but it destroyed me. With all his practice, his sharp tongue and angry gleam in his eyes I didn’t stand a chance. He’d sharpened the edge of his sword to draw blood while I only tried to defend myself.

I felt like he needed to slash me to pieces to make himself feel better. So different from the man I had fallen in love with. I realized I had to protect myself. I changed tactics, and no matter what he tried to do to provoke me, I’d tell him I was removing myself from the situation, and we could talk when he calmed down. This always made him angrier. I’d walk away while he would yell the nastiest, most derogatory comments and names after me. It was exhausting, but at least we didn’t have devastating fights because I refused to.

After a few years of feeling isolated, taking care of kids and home while constantly walking on eggshells. I needed a break. I told my husband I was thinking about going back to work. He angrily snapped at me: “If you get a new job, you’ll have to look for a new husband!”

I felt so stuck, like my life was over even though I had two amazing kids, I was scared, lonely and blamed myself for everything that had happened and did happen.

A friend of mine was a masseuse, she used to give us both massages. One day as she left, she gave me a book and told me I HAD to read it. The book was “Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in their struggle for self,” by Elan Golomb.

I was surprised, I’d never really talked about my marriage with her and my parents weren’t narcissists, in fact I didn’t even know what the word meant. But my friend was observant.

After reading the first few chapters, a wave of relief washed over me.

I had been gaslit

I am not crazy! I finally realized it wasn’t me… he was sick… a wound inside himself so deep and painful that he couldn’t love me, his children, not even himself. It’s not my fault. I had been manipulated to believe I was responsible for everything going wrong, not only in our marriage but his success in life, his anger, disappointments… sleeplessness… I had been gaslit.

Thinking he was sick, I set about trying to help because I was still under the spell. When I suggested we’d go to couples’ therapy, he yelled at me: “I don’t need no fucking therapist.”  And kicked a chair so hard it flew across the room and smashed into the wall, making a huge hole.

He forbade me to go by myself because he didn’t want me to talk about him, about us. I went to therapy anyway. After seeing Michael, my therapist, for six months, he told me: “I’m a family therapist, my job is to help keep families together; however, I don’t think your marriage will last. Your husband will never change, and you are getting too strong to put up with him. I think it’s a matter of time, and I’m here to help you.”

I knew it as well. I felt it inside, but it still took me a couple of years to leave. I was too scared of my husband and what he would do, not only to me, but to the kids. What would happen if I wasn’t in the house to protect them to take the brunt of his anger?

I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t read that book, which spurred me to seek help, even if I had to do so in secret. Working with my therapist to help find the power that I had given away so easily… was the beginning of a new, happier life.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Lena Pousette

Award winning writer/ producer Lena Pousette specializes in high concept action adventures, thrillers and Sci-fi. She began as an actor on stage, film, and TV. Her curiosity brought her to the interactive world where she became a pioneer in interactive design, writing, producing, and directing. She worked as Director of Development for Time Warner Interactive and Philips POV as well as Creative Director for Mass Media. Lena is currently writing and producing linear films and serial TV and has several projects in development.

As one of the founding members in the Toastmasters group Success Masters, she has written many speeches on attaining success, self-improvement, personal growth, and healing. After receiving comments that these essays could be helpful to other communities, she decided to post them to more accessible blogsites.

I want to preface the following with a distinction between “a narc” and abusively narcissistic patterned behavior because this is so much bigger than any one individual. People who suffer from NPD (as opposed to narcissistic jerks) are so deeply traumatized and will take it as a reflection on them… but it isn’t. I’m not wishing to incite violence, but the idealism of “becoming the change I hope to see” doesn’t hold water when what I hope to see has been reverse-victim-ordered.

NPD has a high correlation with misogyny, racism, xenophobic discrimination, and all the other ailments of the world we are regularly told can’t be fixed. When the man to whom I was trauma-bonded (but didn’t yet comprehend had NPD) projected by screaming at me until he was sweating and his eyes were black that I had a personality disorder, I was naively trying to care for him and his sprained ego, ahem, I mean, ankle… and reacting to being snapped at that I “could stand to get him a cold drink”. He later made me apologize for suggesting this happened. At that point, I was hooked by a web of stealthy lies that reflected everything I had ever hoped for and belittled through the grooming of incremental boundary-testing, so my broken spirit acquiesced. My pupils were probably large and black, too, from fear.

A year and a half into our relationship, after much talk about his “very observant, quick-learning, self-aware and progressive path,” he grinned while he tested me with “suddenly realizing” who my closest friend was (he was attempting to suggest a threesome) and the sudden information about his possession of U.S. Confederate memorabilia. My gaslit bleeding heart tried to respect this complicated ambush of cultural heritage and sexual pseudo-liberation and told him, “Just don’t be hateful to people” and “yeah, I don’t need you two to be close”. In retrospect, it was the same grin that he had while I frantically searched for items I’m fairly certain he intentionally hid from me and, to this day, still has in his possession.

I would have said anything at that point so he would stop trapping me. Looking back, this fueled the entrapment. Then again, once the funhouse music and coercive rage started, there was nothing I could do. There was no appeal to logic or facts, no appeal to empathy. Even abrupt no-contact would have had severe consequences for my life, but I was also naively trying to get back to the great love that was first sold to me. Once the funhouse music started, I would apologize for things he did so he wouldn’t scream at me then he would scream at me for apologizing too much, mocking my lack of self-respect. He kept coming back because I had something he wanted, something to which he felt entitled, but it was pure sabotage.

Based on what I now know about my ex’s reputation (that was strategically hidden from me) and how furiously he screamed that I had “ruined everything” the first time I confronted him, I believe I was recruited to prove to everyone that he could keep an LTR. This was why he was on such deceitfully good behavior in the beginning. Today, the recovery advice relating to brainwashing and cult leaders has been most relevant. And since I proclaim honesty, there is a part of me that realized halfway through our relationship that I was deep undercover. Every day still, talking myself through the ambiguous grief of being in love with a man who never existed takes up most of my calories.

During my attempts to get anyone in a position of authority to hold my ex accountable for his psychological violence, half the officials told me, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, that’s incredibly abusive, but unfortunately that’s not how the law works.” The other half said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, and that’s not how the law usually works… but I see what you’re saying. Where are you in the process? I’ll tell you what I know.” I followed their advice as far as I could.

I was then repeatedly told not to say the word narcissist in a courtroom because it’s style of abuse is notoriously difficult to prosecute, and the precedent varies from state to state for its connection to the intentional infliction of extreme emotional distress. In my highly triggered state, this struck me as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, so I took a page out of his playbook. I proceeded to fight my way into courtrooms and get the word on any record as often as possible, even if it had to be mine. Today I still can’t, in good conscience, say that I disagree with myself. But I admit it was a messy process amidst an insufficient status quo.

Nowadays, I reassure myself about my worst reactions by noticing that this is not a pattern in any other of my relationships. I understand that it’s my responsibility to work through the shakes that making even simple decisions gives me after having my sense of self gutted by being regularly screamed at for being a “stupid, useless little girl that shouldn’t trust my body or judgment”. I wake up every day with a restraining order on my name because the reactive abuse was effective and remind myself in the mirror that I didn’t ‘lose it’; it was taken. Keep your chin up, kid. I tried to take the shame and secrecy out of what was already happening since there was no higher road.

But I still stand in front of judges who’ve heard decimated versions of the saga (but ask zero contextualizing questions) and simply accept the consequences. I go to therapy twice a week, plus domestic violence support groups plus EMDR for the laundry list of intrusive thoughts from the distorted intimacy. I’m resilient and adaptive, and I see leaps and bounds of the hallmarks of health since denying the continuation of this treatment. Every morning, I remember the most bad-ass advice I’ve been given so far: that my best revenge is to prosper.

More importantly, in these therapies, I accept my part, realizing that fawning is manipulative even when rooted in fear, and yes (go figure) I didn’t get enough unconditional love as a child. I was tenuously glued back together when my abuser met me, and he smelled it on me. Since he scapegoated my past for everything, it kept me reluctant to admit that all of these are true. I think it is a good sign that I am even considering my part and how to prevent it in the future. I’m proud to take what’s mine, but I am not strong enough to take it all, nor do I deserve to. I’m not willing to “get on with my life.” I’m actively discontinuing this tradition of complicity.

Suppose our best guess about the root of NPD is stunting around the developmental stage of object permanence (peek-a-boo age). In that case, I defer to all the mothers who contain their toddlers’ outbursts on playgrounds: letting kids live out Godzilla fantasies without repercussion isn’t healthy. It isn’t healthy (or loving) to let a toddler feel entitled to that behavior. It gets murky when the toddler is in an adult body with a credit card and voting rights. By the time they’ve grown into an adult body, it’s far too late.

We need to teach kids this discretion as early as possible before sending them back out onto playgrounds (and workplaces, and sacred contracts of intimacy) where sadistic Godzillas will repeatedly bludgeon them. It is a slippery slope to collectively tell others that it’s now their responsibility to metabolize violence far beyond interpretive doubts. I can live with my sandcastles being swallowed by the tide or stomped on by bullies; I can’t tolerate being assaulted behind the swings and then denied the language to accurately describe what happened.

The perks of constant interconnected global conveniences and entertainment come with a responsibility to exercise this hard-earned discretion, part logic and part intuition. If violence is cyclical, we need to find a way to support the wrenches in the wheel who have first-hand knowledge of how enough has become enough and connect them to developing little minds. We need to intervene because narcissistic traits are running rampant like bullies on playgrounds, except now they exact policy through the offices they hold or through their 200 million Instagram followers that enact their word like Gospel. And with so many networks, most behavior has gone covert.

It will be one of the wildest rides you will ever go on to call out narcissistic behavior, be it individual or institutional. Do so judiciously and take care of yourself during the backlash. Men in uniform will choke on their best attempts at trauma-informed language, gate-keeping your recourse. They may tell you the threats you made against coveted models of cars are more valid than what you endured with your body and psyche. Strangers (who know half the cherry-picked version of what happened) will scream at you in the street. People you’ve known since birth will tell you that “good girls don’t talk about that kind of thing.” Connecting your story to the bigger story will get you shamed (and forget to mention how it can be both). You’ll somehow be simultaneously selfish and at fault for giving too much. You’ll be “over-reactive” when it’s convenient and told your trauma is nothing special if you start making sense. They are shades of the same playbook.

However, it will be a rock-hard reclamation of self and reality. People will vet themselves, and flying monkeys will drop like flies when they know they can’t play you like a violin anymore. Some may say that fighting fire with fire makes the world burn, but we are already burning, and self-defense has long been distinguished from preemptive strike. Sauter it with precision.

Participation in this style of resistance calls for deep discretion. In recovery groups, I spoke with mothers who couldn’t fight back because they had kids they were protecting from their exes. I also interviewed someone who told me they wished they had fought back seventeen years earlier in their marriage to get their abuser to back off. (This account single-handedly helped me start sleeping better amidst the consequences of my body’s reasonable reactions to my ex’s gaslighting and reactive abuse.) If you need to get to safety before you use this hard-earned knowledge to fight a dark societal trend, let that get you up in the morning. Let that guide you to a centered safety one day at a time. We need you. We all need what your body now knows.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

Those days have come to an end.

It is unnatural for a child to reject a loving parent in the absence of abuse, trauma, or neglect.

This simple yet practical behavior was steadfastly rooted in the guilt, grief, and shame that clouds an alienated parent’s mind. Opening oneself to those conversations epitomized a fight or flight trigger – neither of which was a healthy choice. The guilt of tragically losing a child who is still alive but is abused to believe the targeted parent has no value in their life. The grief of the loss – where a loving relationship once stood became emptiness. The shame that somehow the mistakes I had made as a parent had some negative effect on my child’s life led to the death of the parent/child relationship. Then there is the unspoken trauma that burns like midnight oil when I’m trying to sleep – how are others judging me? It is unnatural for a child to reject a loving parent in the absence of abuse, trauma, or neglect.

I suffered for months with the agony that no parent ever expects. Something so foreign and strange. Something irreversible. 

I had known in the past, through a series of actions and behaviors from the alienating parent, that maintaining a solid relationship with my daughter was the most important thing I could foster. I did believe that the bond was unbreakable despite clearly seeing patterns of abuse, parental alienation, and covert narcissism oozing from the alienating parent. This was not slow and progressive like sap from a tree. This narcissistic abuse flowed like a levee breach – inundating all aspects of the narcissist’s life – and everyone in it.

Make no mistake. I am an alienated parent, and I have suffered significant loss. However, I have chosen to use that loss to take action and help as many people in the alienated community as possible—one conversation at a time.

Over the years, I have learned two essential truths:

1. There is absolutely nothing I could have said or done to stop my child from being alienated from me;
2. The only way to live my best life is to discuss the taboo subject it is openly

We must open up and talk about this treacherous family disease. We must remember it is generational and passed down through family systems. Discussing it is the only way it becomes un-taboo and brings it out of the shadows. Our collective voices may not be all healing; however, they serve as a roadmap to find solace within the walls of alienation. We can better ourselves with support, empathy, and camaraderie. A reminder to all alienated parents: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

On Tuesday, October 1st, 2024, the CPTSD Foundation will launch the PASS Program: Parental Alienation Support Systems. This group will be held on Zoom every Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. EST and is open to any alienated parent (and other family). These meetings will be a forum for all alienated parents to talk a little about their situations, feel less alone and more connected, and focus on strategies for understanding and self-care. We will not provide individual advice – the group is meant to be self-sustaining, fueled by your shares.

Personally, the loss of my daughter doesn’t quite sting as much as the child abuse she has endured for years from narcissistic and child abuse. It’s nothing short of tragic, and sets up another generation of alienation.  

• Tracing the Family Dynamic
• The Necessity of Self-Care
• Exploring Narcissistic Abuse
• Gaslighting
• Trauma-Bonding
• The Loss of a Living Child

Paul Michael Marinello

Paul Michael Marinello serves as Chief Staff Writer and Blog Manager for CPTSD Foundation. Previous to this role he managed North American Corporate Communications at MSL, a top ten public relations firm where he also served on the board for Diversity & Inclusion for a staff of 80,000. Paul Michael grew up in New York and attended SUNY Farmingdale before starting a ten-year career at Columbia University. He also served as Secretary and Records Management Officer for the Millwood Fire District, appointed annually by an elected board of fire commissioners from 2008 – 2017.

In an oversaturated language, I ran out of words to describe the extent of the damage. Psychological murder and mental rape seemed more appropriate, but using spiritual, metaphysical descriptors in a secular world is challenging. You’re treated like you don’t know the strength of your words; you’re covertly tagged as hysterical. And yes, I am sensitive to that treatment, however inadvertent. It’s reasonable that any survivor of narc abuse would be. My ex’s treatment would have broken anybody, and I’m no longer available for conversations about how I could’ve handled it better.

Analogies have proven helpful: descriptions of the dark spider web I was living in are most proportionately responded to when I describe my narc as “less Taylor Swift, more Ted Bundy.” It illuminates his superficial charm and the unease and chaos that follows. Yes, people can be that improvisationally manipulative, down to their precognitive skeletons, reflexively transactional, even in their best attempts at loving and being loved. The conversations in recovery groups and with practitioners who don’t balk when I use words like sociopathy and violence (even though my ex never hit me) are markedly safer and more productive.

Back to mushrooms: they each have their taxonomy institutionally sanctioned as distinct from all the other mushrooms’ excellent works. Yule log mushrooms will not understand the coercion experienced by a zombified ant. They won’t relate to the alchemy that Cryptococcus neoforman wield. The zombie ant fungus spore babies did nothing wrong, but the ants need convalescence after their heads split if we expect them to return with their stories from the other side and rejoin the work force.

Even after having the mechanisms of NPD shoved down my throat for the last time, it broke my heart that people with NPD are institutionally abandoned, that their suffering is forfeited, and abuse acquiesced to. In contrast, because I had already shouldered violent amounts of blame-shifting, it further broke my psychologically assaulted brain to be told there was nothing I could do but metabolize it. Professionals told me they were baffled; that my ex (and formative family members) would never see it; and sorry, good luck. Stay hydrated.

Meanwhile, institutions collectively take on these patterned behaviors. It drives us to near extinction. As a student of global power dynamics, this parallel keeps me from accepting the radical acceptance stage. If one “can’t get well in the environment that made you sick,” how am I supposed to get well in a world where collective narcissism is running rampantly unchecked? It’s scary to let go of hopes for accountability; where does that leave my god- and grandchildren? (And the philosopher’s quintessential quandary: Why do we do anything without hope for change?) Radical acceptance is a powerful tool for protecting oneself in a damaging world. But the world is becoming one big rug, under which room runs out for things to be swept.

I’m not the only one at this trend’s mercy: I see it in the desperate relief of people in survivor groups. Self-accountability is essential in healing, but it’s too much to ask those already humiliated and repeatedly mortally wounded to bear the exclusive brunt of rectification while their brains (bodies) are functioning at an all-time low. Narcissists, being narcissists, will exploit this, and so on. It’s a societal extension of scapegoating that keeps suicide rates disproportionately high in narc abuse survivors. We are watching this socio-epidemiological snowball in real time. It turns voting polls into circuses. It lines Taylor Swift’s bank accounts with fur: fans crying at concerts, relieved that someone sees it… or is she embodying it? The whodunit is juicy.

Thoughtful choice of words is not diplomacy at cocktail parties; it’s our lifeblood. In a world quickly becoming a compassion vacuum, I was enduring a strange formula of social endemics like rapists and cults that were officially weaponized as only my burden, and recovering from severe abuse under the guise of love. I barely endured the aftermath of unremittingly brutal spiritual assaults (in part) because we’ve made too much wiggle room. During my attempts to not turn against myself this time, I have engaged with group after group of disoriented victims who gather. They hope to re-learn how to validate what was first dismissed by their formative caregivers, secondly, dismissed by their abuser(s), and thirdly, dismissed by society at large, yet is somehow officially only their responsibility. We are being told to run and hide from the air we breathe.

In interviews with narc abuse survivors, especially those entrenched in legal battles, one piece of advice repeatedly pops up: write everything down. Keep a log. Date it. Keep a journal of intuitions you don’t know where to place yet. Keep two paper copies. Fight dirty and record conversations, with or without consent. Even if it’s not legally admissible in court, it will ground you in the fact that you’re not going crazy. Ever notice how some folks get when they’re about to be inexorably caught red-handed? It’ll tell you everything you need to know about a person. We need to accurately get this behavior on the record. Ink is magical in this way.

Narcissism isn’t the word that should be attached to NPD abuse anymore. That’s not what happened. I needed that word to be stronger. I needed to be able to walk into a doctor’s office under Medicare and say, “A narcissist has attacked me,” and not have them look at me like I had been listening to too many true-crime podcasts. Fewer and fewer of us have access to gurus, homeopathists and publicly appointed attorneys that will understand this wavelength. I want those at highest risk for narc abuse who are emerging from having their childhood traumas subjugated to recognizance, coerced, lied to, puppeteered, tricked, then subtly raped, hollowed out, fed upon, then their faces rubbed in it like a bad dog to be able to walk into a medical office and say, “I have my suspicions that I am in relation with a sociopath.” They walk among us and don’t look like they belong in Taylor Swift’s music videos. I am beyond my attempted gestures of inclusive understanding being met with taunts of how history belongs to the victor.

Anything said will be bastardized if you lack the muscle to understand the need for gray spaces, grace for others, and reasonable interpretation. Not having the bandwidth for others who have explicitly expressed the need for support in enduring society’s cracks is not the same as cheekily weaponizing a disregard for transgressions of known boundaries. It’s why some people can’t stand that it’s not PC to say certain words anymore. They are sans the muscle that sees that they’re “allowed” to say these words, but there are harmful repercussions to vulnerable populations that have been begging people to stop for decades; it’s reactive abuse. It’s the basis of NIMBYism: that ideals are good in theory until someone must make a sacrifice that doesn’t directly benefit them. Accountability is being DARVO’ed in our collective ethics. “Consent” is being reduced to an annoying digital box we check to get to a main page. A new strategy is needed.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

The natural world is rife with much richer analogies than our “higher” cultured structures. We have been strategically separated from the knowledge that mushrooms are awesome. They are resilient, adaptive, adept at divvying up decomposition, and taxonomically distinguished amongst the many types. Consider three examples: 1.) Mushrooms that grow on New England Yule logs (morels, oysters, lion’s mane) are iconic, delicious, and indispensable to the ecosystem. 2.) Cryptococcus neoformans fungi are doing a different alchemical work: metabolizing radiation thirty-eight years after the man-made nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl. 3.) Deep in tropical forests, a spore called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (zombie-ant fungus) infects ants’ brains to alter their behavior. The fungus drives an ant to the top of a hill, where there is sunlight that the fungus can’t otherwise reach. It then releases spores for reproduction via the ant’s exploded head. (Plus thousands of examples of fungi soldiers in between!) Yet even in the natural world, parasite populations sometimes get out of balance.

Trauma is everywhere; the more humans there are on the planet, the more trauma there will be. A vast majority of us are living in a triggered state, and only some of us admit it. We also foster minds that can navigate the nuances necessitated by spectrums, strengthening our non-black-and-white thinking in an exponentially complex world. We are tending to those historically kept out of conversations or that need triage because of an immutable past. Institutional sanction may “seem like a trivial issue to some,” but although I didn’t have a say in the need for triage, my privileged access to narc abuse research was undeniable. I accessed it via sanctioned definitions plus survivor’s accounts.

Defending the farthest ends of imposed destruction is essential. In the mid-20^th century, the philosopher Jacques Derrida watched his non-binary deconstructionism weaponized by Holocaust deniers. It was a quick adaptation, one which he himself waded in. Comparisons aren’t logical in trauma-informed arenas; we cannot let it turn into an Olympic sport. First-person accounts are invaluable; they are tools against didactics. If “power over” is the enemy, let it burn. We will benefit from listening to those who have been to the far side: they embody a cipher, attuned to the most damaging collective dynamics.

I would never claim to know the trauma of someone chained in a basement for a decade. To an analogous but empirically lesser degree, it was maddening to hear people say they were “triggered” by things for which they have distaste or “gaslit” by someone who disagreed with them once. During the last chapter and harrowing afterlife of my NPD narcissist, my evenings resembled an Apocalypse Now hotel stay. The mechanisms found when local labor is coerced into performing its own resource extraction are not far off from what drives domestic violence, but it is not the same as the discomfort caused by calling someone out on their bullshit. All of these can be covert, blatant, or have spectacle. It is up to us to navigate the shades in between.

You can’t gaslight someone once or accidentally; it is a method, a grooming process. It is based on a pattern, and keeping a log of this pattern before throwing the word around would serve us all well. Trauma bonding isn’t what occurs when two people become friends by sharing accounts of their trauma, however true and deserving of recognition (think: Stockholm’s Syndrome). You don’t have PTSD from stressful experiences; you have PTS. Love-bombing isn’t over-zealous, misguided courtship, though the pattern of suspicion by its recipients is illuminating. The idealization phase isn’t a “honeymoon period” (think objectification). And the lyrical, colloquial usage of the word narcissist doesn’t do justice to the factions of survivors clamoring to get well in an environment made of this stuff.

It was a year into my recovery from acute NPD abuse before I found therapeutic environments where I could use the word sociopath, which was the accurate word. A year to find spaces where clinicians heard me say: “I’m not sick, I’m injured.” There is growing research that NPD abuse causes literal brain damage, cognitive severance based on coercive depersonalization, inflammation, increased cortisol and adrenaline, and a weakened immune system. Anecdotally, every hellish microsecond of my burning nervous system concurs. Without this patient narrative, my doctors were mistreating me for an inaccurate condition.

By then, I was regularly calling suicide hotlines because my support system was exhausted or my abuser had triangulated them. I cut ties with the rest because of their unnuanced judgments. My tolerance was at an all-time low, and I was realizing similar traits in the people with whom I surrounded myself: they were used to me allowing this behavior, too.

For a while, knowing narcissism is prevalent and underreported, I tried to stay with people’s best commiserative offerings. I believe in this practice of respectful witness but, exhausted from fighting for validation (mine and precedence), my stripped psyche has retreated. I will return. These days, I hold a policy that I won’t discuss “narcissism” with anyone who hasn’t done basic research into the condition.

 I spent a year navigating significant neurological and physical dysfunctions like sequential reasoning, short-term memory, debilitating fatigue, loss of coordination, vision impairment, constant pain and inflammation, sleep disruption, and seizures. My community insisted that eating well, stretching, and forgiveness meditations would help me feel better. I am absolutely not knocking the first two; recovering from narc abuse has taken more physical stamina than I knew I had. But because of the underestimation from all outward appearances, being asked to take better care of myself at that early stage was like asking someone to perform their own appendectomy. I was then criticized for not doing it quietly enough.

I still defend against forced premature forgiveness, though. Insistence on it is dismissive and minimizing. I’m grateful to now be in companies that don’t see it as a prerequisite for my recovery and acknowledge that it may never be possible. I don’t yet talk to many people from “the before times” because the level of sociopathic abuse I experienced is not well-represented by the public’s definition of narcissism. Few aspects of my life that are unscathed by it, about which I can chit-chat. I appreciated the sentiment to take better care of myself and extended grace to their confusion. But thinking positively was not going to cut it. So, I fought my way through.

Recovery coaches recommend not defending yourself to conserve energy. Paradoxically, however, I couldn’t get the treatment I needed without defending the gravity of the situation. I spent taxing amounts of energy defending myself against “breakups are hard” rhetoric. (Several times, my abuser manipulated my closest friends into relaying this message to me. Hearing his echo through them was spooky, but it taught me much about them. I was then ostracized for this accurate paranoia.)  I’m not saying the outlandish reactions that followed were justified (I was as surprised as anybody by them) or that the lack of narc abuse awareness caused them, but it made me significantly lonelier, angrier, and gaslit by proxy. I spent a year putting out some fires and stoking others — because my dangerously empathetic heart sees how this isn’t just about me or my ex — before getting to the actual work. The delay was (partly) due to a lack of shared vocabulary.

Part 3 will be published on Wednesday, 9/25/24

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.