Dad--Mom's evil henchman

I used to love and respect my dad. I used to think he was principled and strong. I used to think he loved me.

Much has happened, and these happenings have taught me many things. Several of which is that all of the above were illusions. Figments of my imagination. Fantasy and dreams.

Recent experience has revealed not only the present but the past. One of the saddest realities I have had to confront in my adulthood is that my father has never loved me. I won't bore you with my long list of remembrances that prove this point. I don't have to prove anything to you. I am only stating that it has been proven to me. I will sum up my realizations about my dad to you, though, just in case it may resonate in your own experience.

The only person who really matters to my dad is himself. Yes, he has worked hard for years to provide for his wife. And himself. By providing for his wife, he can claim this as proof that he loves her and has done his duty toward her. This works for her. There is little more she expects from him. Provide for her in the manner she has become accustomed to and the uneasy truce between them can be maintained. The symbiosis of their relationship explains everything to me about my dad's relationship to me. It was never about me. I have been an attachment to my mother since I was born. He would have never married my mom except that she became pregnant with me. All I have ever been to him is a representation of duty and responsibility. He did for me because it was simply the same as doing something for his wife. It kept her "happy", it met her demands, it shut her up. Which brings me to my first statement that the only person who matters to him is himself. He only pleases his wife in order to "keep the peace" so he can live his life in relative calm as well as pursue his own interests and live his own life. They live separate but parallel existences. It is a business arrangement. A little bit of mutual back-scratching, then they go about doing what they do for themselves. Both are locked in a perpetual pursuit of their own agendas. Separate agendas.

There is no human alive who doesn't fashion some code of conduct that convinces themselves they are "righteous"...i.e. that they are "moral". Some fashion their moral code according to an objective source, such as the Bible. Others just make one up as they go along and construct their code according to their subjective and perverted feelings and ideas. My dad lives by the moral code of the mobster. No matter how angry he may get at my mother, no matter how loudly he may condemn some behavior of hers to her face, no matter the long emotional estrangements from her....let some "outsider" (everyone is an outsider to those two including their children) come along and dare to contradict or attempt to hold his wife to accountability in whatever form and his mobster code of conduct is immediately visible. No one else is ever allowed to "dis" his wife. You make her unhappy and HE is unhappy. You will be yanked on as hard as possible by him in order to bring you back into line and make his wifey happy again. I see this dynamic as yet another iteration of his dedication to his principle of selfishness. If the wife is unhappy....she makes him miserable, too, because she cries, she rages, she whines, she mopes, she sinks into depression, she tortures him with her misery. He sees the only "moral" thing to do is to make her happy again whatever the human cost may be to the "outsider". No one else matters. There is no claim for redress, accountability, or justice that he will admit to be valid. The mobster code of "la familia" applies only to the two of them. The rest of us can rot in hell.

I see my father as Igor to my mother's Dr. Frankenstein. He is simply the club she wields to keep the rest of us in line. She has used him this way for as long as I can remember. I used to believe her lies about how much he loved his children, about what a strong and principled man he was, about how deserving of respect he was. Time and experience have been my teachers. He is as evil as she is. While she abused me with almost impunity, he turned his eye. He has NEVER stood up against her to protect me. Not once. When finally, as an adult, I appealed to him to hold her to account for her evil deeds just once, his refusal was absolute. This proved to me that his claim that had he known how she abused her children he would have intervened was a complete and total lie. He was being asked to intervene now, in the present, for a deed he witnessed himself and admitted for a short while she was in the wrong, and he refused to do the right thing by his family. His dedication to himself....and therefore to his wife....are set in granite. He is immovable. Not any part of his soul is moved by the importunities and pleas of his extended family. No righteous claim can find redress in his court of appeals. His integrity was surrendered to his evil wife many decades ago. He demands from the rest of us a similar surrender of integrity in the name of peace and family. It is a vile thing to behold.

I have no father.

I Hate My Mommy

Today I experience a revival of active loathing for my Nmother. Today I hate her. Again. I hate the long decades of my life where I believed the opposite to be true of her. I hate my gullibility that induced me to stay in her life where she could continue her soft abuse of me and my dear daughter.

What I used to believe about my Nmother:

All other people may be liars, but she could be relied on to never tell a fib.

All other women were likely to be poor at parenting, but my mother was the pinnacle of motherly wisdom and a font of knowledge for parenting advice.

She would admit to being able to control others, but none were more self-controlled than she in her ability to never be controlling.

She was the personified exemplification of peace. Never a raised voice in her home was proof of this claim.

Now I know with painful acuity that every one of her claims above was the diametric opposite of reality.

Indeed, if anyone in the room is a liar it is she. Lies are her stock-in-trade. She lies with such alacrity that one is likely to believe the lies....for who would lie about such things? Who could lie so glibly without a hitch in her breath or a blink of an eye?

How was I ever fooled into believing her to be the pinnacle of motherly virtue and child-rearing expertise???!!! I was on the receiving end of her so-called ability for years! I have personally received her motherly "ministrations" until I made my escape at age 17. My life was often a living hell with her. I guess I have this as living proof of her adeptness at brainwashing that she convinced me for years that all the fault was in me and not her. What I loathe the most about her is that thing that evokes my greatest self-loathing: that I allowed her unfettered access to my daughter when she was so young and defenseless. I hate us both (Nmom and I) for that. I hate that I swallowed all her lies and believed her words over my personal experience. I discounted what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, felt in my own body in favor of what the false reality of her creation. My only consolation is that she had more accountability when dealing with my daughter....she was not able to carry out her more cruel methods as were exercised on me as a child. Nevertheless, how fervently I wish I had left at age 17 and never consented to ever again lay eyes on my evil mother. How did I ever trust her to be different than what I had experienced as a child? I think back at her excessive self-promotion, her claims of success with others' children, her constant insistence at her supreme abilities and I guess I can wonder a little less. She had references! She had many others who sang her praises....how could she and everyone else be wrong and me be right? I caved to the majority. I could question myself .... and did. I'd been raised to do so. Never question Nmom or her motivations. Only question yourself. If there is a problem....look at yourself. I learned well at her knee. Prone to submission, I subverted tangible reality for her version of events. My consolation: my daughter understands malignant narcissism now and is unlikely to be abused by another one in her lifetime. She is also free from ever having to lay eyes on her grandmother ever again. Her complete freedom began four years ago at age 20. She got free much sooner than I did.

I have lived for forty-five years now and I can state with absoluteness that I have never met a more controlling person in my life than my own Nmother. How was I fooled into believing she was the opposite? Go back to point number one: All others may be liars, but she was always telling the truth. I simply took her at her word and ignored all evidence to the contrary. To a point. I can look back at my behaviors starting at age 17 and continuing right up to the total break and see how I took measures to limit her ability to control me. Quite successfully. She constantly chafed at her inability to crack my walls erected to keep her nose out of my business, but she had to maintain her facade of not being controlling, so she chafed quietly.

"Blessed are the peacemakers"....how many years did I believe her claims to be the family peacemaker? Oh, far too many. Now I look back and see how she had her hand in every familial relationship, constantly stirring pots, incessantly creating friction between family members. She was sneaky and underhanded which allowed her to proclaim, "Peace and safety" while "sudden destruction cometh" to each of us in her sphere of influence. 1 Thess. 5:3.

Okay, I think I got this off my chest. I need to forgive myself for being her dupe for so long. When I do, I can stop hating her. Vile, evil bitch.

Is There Good in Everyone?

You've been psychologically tortured and abused by a narcissist/sociopath/psychopath family member. You finally tell another family member what you've experienced. What you get back from this person is a "sermon" on how there is good in everyone. You haven't looked hard enough for it. Everyone has redeeming features; if you haven't found them then you are just not looking.

Implied in this sermon is that the deficiency is in you. Also inherent in these comments is the belief, perpetuated by humanistic psychology, that everyone is basically "good". There is no room in this anthropological theory for the concept of evil. Bad people don't exist. Malevolence is a figment of your imagination.

The person who says things like this to you has something to gain. Perhaps they are trying to keep you from "rocking the boat". Maybe this land of denial they live in is how they keep from having to deal with anything difficult. Fear of confrontation. Fear of standing on principle. Lots of people are afraid of principle if by having one it'll cause them some discomfort. So they become unprincipled which allows the evil people to flourish.

So, let's get back to the idea that you just need to look harder and find the "good" in the person who makes a living by sucking your life from you. First of all, if you have to hunt that hard to find some good in someone it simply isn't there. Another thing is this: there are many deeds a person can do that can appear to be "good" but are not. Look closely and you'll see the "good" done by a consistently evil person is self-serving. They try to appear good in certain situations (i.e. when others are looking) so as to get away with being evil! It is a ruse. A guise. An occasional "good" deed does not weigh the balances against a consistent life of bad deeds.

Let's look at a historical figure. I think most reasonable people can agree that Hitler was an evil man. His complete obsession with wiping the Jews, gypsies, people of Slavic origin, mental deficients and the physically impaired off the face of the planet seems to be sufficient evidence to decent people that this man was an evil psychopath. What good deed could he do that would be adequate to the task of mitigating his evil? Again, reasonable minds could probably agree that nothing he could do would be good enough to outweigh the vast evil of his homocidal hatred of certain classes of people. Some people have actually tried to find the "human side" of Hitler. He loved animals. He was vegetarian. He was able to unite Germany. These are some of the things brought up by apologists for Hitler who try to minimize his evil. He wasn't evil, he was misunderstood. He was a little misguided in some respects, but he was a great leader. Okay, if that works for you then you can go surf off somewhere else because I can't say anything that you will agree with. The truth is that there was no "good" in Hitler that could outweigh his evil deeds. It is rare for a malevolent, evil person to have no qualities that can be construed to be "good". For the naive, the ridiculously stupid, or other evil people, those "good" qualities can outweigh a life of consistent evil. For the sane and principled those "good" qualities are seen for what they are...a mask. An aberration. Yes, for the evil person a "good" deed is an aberration!

So what if you can find some "good" in an abusive person. If you have to hunt around, stretch your imagination or wrack your brain to find the "good", then, honey, it just tain't there. Face facts. Don't let yourself be confused by the silly idea out there that if you can find ONE good thing in someone then you have proof positive that person is not evil after all. It is that kind of thinking that will keep you enslaved. You are allowed to call evil by its right name. You are allowed to distance yourself from it. It is called self-preservation. Self-defense is a fundamental right of all living creatures. Exert your right to live. Shrug off the small-minded thinking out there that puts on such a pretense of bigness and righteousness by pretending that evil people aren't evil. In my mind, these mental midgets are just as dangerous because they do nothing to stop evil. Their stupid philosophy perpetuates evil. Distance yourself from the evil people in your life...and that includes the idiot who tells you to hunt for the good in an abuser.