I feel all the time but I don't know what I'm feeling...

One of the most difficult things about being the child of a narcissist (or someone with borderline personality disorder - BPD) is untangling emotions, understanding what one is feeling, why, if the emotion is attached to something, someone, some event, or if one is generalizing.

As I sit here this morning, I have an intense feeling of upset, slight anger, foreboding, fear, frustration. About what? I haven't untied all that yet.

In the list:

I've had a client contact me about a project I've tried three times to complete for them. They must contact their client to make sure the site is prepared, and they haven't. Frustrating but I can't fix it for them - they drop the ball but I take the hit.

I have a friend needing help moving stuff, which I'm happy to do, but I'm a third party to the machinations, so sitting about waiting on that stuff to be coordinated.

I'm travelling with a group next month, but not positive of accommodations, and unhappy about a potential addition of $500 US to my costs resulting from my having done a good deed...


I'm pissed off we've had dead air from an organization we've been trying to contact since May this year. This angers me so much because their behaviour is ridiculously unprofessional and we're left wondering what we've done.

I'm bored; work is too quiet thanks to a continuing sluggish economy.

I'm annoyed with myself for procrastinating over several need-to-be-completed items that will take only a few hours to finish.

I'm so very angry at my sibling over their handling of a change to our parent's living situation and that sibling's demands for money but a refusal to say WHY.

I'm also furious at this sibling's deep unwillingness to be clear about what is going on, particularly, as I understand it, they were on the verge of losing their home, and the home our parent was living in. This sibling chose to be angry and confrontational despite our many offers of help.

And I'm furious at another sibling for having taken nearly half a million from our parent and lost it all. Every damned penny of it, and $45K from an investor, and $80K from another person's parent too... this is a whole other story, none of which I was part of, except where I suggested, strongly, to my narcissitic parent they should make sure their investment is secured - which they didn't, so yeah, near poverty. 

I'm struggling to figure out which feelings go where and if they're even worth entertaining. And I'm sick to my stomach and I don't know why, and I know I'm pretty close to burying my head in the sand that is Reddit, or in my addictive craft habit. I have lately come to understand how I use these as "treatment" of a sort.

Growing up as the child of a narcissist is a distinctly unbalancing experience. There's no variance in how the narcissist approaches whatever it is they're angry about - and they're always angry about something.

It is never their fault and they always react on maximum volume, no matter how infinitesimal whatever the issue might be. There is no emotion one can feel and/or express the narcissist won't somehow attack, minimize, misrepresent.

They can spend hours or days haranguing, but when the harangued person finally crumbles into tears, or resorts to rage, the narcissist doubles down. There's no emotion one can feel or express that the narcissist will accept as valid; emotion is always an attack on the narcissist no matter what has precipitated that emotion.

When one is subjected to this from an early age, to be blunt, it fucks you up.

The net effect, particularly when all this starts when one is a tiny kid (2 years old in my case) is, as an adult, the victim often - almost always - misinterprets what people are saying, or what they mean by what they're saying. I am, as a rule, confused and uncomfortable about where my emotions are coming from and I have a difficult time understanding other people's emotions. I am aware I read in other people's feelings, but am terrified to ask if they're actually feeling the way I think.

I usually default to believing they're angry, or they detest me - this being a result of my parent's regular assertion when I was young that they had "people" watching me all day, every day, whether I was at school or with friends (I had so few friends; my trust was shattered at such a young age, and I never knew who these "people" were).

I always feel as if I've done something terrible - a persistent, ungrounded foreboding. Someone saying, "Hey can I talk to you for a second," releases and INTENSE fear response in me. Always. You will understand in employment situations, where people must collaborate many times a day, the "Can I talk to you?" thing made my work environments unbearable and terrifying. For the record, I work for myself now and have mostly done so for about 25 years.

I struggle to let things roll off me and to understand when something needs a response, or when there is no point in even thinking about it, let alone responding to it. I am never confident in whether I have appropriately dealt with a problem, or responded correctly to a question, or an issue. I feel most of the time I've made things far worse, by addressing them at all.

This weirdness has not been helped by the couple occasions when I've been blamed for something completely out of my control; once a pipe burst in a room I was in, and the woman of the house - my former spouse's mother - came steaming down the stairs yelling "what did you do?" at me. I was sitting there, stunned that water was suddenly pouring out of a wall behind all the shit she had stacked up there, having had no clue there were pipes there.

I have three adult children and I am fascinated (and envious in a sense) by how expertly they deal with the day-to-day issues they have, and how well they solve work-related stuff, and by their excellent friendships - with each other and with actual friends.  I'm also amazed I managed to raise three kids who can do that. I'm very glad my distinct issues seem not to have transferred to them. They're great collaborators and skilled at conflict management and resolution.

I feel unbalanced most of the time where it concerns my emotions: I'm either flat, meaning I feel nothing, or experience far less emotion than someone else might in the same situation, or I'm often full-on torn apart by a comment or event someone else might barely register.

I feel I am always letting people down, never doing the best I can do, cutting corners, being shitty. This is my narcissistic parent speaking, and I know it, but this horror began when I was very young.
Although I know it isn't logical, it is deeply internalized. I've heard it said children raised in such environments are permanently-affected, as the trauma causes changes to their DNA. I haven't read too much on the subject, but colloquially, I'd claim it true.

Where it concerns my siblings, my emotions are particularly hard to manage; I shift between concern for them - they were victimized as much as I was, in different ways - and anger towards them for not taking off the blinders they find so comfortable.

I am very concerned for my one sibling, as they are enmeshed in a not-at-all-positive way with our joint torturer/parent. I have deep concerns as to how this sib will react to this parent's death (this parent being 90 years old presently), and how they will adjust to the absence of this still-narcissistic, parent who has, I understand, added stalking-type behaviours to their contact with this sibling.

At the same time, I am beyond furious at this sibling - for how they have scapegoated me, in concert with our parent, for more than 45 years, how they fail utterly to see how, more and more, they are exhibiting the same characteristics of this parent (and of this parent's own also-narcissistic/BPD parent), for how they protect our abusive parent, how they prey on me for help, but reject any help offered - except when they are in dire straights - and ignore me entirely when whatever crisis they may be having has been solved. Since early this year, my overriding emotion is a desire to literally tie this sibling to a chair and punch them until they feel the deep pain I've felt my entire life.

The other sibling ... I also feel so much fury and anger towards them. I cannot comprehend how they can sleep at all, let alone live day-to-day knowing they are the one-and-only reason none of us will have an inheritance, and why the other sibling has been footing the bills - all of them - for this horrifying parent we share. This sibling has exhibited a bizarre vacillation between having near-murderous feelings toward this parent and attempting to have a relationship with them. For the record, their joint relationship has been spectacularly and catastrophically unstable for most of this sibling's 47 years.

Well-meaning people will often say, "Just let it go," but they truly do not comprehend how children of narcissists experience emotion, and how confused and often fearful those children (who may be adults in their late 50s) are. If we're struggling to wade through a lifetime of it, imagine how little a probably-caring but uneducated person might understand.

The net effect of my inability to appropriately parse and navigate my emotions has been the development - among several issues - of profound body dysmorphia to the point of obsession as a stand-in for dealing with the moving parts.

This dysmorphia coalesced on a specific day when I was 13 years old thanks to an off-hand comment made by a good friend, who I know meant absolutely nothing by it. I was going down the stairs in our school, heading to class - she being on the stair directly behind me - when she made a comment about the structure of my hips and butt. I can remember that moment and I were I in that school, I could walk to the exact place - the exact stair I was on - when she made the comment.

Literally from that moment on, this dysmorphia has been a daily, draining, torturous fixture in my waking life. It is the first thing on my mind when I wake - and I wake three or four times a night - and the last thing on my mind before I fall asleep. It doesn't help my sibling is a fitness professional (driven to some extent as a means for them to cope with their own demons I suppose), who has no shame about shaming me and how I look, whether that be the body scan or an insulting comment.

This dysmorphia is coupled with an ever-growing fear of being in public looking like I do. This is compounded by my having competed in a fitness competition four years ago, and then returning to a normal weight and average strength for a person of my age. Hating how I look also keeps me out of the gym: I'm embarrassed to be "normal" after having become so fit and strong.

In my case, that bucket-list item, the competition, was approached as a means of, "SEE! I'm not gross!" rather than something I pursued purely on my own terms, for my own reasons. I'm now fighting with entrenched dysmorphia made worse by having become very fit and quite thin for that competition, but not having the tools to deal with being a normally-sized person of my age. On the rare occasion I see my sibling, their habit of body-scanning me, and their unshielded look of disgust after that ... it doesn't help, and it makes me want to injure them all the more. Vicious circle for sure.

If you're reading this and wondering why I don't get help, I assure you I have tried. I have used - with some success - one of the on-line counselling services when the issues with my sibling were such I was feeling suicidal. It was very helpful to have a faceless, but experienced psychologist willing to read my long accounts, and make observations and suggestions. To not have to be face-to-face where he could see me, how I look, and to have counselling sessions not diluted by my terror over how I look - it was a good solution.

I have recently sought out mental healthcare services; however, despite physical health care being easy to access and covered under the country's health care plan, mental health services are not covered and are very costly, or if provided on a sliding scale, not dependable.

I need care several times a week for at least a year, but at a cost of about $2000/month, it's impossible to afford. It is not for a lack of desire and willingness to get help; it's a literal inability to afford the care I need. The doctor I saw recently diagnosed me with severe anxiety - filed under "No shit, Sherlock," - and prescribed a specific medication to help. The drug she prescribed has a significant side effect - predictable weight gain. Definitely no bueno. Like 1000 percent no bueno.

I am not in contact with my siblings or my parent - and yes, this is extreme, highly guilt-inducing, and difficult to swallow. I know, however, contact with this parent is poisonous, and contact - currently anyway - with the siblings is likely going to affect me negatively.

I know what it's like to have to talk myself out of walking into traffic or driving into a semi - it is utterly, utterly terrifying to be at that point and to know what might trigger that again, and how bloody close - twice in the last eight years - I came to saying "aw, fuck it," and driving across the line on purpose, despite knowing doing so would end my intense pain but would ruin my own children's and partner's lives.

I cannot stress this enough; when someone is in THAT much despair and so desperate to end their own pain, and they know doing so will have a massive, permanent effect on their loved ones, you MUST understand how unbearable it has become for them.

Neither of these siblings is willing to acknowledge their parts in any of it. They are, at times, like starving dogs with respect to goading me. One of them - maybe both - seems to enjoy pushing me to the point of pure, blinding despair. I don't know what they get out of it but it seems to satisfy something for them. Then again, they learned at the feet of the master, given our parent was ravenous for the high of torturing (in an emotional way) me, teaching them how to scapegoat, and expert at alienating us siblings one from the other. The effects of this parent's efforts are cell-deep and permanent.

A bit of advice for people who like to give advice, particularly to people like me: Just don't.

I guarantee you, if you had a happy or reasonably stable childhood, you cannot possibly understand the chamber of horrors that is a childhood overseen by an angry, unfulfilled narcissistic parent whose sole purpose in life is to create as much pain, despair, fear, sadness as possible as some means of obtaining power, and edifying themselves.