Managing your past

Flying monkeys show up after the abuse.

They aren’t there to witness it. It could be decades later or it could be the very next day, but they will defend the abuser.

There were not two sides in that house. There was a child, and there was a grown people with total power over her.

That is not two perspectives, that is two people harming another person who had no way to leave, no way to fight back, and no way to even name what was happening to her. The child lived in fear and silence.

The adults had the size, the strength, the ability, the courage, the authority, the control over everything you needed to live, and the ability to define reality for you before you were old enough to know reality could be defined differently.

You were an innocent living with no voice. You had none of the adult descriptions to get yourself help.

Calling those two positions “sides” is an insult to the word.

And then a flying monkey shows up and says, “but they’re not like that now. I can see that they probably did that when you were younger, but they’re nice now.”

Are you fucking kidding me?!? Listen to yourself, Audrey. You’re saying I was abused. You admit that I’m not making it up, so I should reunite with those disgusting people? What the fuck is wrong with you? I lived beyond 18 years of being abused, because their dysfunctional behaviors continued right up until present day, so trust me, they are not changing. They have not changed. No mother calls their daughter toxic and bitter and a crybaby when she finds out that a book has been written about her abusive childhood. That mother should beg for forgiveness and offer to give a public apology for calling her a liar for the last 20 years. She’s using projection and will never see me ever again after abandoning me.

The line of, “she’s not like that now’, just kills me.

It gets used because it is the fastest way to avoid deciding that it’s no big deal now. It softens abuse into a difference of opinion. It converts your account, the one you paid for with your childhood, into merely one interpretation, sitting neatly alongside hers, which she has been polishing and rehearsing for decades.

Nobody says that it’s okay now, because they want the truth. They say it because the truth is uncomfortable and this phrase lets them set it down without having to hold it.

You have CPTSD and now it’s no biggie? Gtfo.

And it works, which is the maddening part. It works because it sounds fair, and people would rather sound fair than be accurate. Meanwhile she gets the benefit of a framing that treats her carefully constructed narrative as equally valid to the lived experience of the child she raised.

That is not balance. That is a woman being handed the same credibility as her victim, purely because she is the one telling her version with more composure.

Her account is not the other half of yours. She called the adult child a liar. She was the adult. You were the child. There is no second side to that, and you are not required to pretend there is just because someone finds the truth easier to swallow when it comes cut in half.

#narcissisticmother #daughtersofnarcissists #ptsd #gtfo #childhoodtrauma #narcissisticabuse #complextrauma #motherwound #narcissisticabuserecovery #nocontact #thecyclebreakers #boundaries

Natalie Mosley Klenotic