Thank all of you for your comments. I'm sorry that all of you had to go through all of this abuse my heart goes out to each of you. Huge Hugs!! God bless all of you. Validation helps us cope with this kind of abuse. Some of the abuse is physical and that's horrific and don't let anyone tell you any different. Fortunately those wounds eventually heal but some scars stay with us possibly all our lives. I'm talking about the emotional scars and what it does to our perspective. The perspective of our own lives how it makes us devalue ourselves because they have devalued us. They made us feel like yesterday's garbage. We were taught that our feelings, our needs and essentially WE don't matter. Any thing we do out of our own kindness to them is spewed back in our faces. I remember an instance as a child I was always trying to get acceptance from my dad. I idolized him, yes I know that was sick but I was gaslit into thinking that the beatings I got were all justified and that I deserved them. Not to mention that he was a pastor so I looked at him as a "man of God". Everything he said was gospel to me. I know stockholm big time!! Here's an example of our kindness being thrown in our faces, literally. I was approximately 10 years old at this time, my dad was mowing the yard. He looked hot I went in and made some ice tea for him and brought it out to him in a tall glass. He shut off the mower, he started to take a drink and then paused and asked if I had washed my hands before making it because I had been playing with our cats. I said no. He poured the entire glass of ice tea down the front of me and then ordered me to go back in and make him a new glass but this time WASH YOUR HANDS!!! What started out to be something nice turned out to be something totally different. He couldn't have asked nicely or just told me in a calm voice no he had to pour it on me and then yell at me. Great man of God!!! You find yourself thinking I can't do anything right, I'm just a failure. No wonder we have self esteem issues after they get through with us then our minds now warped beat ourselves up as a result of all the mean things they've said play over and over in our heads.
They lay most of their groundwork while we are children. It's easy to bully children especially if they are your own. There's no one that we can go to for help, who's going to believe a child? The risk you take of telling anyone what if they tell your abuser what you said? It's much easier to remain silent they hell you'd deal with if you told anyone. I would have never considered it anyway because I thought it was justified, I thought I was a terrible person. I believed I deserved it. This is life living with a covert narcissist. On the outside everyone thought he was the salt of the earth type guy. Everyone loved my dad, few loved my mom but mostly it was dad that they mentioned. They hide behind religion and appear so "godly" on the outside. I spent years believing the lie. I'm so thankful for God and my husband who helped me see through the facade, it was all a sham.
