https://www.patreon.com/posts/fuck-off-boomers-96934186
Hi Fuckers! Happy Monday!
I’m clocking in nice and early this week because we have some big work to do. And as much as I’m a natural self-doubter, I’m really determined about it.
Woah – who’s talking here? Doesn’t sound like your toothless cousin Jess and her ten screaming dissociative personality babies from different fathers reporting in from the trauma park today. Yeah, sometimes I also forget that isn’t actually my identity. Part of that whole “goings on with daily duties personality” taking over the wheel as the realistic, functional, presentation of self. But I digress to dissociative personalities again.
Like I said in the coping with covert abuse episode, playing back that mental highlight reel of my life is pretty helpful for keeping myself in the integrated, adult self. Oh, I’ve been a student, a scientist, a logistics manager, a fucked up family member to international trauma friends, and a CPTSD podcaster… no mention of meth addiction, destitution, or institution no matter how hard I look. No matter how hard people try to convince me that’s my demographic information.
Ah. Right. You’re a real, working adult and always have been. Feels nice.
The functional executor in my brain has had to keep shit on the up and up lately, because I have some serious news coming at you this week. Actions that need to be taken by everyone for everyone’s sake (and by “everyone” I’m not only talking about my personality parts again, I’m talking about You).
So. We’re going to talk about the big change on Thursday, and hope you’ll be there. I mean, take your time, but I think you’ll want to tune in fairly promptly for the next release. Hint hint. It’s a big deal. For all of us. And I’d rather that you heard about the family pet dying directly from me, rather than finding out via the new hole in the backyard. So. Try to pick up your podcasting app when I ring later this week. It’ll be a serious talk, but one that I feel good about and I think you will too, after you hear me out.
Which is to say, I’m in a great place right now. I mean, not physically in the most ideal place, uh, clearly, based on what you’ve heard recently… but mentally things have actually been solid around here for recent days and weeks. Like they haven’t been in a long time.
Why? Uh, seems like an impossibility based on what was just being discussed a month ago? Kindof doubtful that reporting on narcissistic abuse in an escalating environment could run tandem with feeling uplifted, trauma-controlled, and free spirited?
Well, trauma recovery therapy is really something, innit? I told you Fuckers from the beginning, it gets easier. Not necessarily the handfuls of rocks and razorblades that life will throw at you – those are always pretty jagged and solid; they will give you a few bruises – but your ability to dodge, deflect, and deal with them instead of laying on the ground and being stoned to death… yes. It gets easier. Much easier.
This is one of the reasons that I get weird when you guys seem worried about my situation. It can be hard running everything on my end and also existing, but by the time you hear me speak whether it’s two weeks or two days later… I’m usually back to a homeostasis again.
Like, yeah, I get riled up from the outside in and inside out. I still have a trauma brain. I still live a trauma life, in some ways, as you know. I get triggered. My survival parts leap to the command board of my control center when it happens. And, yep, sometimes I do things that my old parts would have relied on as dysfunctional methods of staying on our two feet. Like turning to substances, working myself to tears, and other self-harming behaviors.
BUT. I also calm right the fuck down pretty quickly. I take care of my overactive nervous system. I step out of my trauma-thistle patch and see the landscape with a broader perspective. I do my fucking research to understands what’s up – the stuff that you guys get to hear ALL about. And I start experimenting in my day to day existence to see what makes the problem better or worse. Detailed notes to understand the patterns at hand, included.
What do you know? Suddenly you’re just an observer of this whole trauma shitshow, it’s obvious that the playwright has relied on the same boring plotline and lackluster character development for 31 years, you get to watch the disaster safely from a distance while penning your editorial notes… and everything sort of falls right into place when you start piecing together the present with the past.
It’s really enlightening and very useful for integration to look for the big trends. Especially when the terrible acting is coming from all sides, actually.
Which is NOW to say, there have been a few troubling characters in my life recently. Not only the mama drama that I finally put together last month, but a litany of other difficult interactions that sprung up in the aftermath. Friends, romantic, and otherwise. At least trying to give me grief. Negative narratives. And a whole lot of unnecessary projection.
And that’s sort of what I want to talk about here today.
There seem to be some unhealthy energies popping up all over the place this spring. At least, in my life. I can’t speak for your experience recently, but I know that personality disorders are on the upswing.
And, you know, this isn’t something unexpected or new. Actually, it happens on an annual basis for me – I can’t say if it’s because I change when the weather gets warmer, or if it’s because OTHER people do… or both. But I can tell you that every April and May, I end up cutting ties with some now-obviously-unhealthy-energy in my life that was somehow allowed to fester under the staircase for a few months leading up to the Marie-Kondoing event.
My brother and I have a joke about it from LAST year. Jess has a real “May Day Explosion” every spin around the sun. Something big happens that wasn’t foreseen before… even when it probably should have been.
Actually, May First seems to be the day when I. Am. Just. Done. With. Endlessly. Trying. To. Fix. Others. Who. Won’t. Fix. Themselves. But it doesn’t proceed like a calm and purposeful spit.
Instead, there’s been this big, emotional break that – as you heard in the CPTSD relationship patterns episode – is a long time coming, but extremely difficult nevertheless. I think it’s that “connection” tether finally snapping under the pressure of everything else that’s not working after being strained by our now-differing perspectives. Or, to keep coming back to it, different personalities presenting – so that connection isn’t even relevant anymore. It dissolves. Very rapidly. Game over.
And then everything in my life gets exponentially better in the aftermath. I don’t know. It’s something.
Blame spring mania on my part or their part or our collective parts, if you want. I hear you. I’m not discounting it. The end of SAD is something to behold.
But I also think that winter serves as a bit of an “incubation period” where all of these unsettled realizations are slowly forming in my brain… and spring time is when all those thoughts finally come together, and epiphany moments start pinging my brain left and right. I start getting outside and getting the brain organization that I need. Get rid of the hibernation instinct that’s been fogging up the mirror for months, and all of a sudden I can actually see straight again.
And, holy fuck, everyone I know and their dirty ass boyfriends have been drunkenly writing in sharpie markers all over the bathroom walls this whole time. Time to have a talk about roommate respect and eviction details.
Side note: This was an actual thing that happened in my 20’s. Want to hear my other failed tales from trying to live with humans? I’ve got em.
Anyways. I’m just saying. Folks have been challenging in the past few weeks, while I’ve already been challenged by my blood-related folks. And my therapist and I think a lot of it has to do with healthy and unhealthy energy repelling each other. Which is uncomfortable, no matter which direction you’re approaching from.
I also think these connection breakdowns are related to the natural process that happens when people see other people making changes that question their own perspectives and fucked up core beliefs. We all like to support our own beliefs by being around people who are on-board.
Danger danger. It’s uncomfortable when the dynamic changes.
Plus… I’ve gotta say… talking about covert narcissism seems to have sparked a lot of additional covert narcissism energy around here.
Like, they’re doubling down on all the things they insist they don’t do, in the aftermath of not wanting to acknowledge that these are things they completely do, and while continuing to deny they’ve ever done them at all. It’s, uh, been a show.
Like I said. Just kicking back and watching the production. Seeing a lot of trends. It’s honestly making the play extremely predictable and uninspired. I’m not so moved by the plight of the main characters anymore, and I’m certainly not surprised by any of their spontaneous breaks into song and dance anymore.
So. ALL of this lead in is not just to tell you about my springtime being the same as all of my springtimes. AKA – extremely challenging, triggering, and emotional, but also extremely enlightening, insightful, empowering, and necessary for making the next moves forward in my life.
But, also to say… Fuck you, Boomers. For lack of a more specific categorization.
On to today’s bigger topic.
Go home, Boomer
So, first of all, please don’t take offense if you fall into that age group, but you aren’t what I think of as a “traditional Boomer.”
Which would be, someone with rigid, unquestionable beliefs about yourself, your opinions, and the whole planet. You consider yourself a victim of your entire era and expect modern humans to pay for the challenges you faced… yet have immense pride for your collective adherence to the ideals of the period. You have no capacity for accountability or self-reflection when it comes to treating other people with any basic level of respect, kindness, grace, or dignity unless they fall into one of the groups that you consider “superior enough.” As in, humans who make a ton of money. They have a huge house. They control other people as authority figures. You’re threatened by new ideas and have to keep everything under control of the “old traditions,” to exist.
Outdated, authoritarian minded, human-centered, broader picture deft things like that.
Now. There are plenty of badass Boomers who DO listen to this show – I know some of you personally – and I’m not here to shit on you. I’m here to shit on the people who grew up around you, and who went on to become the unexamined covert narcissists that swear by emotional negligence and punitive rule to serve their own paper thin egos. Probably people you don’t get along with, either.
So, I actually was going to release this episode today on how the Boomer Generation seemed to have really embodied the Vulnerable Narcissist way of life, on a frighteningly common level. After hearing from SO MANY OF YOU that we essentially have the same mother, despite their obviously dissimilar backgrounds and surface-level personality presentations, I had to think about WHY that would happen. WHAT in their childhoods created these personality parts that have to control and demean others for self-protection? HOW did their social upbringing shape these defense mechanisms? WHY IS IT that our (broadly speaking) mothers all seem to present their own trauma responses via the manipulative narc tactics that we’ve been talking about for a few weeks?
Because, if I wasn’t clear enough already, I don’t think that half the population qualifies for an NPD diagnosis, but I DO think that an awful lot of us assume those behaviors as a function of our own mental illnesses and self-protection. It’s common that trauma presents in line with the VulNarc characteristics, but we are not swimming in a sea of near-psychopaths.
Just making sure I state that again, very clearly.
So what happened to these Traumatized Fuckers, who both refuse to acknowledge that they probably qualify for a PTSD diagnosis but also pull their past traumatic experiences into every emotional war they wage? “I don’t have problems! But if I did… I would like you to take extra good care of me.”
Well. I thought about it. I talked to other people about it. I researched it. And I made this whole, hour-long, in depth article about how the Silent Generation that came before them could have easily caused the downstream narcissistic trends that we see today.
How their parents shaped them. How their society of buttoned up lips and traditional values fucked everyone. How the rapidly changing global environment must have really screwed them, as the first people who had the choice to go work in offices instead of factories if they were of “worthy” enough status. How women were still expected to stay at home and shut the fuck up… while also being told that maybe that was coming to a head.
Oh, and then all of a sudden college became mandatory, the internet happened, gender norms and allowable lifestyles completely changed… and with all of that happening, what the fuck chance did they have to ever develop a stable, secure sense of self, when sandwiched between the most modernly oppressed generation and the most free-balling?
Yeah, you know… I really felt like I was trying to deal with these Covert Narcissist and personal life problems pretty kindly, compassionately, and respectfully by looking at both sides of the coin in all of our conversations, leading up to this full-fledged sympathy-fest for our emotionally crippled mothers and fathers. I didn’t want to villainize them. I didn’t want to incite a mass family exodus among listeners. I didn’t want to make them feel bad about who they had become, without having the more enlightened cultural tools necessary to ever realize it.
But. You know what. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it. I didn’t want to make them feel bad for realizing who they have become. And that isn’t how things work. That’s how they WANT things to work. That’s how they EXPECT things to work. That’s how they FORCE things to work, by training us to appeal to all of their feelings with more dedication than we’re ever allowed to give our own. So that they never have to face them, themselves.
And that’s what I was doing again here. Don’t want to make anyone sad. Let’s talk about how hard they had it and how it’s not all their fault.
Well, you know what? No, their early life isn’t their fault. But their later life is her responsibility. Their actions need to be accounted for by SOMEONE, and that person isn’t their mother, their culture, OR their children.
And that goes for all of us. Anyone who’s been CovNarc riled, feeling like a victim, and projecting your upset onto others (or, specifically in some cases, uh, ME)… you gotta stop. You have to learn how to have and release your emotions and thirst for vengeance without blaming the first person who walks into your line of sight. You have to accept and process your early lives so you can move on. You have to separate your past abusers from your present associates and your own children. You can’t keep demanding that the world bends over backwards to your will, because your brain is too inflexible to touch your fucking toes.
And that’s why… I’m not putting out that episode. I don’t think that it would help right now. I think that it would make things worse.
I don’t want to keep feeding the victim machines in our families and social contacts. I think they have enough steam power in their individual echo chambers already.
This show is about giving a VOICE to people who don’t have one. You know, they have plenty already. Besides surrounding us at family functions, grocery stores, and corporate offices, they control almost every aspect of our popular lives – everything from the government to the news to network television programming. We’ve heard their side. It’s probably the only one most of us have ever considered.
And I don’t want to keep pushing those of us who have been dealing with them through a lifetime of guilt, emotional protection, and sympathy already to have MORE compassion for the same folks who won’t issue an ounce of it for anyone else.
Their unfortunate arrival times on this planet and unfavorable social environments can’t continue to be our burden. We can see them as whole, complex, challenged, good and bad people… which is what I encourage… but we can’t keep breaking our own heads and hearts FOR the ways they experienced the same.
It’s. Not. Our. Job.
It’s. Their. Job.
If they won’t show up, realistically learn about their brains, and use that information to get into therapy where they really do the work… not just go to a few Skype sessions and proclaim that they’ve turned a corner by being in counseling… then what the fuck are we supposed to do here? We can’t fix them. We can’t force them to get help. We can’t even make them see their own behaviors that are right in front of them.
Too many convenient memory lapses and personal justifications mixed with damning accusations based in delusion for that to ever work. I think most of us have seen that by now.
So what’s the point? Why should I keep being so abuser-sensitive, when it’s only going to be leveraged against all of us in the long (or, in my circumstances, very immediate) run?
I shouldn’t.
The only point was to be aware of the fact that their own trauma had turned into a widespread archetype of covert narcissists among their generation, who then created a societal tone of covert narcissism that we’ve all grown up with and rarely questioned.
You know, until you realize that the phrase, “because I’m your mother and I said so,” was a fucking bullshit reason to be outright controlling and abusive. Along with, “In MY house,” “You’d better X if you know what’s good for you,” and “You’re so lucky that you didn’t have it worse.”
But it takes a long time to get to that point of recognition, because talk like that is EVERYWHERE. Go watch any TV or movie with “normal” presentations of parenting. Tell me that you don’t suddenly see vulnerable narcissist statements and manipulations everywhere. Uh, television has gotten very psychonoxious for me since learning about CovNarcs. Is everyone really this fucked up and unhealthy? Has the media also hugely contributed to our generations of parental abuse acceptance? Cuz it sure seems like it.
One more time, let me use the most important phrase of this entire conversation. “Echo Chamber.”
I think that our parents and their parents have been hearing the same old narratives developed by the same old ego defense mechanisms to achieve the same old goal of controlling others for the incredibly impossible, same old purpose… of not ever acknowledging who they’ve really become in their lifetimes (or, at least, at certain points in their lifetimes.)… for long enough and with enough popularized success that you know what?
I just don’t need to lend another voice to their cause. They’re good. They have all the support and validation they need from their fucked up friends, the public school system, capitalism, and the sitting US government. They don’t need me.
So, fuckit. Done trying to be the fairest of them all. We know, your lives were hard. So were ours, but we’re actually trying to do something about them.
And that brings me to the next point that I was going to make.
We have the same challenges, on a very literal basis.
You taught us… to be you.
The big kicker of the episode – the thing I was leading up to that was supposed to be a big “oh fuck” moment… but, honestly… probably wouldn’t have been because we’re all smart and insightful enough to have realized many times over was…
The fact that the effects of being around a covert narcissist sound a lot like the prerequisites to being a covert narcissist. The fact that mom and dad’s varying narratives about how we should see ourselves kindof build a confused identity that feels awesome or awful, but nothing in between. The fact that our learned defenses to covert abuse are often offenses of the same string.
The fact that Narcissists are known to breed new Narcissists.
Meaning, if you grew up with a Covert Narcissist energy surrounding you, you were fairly likely to become a VulNarc offender, yourself. Or, to at least copy the behaviors that were demonstrated in your childhood home. Or, more specifically, to develop a brain that operates on the same social and egoic patterns that mom and dad presented as you learned to match their energies and their expectations. A lot more to say about this another day.
But, at the core of it, it’s all nothing new. Just the usual conversation about the generational shittery of trauma. Parents teaching kids to abuse both through modeling and through personal defense adaptations, kids growing up having no idea what they’re doing, psychopathology FROM the abuse makes the whole situation even more challenging, and we’re stuck in this trauma trap forever.
This whole surprise moment was even going to come with a sad admission that – fuck me… you’ve also probably been smart enough to catch onto this in the past few episodes… I’ve absolutely acted like a Vulnerable Narcissist before.
On many occasions. In various situations. Generally, in my past. Generally, when under the spell of another Covert Narcissism energy – that shit sucks you in when it feels like home. But also, more generally at times when my sense of self or sense of purpose is being challenged and I enter existential crisis mode looking at the future.
That’s when the claws come out. That’s when I’m 100% agitated Jess – the personality that I’ve always known as the embittered old man – takes over the steering wheel. That’s when my emotions feel like they’re out of control, because every last breathing thing on this planet is trying to test my last nerve, and they’re doing it on purpose.
And, do you know how frustrating that is? I mean, after all the fucking bullshit I’ve already dealt with? IS it so impossible for things to just work out right for me? For people to just show up and do what they’re supposed to do for me? For basic consideration to be taken? For my expectations to be met? For even the slightest semblance of thoughtfulness on their part, considering all the things I’ve done for them already? I think if they could possibly understand how hard it was just to be ME, just to live this life, just to be stuck with this overactive, self-destructive, anxiety-drained brain and body – maybe everyone would finally give me the credit I deserve, take a little more caution with my feelings, and try to make my day even a tiny bit better.
Mhmmm. There’s my Covert Narcissist Narrative. It sucks, doesn’t it?
Yeah. I know it. I’m not proud of it. It stung to realize it… as in, I definitely went through a personal crisis throughout the course of having to admit it. But, uh, I survived, obviously. Seems like I’m going to make it, considering that was actually about two years ago.
There’s your final surprise – I’m not coping with those discoveries in the present.Anyone who needed to comment on my own relation to these recent episodes, you can calm down because you’re really late to the party.
The only difference between then and now? That I didn’t have the language to describe what I saw myself doing back in 2018 or 2019. I didn’t know about covert abuse, covert narcissism, or personality parts. Just that I was in a toxic relationship which – unsure which came first, the chicken or the egg – somehow involved me being a terror.
Don’t get me wrong, a terror who originally thought that I had every right to be a terror. And slowly had to come around to understanding this fucking lesson that I keep yelling about because I KNOW it to be absolutely true and absolutely necessary in my own journey – YOU HAVE TO BE ACCOUNTABLE FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS, EVEN IN THE WAKE OF A “UNFAIR” LIFE AND SUBSEQUENT MENTAL HEALTH DISORDERS.
No one had ever told me that before. I grew up being told the exact opposite, if that wasn’t explicitly stated enough times.
Now, with this new education, I can easily name SO many of the VulNarc characteristics in myself in the past. I can place those behaviors, too. This is the person I become when I’m in losing job situations with backstabbing coworkers, which makes me hate myself and get defensive. Also, when I’m in toxic romantic partnerships, which makes me hate everyone involved and get victimy. And when I’m around my mom in a traumatized state, which makes me hate the idea of living another single day on this planet and endlessly project onto others about myself.
And this is also the self- and everyone-hatred that made me go to therapy, in the first place.
Realizing that I didn’t like what I was seeing myself do – if I was really fucking honest about how it presented from the outside, not just focusing on how badly I was feeling to be driven to commit those narc crimes on the inside. That was a big motivator a few years ago. Letting go of how ashamed I was about myself, and actually tackling the problems creating the mental strain instead of denying and protecting them.
And everything has been a whole lot fucking easier since getting started. Again, the radical self-acceptance that has to take place in order to buck up and tell yourself, uh, maybe you’ve been the problem – it takes a while to build up. But once you’ve got it, I don’t think you’ll ever want to let it go.
So. There it is. There’s the big reveal of the episode, Fuckers.
Narcs breed new Narcs. I am not an NPD candidate, but I have presented with similar behaviors in the past. I’m sure, still, on my flimsier days in the present. I think it’s why I used to attract them like magnets – why they still start coming after me now… until I get back to being in a healthy place again, and we’re both repulsed by each other. Why I fall in line with my mom’s aggressive bullshit and self-sacrificing narratives… but also take on her attitude of “why doesn’t life just happen for me the way I want” in her presence.
And why I have such diverse feelings about Narcissists. Long before I started digging into this springtime research, I started getting the notion that they might not be purposeful narcs at all.
Do I despise them, on a broad level? Absolutely, because I’m good at hating myself AND hating anyone who hurts other people. Do I also feel sorry for them? Completely, because I really do think I understand where their shit behaviors come from. And it’s usually a place of identity confusion, a lifetime of challenges, and a lack of emotional education.
To make matters worse, like I said, I know how hard it is to come to terms with who you are long enough to commit to making changes. It essentially requires a full ego breakdown, so you can start rebuilding things without all the deluding attempts at old-me preservation. And, uh, I don’t think many of us want that, at face value.
Realizing you’re acting up is a big step. Giving yourself an honest appraisal for good and bad behavior isn’t comfortable. Finally coming to grips with the fact that you’ve hurt other human beings that you loved – whether you meant to or not…
It’s kind of a May Day event for anyone.
In my case, very literally.
WHEN did I fully start realizing that I was not acting as the person who I knew I really was? Winter of 2018. WHEN did I accept that my personality was out of control in my circumstances, it was toxic for everyone, and we were both going to lose indefinitely unless we split up our equally covert narcissistic mothers’ energies? Early spring of 2019. WHEN did I pull that fucking trigger, and REALLY start my trauma recovery journey – which included the creation of a CPTSD recovery blog? When I left the relationship with two bags of shit. May Day of 2019.
And that’s when things really changed for me. When I got away from the outside stimulation that was making recovery impossible. When I went into social hibernation and learned how to do things for myself again. When I stopped giving myself the old excuse that, “I had been through a lot, my problems were deep, dense, and dank, and I was deserving of someone to make up for the trouble I’d already seen.” That it was my job to be accountable for who I was and the future I wanted.
Apparently, if you’re listening to this and gaining any sort of healing from listening to my trauma teeth-grinding, that’s when things really changed for you, too.
Just – none of us knew it yet.
Moving forward together
SO, I’ve got a lot more to say on this. Don’t think I’m trying to skirt the issue about being a rehabilitating member of the “acting like mom when life feels unfair” gang. I’d just rather take it up in another episode, with more detail on the biological reasons on the “why.”
But there you go. Again, any of you wise-asses who only half-listen to the show to catch me in “gotcha moments…” which is very, very few of you… 1) you didn’t listen to the end of the covert abuse stigma episode and 2) I’ve been building up to this the whole time. Calm down and let me paint my picture. Sometimes you can’t see where I’m taking this mural over the course of a month.
Anyways, I don’t mean to be divisive. About any of this.
My hope is, these episodes about Vulnerable Narcissism and Covert Abuse don’t continue to rile up and separate us. That they aren’t wild accusation-dispensers for us to fling at our parents and our parents to deflect right back at us. That, instead, we can get a bit more honest about the similar trends that we’ve seen in our entire lives, from social contacts of all shapes and sizes, and from our own actions expressed when we’re in an ugly state of scrambling for what feels like survival.
Maybe we can start to honestly identify… How we CAN look in our less-than-finest moments. What narratives DO run through our heads when we feel unstable and abandoned. Why our voices and behaviors OFTEN are a little too close to mom’s for comfort.
And all the ways we either berate ourselves or compartmentalize the internal reckonings to escape the pain of knowing… this isn’t who we want to be. This isn’t who we’re sure we COULD be. This isn’t who we were BORN to be. This is who someone – or, a society of someone’s – TRAINED us to be.
So that, maybe, fucking hopefully, more of us can make the decision to commit to the help we need. To accept ourselves. To make lasting change, instead of expecting the world to. To break the endless abuse cycle. To quit making excuses for hurting others who will go on to hurt others because we were hurt ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. To stop another victimy voice from contributing to the abusive echo chamber that has normalized the whole generational experience.
Or, just to finally start living like the person that we were – that we still ARE – under the layers of fear, pain, and uncertainty about what that even means.
Let’s stop fucking our lives up. Let’s stop fucking each other up. Let’s stop fucking this world up for the next humans who are going to walk this planet. And let’s stop trying to blame them for our hard times, before they even have a chance to learn how to deal with their own.
Which, just to throw this in at the end (because what is a conversation about our parents without discussing how royally they fucked up the planet), is an extremely broad generational chasm we’ve fallen into. The death pit in between Boomers and Millennials, where we can’t afford to survive on a very practical level thanks to the troubles that were handed to us by the prior economy-builders. The “can’t get a job, a home, medical care, or out of debt” canyon that’s somehow our fault – and also a reason for our parents to further their CovNarc abuse when it comes back to negatively impact them.
Say, when they offer to share their 5 bedroom house with a grown child who’s restarting their educational and career goals, because the prior attempt was a desperate grasp for “just get any degree” straws leading to a professional dead end in the wake of our college degree oversaturation, lack of available paying positions, and rising costs of life on earth. And then perpetually demean said child for being in a position of being offered help, because “our generation didn’t move back in with mom and dad.”
Well, your generation didn’t need to. Because your mom and dad didn’t ruin the country. Only your sense of self, appeal to humanity, and distress coping skills. Which went on to destroy everything for your kids, inside and out. And now you judge them for all of your own handiwork.
Congratulations. You’re truly “the greatest generation.” I guess, because you fucked everything for everyone who would follow. Wipe out the competition by crippling the other earth attendees, and you get to proclaim yourselves the winners forever. Way to go.
And in the aftermath, we owe you forever for the scraps that you throw down just to say, “you never went hungry, you had it so good.”
Ugh.
I’m sorry to be a Boomer Blaster today. I’m sorry for pulling an episode that had important, potentially-healing purpose to it. But I’m not sorry for cutting the cord on this abuse-enabling mentality, after a lifetime of being inappropriately attached to mom like an extension of herself… by her design, but not through explicit planning of her own. Just through the cultural programming of her entire upbringing.
I guess I wanted to pop in today to say that things have recently been tumultuous. People have been challenging. But even in the springtime riots that mark my trips around a google calendar, I can see the good and the bad in everything that’s happening – and everyone they’re happening to.
I’m not going to continue to play the world’s tiniest violin for the past generation of Traumatized Mother Victims, but I also want to make sure that we aren’t standing on street corners, sneakretly begging for tips for the rest of our lives, either.
And that brings us to our big conversation on Thursday.
Because I’ve been in therapy for years, undoing my own destructive brain adaptations and fear-based defensive tendencies. There are always new wrinkles to iron out of my lifelong attempt at humaning responsibly, I’m far from completely unlearning all the nuances of my trauma-training.
But, you know, I seriously no longer consider myself a frequent flyer of Abuser Airlines. I think I understand relationships and the rules of autonomy now. I think that, for the most part, that boarding pass for controlling others to mediate my own loneliness and self-doubt has been returned back to the carrier.
And goddamn, if this spring time anti-abuse energy hasn’t reminded me of the phrase that all recovering or currently ailing CovNarc Co-Poilots might need to familiarize ourselves with.
“May Day, Motherfuckers.”
Now. Today we covered the fact that I’m guilty of behaving as a covert narcissist influenced abuser. In three days it’s going to be time that I stop playing the covert narcissist influenced victim. And – I’m sorry to say – that some of you guys do, too. But you’re not alone. We’re all going to do it together.
I’ll meet you here on Thursday, and we’re going to talk about this bankrupted travel agency for Traumatized Mother Victims. What’s happening next. Which gates are open. And how to book a new flight on TMFRs International.
I’ll see you guys then.