Learning to live with the heartbreak of family betrayal is a difficult and time-consuming process, especially after enduring what might seem like or has truly been a lifetime of suffering at the hands of Domestic Abusers.
Doing so requires mindfulness, a hell of a backbone, and ultimately a positive attitude of gratitude.
But it is hard to feel happy about being abused — and it’s even harder to feel good about watching people you’ve known forever literally turn their backs on you when and if you out an Abuser.
Suggest something as outlandish as having all the family members come together to stop enabling a Cluster B family member, or to watch while you sit back feeling powerless to defend yourself from smear campaigns started by an angry, socially toxic con artist who is actively preying on you or your family member(s) and LOOK OUT.
Chances are you will immediately become persona non-grata at every family function, smear campaigned against in the most brutal of ways, and the stories you hear told about yourself won’t even sound familiar to you.
Such people are commonly known in self-help social circles as Flying Monkeys. When and if they band together to support or socially back a stronger predator, the Narcissistic Abuse tactic they are using is referred to as mobbing — a pitchfork in hand, led by a fork-tongued abuser style mob ready to do or say anything they can to ensure that whoever is targeted for exile.
Their primary goal and pleasure in life is to control other people’s psychology, emotions, and personal lives. Preferred scapegoat targets and anyone who purposefully or inadvertently become whistleblowers are socially shamed to the point of no return with regard to being functionally allowed to be allowed to live life with dignity.
The number one goal of Abusers and their Flying Monkeys (a.k.a. ENABLERS) is to ensure all Narcissistic Supply sources remain under their constant psychological control.
If a target is financially, spiritually, and emotionally crushed, the hope in every abusive social predator’s basket of deplorable dreams is to have their targeted Narcissistic Abuse victims return to the fold, begging for love, affection from the predators, and the entire clan’s social re-acceptance and mercy.
It’s a heartbreaking and life-changing experience for most, either being abused by narcissistic people or watching those to whom they have always supported and done nothing but love and trust align with people who situationally abuse.
But honestly, it’s the name of the game. ALL — and we do mean ALL Cluster B people manufacture triangulations, pathologically lie to alleviate boredom, and will do or say whatever it takes to self-promote while destroying another person’s life, mental health, and spiritual state.
Narcissistic Abuse is always about one person having power and control over another person’s psychology and emotions. Nothing good ever comes of it, either for the abused or in the cosmic sense for the Abuser.
People who betray friends and family members in order to elevate their own social status in and among toxic peers or toxic family members are guilty of a double moral crime — overlooking and subsequently enabling abuse.
Mobbing — meaning ganging up to talk trash, menace, and humiliate a target while banding together and taking pride from feelings of social inclusion — is truly one of the least attractive sides of human psychological compulsion to witness. Especially when you are the Frankenstein monster of sorts being hunted by toxic family members or targeted.
Flying Monkeys take several forms when and if they elect to jump on the bandwagon in order to make themselves feel like part of the “in crowd”. In their manner of vertical (rather than horizontal) thinking, in order for them to feel successful, there has to be a winner — but more importantly, they must then totally socially, personally, and most oftentimes professionally annihilate anyone they deem a LOSER.
Some conformist adult children willingly align themselves with social predators in order to themselves escape abuse.
Others do so because they feel with another sibling or person out of the way, the charming Abuser will bestow on them something akin to “Golden Child” status.
Hoping to be treated like they are worthy, such people tend to emulate the abuser… ruthlessly striving to prove how BAD their sibling or a rival is for doing nothing more wrong than being born or breathing.
Most conformist children secretly hate or deeply mistrust Abusers but will suck up compulsively in order to do things like jockeying for more favorable positioning with elderly people. Seriously — CONFORMIST ADULT CHILDREN who have been raised by or around toxic peers are quite simply NEVER good people.
Many are readily willing to admit behind the back of the Matriarch or Patriarch of the family unit they seek to impress that they are hoping that when that person or couple dies, they (the Abuse Enabler) will have ingratiated themselves enough to sidewinder bypass an abuse victim in order to financially steal the inheritance.
It’s all about feeling like THEY are more powerful, somehow smarter for being Machiavellian, and to prove to those they hurt that they — as the former lackey, are somehow entitled to wear their abusive parent’s imaginary crown.
Whatever the case, family members who elect to overlook and enable abuse do something far eviler than the two karma inducing things enabling and overlooking abusers do.
When Enablers choose to socially and publicly align with situational abusers who lie about the moral crimes they commit in secret, they themselves actually BECOME ABUSERS.
How do you know when they have been socially lured to embrace the dark side of the personality force?
When and if they:
- engage in the act of mobbing
- or play both sides of the fence,
- spying
- and lying to both sides
- while rubbernecking
- and fostering more social mayhem.
By compounding pre-existing things like sibling rivalries, parent-child estrangement, or fully artificially devised, sabotaging triangulations, you know both who they are by nature as well as the type of people they choose to be based on their own desire of personality qualities to nurture.
That’s right — Flying Monkeys who support abusive, dishonest, lying, sadistic, or covertly manipulative personality types, simply by their choice to stand on the side of a predator over rationally and empathically validating a victim and seeking to stop enabling social predators, become something called ABUSERS BY PROXY.
And yes, that’s a moral crime — something that is akin to being the “getaway driver” for a bank robber. Make no mistake about it.
There truly is no other interpretation. It’s dangerous to minimize, overlook, or to try to sweep bad behavior under the rug when and if you are confronted with having to deal with social predators.
Moral crimes are those social injustices that no one can quite seem to hold another person socially or legally accountable for, in general. Deplorable behavior is deplorable whether a person can be or is ever arrested for it or not.
Moral crimes are things like promoting or enabling hate speech, telling lies to avoid personal responsibility, misleading friends and family members about private action as well as falsifying public image, and doing things like simply behaving in public one way while acting totally different in private whenever.
In close-knit families with many siblings, toxic parents strategically triangulate children and grandchildren.
Triangulation is meant to foster sibling rivalry, and most toxic senior citizens who have raised children to socially and emotionally compete for their approval, attention, and affection (as well as protection) themselves typically report having been parented in a Narcopath style by their own elders.
What’s more, toxic senior citizens who have raised families that divide tend to report that they grew up estranged from their own siblings emotionally, physically, or psychologically. That’s not by accident, either.
The more toxic a parent — especially a mother figure or female role model — the more likely siblings are to have been socially nurtured to think like conformists, competing with targeted or scapegoat family members for the proverbial one-upmanship status Cain and Abel already tried.
Narcissistic mother figures tend to thrive socially and emotionally by pitting their children and grandchildren against one another. The more a child strives to win favor with the parent, the more likely the other siblings are to feel less loved, less appreciated, less valuable, and ultimately LESS LIKED.
Having parents who like you — rather than simply barking out hollow terms that they love you — is a huge deal. People who grow up to have close personal relationships with their parents as friends tend to have the most stable families and personally fulfilling home lives.
But people who grow up with role models that declare stupid colloquialisms like “Because I’m your mother and I said so, that’s why!” in anything other than a truly joking, loving tone are likely to feel the sting of their parent’s toxic thought patterns and accepted belief systems. This phenomenon tends to produce in an adult child a socially and psychologically perceptible sting.
Nasty parents will smear campaign against an offspring the very same way a toxic adult child will do all they can to socially and emotionally target and invalidate a sibling with whom they have always felt less kinship and more rivalry. If the Golden Child of the family does something to displease a parent, watch how fast narcissistic and anti-social family members will slide right into position themselves as the new preferred favorite while hoping to keep the parent functionally estranged from a sibling!
Why would they do such a thing? Beyond the obvious SELF STROKING OF THEIR OWN EGOS, the biggest suck-ups in the family are typically those status-oriented, socially and emotionally competitive family members who are above all else greedy and obsessed with WINNING.
That’s where betrayal comes into play, as people with Covert Narcissistic tendencies who harbor secret ill will against a family member or close personal friend tend to start sucking up copiously.
The pattern includes former spouses of adult children sucking up to former in-laws in an attempt to socially promote themselves while they rubberneck and meddle in their former love interest’s life, people who see senior citizens as weak-minded and easily able to be manipulated psychologically and emotionally into leaving themselves or their own children money in wills, and those who just plain don’t like an abuse target personally (but have always kept that fact a secret in order to avoid that person finding out they were two-faced, self-centered, and ethically duplicitous).
Parents who abuse their children often raise at least one in four of their children to be abusive. They persistently tend to enable that person, while showering them with compliments and absolutely unwavering social protection.
Parents who have several children raise runners, lost children, rebels, and golden children. The Abuser in the family (as the adult offspring most likely to conform to the abusive parent’s Cluster B thinking) does not necessarily take on the role of Golden Child, however, in the family structure.
That title tends to be afforded to the most self-interested and self-centered of all the siblings. Golden Children tend to strive to please and impress their toxic parents by sucking up, speaking one way to their face and another completely behind their back.
Understand that this is the personality type most likely to manufacture chaos, to betray their sibling’s confidences, and to ruthlessly do whatever it takes to make sure their material and social status is secured.
Sometimes that person is the adult child of a toxic parent, notably a conformist or Golden Child by both nature and nurture.
But it could be the sibling of a toxic parent, an ex-husband or an ex-wife, a grandchild who takes after the Cluster B grandparent by genetic nature, or a person who has hung around and weaseled their way into the family network with the sole intent of spying, sabotaging interpersonal relationships, and compulsively seeking “validation” as a person who matters to the targeted family for years.
Noting that Abusers lie, blame shift, victim shame, and do or say anything they can to make people like them while they strive to socially destroy the reputation of a targeted Narcissistic Abuse victim, weak predators who suck up to Cluster B personality types tend to have a rude awakening in later years.
As senior citizens, people with full-blown personality disorders or extreme entitlement issues tend to get old without ever socially or emotionally maturing. What that means is, once the nicest people in the family have been “run off”, that the care of the elderly falls into the laps of those the least inclined to give up their own lives, lifestyles, money, or time to do it.
This places the toxic senior in a more vulnerable position than many of them who realize the reality of what they have done typically care to admit. If they were Somatic Narcissists when they were younger, age and failing health issues tend to dysregulate them psychologically and emotionally speaking quite a bit.
Most children who are targeted for abuse by a toxic family self-identify with preferred scapegoat status. Parents encouraging siblings with more aggressive personality types to pick on and abuse emotionally sensitive, thoughtful, and reflective children tend to end up stuck living with their nastiest offspring or shuttled off to places like assisted living facilities or nursing homes rather than being cared for lovingly and compassionately by their “overly sensitive” adult child types.
Children of toxic parents have tough life choices to make when it comes to deciding how to handle parenting strife. If adult children are toxic themselves, many relish at the opportunity to abuse their senior citizen age parent in private at every opportunity.
Why?
Because Cluster B people are simply all alike. Being able to abuse a parent who abused or neglected THEM as children is their ultimate joy, “victory dance”, and pride in life.
But if that parent gets savvy and wise to their toxic adult children’s (or toxic adult grandchildren’s) mind game, chances are incredibly high that their own narcissistic streak will let them go out on an emotional high note.
All of them — whether 30 or 80 — will tend to revert to playing childish psychological games to drive their caregivers crazy. Most, when and if they can gain access to a lawyer or accountant, will do things like move money around in secret and do things like write people in and out of wills in secret — so when they finally DO kick-off, they have the last laugh burning people who traded valuable years of their lives and countless dollars trying to ensure their comfort.
That’s the most common horror story reported by children of all ages whose parents had Cluster B personality disorder issues.
So many of them write the people who care for them the most out of their wills in secret or wipe people’s names off life insurance beneficiary lists with a vendetta agenda or out of pure ill-intentioned spite that is like meeting a unicorn when and if a loving adult child says they were well taken care of or provided for by a nasty parent when they die.
Take for example the Celebrity Narcissist news story about Aaron and Tori Spelling. When Aaron died, he was worth a fortune. But do you think he left his fortune to his daughter Tori?
No.
Aaron Spelling left his mansion, the bulk of his wealth, and complete control of his estate and holdings to his Somatic Narcissist wife Candy. Not to the mother of his children, mind you. To an evil Narcissist he trusted to do the right thing as the executor of his last will and testament, a woman expected to fairly distribute his personal property and holdings.
But guess what.
Mama Candy decided that her beloved husband’s daughter deserved virtually nothing. Candy kept the mansion. Candy kept the art. Candy kept the house. Candy kept the furnishings. Candy kept the stocks and bonds and financial assets. Candy, Candy, Candy, Candy, Candy…
And Tori? The daughter Aaron treated and raised like a Golden Child, doted on, and paid more attention to in life that he did the wicked wife?
Guess what she inherited after spending a lifetime following her father’s orders, striving her best to please and impress him? Bupkis.
Yes, you did read that right.
Unbeknownst to Tory, when her father married Candy, Candy — a Somatic Narcissist as his lawful wife — stood to inherit EVERYTHING. Trusting her to behave ethically was Mr. Spelling’s biggest mistake. Either that, or he was one of the meanest and most toxic rich parent snakes alive.
Tory ended up net gaining roughly 800K plus a carload of items from her father after spending her entire life thinking that both she and her own children would be financially protected, safe and provided for in life. To some, that might sound like a windfall of cash — until you realize that Tori’s father left over 600 MILLION DOLLARS in estate holdings, micromanaged and kept for her own personal use by his greedy, rapacious, and narcissistic spouse.
Now, some toxic thinkers raised to read greed into our above statements are likely to say a parent owes a child nothing when and if they die.
But we’re not talking about parents who never lead children or adult children down the primrose path of believing if they allow parents to dominate their time, ruin their marriages, destroy their own relationships with their own kids while striving to please their unpleasable parent, and spend literally decades being verbally and personally abused by a parent who dangles things like “family honor” and sentimental possession inheritances in front of children in order to manipulate and savagely control their adult children’s lives.
We’re talking about nasty people who hold things like personal property from ancestors and family photos hostage.
We’re talking about parents who themselves pulled Candy Spelling maneuvers with trust funds left for grandchildren with the sole aim of easing their OWN financial and physical burdens in life.
We’re talking about parents who are so toxic that never one during the course of their natural-born life did they do a single nice thing for a child without that child being pledged into indentured servitude for life. And we’re also talking about parents who — for WHATEVER they say is or was their reason — never one put their own child or adult child’s current or future-based needs above their own sense of material comfort or social pleasure in life.
To be told daily that if you just follow a parent’s orders, take their personal life advice, and fall into line makes you a part of the family is hard enough… but toxic parents who use money and sentimental property possessions as a weapon or tool to manipulate their adult children into kissing their ass for 80 plus years based on the promise that the time they trade doing so (as lost fiscally productive years) will be “made up for” when and if inheritance time comes near can truly leave an elderly parent’s primary social and emotional caregiver and companion unprepared.
That means no matter how much a disenfranchised offspring who is and has been nothing historically but a sensitive, emotional, loving, kind person striving to help their own parent of the nuclear family of birth improve and elevate their conscious connection is accused of being “greedy” or “selfish” for feeling hurt when and if they are financially or socially shunned, the accusation is based on an illogical presumption that the same things motivate an Empath or HSP [Highly Sensitive Personality type] as does a person whose brain bio-mechanically operates in such a way that they socially, emotionally, and psychologically typifies that of a person who is by nature or nurture a Cluster B.
You see, the primary motivator is LOVE seeking validation and ultimate harmony for most HSP individuals. Living life from a high EQ as well as IQ perspective tends to produce mature thinkers, noting that someone who is chronologically age 12 is likely to be twice as mature as a 50-year-old person who has a personality disorder like NPD, HSP, BPD, or a truly anti-social ASPD personality.
Be mindful that toxic parents raise messed up children at best. That includes scapegoats, children who rebel as black sheep of the family, those who enable while basking in Golden Child status with glory, and abusive conformists who take after their rotten mother or toxic father figures, too.
As such, the recommendation is to depersonalize abuse, disengage from a social relationship with any person who sucks up to a known Abuser, and take a life skills tip from those who are primarily self-centered, shallow, and egocentric.
Protect your OWN interests physically and financially. Stop sending all your retirement money and savings to help buy gifts for a mother who gives back little (if anything) and appreciates NOTHING. Stop taking crap from your angry and verbally abusive dad who was never there for you as a child but now demands you enable your toxic mom to abuse your fiscally, socially, emotionally, and financially.
Walk away from that nasty grandparent who did nothing but try to get you to disrespect your own loving parent while they compete with their own child for YOUR affection as their target possession acquisition.
The money you stand to inherit will never replace the trust and (honestly) unconditional love of a kind-hearted parent.
It also won’t undue karma you create for yourself when and if you choose to accept the 30 pieces of silver a toxic abuser offers you to become their pet Flying Monkey — using and abusing YOU by pretending to genuinely care for YOUR long term best interests when all they really want to do is make sure your betrayal of a parent makes YOU an Abuser By Proxy, breaking the heart of your loving mom or devoted father.
And by all means, if your sister or brother treated you terribly as a child, don’t waste one moment of your time worrying about making nice with them in order to please an enabling parent.
Let mom or pop take over the role of trying to deal with them — something they failed to do when you were kids, leaving them free to situationally abuse while parents did their own thing like sit at cocktail parties, avoid family responsibilities by claiming they “had to work”, spent countless hours avoiding true parenting responsibilities by engaging in busy work, or they played golf at the country club with absolutely zero care, concern, or remorse!
If a sibling showed signs from a young age of developing a Cluster B personality disorder in their childhood years, chances are that without serious behavior management and family-supported proper socialization of a child that they grew up to have “bona fide” personality disorders.
Early predictors include children likely to develop Narcissistic Personality Disorder showing signs of having had Oppositional Defiant Disorder during their middle school and teenage years and kids likely to develop Anti-Social Personality Disorder having exhibited all the traits of little people who had Childhood Conduct Disorder.
Parents who have Cluster B are easy to spot. They glorify themselves, act with raging entitlement issues, tend to be the first people to point out why everyone they come into contact with owes them respect and should treat them like royalty, and they will be quick to point out everything in the world wrong with everyone but themselves — especially taking great delight in socially or emotionally shaming and publicly humiliating you.
Identifying a Cluster B sibling requires honest forensic psychology work. If you do an inventory of memory, chances are that your sibling’s personality by the time they were age 6 was fully formed, whatever it was at that stage of the game is exactly where they are most likely to revert to by core nature when and if stress forms in them.
Both parents and their toxic adult children tend to revert to raw, more primal “id” states of explosive rage-a-holics and become more (rather than less) sinister and self-centered as they age.
Time is never the friend of a Narcissist, and it damn sure never favors a Sociopath, Histrionic personality type, or person who shows symptoms of having Borderline Personality Disorder, either.
If you are expecting a Cluster B parent or a sibling to mature as they age, to realize the error of their ways, and to make your own brutal life history up to you in the end, you might want to consider buying that bridge in Brooklyn rumored to be for sale by toxic parents for YEARS.
Bridge the gap intellectually between what the reality of personality profile traits for Cluster B people and the Cognitive Dissonance inspired dream that you have that your parents and family members love and want what is best for you in order to save yourself from having the proverbial rug pulled out from under you.
Learning how to detach from the dream of having a family that loves and supports you is the hardest part.
But once you realize that the nicer you are to Cluster B predators you are, the more likely they are to loathe, abuse, and ridicule you, the faster you will be able to celebrate your first birthday — 12 months after going NO CONTACT with any person who enables, enacts, excuses, or willfully chooses to self-promote while deliberately and consciously overlooking Narcissistic Abuse issues.
The faster you come to realize that when and if a toxic family unit comes bonding together to show solidarity in targeting one or more family members for Narcissistic Abuse, they accomplish one very real thing only in their attempts to socially undermine, psychologically destroy, and completely emotionally invalidate you. They pledge allegiance to the continuation of toxic family dysfunction.
What that means is, whatever time and money you lose is well spent to have such low-rent, vile-natured, morally insane people out of your life. Learning to live with family betrayal is something that takes time, patience, daily reflection, and above all else a strong self-help themed forensic psychology education.
With any luck the blood money and personal self-aggrandizement they engage in, treading on the backs of fallen, more emotionally sensitive and morally righteous family members who end up spending countless hours in agony, ruminating over the pain caused to them by people who by blood allegiance should have felt morally compelled to both love and protect them… with any luck, the Karma bus won’t be gentle when and if it’s driver comes back around for them.
And no — to hope that a person who harms you is held personally accountable for their actions is not wrathful. It’s trusting the universe to handle its business, noting that nice guys finish last for a PURPOSE.
For some, that purpose is to have enough time on the proverbial life pond to heal. For others, it is likely to land them in the loving arms of their creator after death, knowing they lived a good life striving to be a good person rather than acting like a grab-me-gotcha personality who relentlessly strove to one-up others by cheating, lying, and backstabbing with zeal.
But be hesitant to spend too much time wishing, thinking, or hoping a person or peer group that abused or actively strives to invalidate your fundamental human rights as a person “gets theirs”. After all, the more time you spend judging their motivations, intents, and misdeeds, the less time you have to spend purposefully designing the next stage of your own emotionally freed and well-balanced life.
When and if extreme feelings of emotional toxicity, moral outrage, and sourceless anxiety arise, go back to the basics. Read a self-help article written by an expert on dealing with Cluster B personality types. Check out a new research article about how to successfully cope with or self-manage C-PTSD issues. Do some yoga, go for a walk, scream into a pillow, or cry it out in a bathtub filled with sparkling, clean, healing waters and 2 big cup fulls of magnesium replenishing Epsom salts.
“Feel the feels…” as Spartan Life Coach Richard Grannon might say… or laugh their ridiculously hurtful, patently obvious attention-seeking and grandiose behaviors off as the wise young YouTube guru from someplace like Self Care Haven advises. Then, think things through.
If you are living in the present, the past helped create you. If you live in the now, look around wherever you are right now, at this very moment. Unless someone is making a Jack Nicholson face, wielding an axe, and busting through a door to try to physically murder you, chances are you can list 10 things you are happy about, feel positive about, or are absolutely grateful for having today.
And that’s how you do it. That’s how you survive.
Let the emotional angst caused by Narcissistic Abuse wash through rather than sticking to you. Live life 200 feet ahead of you at a time, just as the author of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” creator Jack Canfield advises people to do.
And no matter what, remember this one thing…
NEVER RUN BACK TO THE PEOPLE THAT HURT YOU WHEN AND IF YOU SEEK EMOTIONAL VALIDATION.
The only validation you need is recognizing what is and what is NOT Narcissistic Abuse. After recognizing that, do a forensic analysis of yourself as it related to having been affected by your life experiences.
You are who you decide to be — and whichever wolf you choose to feed in your own inner psychology is the core personality most likely to become the dominant one, fast.
Be grateful for the very real fact you yourself are unlikely to be sucked into making things like other people’s personal life dramas worse by engaging in acts of mobbing. Count your lucky stars if you understand why inheritance is about validating love and care for the person inheriting, eschewing things like greed and blood money.
Then, be perfectly happy to strike the first match when and if it’s truly the right time in life to burn bridges with people you in no, way, shape or form would ever be physically or emotionally safe being around.
Those kinds of people — no matter WHO they are or THINK they are — have absolutely no reason or right to rent space in your head, let alone to someday stage a hovering coup-style attempt to return.
