Letting go of an abusive or narcissistic child is tough. Hold space for them to mature but expect NOTHING. If they have a personality disorder — whatever the reason — loving them from a distance and getting on with YOUR OWN LIFE as a HUMAN (rather than as a parent) is CRUCIAL to Narcissistic Abuse recovery.
If the thought of them returning to your world continues to fill you with dread as the days, weeks, months, and years progress — maintain the enforcement of your own healthy boundaries.
The toxic shame you feel over “abandoning” a child that wants NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU has nothing to do with reality or with them. It has everything to do with shame lessons you were most likely taught since early childhood by people who actively and willingly enable abusers.
Having a child should NEVER be a death sentence for a parent. It does not imply indentured lifelong servitude.
Once a child is emancipated or an adult, a relationship with them is supposed to be loving, kind, respectful, and beneficial in a RECIPROCAL fashion.
If an adult child loathes a parent, finds their goodwill ANNOYING, and does nothing but take extreme emotional and financial advantage of a parent or family unit while they callously show an appalling lack of care, consideration, or appreciation?
END THE ENMESHMENT.
Once a person shows you who they really are at their core, believe them. No blood bond can cause a Cluster B thinker to value or appreciate having an ongoing, lifelong relationship with a loving, kind, and HUMAN parent.
Consider their betrayal and essential abandonment of you, as their despised and/or discard pile parent, as YOUR “Get out of Jail FREE” card.
Once they turn 18 and disappear or they do things like lie to your face, break personal trust, strive to socially shame and ridicule you, break financial or physical trust, they abuse a pet, they gaslight targeted marks in order to do things like manufacturing hateful triangulations between you and their love interests/friends/in-laws, they take the side of an abusive parent or toxic grandparent known for being INSANELY abusive, etcetera… let them go.
The pain they are likely to bring to your life and the situational abuse they coordinate as leader of a mob is not worth the strife of striving to maintain an unappreciated contact.
They may not have the physical ability (if they are over the age of 28) to love anyone except for themselves. If the neuroplasticity is simply not in the brain, the harder you try to get them to let go of vertical thinking the more you are likely to frustrate and abuse them.
[Realizing that trying to teach a Cluster B person or die-hard vertical thinker to let go of socially competitive thinking in order to “wake them up” is as productive as yelling at them and demanding they change their height or eye color.]
That may or may not be YOUR failure as a parent… but regardless of whose fault it is the youngster experienced trauma in youth, it’s their personal responsibility to own their own shit. If they are over the age of 12 and they do things like abuse or lie, the karma and social responsibility for their PERSONAL choices is on them.
As a human, protecting yourself from a Cluster B PERSON is the survival imperative. You simply cannot allow personal guilt to cause you, as an adult human, to enable another human being to abuse you.
A good litmus test for when it’s time to break away from a relationship is when you consider your child a stranger. If you met them on the street or at a social function TODAY would they be the kind of person you would want to start a close personal or professional relationship with straight out of the gate?
If the answer is HELL NO, then you know. Adult Children are ADULTS.
Honestly, who their bio family is ultimately does not matter in any way. Putting the loss of your physical, daily, personal relationship with them into proper, non-grandiose historical context, consider how many people have succeeded in life who were orphans, who had limited to no contact with family members, or who only see or speak to family members for a few hours or days in every decade.
For instance, consider the plight of immigrants who came to America in the 18th, 19th, and 20th-century specifically. Think of all the generations of second-born sons who left their families in Europe and moved to the United States, fleeing primogeniture in pursuit of narcissistic gains while abdicating taking personal responsibility for the continued success and caretaking of their birth family, family lands, and management of estate properties. And consider the plight of the young women who followed them.
Millions of immigrants started a new life, never looked back, and most never saw their parents or siblings or extended family again. Those folks are the people American culture tells citizens they are supposed to emulate.
Do you think their parents felt abandoned? Did their family members feel hurt, neglected, put upon, and abused because their relatives chose to follow their own quest to go on an adventure to alleviate boredom?
BOREDOM is at the core of most Cluster B people’s behavior. So is socially competitive thinking.
Individuals fleeing Europe to avoid religious persecution were motivated by a different agenda than those who came to the United States because they were insanely jealous of the firstborn sons who inherited the right to own family property.
The obsession with capitalism, when taken to an extreme, prompted many Narcissistic Abuse tactics to be employed by Cluster B thinkers to ensure their personal needs and desires were met. Ask a former slave family or women who were sold into the marriage equivalent of indentured servitude to understand more about the psychological phenomenon to which we are energetically referring.
Did it breed an epidemic rise in NARCISSISM and Sociopathy in modern culture? YES.
But, it is what it is. It’s what the kids at the time wanted… and all Americans have been culturally nurtured to overlook and ignore the inherent dysfunction.
NOW, with the biological ability to FEEL empathy waning, generations of human beings have been damaged. In 2015 researchers were finally able to prove that trauma can damage DNA in such a way that dysfunctional thought patterns and stress-related illnesses are actually inheritable.
But, adult children who are still able to self-reflect are evolving. Those who cannot self-reflect and process complex emotion while thinking are prone to situationally abusing others while genetically devolving.
Some adult humans grow out of the peer pressure to emulate Cluster B thinkers. But actual Cluster B people — those who are BIOLOGICALLY impaired — are unable to socially or emotionally mature.
It’s a tragic fact, but most Cluster B people calcify their personality type by or before the ripe old age of FOUR.
If you are reading HERE, chances are you are one of the empathic… regardless of your own parent’s behavior. If you have the ability to self-reflect and behave with empathy despite having been abused by your own parents or children and/or step-children, understand you have chosen WISELY.
Take a watch of the old Indiana Jones movie and give yourself a pat on the back for being smart enough and willing to pick the proper chalice.
Why?
Because it’s ALWAYS important to remember the map is NOT the territory.
How you think and feel about your personal relationship connections with any and every other human being on the planet is a reflection of your own internal map. If you were raised by enablers, abusers, or toxic thinkers, chances are it needs some corrections.
Give yourself permission to let go of an emotional attachment to BEING a parent first before considering trying to make a relationship with an adult child who has little to no respect for you as a human being work.
If you think it’s YOUR moral obligation to socially pursue an ongoing entanglement with a child who does not love, like, or value their relationship with you, understand the logical schema you are following due to earworms that an NLP savvy Abuse Enabler, family, or peer group put into your head about your own rights and responsibilities as a person or parent are reflections of their own elders thinking.
It’s not 1900 anymore. It’s damn sure not 1500, 1600, 1700, or 1800 either.
The life lessons about social skills taught generationally to help second sons, women, and elderly senior parents survive are likely, in the 21st century, to cause all adult children on the planet to fail to thrive. Be a better role model by letting go of the people who hurt you.
Abusive personality types are simply not the kind of people anyone wants or needs to be around. Tolerating abuse only ensures two things.
- The ABUSER is able to more efficiently and comprehensively socially, physically, and emotionally abuse their preferred scapegoat targets and collateral damage victims.
- The TARGET is likely to develop C-PTSD and have their own life, health, and happiness stolen from them when and if they leave the front door unlocked to the metaphoric bank, heart, and mind.
Let children who see no value in your human worth find happiness elsewhere. There’s NO commandment that says, “HONOR THY CHILDREN” and let one prone to pathological lying, conscience-free behavior choices, and a compulsive “gimme” nature on their own learn how to thrive and survive.
You be you. Take back your power, be the kind and loving person that you are, and when the urge to parent strikes? Volunteer as a Big Brother or Big Sister or at a similar non-profit organization as a mentor… or offer to babysit someone else’s children for a while.
Considering the number of human beings on the planet who would love nothing more than to have a parent or mentoring figure who loves and cares about them, give back to them. Let the Cluster B adult kids of the world do their own thing elsewhere.
Stay focused on being the best human being that you can be. And, when and if that happens to include the option of being able to parent, don’t let bad blood between you and your bio stop you from stepping up to the plate and helping another person’s biological replicant.
You don’t have to be blood-related to act as a loving stand-in for a child, young adult, or even an old person who needs a bit of mothering or advice from a sage elder or parent. You also don’t have to have children of your own who love or respect you in order to be or have been a good person or kind and loving parent.
All you have to be is a human being who loves themselves while simultaneously caring about and considering the well-being of other humans. So, while it might hurt to be pigeonholed into the role of scapegoat targeted parent to a Cluster B child or as a person deserving of exile and persecution by a brutally narcissistic and overwhelmingly toxic family unit, understand that once you stop caring about what they think it’s perfectly okay to mourn their loss.
You are not being a bad person when and if you give yourself permission to grieve the loss of a relationship with your own flesh and blood. Just remember — if they are Cluster B, the older they get, the more ruthless and Machiavellian all of them are going to be.
Remind yourself of that proven psychology truth when and if you feel waves of nostalgia wash over you. Love them from a distance, but grieve the loss of the relationship in a way that promotes their psychological well-being as well as your own.
They will NEVER find your kindness anything but annoying if they are spiritually and mentally broken.
You will NEVER find their abusive behavior or toxic thought patterns acceptable.
Once you grasp that you showing care, compassion, or concern for them only incites rage and infuriates them, leaving them and avoiding communication at virtually all cost is truly the most humane way to treat your relationship with them. Be there if and when they ask for clarification of a life or medical history detail, but aside from that?
If their behavior is abusive, understand they are grown adults abusing another grown adult. And that, dear friends and discard pile parents is simply a social posture that defies logic, is morally insane, can legally and spiritually be described as deplorable, and is ultimately simply beyond the pale.
If you are the parent of an adult child with a Cluster B personality disorder, understand going low to no contact with them is humane — the polar opposite of mindless, rash, stonewalling, rejecting, or callously narcissistic and anti-social personality disorder driven abandoning behavior.
Follow the Support for Abused and Discarded Parents page located at facebook.com/discardpileparents for ongoing moral support, daily insights, and more information about how to survive parent-child estrangement.
