raised in the darkness

[Guest guest]

i was thinking tonight about how i was raised and the effect the extreme

narcissism of both parents has had on me. I was watching " Last Chance Highway "

on Animal Planet and it was very overwhelming to me watching this real estate

agent sweep into a pound in Mississippi and rescue about 20 dogs from death row,

and adopt them all out. I really cried alot watching this, because it just moved

me so much to think that there are people in the world who live for greater

causes and the darkness of the borderline/narcissism that I grew up in cast such

focus on the shortcomings of everyone in our family. there was constant

criticism and dissatisfaction with everything in our family. there was constant

grief and arguments and negativity. it was just a perfect storm of every

negative emotion known to man all the time.

I watched this show tonight and I felt robbed because I never knew people lived

this way. I never knew that people gave of themselves so freely growing up. i

learned that everything was horrible and terrible, and that my family was very

put-upon and unfortunate. I grew up believing that my family was poor, and it

wasn't until I reached adulthood that I learned that we were in no way poor. We

were not rich and my father had a working class occupation but he was paid well.

His personality disorder kept him from staying at any one job for more than a

few years and we moved alot. he was self-employed for a while but during that

time he made good money.

I am just so in touch tonight with how my parents painted literally EVERYTHING

black, not just me and sometimes the other kids. The whole world was an awful

place. And they are still this way. And they mistreat each other on a daily

basis. I grew up being told that my family was literally 'cursed' and nothing

would ever work out for us.

It's striking to me because it made it clear how this had affected me not just

on a relationship level but also in regard to my outlook on the whole world. I

was taught to have a negative perspective and outlook on life. i was taught that

things were bad and would only get worse. I was taught not to try, because if I

did manage not to fail, something unforseen would come along and mess things up

anyway. In short I was so full of these negative aspersions that it would have

never occurred to me to live a life like this woman on the show, who said she

spent almost $80,000 of her own money last year paying vet bills for rescued

animals. It's like a paradigm shift....I feel so cheated, really, that I was not

taught to look outside myself and my own little world and see the big picture. I

couldn't look for some way in which I could help the world to be a better place,

because I was quite literally told that I was useless, no good, a complete screw

up, and would never succeed at anything. And those were some of the nicer things

that have been said by the parental units. They wanted to make me afraid of my

own power because for whatever reason it scared them. so they taught me to be

powerless and ineffective. just seeing someone like this woman on the show using

what little power she does have to make the world a better place and affect so

many lives if really a contrast to the darkness I grew up in.