u/RipAlarmed9024

It's been 6 months of nc with my parents and older sister, and I'm more convinced now than when I was told 30 years ago by a brilliant psychiatrist to break contact but couldn't that I will never re-enmesh/re-integrate/reconcile. The hardest part for me (and I've got so many other things going on including addiction and job loss and depression and AuDHD recent diagnosis) is that I moved to the same small town as my parents 5 years ago to get out of a bad situation in the city I was living in. The issue is that it was a lifetime of narc abuse then collapse, repeat, and it's been weaponized. I'm in my 50s and feel like my mother should know (not in a thousand-word essay but in a tight few-line email) that the break is not about punishing her, but about freeing myself. Even writing this, I know it's a bad idea. But it is so hard to feel resolved inside when my family performed as perfectly functioning when we weren't and I'm the bad apple rotting the entire family system.

Narcissistic parents do not metabolize insight. They weaponize it.

I thought of writing a long email to my mother who is haunting me and stalking me and has turned my entire family against me, but I asked myself which is the better option: 1 try to explain the pain of the past 50 years or 2 find every way possible to heal my nervous system, create safe relationships, build a life outside of validation, and then write my story, not for them, but for me.

I've been diagnosed in my 50s with AuDHD and CPSTD. I was an HSP child made into the scapegoat then fell into a shocking spiral of fawning, collapse, identity crisis, addiction, mental health ... adding up to extended family now really believing I was the problem all along. It's freaking lonely and dark to be rejected by your mother, but it's triple-threat when other diagnoses come into play that they can weaponize. What a world we live in. Hugs x

(TW: suicidal ideation; addiction; baby loss; childhood trauma)

I'm 53, turning 54 this month, and my life is not at all what I had hoped for, in fact, it's so much worse. Without getting into all the particulars, I am flat-out lost. I was a gifted but scapegoated child, and it literally destroyed my sense of self. I grew up in a performative, emotionally immature household with a controlling, overly critical mother and an alcoholic father. I only got diagnosed with AuDHD last summer, which explains a lot of my childhood behaviour, but it doesn't explain away the emotional abuse I received: stop doing that, stop being so sensitive, you're being dramatic, that never happened, that's your perspective. I made it through a fairly triumphant decade in my 20s -- working in national radio, at Rolling Stone magazine, trying my confident hand at being a foreign correspondent, working as a chef, writing a newspaper column . . . and then I got pregnant at 34.

I was deeply invested in making it work, but, in the end, the odds were against me. The mother wound I had from my own mother was amplified by her screaming at me that I was going to ruin my life and dragging me kicking and screaming to a clinic at 12 weeks. For many people who don't talk about or feel things as deeply as neurodivergent folks, this was the beginning of the end of my soul. Fast forward through decades of addiction and reckless behaviour (yes, I dated a heroin dealer who was HIV+ and carried a gun).

I finally carved a livable life for myself in a small town working remotely in a great paying job. I adopted a northern rescue and went hiking every day. Then a covert narcissist coworker showed up who wanted my job. Three years of dealing with this person with multiple medical leaves until I got fired in February. I started back down the path of addiction last December, so it wasn't a surprise, but it was a coping mechanism.

I went no contact with my family also in December (they live in the same small town), and now I am four weeks from my severance ending, and I don't and can't see a path forward. I was great at in-person interviews -- I'm genuinely warm and curious -- but automation for job recruitment has only enabled those who can fake it til they make it. I am on a downward spiral, but I don't want to die, I just don't know how to live in a world that (mostly) favours the charm and not the essence.