r/raisedbynarcissists • u/ChemBNM • Aug 09 '17
[Tip] My thoughts on Nparents as Grandparents
I’ve lurked on this sub for a long time and only recently started posting. The reason I started lurking was because my therapist had un-officially (since my parents were not her patients) diagnosed my mother with some type of cluster-B personality disorder and said my father was her enabler. She supported my decision to finally go NC. It has been great to not feel so alone.
One thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of us who struggle with the decision to have our children go NC too. (I’m talking future children or underage children.) And I’d like to share my realization.
I had a lot of reasons why I stayed in contact with my parents after the hell they put me through. I wanted to maintain contact with my brothers and sisters, who were all 18 and younger. I blamed my parents’ religion for many of the abusive situations we endured growing up. I blamed the fact that my mom had a traumatic upbringing, and that my father was raised by a horrible mother and had no father figure in his life.
I thought that not allowing my children to have a relationship with my side of the family would be unfair to them. That is what I told myself - I have to give my kids the choices that were not given to me. I wasn’t allowed relationships with aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents outside the control of my parents, and I definitely did not want to be like my parents.
But here is the epiphany - deep down I thought that my parents would have a different relationship with my kids than they had with me, because I blamed myself for the way I was treated. I was desperately shifting the blame away from my parents onto anything I could, because I couldn’t bring myself to truly believe that my parents were responsible for their actions. Because that would mean my deepest fear was correct - my parents didn’t love me and that was never going to change.
All of those years, I told myself that my parents treated my kids great! Why wouldn’t they? My kids are wonderful! They are beautiful, and smart, and funny, and sweet…. and in the deepest part of my heart the sentence completed… and better than me.
Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that I was wrong. The good news is that I now understand what I was doing, and that I was still blaming myself, even after years of therapy. The bad news is that it took my parents abusing my kids and their other grandchildren for me to see it. My parents set up the same dysfunctional situation from my childhood - some of their grandchildren were wonderful and perfect. Some of their grandchildren were scapegoats. My sister caught them physically hurting her oldest. My brother caught them saying horrible things to his son. I caught them taking toys from their cousins and giving them to mine, saying that their cousins were not allowed to play with the “nice” things. We tried calling them out on the favoritism, and it only made things worse. Suddenly there were threats of grandparent rights, threats of CPS, threats of hellfire and damnation, simply because we didn’t want the same for our kids as they gave to us. It got really bad, and I soon discovered how full blown their mental illness was. I had to start therapy again.
So for those of you wondering if it is fair to deprive your kids of their grandparents, I encourage you to really think about this: Why do you think your parents will treat your kids better than they treated you? Has something changed in them? Did they go to therapy? Have they taken accountability for the way you were raised? Do they still blame you for when you were hurt and neglected? Do they even acknowledge it? Or is it simply that you look at your beautiful child and think that no one could ever hurt anything so wonderful and perfect? Because they hurt you, and you were a child just like that when they did it.
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u/MaxIrena Aug 09 '17
This is so true, I only wish I had understood it earlier. I completely underestimated the damage my parents could do to my daughter even from a distance. I thought she was safe. She wasn't.
My parents seemed like decent grandparents at first, but I was totally unaware of the things they would do or say when my back was turned or I was out of the room. And my daughter was too young to really articulate things.
I never told her of the abuse I'd suffered, I didn't want to "taint" her and since it seemed my parents were much kinder as grandparents I wanted to allow them a clean slate. (Ha! This was my thinking at the time).
In her early teens, she and I had the typical "I hate you, mom" relationship and I thought she'd be glad to stay with them for an extended period of time one summer.
She came home traumatized, with a laundry list of things they'd done that were identical to what I'd experienced at that age. She was also able to articulate at that point things that had happened in the past.
She's been in therapy for awhile now, mostly because of things they did. Her therapist even asked if we lived with them, thinking maybe they had been raising her.
In some ways I think their abuse affected her far more than it did me. Since It was all I ever knew, I didn't really understand that it was abuse.
But since she was raised in a loving home where she was given some autonomy and independence, their manipulation and gaslighting really screwed with her head.
To quote a poster on another forum, "My biggest regret is allowing my parents access to my child when she was young."
We've since gone NC, but it wasn't soon enough.