A Note to the Survivors/children of narcissistic parent(s)

People who feel they are entitled for respect because they have aged, or that they had suffered a lot in their past and hence feel deserving of others respect, and who blame others and not take self responsibility where it warrants are not only emotionally immature but are also narcissists.

For them, their self image is everything and they want that others respect and look upto that image they have in their mind or have projected it onto others minds through skillful interpretation of their emotions and feelings conveniently in order to retain their image. This in turn implies that they have to continue to retain a a sense of  victimhood or herohood wherever possible and not outgrow that as they need to keep people working for them in whatever way they are related to the narcissists.

Everything works and it works for the good of narcissists according to their life experiences. Be it poverty, health issues, relationship issues, they can manipulate it in such a way that they continue to remain the unsung heroes that they don't mind blowing their own trumpets or exaggerating their struggles just to carefully present it in such a way that it is all the others fault and conveniently dodge taking personal responsibility for anything regarding these situations.

And the sons and daughters who are the real victims of such 'heroes' who don't have a choice but to respect such parents for respect's sake as they are never loved for love's sake unconditionally as children. It's a tiring feeling to steer oneself clear from the heavy layers of image building for the children of narcissists as it's complicated to separate their own individual feelings from their parents as children get sucked or drawn into the parents image building activity from childhood, and children are impressionable at that. And even as they grow older they feel helpless some times or feel choiceless but to love their parents(as the parents don't outgrow their self image which they have preserved all along and expect their children to respect that image) and not bring upon any misunderstandings in their relationship with their parents for this reason.

The mirror can only reflect the truth as is but for a narcissist, the mirror of selfhood has their dramatic retelling and reliving of experiences and making others believe in this stuck reflection for years and years. Now, any ounce of criticism or a pointing at truth at their direction that things have not been so bad after all for instance would break this self image of 'victim herohood', and this they will not allow no matter to what great extent they can go to preserve their heroic tales and the standard way to react would be to make people feel guilty for bringing up the truth of their (the narcissist's) immaturity in the present times. 

Narcissists may have crossed many a mile in their lives but the fact that they use others to get to where they want to go and that does not exclude their children is the painful truth and the narcissist's journey in short. To go along in their journey is not a journey of self discovery for the children of narcissists but a journey of getting lost and to understand how far they have come away from themselves is like looking at a lost cause. But to personalize that lost cause by being mindful to it and setting up boundaries wherever possible and going deep within one's life to unravel the uniqueness of being an individual self is the best form of self care that becomes crucial for the survivors or children of narcissistic parents.

All is not lost yet and don't just lose your will to live to the fullest is my reaching out to the children of narcissistic parents. 

 

Mind Maintenance

 The body holds memories of trauma, physical or emotional. Mantras act as the interface for dissolving those painful memories that seem lie dormant in pockets in our bodies and the sounds that emerge from the seed mantras, whether you listen to them or chant, seem to awaken the pockets and stir them until they get clean and get restored as pure spaces in the body.

The constant bombarding of sounds from the seed mantras can uproot one's knots that interfere with the patterns of day to day living. For instance "Om Dum Durgayei Namaha" is an example of toxic repellent where dirt gets accumulated in the form of thoughts and festers the consciousness to get toxic. It's a slow poison, our toxic thoughts, and time to time detoxing like these beej mantras help unearth them from the dark crevices of our minds and bodies and make us feel clean from within.

Our minds become the seat of mindful channelizing and tuning with our reality, moment to moment as we feel driven and know where we are trying to go. It's like the mind becomes the vehicle by which we move with our lives from one point to the other or also get stuck and keep blaming the vehicle for not taking us faster and making what we desired for to happen. Vehicle maintenance is part of the journey and the journey of a lifetime needs all the more discipline and awareness to understand the signals that how fast are we speeding or how much we can slow down to keep the movement nevertheless going. In which direction we want to go and what is the point we are trying to reach can all be understood if we keep track clearly instead of going haywire in all the directions and not reach anywhere.

Therefore one's consciousness is the inner compass to rely on and maintenance upkeep of the mind is the way to do so.

Spirituality is Unconditional love

 Spirituality without self transformation is not true spirituality. The essence of the all knowing God who manifests as truth and sweeps one's mind off all the layers that are patterns conditioned by one's past is the all encompassing feeling of being protected from it and becoming embodying of His essence through mind and body. As the presence and inclusion and experiencing God is not an outside experience, it begins to resonate more and more  that He is within and that all changes happen from within. One's mind being vulnerable to outside influences, to interrupting thoughts, to distractions from surroundings, from technology, from one's family and so on would just be challenges that come and go but would not feel like they change you or deviate you from your alignment with God - that's the constant despite everyday life situations.

To come to this realization is so self fulfilling and complete by itself that all those situations, memories that made you get stuck to traumatic life experiences from past, differences in expectations from relationships and their disappointments and so on, health challenges, anxieties, worries about future, they all come together but do not have the grip to become cohesive or random knots that seem to block you from within to draw in the essence of your own true self. And so, to be cleaned, flushed, and energized by Muruga's (My life changing God) compassion, His will combined with my surrender to work on healing from within has been like being gifted with a second chance to start living my life all over again.

What is gone is gone, but what remains is the unconditional love to God for all the good things that have happened, and for the not so good and unexpected things that have happened, and the learnings that they have given me is the ability to trust myself that I can keep the faith in Him no matter how life turns out in future - being present with Him as I write this is all that counts.

Discover your true courage

 What it takes to discover true courage is when you come face to face with your fears and are brave enough to share your vulnerabilities with others. Denial of one's vulnerability adds more and more stress to normalize being a human. 

For me frequent migraine headaches meant I was walking on egg shells with my body and the stress from a dysfunctional and crowded joint family meant walking on a landmine where anything happens anytime. It's like I can never be too careful with a highly sensitive system and owing to fight or flight in each of us, I chose to flee or disconnect with my body as pain sensitivity for a spectrum of my health issues(Migraine was one of them) was significant, and my quiet struggle to process with rising fears that ebbed with numbing the pains from time to time through allopathy, homoeopathy medicines mostly was the quiet before another raging health storm that upturned any sense of stability and relatedness to reality that I wanted to establish. I fought this feeling of helplessness but it didn't quite help. It just added more emotional numbing and was woken up from it through physical pain, discomfort and vice versa, as if one feeds another in turns.

I just leaned more and more on numbing myself and not through any substances but overthinking, fantasizing, daydreaming, and floating like disconnected from myself in a vacuum just kept me sustaining through any unforeseen episodes of health issues. I started to relate myself or be defined by my health problems as if my adapting to that would help me stay in survival mode and as I thrived on negative expectations, my highly sensitive intuitions were keyed to alert me before the actual pain episodes start as if proving to me that I was right after all about having to go through this issue for this day. 

Fear before incurring bouts of headache with an exhaustive episode of nausea, vomitings, dehydration left me with no energy to even feel hopeful for good health in the coming days as the next step or steps in the coming days would be to sidestep as much as I can to avoid getting caught in this knot that I seemed to not let go and kept getting wound up in it.

All this struggle to seem to do well in the intermittent time when there were no migraine attacks meant putting on a fake positive attitude and feeling so lonely and empty as if I was the only one in this planet going through this, and my world which I considered to be my family just went around and round me just observing, worrying, dominating, criticizing, unhealthily comparing me with my peers, my cousins, and when I got sick, with my late father (my mother would do that) and just letting me be with my overwhelmed inner world that was stretched and torn from all the overthinking and anxious to feel normal again pattern.

To get it that this is also called trauma and an unhealthy attachment to the way I had conditioned myself mentally owing to lack of support from my mother who is a single parent by the way and who I felt obligated to be good enough for all the money she put in for my medical costs as a working woman made me just want to remain conditionally visible to her - in the sense that she saw what she had wanted to see but never saw my struggle to keep up with this torturing cycle of migraines (I have other issues too but this stood out like a sore thumb) that made me want to stay buried in an unconscious land of make believe personality, confidence, expressing myself fearlessly and so on. 

My inner voice was afraid to speak up as fear ran through the entire length of my body next to blood. Fear had kept me from feeling my life, that there could be more to my life than just coping up with health issues. Not knowing how to process through my fears and not expressing that to anyone, and assuming that people would get me proved to be just a constant stretch of this pattern no matter how older I got. I just had got stuck and didn't know how to grow up despite this and beyond this, as change got identified with only physically and its problems thereof and to cope up accordingly. 

Childhood trauma needs to outgrow through one's age and unless those locked in fears, anxieties, and muffled tears, stifled sadness, and passive anger doesn't get released, until then I will remain a prisoner to my past. And in realizing this, releasing through tears, I have unlocked the way to let myself out by opening the door to looking at things from a different light. That courage is not absence of fears but acknowledging that circumstances no matter how uncertain, fearful, and overwhelming as they maybe can be changed if we choose to work through it, ask for support where it matters, and also accept that there's only so much that we can control. A shift towards a healthy attitude feels a new way to reconnect with my body, my feelings, and that attitude begins by being open to my life's possibilities and life experiences. While I can't undo all the stickiness with fears that I had gotten wound up in, but making this as an excuse to not live life fully is just not a way out. 

The way in to stay connected to my life are through prayers, meditations, journaling, mindful self talks, observing nature, taking long walks, feeling my feelings, sharing them with select few who get me, listening to soothing music, and taking relaxing warm baths are some of the few ways that I have learnt and applied to reconnecting to this new version of me. 

Fear does not bridge the gap between your outer reality and your likes or interests, it just widens it. Your belief in who you are and what you want to do with it needs your focus and attention to what gives you joy. Being mindful of your happiness no matter how small or big it is comes with your courage to own up to it. My acceptance that I allowed circumstances to define me and limit me is an eye opener and the real struggle sustained when I refused to let go those self limiting beliefs is bitter sweet but yet is part of my life experience.

So, my past does hold me captive still but becoming aware of it is discovering true courage to gradually let go and move towards clarity despite the chaos of mind voices.