When you are a child, living in a toxic home, you try to soothe yourself, tell yourself that your parents weird behaviour is normal, natural and what goes on in other people’s families. You are trying to normalise insanity and bad behaviour. In time, as time goes by, you join in with the toxic behaviour because it is being taught to you by your parents as normal, and to be accepted and loved by your parents you accept whatever they push into your life as normal.
All the time this is going on your deep-inner-voice is telling you that something is wrong, your instincts are telling you that something is wrong, and your mind is seeing Red Flags everywhere – so in order to make your parents happy and to be loved and accepted by them your little confused child mind learns to ignore red flags, your inner-most feelings, your instincts, and especially that deep inner voice.
Being a toxic home you become less empathetic (because if you were empathetic you would practically in the madness of your toxic home cry yourself to death or commit suicide), so your empathy has a funeral of sadness and you push it away because the pain and suffering, tears and realizations (of how insane your family is) is too much to deal with as a child and you become apathetic, colder, have few feelings for yourself or others, you accept the toxic state of your parents, home, life as normal, and then with growing pride for your family and the toxicity you defend, sometimes even threatening or violently your toxic existence, parents and lifestyle.
You learn in survival mode to help and protect your toxic siblings and parents, and you become your parents.
As an adult you are who your parents were/are and you see the whole shift from an innocent empathetic honest humble child to a toxic, mentally depressed, anxious adult as a normal procedure that you chose for yourself, forgoing any blame that your parents should own (and they don’t) and on mothers and fathers day you honour and care for the very people who destroyed your life, hopes and dreams, and made you the mentally struggling addictive mess that you are today.
As a child you have to soothe your mind, talk to yourself, reaffirm that you are worthy (you don’t get this from your parents, they only tell you good things about yourself when you are joining in their toxic behaviours and abuses), in a continuous banter to feel happy, and then one day you are given drugs, marijuana, alcohol, and so on, and they become your soothers.
As an adult people tell you that you are weak-minded for being a druggy, alcoholic, partying, but in reality these things (and they are weak-of-character) are simply your pacifiers as adults to try to soothe the madness within put their by the adults/parents that you love.
As an adult you ignore (don’t see) red flags, and your inner-voice and instincts long forgotten (you hear them no more), and so you are open to all forms of abuses, manipulators, narcissists and the like because you are not only never prepared to recognize such people, (your parents even approve of them) you also have lost the ability (as a frightened confused child) to see the red flags and so on, thus you cannot protect or defend yourself as an adult.
In a Narcissistic relationship you fail to leave because your whole life has been about following, conforming, obeying, submitting, and telling yourself that the reason that you are a failure is because you are useless, hopeless, and dumb.
As long as your parents are never taken-to-task for the way that they brought you up and destroyed your life, they will always be your masters and you will always blame yourself for all the evils that they did to you.
Another point to add to all of this is that because your mind has become apathetic, and you think that you have the empathy that you don’t have, and you have never experienced true love, empathy and humbleness, when you meet someone who has those attributes you will not recognise that person for who they are, and more than likely because your are now toxic, caustic, sex addicted and so on, you see only what you know as evil in that good soul.
Many people call out a good person as a stalker, pervert and so on whole he or she is exacly that themselves.
Their minds were never prepared by their own parents and by society to recognize a good thing even if it is right before them being kind and gent;e with them. People tend to see in others what they are, not what the other person really is.
– James Martin Sandbrook.