Self Diagnosis

When I started this blog I wasn't really sure what I was doing. I had been reintroduced to journaling while I was in rehab. They also preach authenticity and vulnerability. A public forum to discover and assemble myself seemed to combine all three. I was in a very dark place. It was change or die. I was completely exposed. The status quo looked something like a combination of Requiem for a Dream and Leaving Las Vegas. It's like I was suspended in air or water with nothing tethering me to anything. I had broken myself completely apart. There was only all my experiences spread out in my consciousness like 1000 puzzle pieces spread out on a table waiting to be put together. I think the blog, among other strategies, was the process of assembling the puzzle. Determining who I was. Fusing all these experiences into the person I was supposed to be. The person trauma had prevented from being cultivated on a normal timeline.

Trauma is like a cork that keeps everything that comes after from everything that comes before it. For a small child this is disastrous. A brain in it's early stages of development is not built to handle an influx of mature and adult emotion and fear. When forced to contend with a situation like I was did gives the child's mind a game breaking glitch in the source code that lies dormant through beta testing and only shows itself after launch. I was alone in the task of rooting out the bad code and replacing it with something that allows for a normal game as I had always been. I just hadn't realized it because my family gaslit me into believing I was supposed to parent myself. Or that parenting bears no effect on the finished product when a child becomes an adult. Or that age and time dictate a child's emotional, intellectual and mental growth. It's clear to me, I, unlike anyone else in my family was expected to parent myself and be quiet and happy about it.

The obvious fact is a child inherently knows how to be a child. No one has to teach them that. A child will not understand what they are missing. They will be conditioned to believe whatever they are getting to be normal. It's all they know. If a child is abused, abuse seems like love. Completely normal. The child is programmed by the abuse and the inability to do anything to change the situation to accept abuse. That relationship dynamic will haunt him for life. Dysfunctional parenting lays dormant until that child is required to be the adult they were supposedly being trained to be.My family simply ran the clock out and then put all the blame for their failures at the feet of a child. The victim of their failure, victimized again by their lies about it. No one was willing to come into my reality and help me. My family stayed fractured in a reality where I was to blame for my parents dysfunction instead of the obvious and tragic reality that they were responsible for mine and theirs would never let them see it. It's still fucked to this day. Look at it. Read all that's happened and then ponder that my dad won't speak to me, not the other way around.

And not a single family member has said a single word to him to stand up for me. That is a point I will hammer home. It's unacceptable if they think I am a part of any of their families. I am right. My dad and sister are wrong and abusers. There is no gray area. They don't even deny it. Either I am a human being and family member in which case I demand love and protection or I am not. As I have said, it is clear by the behavior of my family that in function, I have none. I wish it were different but I live in reality. I see clearly and truthfully what the behavior of those claiming to love me actually means and it's not a situation of love. There simply isn't evidence to support that position. It's changeable, but that's not something I can control.

More than anything else growing up and until I was about 40 I was terrified. I was a child until that age. A shell of an adult human being. A Potemkin person. I looked and sounded like a few different people at different times, but the reality was there was nothing there. Only the superficial trappings of a human being. I learned to act very well. If I had known I was acting, I probably would have been a great actor. I thought I was a person. It seemed like it, even to me. A child doesn't understand how different they are. I hadn't been given a chance to develop into a real person. My dad's NPD and my mom's mental health struggles obscured that I wasn't ok. At all. I was drowning. I did the best I could. When I think about the fact I graduated college. Held down a job. Had a social life, I'm in awe of myself and how much work it was. I may not have gotten great grades but to graduate college without really being able to study because of untreated ADHD on top of untreated CPTSD is an unfathomable accomplishment. The amount of untreated mental health and personality issues I was dealing with unaided is a quarter of the DSM.

I didn't even get a graduation party. I'm viewed as an outright failure in my family.

I had spent my life destroying myself to avoid the fear at the root of my existence. A child can subconsciously understand they are in a situation without reliable caregivers, but it's too much to process consciously. A child does not have the words or the emotional intelligence to have any clue what's happening inside them. I was scared of myself. Of my father. Of my mother. Of my sister. Of being with them. Of being without them. Of not having money. Of having money. Of having needs. Of making it worse.

I know all of this now. I did not know it then. It's a child's family's responsibility to meet the child's needs. Full stop. I was accused of being entitled for having basic needs because. My family criminalized my needs to the point I thought my needs were there needs. There was no way I could articulate things I had never been exposed to. Like the fact I was worthy of love and having needs and being respected as a unique and independent entity.

What I want to do is trace what I see as the crucial pieces of the puzzle and assemble them into a coherent narrative. Maybe a book forms out of it. Maybe not. Reconnecting to the process of exploring myself through writing has already been a huge win for me. I do this with no expectation. Only with the hope that I continue to grow and cement myself into my truth.

I've come a long way these past years. I understand myself on a level I wasn't sure was possible. As I sit typing this I sit in the awareness that I've done that hardest thing I will ever be asked to do. I took a mind conditioned for self destruction and rewrote the source code for freedom and enlightenment. I raised myself. I broke myself. And then I raised myself again into a man with super powers. I truly believe I will do great things. I will heal many minds and I will share myself with those who need me and deserve me. I will be the protection for people in my situation that I didn't have myself.

My intent is to paint a full picture of my origins. To map the experiences both internal and external that led me to this point of self actualization. My life had existed in pieces in my own internal map. All this writing has brought the picture into focus and I'd like to do my best to arrange it into one cohesive narrative. Vulnerability has been a large part of my healing process. Writing and sharing for me is as much for me and my conception of self as it is for the world. the process of sharing ourselves makes our experience a well from which others can draw connection and comfort from. Growing up with a narcissistic parent or parents or cluster is awful. It's a profoundly isolating and disconnecting experience. The child ends up disconnected from himself even. An empty vessel floating in space. Unaware of his of own ability to save himself. Programmed to believe his only option is self obliteration. Most of the literature available looks at NPD abuse through the lens of romantic relationships. It's not enough. Our brains were formed by these monsters. We don't have recover, we have to destroy and hopefully rebuild. I suspect the odds of success are low and most people like me end up dead by my age.

Part 1:

Chapter 1: Original Trauma

My dad was born in Harlem. A child of an Irish immigrant mother and my grandfather. Who I don't know much about. He had polio and emphysema. I probably saw him under ten times. My dad has shared about as little as a dad can who didn't actually abandon his children can share without being mute. So I'm writing as I understand things. I could very well be wrong about details. I barely know my father. No one knows him. He is unknowable. I don't think there's actually anything to know other than his personality disorder. It dictates and defines everything he does. In that regard he is incredibly boring and simple.

A narcissist can never actually be very smart. They may be successful in business. Capitalism rewards people's greed and ability to win at other people's expense. If you ask me everyone is mentally ill in one way or another. It simply a matter of whether your particular strain helps or hurts you in this sick society. If there is such a thing as a normal person I have yet to meet one. Give me ten minutes with anyone to do some probing and I can prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Are you going to tell me believing the entire meaning of life is the pursuit of a made up concept like money is a product of good mental health? Really? I'd say the modern version of what we call "life" is beyond sick. Look around you.

Who's not crazy?

What is normal?

What does good mental health even look like?

The Jiddu Krishnamurti quote comes to mind and perfectly sums up my feelings about the general public's overall health.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Or family system. Truer words have never been spoken.

We tend to reward the very qualities we claim to abhor and punish the ones we claim to revere. Self awareness, even for a nation, is hard to acquire. The lack of it leads to situations like the one we find ourselves in now. There are so many parallels in my story and the country's. Narcissism drives both. Indeed, I think narcissism's role in human history, from a modern understanding, is massively underestimated.

A firm case can be made that our historic understanding of evil correlates directly to narcissism. People acting in pure self interest with no regard for anyone else. Fascism for instance, I would argue, is precisely the combination of NPD and political power. When someone who is incapable of even considering the greater good and can only act in self interest, be it personal or with an in group, is handed responsibility for a diverse citizenry you get fascism, authoritarianism and racial based oppression. They are all tied together by actions based purely on self interest.

Likewise, my story is tied to humanity's story by my experience understanding and overcoming this invisible evil and malevolent force on the events of my life. Understanding this personality disorder and the webs of behavioral problems that branch out from it has been a rosetta stone for my history, my life, but it's also illuminated the hidden order behind seemingly disjointed stories and behaviors. It makes sense out of things that appear nonsensical.

Something happened in my dad's childhood that broke him. A true narcissist, that word is thrown around casually, I am using it as a clinical term, not to describe an arrogant person, remains stuck in early childhood in his relationship to the world around him and to other human beings. They can only think of themselves. It is not they consider other people's needs and decide to act selfishly. It's that other people's needs quite literally never enter into their thought process. Look at Trump. It seems impossible and yet it is undeniable. He can't see the pandemic through any other lens than how it effects him politically. Likewise my father has only been able to see my life in terms of how much money and time it costs him. He wanted to spend as little as he could of each on his children. Only problem was I needed a father. He threw money at me without time and then blamed me for not parenting myself.

That's the only way he can see it. All my powers of articulation come from my 39 year belief that if I could only say the right things to him he would understand. Donald Trump helped me see that that strategy was only going to lead me down a dark path. The reality is there is nothing I can say to my father to get him to love me in a normal way or see my life as independent from his own. To get him to actually support me, not treat me like a line on Narada's balance sheet. That will never happen. He is incapable.

For me the main problem is no one else in my family either understands that or cares enough about me to help me through any of it. For 42 years. Nothing.

My mother grew up in St. Paul. The defining facts of her life are she was the second eldest child of 9 and a woman. She was raised in a very misogynistic family. Raised to be a subservient wife. She got no attention from her family and was raised to see her siblings as rivals for time and resources. I don't think she was really parented at all, tbh. This is important because her parents passed down the belief that children were burdens. My mom constantly talked about needing breaks from parenting two children. She was alone. My father was an obstacle, not a coparent, but forgive me for not accepting that as an excuse for abuse. She married and procreated with a monster and her family did nothing to help her.

When I describe my mother it is important to understand she has been profoundly abused and traumatized on multiple levels. At the root of my trauma is her trauma. That is how generational trauma works. It is piled on exponentially. She and I also carry my grandfathers trauma from WW2 and his upbringing. Trauma will wreak havoc until someone has the courage and strength to stop it. You pile on the trauma inflicted by my father to her generational trauma and then add that to the trauma they inflicted on me and it broke me. I understand how strong I must be to have stopped it, even if no one else does. I know what I've accomplished and how few people are capable of even understanding what must be done much less follow through and succeed. I have supreme confidence in my ability to do whatever I want now. I know I am wiser than most human beings on this planet. Enlightenment is within reach. I've transformed.

Alesha would be wise to understand what I have done and utilize me as a tool to prevent her children from suffering. Her hubris and delusion have needlessly put them in harm's way and subtracted their protector and the only person aware of the family's dysfunctional structure from their lives. Like Trump supporters are trapped in Trump's alternate universe, she is trapped in my dad's. Unfortunately, this will prove in time to be a massive error in judgement on my sister's part. She has told me she will make it so the kids need nothing from dad so he can't let them down. This is a fundamentally flawed reading of the emotional situation. She is right, the kids may never need anything material or financial from him. But they will need love. And a healthy relationship. Two things that he is 100% incapable of delivering. Point to one. Point to him understanding love in any scenario. It's simply not possible for him. He is broken. His wife too. Deep down Alesha knows this. Or she should. I wish she would come to her senses. When she is ready to enter the reality of our lives and what our father is and how that is effecting her children, my door is open.

Just like I don't want to be blamed for the results of my trauma, I hold nothing but love for my mother in my heart. Immense, unconditional and eternal love. None of this is her fault. My father has left her to do all the parenting and now he gets to be the grandpa because my sister is brainwashed. It makes me sick to my stomach that Margie was given the title of grandma. She wasn't a mother to anyone. She's not even related to those kids. How dare Alesha? She's drunk on the promise of my dads money. She already traded me for it. Of course she'll trade my mom as well. Alesha is lost and needs help. She is doing immense damage to her children. I predicted all of Trump's behavior because I understand these men. By ignoring me and what I'm telling her about our family structure she is willfully exposing her children to abuse. It's absurd and she needs her head examined.

In my mind my mother is a saint. I know this is hard for her and yet this beautiful woman, called weak by her family, stands next to me and accepts the difficult details and gives me the validation I so desperately need. So even though these are hard memories and situations to have to resolve, I have nothing but love for and a desire to protect my mother and make sure she knows how strong she is and what power she has. How she has withstood things in her family life that would kill her supposedly stronger brothers and sisters.

I paid the price for all of it. It was not my bill to pay. And yet I did and instead of thanks for the load I carried for all of them, they ostracized me. Denied me my nieces and nephews for telling the truth an again, not a single family stands up for me. They tell me I'm not alone, but objectively, I am. And always have been. Its not a close call.

My parents met at marquette. My dad loves pretending he's a self made man but someone paid for him to go to marquette and gave him a credit card. He never gave me one. I don't have credit. No one taught me and my anxiety around money and lack of parenting has made managing debt and my finances a huge challenge in my life. No one has ever helped me with this. My dad would write a check for not enough money and then blame me when it wasn't enough and take no time to help me through a problem that is obviously bigger than me simply being irresponsible and incapable. I am neither. I am in need help. Always have been.

If you don't train a puppy, it doesn't magically get house broken when it reaches a certain age. Especially if it's conditioned to shit in the house. In other words given improper training, as I was.

My uncle describes my mother as one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen when he met her. My father was a long haired hippie. Or at least that was his mask. An early advocate for yoga and meditation. According to him, and it appears to be legit, the second yoga teacher ever in milwaukee. I imagine a fairly normal couple in the 70's. They got married moved to colorado, alesha was born and they moved back to milwaukee.

I was born at home in a house on Beaver Lake in Hartland Wisconsin. A drug free birth. The attending doctor would end up being a future girlfriend's grandfather. So far so good. The pictures from my birth, although a little to graphic for my taste, are of a very beautiful and open birthing process welcoming me into the world.

When I was 6 months my mother was changing me and somehow I fell off the table and broke my arm. I have no idea about what this does to an infant. I can't imagine an influx of pain when a child is arranging a blurry world into safe and unsafe helps him feel safe. Understanding the role of safety in childhoood trauma and my subsequent life long struggle with it, I find it hard to look at this incident without meaning. My brain was being formed. I've never seen an infant with a broken limb since.

I don't have any real memories of my dad in the house. I seem to recall him coming home from a "business trip" and giving me an REO Speedwagon record. A 45. I remember him going to and coming back from Japan for work. That's about it.

My earliest full memory is when they told us he was moving out. I was playing at the park across the street from our house and was called in by mother. I remember her sitting in a chari and all of us in a circle. I don't remember what happened next. This day broke me. My mother recently told me what happened next.

As my father pulled out of the driveway I chased after him sobbing. My mother and sister stood and watched and my sister said "dad just stole chris's soul."

This is important. For my entire life I have lived in Alesha's shadow. She pretended I was the favored child, but that was never actually true. She had a different relationship with my dad. She had a godmother who was very active in her life. She had a closer relationship with my grandmother Mary and everyone on that side. She didn't need to be taught to be a man. Even now as I struggle a voice in my head says, but Alesha turned out fine. No. She did not. Alesha can support herself. She is financially capable. She is emotionally broken. She cannot talk to anyone about any of this. She has locked it away so deep she cannot even look at it to love and protect her little brother. Instead she took that boy who's soul was stolen and kicked him for 30 years in the face and sided with my father.

Alesha was 10. She had a different relationship with my father. That is to say she had one. She was out of high school before he moved in with Margie. She was out of the house before it burned down. Initially at 10, while i was at 7, she was old enough to be a person, to be angry. I was not formed yet. I was destroyed.

Or it could be it just effected her differently. Destroyed her differently. Or not at all. Look at how people react to other traumatic experiences. War, for instance. Some get PTSD, some do not. All of our brains are different. All of our experiences, even when identical, are seen through radically different eyes. I cannot speak for my sister and I will do my best to try not to. I have compassion for her. I understand she was a victim too. I have wanted nothing but love and protection from her. Some sort of validation. For whatever reason she has been unable and has made the decisions she has made. It makes me sad to have to describe my reality. It made me sad to live it. There's nothing left for me to do but establish the truth of my experience and move one.

CPTSD is what happens when a child who has not yet developed a stress mechanism is overloaded with adult stress. PTSD becomes the stress mechanism. Fight or flight is broken.

This fact clouds every minute of every day and every parental and familial action that comes after.

Trauma informed.

To give a child who is obviously traumatized "tough love" is to profoundly abuse that child and teach them a completely dysfunctional and abusive understanding of what love is. It further traumatizes him. There is quite literally nowhere where this child feels safe. I cannot begin to describe the complexity and severity of the emotional problems this creates. Now imagine this child lives for 40 years being blamed for the obvious behavioral patterns of ptsd as though he is an adult expressing adult anger. I was accused of being abusive and manipulative as acts of abuse and manipulation. Its a vortex of inverted parental/child emotional roles and meta abuse. It's beyond fucked up and quite frankly it makes me seethe with rage to think about.

A recent experience with a neighbor is a nice example of a few things. First, how watching your contemporaries become parents informs the past. A child doesn't have the context to really understand the quality of parenting they are receiving. It can take decades to get enough distance to begin to see your life and your self clearly. For me, as I've watched my sister and friends have kids and be parents, I began to realize just how much my situation left to be desired. That's putting it nicely.

It's clear to me the way I was parented and grandparented was nonexistent. My needs did not enter anyones list of priorities in any real way at any time. It looked like they did but reality tells a different story.

I was at my neighbors the other day hanging out. They have 4 boys. The 5 year old had a little meltdown. Yelled he hated his mother, started crying and ran and hid behind a grill. His father, a very good father, immediately went to him and picked him up. He asked what happened. He empathized. Something like, "yeah buddy, i can see why that would make you mad." He hugged him and held him and comforted him, but after he validated his emotions. It was perfect.

My family on the other hand by the age of 7 treated my anger, righteous and confusing anger, as though i was an adult and it was abusive. My anger would be met with their anger and I would be left to process all of it crying alone in my room. There was no validation that the anger was normal. Instead, they said it was an emotional problem. Something was wrong with me. When my mother started having boyfriends it was clear I had to temper my anger around them. She made it clear if I misbehaved it would drive them away. So not only was some guy's feelings and needs being placed ahead of mine, it very clearly indicated I had driven my father away. If i have to power to drive this dude away, it must have been my fault the other one left.

Then John, her future husband, started getting in on it. I remember him yelling at me that my dad was a Casanova. That's how I found out why my parents got divorced. I still don't know how my mother could tolerate this. Lets unpack the emotional complexity and abuse that's being directed at a 9 year old, already severely traumatized child. His father has abandoned him and the family. His mom had to go back to work because his father was cheap on child support meaning he's alone all the time processing all this chaos. His mother starts dating someone he doesn't like. She tells him he can't show any emotions about the complexity of her last relationship with his father in fear it will drive her new boyfriend away and on top of it the boyfriend is yelling at him about his father and his fathers misbehavior when his father is also neglecting and abusing him. How is the man neglecting and abusing him being used as a hammer by the man supposedly there to save him? Its ridiculous. Who's behaving rationally here?

Got all that. It's a lot even for me at 42 to untangle. I had no chance at 9. I can't believe I'm alive, tbh. Again, I want to stress the idea of needs. It's at the root of my dysfunction. Fight or flight got broken and permanently set on flight. It should be becoming clear why. My needs were the primary source of stress and fighting between my parents. The only time they communicated was to fight about who was or wasn't doing or paying enough. That's conditioning. A child learns more by observed behavior than anything else. I was observing a relationship based on hatred and anger as the one from which I as born. For some reason my family never seemed to be willing to admit that regardless of their feelings for one another their relationship was the template they were handing down to me. Alesha got to 10 with a fairly normal example and that allowed her to transcend the next 8 years. I wasn't so lucky. I wasn't a person yet. I don't have a single memory of a healthy relationship. All I remember, all this poor kid absorbed, was dysfunction and anger. And then they blamed me for those things.

Chapter Two: CPTSD

My parents divorce as far as I can tell is the moment where trauma broke me. I don't really have many memories of time before then so that will have to do. I want to explore a couple other moments around this time that were crucial in turning the initial instance of trauma into a system that retraumatized me with a shocking and perverse regularity. In the story we will begin to see the way a scapegoat is preyed upon by design in a dysfunctional family with a narcissist at the head. As with all a narc's behavior, the family system's abuse rests in a gray area where it's difficult to parse their agency in the abuse. It's like they can't help themselves. In many ways they can't. Abuse is simply how they relate to other human beings.

But eventually you realize it doesn't matter. Whether they mean to or not they are horrible abusers incapable of changing. So it's best to accept the behavior for what it is. Abuse. And act accordingly. As I began to understand these dynamics more and more it became very apparent I could not exist in my family system as it was structured. As the clear scapegoat all the dysfunction was placed at my door step. Our problems became my problems alone to deal with. I went to therapy. They didn't. I had emotional problems. They didn't. I was broken. They weren't. We were all those things. I wasn't anything by myself. Everything I was, I was taught or conditioned to be. Sending me off to deal with it on my own is not the behavior of a loving family. Its neglect and abuse. Plain and simple.

One of the hardest aspects of this ordeal to understand was how the trauma snowballed and multiplied. It's confusing. Eventually it became clear it was on a lifelong upward slope. The trauma and abuse got worse and worse as I got older and older. The approach that ignored the trauma made me more and more sure that I was the problem even though looking back it should have been totally obvious to anyone looking the chaos of my parent's emotional states, mental health and personality disorders were wreaking havoc on my adolescent mind.

No one saw that. They saw a wild child. An irresponsible brat. I really can't even imagine what these blind adults saw. At some point it should have become apparent that I wasn't the problem. As it went, it kept getting worse and worse. As I became an adult, my coping mechanisms became huge problems unto themselves. Substance abuse, suicidal ideation, complete dissociation, learned helplessness. The list of crippling dysfunction is literally endless.

This is going to be long so i'll hit publish and update as I go....