This is the transcript of the recent release of the same name!

For more episodes like these, from MFs like you, join us in the private podcast stream/community here! And help support this DIY trauma support effort while you connect.

Take care, get inner werkin, and hail yerSelf Fucker!

Hey Fuckers! So, we’ve been working hard over here – in all areas – but one of them has been sharing more from myself and the community on this stream. Practicing opening up again, as we talk about vulnerability, intimacy, and trust. And today, I have a first for you in that direction.

It’s a recording that was submitted by a MF like you!

As part of our “community healing” project, we share these for two weeks at the end of each month, as additional commentary and real life application of the concepts we’re discussing. We call them “MF Speaks” episodes. And they help us all feel a little less individually fucked; hearing similar stories coming from around the world, while also fostering connection in the crew.

Now, normally, these submissions are reserved for the private stream, so everyone feels safe and understood sharing their story. Disclosure is hard enough, so we keep it behind the closed door provided by Patreon.

But this time around I asked for permission to share it publicly.

Here’s why.

We’re talking about relational issues this year. Specifically, these past months we’ve discussed what holds us back from feeling safe enough to engage in them. What parts, patterns, and programs inside of US put a halt to external relationships.

… you know… for valid, logical, learned reasons….

But unfortunately, if we don’t know about those narratives and automatic reactions, because we’re blocking them from our own consciousness, we wind up living in a way that’s constrained by them. Unable to move forward, because of past events that have left their (often subconscious) mark. Unable to heal the wounds, because we aren’t identifying them to rewrite those stories.

And I thought this submission from good fucking friend of the community, Leanne, was a great example of exactly how that goes down.

So, our delightful Aussie pal Leanne is going to discuss a very early experience of parental emotional abuse (here’s your trigger warning, but not your free pass to avoidance, on that one). And I found it to be a perfect jumping off point for considering how an event like this one could add to a pile of uneasy feelings and obstacles to connecting with others… for a lifetime. All stemming from an experience that would be easily forgotten or off written, if this MF wasn’t so astute with their trauma excavations.

Luckily for us, they are.

So, piggybacking off Leanne’s inner work, let’s consider how our caregivers teach us early on that relationships are unsafe, our emotions and needs will be used against us, and therefore no one is trustworthy. Meaning vulnerability isn’t something we can offer, and relationships continually feel dangerously close or unsatisfactorily surface-level.

Does that sound familiar? Ha, yeah, same.

Now, it’s always nice to hear yourself being validated on the airwaves. But to fully benefit from this recording in your own journey?

Use it as a prompt to consider experiences in your own early upbringing that may have instilled human distrust in yourself, as well.

Maybe you can’t remember them as aptly as Leanne – plenty of us have “missing childhood syndrome” in the brain.

But I bet you can trace the feeling of being uneasy around other humans back to your earlier years and start to gather some clues about how your FOO (family of origin) may have created intimacy-punishing circumstances that still leave a mark on your relationships to this day.

And then, maybe start thinking about how those people and relational dynamics were one particular set of circumstances that can’t be generalized to the entire race.

What resources and knowledge were these folks lacking?

What history of CPTSD did they probably hold, themselves?

How dysregulated and self-unaccountable were they?

Can you understand (not forget or forgive) where they were coming from with their less than stellar caregiving efforts?

What models did they have? What mental illnesses they weren’t privy to?

And is it accurate to have the same expectations for every person you’d ever meet?

Lots of trauma-placing and critical re-examination of your fucked up core beliefs awaits! If you’re willing to do some werk.

And remember, all these questions and prompts will be available in the episode transcript at t-mfrs.com in case you want to sit down and do some deep inner diving alongside the show.

So, let’s get into the episode, straight from the private stream. And give Leanne a round of applause for her courageous share. Feel free to comment through Spotify, I’ll pass the messages along. And you can find her, often, in the MF Speaks episodes and the comments sections of Patreon, if you want to learn alongside this wise Fucker. I can tell you, I’ve gained a lot from her insights.

Lez jump in. And hail your damn Self.

Leanne:

Greetings, fuckers, you know who this is and where I’m from, accompanied again tonight by a purring cat.

So today I wanted to talk about anger you may have at a parent who abused you but whom you may must also worship to survive and the ensuing cognitive dissonance or you could call it when the perpetrator of your trauma is also your saviour.

This could get long folks.

I hope you’ve got a cup of tea with you and a trigger warning for deliberate emotional abuse of a very small child less than two years old.

I hope this doesn’t stir up stuff within you or kick off any nightmares.

Well, who would have thought it that creating a podcast episode would get you really, really thinking and getting a more objective view of yourself by listening back to what you weren’t actually saying in words, but what was a pretty obvious thread of self limiting beliefs that you live by.

Today I created a voice post about loneliness.

In it I explained how having had a narcissist mother and a narcissist husband, I’m delighted to live alone and be able to make my own choices and run my own life.

But the underlying thread that was coming to mind below the words I was using is that as a child and in my marriage, I was afraid to assert myself in any way, which sounds a little bit shamey, as if it’s my fault that I was weak, etc.

I think a better description is to say that I was terrified to assert myself in any way.

Fuck.

Fuck.

I remember as a very small child being sat in the middle of the living room by the woman who raised me. I couldn’t walk. I’m not even sure if I could crawl yet, but I could sit there on the floor.

Where I was positioned, I could see into the kitchen.

I think I had pulled the woman’s hair, as babies will do when they’re discovering their environment and learning to use their hands. She had told me to stop and I hadn’t, and she got a bit pissed off.

So she sat me down in the middle of the room and walked out.

It was daytime.

After a little while, I started to fuss and make noises in the expectation that she would come back to me, but no. I started to get scared about being alone and even more scared about being alone and crying and the fact that she still wasn’t coming to be with me.

Then I saw her walk from the hallway into the kitchen.

She didn’t look in my direction or acknowledge me in any way as I sat and cried. She did some stuff in the kitchen as I grew more and more distressed, feeling more and more exposed to danger because no one was coming to soothe me.

She went back up the hallway and after a few minutes appeared at the living room door.

She stood there looking at me with cold fish eyes, turned on her heels and moved out of sight again.

I was red-faced, heaving, covered in snot by this stage, stuck in this spot because I couldn’t move myself to go and find her.

I was just fucking terrified. I was alone and no one was coming to be with me.

Geez, I’m almost in tears recalling it.

I was screaming my tiny chubby cheeked head off by now, howling and sobbing and trying to catch my breath. I was out of control with fear, with terror.

She appeared again and with crossed arms, she leaned against the door jamb, observing me. I’m waving my tiny little fat arms at her to pick me up, save me, comfort me, all those words I didn’t have the ability to say as yet and weeping, weeping, weeping, a terrified bundle of primal fear.

After a minute or two, she finally came over and picked me up.

I cuddled deeply into her chest and neck. Oh, mummy, you saved me, thought my tiny brain.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thought my tiny brain. I was so, so scared and you’ve saved me.

She really enjoyed the clinging and snuffling and nestling into a chest and neck that I was doing. She enjoyed the act of soothing this poor scared little bubby girl.

Oh, you love mummy now, she said as she patted my back and rocked me side to side.

Okay, let’s take a break from this scene. Open a window, breathe in some fresh air, blow our noses and wipe away our adult tears.

What that woman did to me is out and out fucking emotional abuse of a pre-walking, pre-verbal baby.

She deliberately set me up to get into a terrified state of abandonment fear so that she could be the one to swoop in and save me and receive all the gratitude and physical I need you cues that a tiny kiddo can express.

How sick can you be to deliberately get a wee little kiddo terrified so that you can then have your dopamine hit by acting the saviour? How fucking sick is that? And I learned something that day, although I was too young to have the words and probably the actual logical thoughts to express it.

What I learned was to never defy my mother again.

Ever.

Ever, ever, ever.

I knew that I never want to feel so abandoned and terrified again.

So let’s discuss a couple of different points from this event.

You might think that no one would do this. It’s too cruel. I must be making it up or misremembering it. Unfortunately, no.

I’ve witnessed her do it to my three younger siblings who hadn’t been born at the time.

Worse, I’ve used the tactic myself when I was a teenager.

I’ve mentioned that to my therapist several times in the past few years and wondered where the hell I had learned to be so cruel. Now I can see where I learned it.

If we ignore the fact that she was enacting this cruelty on a little baby girl, it’s not an uncommon practice amongst narcissists.

Be cruel and mean and belittling, or whatever it takes, to someone you want to be firmly under your control. Get them feeling really frightened or confused. And when they’re really distressed, then you, the narc, swoop in as their saviour to make them feel better.

They’ll be so grateful to you for rescuing them for your comfort and solace that they’ll never challenge your status quo as the one who must be obeyed again.

And if they do challenge it, you just repeat the process again as many times as necessary.

People who’ve dated or been married to narcs know what I’m talking about. Many who had narc parents may also unfortunately be familiar with this routine.

One thing that has bubbled to the surface as I’ve been pondering this for about 36 hours is that I knew that she had caused me to feel so scared.

Her actions or non-actions had made me terrified.

But she was the one who saved me.

But she was also the one who made me get so frightened.

So something else I learned that day, I couldn’t trust her.

She was not really a source of solace.

And something else that I think has bubbled away quietly in my subconscious, but I could never allow it to speak clearly to me, is that I’m angry with her for what she did to me.

It was too dangerous to think about this at the time, had I been capable of having thoughts about my feelings.

I was utterly dependent on her for everything except breathing. So acting out feelings of anger were going to put me in danger of being abandoned again.

I could not be angry at her.

So here we have a little kiddo who does not trust her mother, who knows that her mother is capable of cruelty and abandoning her, who knows that she must not defy her mother again or risk being abandoned, who can see that making the mother feel loved and needed should help keep her safe to some degree, and who is angry about the mother’s cruel actions, but who can not signal any retaliation against the mother because that could lead to abandonment again.

Sigh.

No wonder I’m fucked in the head. Sheesh.

Okay, the clouds are now parting and it’s become reasonably clear about why I’ve always been terrified of asserting myself.

I’ve been doing it since I was one year old is why.

It’s an ingrained habit.

It’s a self-limiting belief.

I’ve never logically reassessed whether I could or couldn’t be abandoned as an adult until yesterday. So I’ve just been living with this, oh my God, we can’t be abandoned mindset since pretty much forever.

Where I am mentally these days is that, yeah, I can survive being abandoned by other people actually if I had ever stopped and thought about it.

I know how to care for, nurture and love myself.

My parts know how to care for, nurture and love each other.

Well, most of them.

I don’t need much validation from others, but I never thought about it until yesterday and you can bet I fucking wrote that down.

I didn’t have this mental confidence when I was married.

I was fearful of abandonment when the kids were infants or little, fearful of not being able to raise them on my own, fearful of financial consequences or God forbid poverty, fearful of the expected bitter, nasty fighting over divorce that I had witnessed between my own parents and fearful of the impact of all of that on the kids.

Oh, and on top of that, fearful of giving the woman who raised me a new fish hook to stick in my mouth because I would have had to have asked her for help and she could then throw it in my face periodically and call in that fish hook favour at some point in the future.

I wasn’t going to stick my head in the lion’s mouth like that.

Damn, all these characterisations of the woman who raised me as very scary animals.

Okay, okay.

I’ve got work to do.

I need to bring the understanding that I can be abandoned by others right up to the front of my brain and have it as a not scary understanding. I’ve got to find a way to do that so that it will replace my traditional abandonment fear.

I’ll figure that out.

And now a word from our sponsor of which there is none but I just wanted to put a line under that part of the episode because I’m going to talk about another aspect now.

This other aspect is carting around the duplicitous feeling of being saved by someone but at the same time carting around buried deep, deep in my subconscious anger at that same person for having created the fear and distress in the first place. This is brand fucking new thinking for me just today.

I’d never considered this before.

Cognitive dissonance in fucking deed.

I’m surprised I haven’t gone completely nuts. What a load for a brain to have to manage.

How much energy must have been put into keeping the unacknowledged anger suppressed whilst doing all that gratitude and admiration to keep myself safe.

In my childhood I had to fawn and be enmeshed and codependent to make the narc feel better to keep myself safe. I had to absolutely suppress the anger I felt towards the narc.

I didn’t even know I was angry at the narc other than after specific incidents which I somehow managed to get over.

I had to be hyper vigilant to stay attuned to what the narc wanted from me and do whatever that was.

In my marriage, ditto, same as the previous paragraph except the anger did make itself known to me.

Abandonment fears stopped me from ever expressing it and it grew hotter and nastier inside me.

I got very resentful.

I stopped doing every tiny thing I thought the narc wanted me to do to keep him happy.

I eventually left when the kids were old enough, when I felt financially secure enough, when I fortunately had a second home that I could live in.

I could finally say, I’m not taking this shit anymore.

And abandonment fear played another role in my decision to end my marriage.

My son had graduated high school the year before, my daughter was about to graduate, and over the past nine months they had seemed to become critical and dismissive of me, or perhaps that’s normal for that age group.

I didn’t feel needed and often didn’t feel wanted.

There was talk of them both possibly moving out of home to attend university the following year.

To get away from what I perceived as their rejection of me, I abandoned my own children before they abandoned me. I was not prepared to wake up in a house alone beside a man I detested. So when the window of opportunity arose, I left.

So what’s the point of all that talk about abandonment fear in my marriage? Well, that’s just me talking it through with myself, because before I started composing this episode, I couldn’t see how abandonment fear would have fucked up my marriage, but now I do.

Well possible takeaways are, if you have a relationship where you go through these torment you then save you routines, you might want to question whether you’re in relationship with a narcissist, and perhaps get the fuck out of there.

Two, if you hate yourself a bit for all the fawning you had to do to stay safe with the people who raised you, well, yeah, me too, but at least now I understand why I did it.

Three, you might recognize the I’ll reject them before they reject me modus operandi, and might need to consider if you too have abandonment fears. Exploring the validity of that fear could save or at least lengthen a marriage.

And four, if you’ve had confusing, unable to put into words, ambivalent feelings about your parents, then maybe they did things to you as a child that made you angry at them that you were forced to stuff deep, deep down into your subconscious because you had to rely on them for survival.

It might be time to unearth that anger, process it and learn and heal from it.

I’m about spent fuckers. It’s been a tiring couple of days with all this brewing up in my skull, but I’m glad I had a jolly good think about it and arrived at some new perspectives.

So take care fuckers.

Yeah, we’re fucked up, but it’s a lot less shameful when you figure out why.

This work is not easy, but I know I’m feeling better already and will continue to improve.

Love to you all.

Fucker out.

All right, motherfuckers.

Another big thank you to Leanne for this share and a reiteration that I’m adding a point number five onto her very excellent list of takeaways from this episode, which is if you feel ambivalent about all human relationships, you might need to go back and reconsider if any of those patterns came from your early parental ones.

They might just be reverberating through your brain and your life ever since.

That’s it.

Thanks everybody for tuning in and listening.

Thank you again and all the gratitude to Leanne for the impressive share and reflection and be sure to give her a big round of applause till we talk next time.

Hail your damn selves and cheers y’all.