Reflections on Being a Thrown Away Golden Child

Posted on by Astrid

I’ve been struggling with memories lately, as well as with the role I played in my family. I was for the most part the golden child. For those not aware of what this means, this is the child in a family in which one or both parents are narcissists or otherwise emotionally immature, who ends up being the parents’ favorite.

My parents often half-jokingly (though it wasn’t funny) said that my younger sister was oh so nicely average. More like invisible, I’d say.

I, on the other hand, was exceptional in both positive and negative ways. I was a genius when doing calendar calculation, which for your information is a common savant skill in people with developmental disabilities. By contrast, I was threatened with being thrown away into institutional care and called all kinds of insults for people with mental illness when I was acting less than excellent. I at one point thought of printing out the table of contents for the DSM so that my parents at least knew the correct terms for what they were calling me.

Then, when I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital in 2007, my parents more or less actually threw me away. No, that’s not even entirely true: they threatened to abandon me when I announced that I was taking a second gap year in order to work on independence skills in 2006 and only came back into my life after the independence training home promised to prepare me for university and independent living. Which they couldn’t.

I struggle with both the fact that I was thrown away and the fact that I was my parents’ favorite before that. After all, it adds an extra layer of shame to my life: the layer of “if only…”. If only I hadn’t taken that second gap year… If only I hadn’t consented to being admitted to the psychiatric hospital… If only I hadn’t applied for long-term care… would I still be the hero… in my parents’ fantasy tale? In other words, isn’t it my choice to have fallen off my parents’ pedestal?

I don’t know how I feel about the idea that it might’ve somehow been my choice to be thrown away. On the one hand, I feel it makes me responsible for not having a “normal” relationship with my parents. On the other hand though, I know how many golden children turn out and that’s not pretty. Many end up repeating their parents’ toxic patterns with partners or children.

I’m forever grateful for being childfree for this reason (and others), as just today I had a memory of shoving my and my wife’s then cat Barry out of the bed. I feel forever guilty about this and the very thought of doing this to a child, makes me sick.

Remembering this and other things makes me realize I’m glad I didn’t stay in the golden child role. If I had, I might as well have ended up in prison… or should have.

Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and “Narcissistic Abuse” #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter N post in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I want to talk about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder. I’ll also talk about the controversial topic of “narcissistic abuse”.

When looking up the definition of narcissism, several different descriptions come up, but an overarching theme is an extreme sense of self-importance. In psychoanalysis, narcissism is thought to be due to a person’s inability to distinguish themself from external objects. This is thought to occur naturally in infants but may also arise as a result of a mental disorder.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, excessive need for admiration and a reduced capacity for empathy. Symptoms include:


  • A grandiose sense of self-importance.

  • Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty or ideal love.

  • Belief that they are special or unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, specific people/institutions, usually those with high status.

  • Requiring excessive admiration.

  • A sense of entitlement, such as expecting especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations.

  • Being interpersonally exploitative.

  • Lack of empathy: unwillingness and inability to identify with the feelings of others.

  • Often being envious of others or believing others are envious of them.

  • An arrogant, haughty attitude.


There is also an alternative model of describing personality disorders, which lists NPD as having two main criteria: grandiosity and attention-seeking.

There are two main subtypes of NPD: malignant and vulnerable. The malignant type is how most people see a classic narcissist, whereas those with the vulnerable type display more negative affect and shame.

As I look over the criteria of NPD, I can somewhat see why some people have called me “a little narcissistic”. I, after all, do see myself as unique and feel that I can only be understood by a handful of people. Unlike actual narcissists though, I don’t think of myself as “better” than others and, as a result, the people who will understand me are most certainly not high-status people.

Now on to “narcissistic abuse”. This is a term used to describe abuse, mostly psychological, perpetrated by people with NPD. However, it is more commonly used for any long-standing pattern of psychological abuse. As such, many people have come to call their toxic parents, partners or other abusers “narcs” even when these people don’t have a formal diagnosis of NPD. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it’s stigmatizing a mental disorder and also providing excuses for abusers (after all, they can’t help being a “narc”). On the other hand, well, it’s a major thing in abuse survivor circles and I need support regardless of what my abusers are or are not being identified as. I lean towards not believing in “narcissistic abuse” as its own thing.

Dysfunctional Families: Characteristics Seen in Adult Children #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today’s topic choice was hard once again, so I eventually decided on one related to yesterday’s topic of codependency. Today, I am going to describe the characteristics of adult children of dysfunctional families.

First, what is a dysfunctional family? It could refer to a family in which one or both parents are alcoholics or addicts. This was how originally ACoA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) was started, but later “and dysfunctional families” was added. Dysfunctional families are, in this sense, also families in which one or both parents are abusive or neglectful.

What effects does growing up in a dysfunctional family have on adult children? Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families has a laundry list of characteristics of adults who grew up in dysfunctional households. This list includes being an approval-seeker, being frightened by angry people and frightened of personal criticism, having low self-esteem and stuffing or denying your feelings.

Most of these characteristics are what Lindsay C. Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, calls “internalizing” traits. However, depending on your role in a dysfunctional family, you could also end up externalizing your trauma. By this I mean that you end up being toxic or abusive yourself. This particularly happens to adult children who were the “golden child” or “hero” in an abusive family. A “golden child” is a child who is praised excessively and used to uphold the family’s “perfect” image. These children are often the parents’ “favorite” and may get spoiled. As Pete Walker, author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, says, however, being spoiled excessively is traumatic in its own right.

I myself exhibit both internalizing and externalizing traits of being an adult child. I could, for instance, relate to at least half the items on the “laundry list”, but also can be emotionally volatile and demanding. I was, also, usually treated as the family’s “golden child”. This sometimes makes me feel sad, but I try to focus on self-awareness and healing instead.

Codependency and Emotional Dependence #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. For my letter C post in the #AtoZChallenge, I wasn’t really sure what topic to pick. I could go with cognitive functions, but without explaining personality typologies first, this wouldn’t make sense. Since I chose the broad topic of personal growth for my theme, I could however choose a topic that isn’t necessarily related to personality. IN this post, I’m talking about codependency.

What is codependency? In a narrow sense, it refers to certain behaviors exhibited by individuals in a close relationship with an addict. The addict is, in this sense, dependent on a substance (or behavior) and their partner is codependent, as in “second-degree dependent”.

I used to understand codependency as involving just enabling behaviors. For example, a codependent person might be manipulated into giving the addict access to their drug of choice. In this case, a person buying alcohol and giving it to an alcoholic, is codependent.

Actually though, codependency isn’t just the direct enabling of an addiction. It also happens in abusive relationships in which neither of the parties involved is an addict. For example, a person staying with their partner in spite of domestic violence, could also be seen as codependent.

Codependency, as such, is more related to being emotionally dependent on someone else despite them being in some way toxic. It could also be seen as compulsive caregiving.

For clarity’s sake, though their are certain individual traits that make someone more susceptible to becoming codependent, codependency is at least as much an attribute of the relationship as it is of the individual.

How can you heal from codependency? The first step is to set healthy boundaries. This means that boundaries are not so weak that they allow others to use you as a doormat and not so rigid that you end up self-isolating. Of course, what boundaries you set, depends on the person you’re setting boundaries with. For example, you may want to go no-contact with an abuser, but keep a supportive friend close by.

Another step in the healing process is to recognize yourself as a unique individual separate from the addict or abusive person you’re codependent on. And, for that matter, separate from everyone else in the world. This means learning about and validating your own preferences, wants and needs. As you learn to be more aware of your own individuality, you’ll start to develop greater emotional independence.

Healing from codependency will ultimately help you have healthy relationships with the people around you.

I am not currently in an abusive relationship and don’t have any close relatives who are addicts. As such, I am not really codependent on anyone at the moment. However, being that I grew up in a dysfunctional family, I do share some traits of emotional dependency. I was at one point also diagnosed with dependent personality disorder (DPD), even though my psychologist at the time only chose that diagnosis to make it look like I was misusing care. She actually claimed that I was perfectly capable of asserting myself, which people with DPD definitely aren’t.

Like I said, codependency is at least in part defined by the relationship, whereas DPD is a diagnosis meant for an individual. It doesn’t, however, take into account the fact that many adult children of dysfunctional families will end up showing (co)dependent behaviors in other relationships too.

Opening Up About My Trauma

Posted on by Astrid

Last Monday, I was going for a walk with my one-on-one for the moment when we saw a few clients and staff she knew (she’s a temp worker). She wanted to “say a quick hi”. That turned into a fifteen-minute conversation between her and one of the other staff, which eventually turned to clients with severe challenging behavior being taken on outings off grounds and then, when they act out, staff being filmed by bystanders when restraining the client. This discussion triggered me, because it led to flashbacks of the times I’ve been “guided” (as staff call it) to my room. More like physically moved by several staff at a time, and the fact that I wasn’t officially restrained (because that probably only counts when you’re pinned down to the ground), is solely due to my lack of physical strength.

I asked the staff, admittedly more curtly than I should have, to not have these discussions in my presence in the future, as it was triggering me. She told me I was making it all about me and if I wanted to offer an opinion I should’ve made sure I listened to the whole thing because now I was twisting the truth. I told her about the time I was shoved to my room and staff threatened to lock me up in there. “You probably deserved it,” was her response.

This led to a whole chain reaction of triggers, in which I started to doubt the validity of my trauma-related symptoms. Didn’t I deserve the harsh punishments my parents gave me? I know at least back in my day an “educational spanking” was legal. In some U.S. states, child abuse isn’t even child abuse if it’s used as punishment.

I can’t go into the details of the punishments I endured as a child, and I’m pretty sure they’re not necessarily illegal. Does that mean they can’t have caused me PTSD?

That evening though, I was having intense flashbacks and decided to open up to my staff for that moment. She happened to be one of the staff who’d shoved me to my room on Friday and threatened to lock me in there. I had to admit – even though I don’t believe it – that I deserved to be physically moved to my room. I mean, the reason was my dropping the F-bomb while in the communal room (and then refusing to go to my room on my own when told to), which, well, truthfully staff do all the time.

After I’d given examples of the way my parents treated me, my staff seemed quite shocked. I honestly don’t understand this, as she restrains clients everyday and never even cares about the impact this has on them. I mean, I know, staff restraining clients is legal, but then again does something have to be illegal to be traumatic? And if so, where’s the boundary between an “educational spanking” and child abuse? Or does it have to be unwarranted? In that case, I must say, my parents acted out of a need to show who’s boss because they’d felt powerless over my behavior. I did, indeed, try to excuse my parents’ actions by explaining about my own behavior. The staff didn’t seem impressed.

I know, in my heart, that the truth is that restraints can and do traumatize clients too. I know I experienced trauma while in the psychiatric hospital because of being locked up in seclusion against my will. I know I still experience emotional trauma. And, of course, I’m more sensitive to this due to the trauma I endured as a child. But it isn’t black-or-white. And this is confusing.

Poem: Home Is…

Posted on by Astrid

Home was
At my parents’
Who were there and yet weren’t there for me
Hurting me in ways I feel I can’t express
It wasn’t safe
Or maybe that’s just me

Home was
On my own
Barely holding on by a thread
Surviving but that was about as far as it went
It wasn’t doable
Or maybe that’s just me

Home was
In the mental hospital
Where I stayed for nearly a decade
Only to be kicked out again
That wasn’t forever
And that wasn’t me

Home was
With my spouse
Again, barely holding on by a thread
Managing life by sleeping and panicking
It didn’t work out
But maybe that was me again

Home then was
In the care facility in Raalte
About as unsuitable as they come in theory
But it was near-perfect in reality
And yet, I left
And that was me (sort of)

Home then became
My current care home
With harsh staff, chaotic clients and poor quality of care
I wasn’t abused (not really), but that’s about as far as it goes
It doesn’t feel safe
But then I wonder, isn’t that just me?

Maybe soon home will be
The future care home
The big unknown
Will I feel sort of happy there?
No-one can tell
But it’s up to me

To make myself feel at home

This poem may sound a bit self-loathing. It isn’t intended this way, but I couldn’t express as concisely how I feel about my various “homes” and particularly the way people have told me I approach them (ie. the idea that I’m never satisfied anyway because I’m looking for perfection) without sounding this way. This is definitely not my best poem, but oh well, it shows my conflicting feelings about the fact that I’ve never felt “at home” anywhere.

I’m joining dVerse’s OLN. I’m also joining Friday Writings. The optional prompt is “muscle memory”. I guess repeating that I don’t feel at home anywhere counts.

Book Review: The Bad Room by Jade Kelly

Posted on by Astrid

Last month, I somehow felt inspired to check out abuse survivor memoirs on Apple Books. I came across The Bad Room by Jade Kelly and it immediately appealed to me, so I decided to buy it. At first, I raced through it. Then, I fell into a reading slump. I finally finished the book yesterday.

Summary

After years of physical and mental abuse, Jade thought her kindly foster mother would be the answer to her prayers. She was wrong … this is her staggering true story.

‘This must be what prison is like,’ I thought as another hour crawled by. In fact, prison would be better … at least you knew your sentence. You could
tick off the days until you got out. In the Bad Room we had no idea how long we’d serve.

After years of constant abuse, Jade thought her foster mother Linda Black would be the answer to her prayers. Loving and nurturing, she offered ten-year-old Jade a life free of fear.

But once the regular social-worker checks stopped, Linda turned and over the next six years Jade and three other girls were kept prisoner in a bedroom
they called the ‘bad room’.

Shut away for 16 hours at a time, they were starved, violently beaten, forbidden from speaking or using the toilet and routinely humiliated. Jade was left feeling broken and suicidal.

This is the powerful true story of how one woman banished the ghosts of her past by taking dramatic action to protect the life of every vulnerable child
in care.

My Review

I was pulled in to this book right from the start. The prologue was captivating! It immediately painted a picture of what life was like in the Bad Room. Then, as Jade describes her life before being taken into foster care, the story gets slightly less fast-paced, but it’s still very intriguing.

Jade is very candid about her own faults. Like, when she’s first in care with Linda Black, she genuinely believes she is different from the other girls in care and she won’t end up being treated like them. She is also open about the moments she tells on or even lies about the others in order to (hopefully) be liked by Linda more. This shows that Jade isn’t a saint; she’s just trying to survive.

It is truly heartbreaking to see how social services fail Jade and the other girls time and time again despite the massive amounts of documentation on their case. I can relate to this in a way. For this reason, I feel that this story is very important reading material for social workers and foster carers in the UK and elsewhere. Thankfully, Jade survived to tell her story. Others may not be so lucky.

Book Details

Title: The Bad Room: Held Captive and Abused by My Evil Carer. A True Story of Survival
Author: Jade Kelly
Publisher: HarperElement
Publication Date: June 25, 2020

Advice to Today’s High Schoolers

Posted on by Astrid

This week, one of the prompts over at Mama’s Losin’ It is to share advice you’d give today’s high school students. I cringed a lot at Mama Kat’s own post, as it was based on the idea that all high schoolers have parents who have their best interest in mind. I mean, I lied regularly as a teen. Though I wouldn’t advocate for that, it was all I could, because honesty led to harsh punishment.

I am not sure how much of my experiences was shaped by my neurotype, ie. being autistic. I mean, the main reasons I was ridiculed and punished harshly were because I was “weird”. However, there are lots of high schoolers who for whatever reason cannot follow Mama Kat’s advice, either because of their own situation or because of their parents.

For this reason, the main piece of advice I would give any high schooler is that it’s okay to be themselves no matter what. Whether your parents accept you, is something about them, not you. Do stand up for yourself if they are abusive or hurtful. You may be a minor, but that doesn’t mean your parents are all-powerful and all-knowing (especially that).

Also, seek out adult role models other than your parents. I felt helped a lot by being in contact with disabled adults. Even for neurotypical, non-disabled teens, it is useful to have people that inspire them other than their own parents.

Use social media, but of course use it wisely. There are spaces on social media for people just like you. Of course, I know most parents supervise their teens’ social media use and I think there is some good reason for that. Mine thankfully didn’t, but then again I was pretty careful not to engage in unsafe behavior online.

I do agree with Mama Kat that honesty is part of a good family dynamic. It has to come both ways though. As teens, it will help you to not give your parents reasons to snoop on your private life by being open about it. If your parents aren’t safe, seek out another adult to talk to.

What advice would you give current high school students?

Mama’s Losin’ It

Listening to My Inner Voice(s)

Posted on by Astrid

The day two prompt in The Goddess Journaling Workbook is about listening to your inner voice. This is incredibly hard. Not just because I have multiple inner voices, but because a lot of them carry shame.

Today I found out Onno van der Hart, one of the world-s top experts on dissociation, had his psychotherapy license revoked indefinitely for violating a patient’s boundaries. He was the main proponent of the structural dissociation theory. This theory is controversial in its own right, as it dehumanizes alters. For example, therapists are supposed to only talk to the host or apparently normal part, who is then supposed to relay messages from the other alters or emotional parts. One of the main problems with this is shame. The host often feels uncomfortable sharing the other alters’ thoughts because they are painful.

So, as an act of radical rebellion, I am going to now let each alter who’s willing to speak on this issue share their thoughts.

I knew this. DID is bullshit. It’s not real, at least in my case. I’m so happy I am not diagnosed, as this Onno van der Hart, a so-called expert, took twenty years therapying with a client only to make her dependent and then dump her like a pile of poo.

I’m scared. I wish I still had the diagnosis so I could get trauma therapy. I want my therapist to comfort me. I don’t want to integrate, but I do want to process stuff. I’m not sure. I’m scared that no-one will believe me now that the Netherlands’ top expert on DID lost his license.

I don’t want no fucking therapy. I don’t want to be forced to be anything I’m not. I just want to be me and be myself and be accepted.

Fuck. I’m manipulative. The whole trauma thing is made up.

Well, I realize I’m not really even capable of letting each of us share their honest thoughts. I still find that I was going to redact out the four-letter words. I feel tons of shame surrounding this whole controversy and the DID thing as well.

As a side note, Onno van der Hart wasn’t sued for his theory of structural dissociation. I think it will continue to guide psychotherapists and the multidisciplinary guideline for treating DID. Van der Hart lost his license for boundary-violation, including unloading his own personal problems onto the patient, sending her unsolicited, emotionally laden E-mails, etc. My husband said he was just trying to cash on her and if no-one saw it, something’s wrong with psychotherapists in general. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Dealing with Some High School Memories

Posted on by Astrid

We are struggling quite a bit. We hardly know why, but yesterday, a memory appeared. It’s not like we weren’t aware of this having happened before, so it’s not a repressed memory. However, it still feels as though only certain insiders can “own” the memory, if this makes sense.

This is hard, because we got told last Thursday by our nurse practitioner that it’s good people aren’t validating our experience of dissociation. For example, they’re reminding us that the body is 32 and we’re all Astrid. That may be so, but it’s only getting us to further disconnect from ourselves.

He told us that being a child at heart is not wrong, but claiming to be a child is. Or something like that. He more or less told us to look beyond the emotional parts’ words to what was actually troubling us. For example, Jace saying she has to move out by age eighteen meant we’re afraid we won’t get long-term care funding. Fine by me but I think it’s not that simple. I think this may be an actual memory bothering Jace and it was just triggered by the long-term care stuff.

Anyway, yesterday evening we started experiencing high school memories. Our high school tutor was our safe person at the time. We trusted him more than we did our parents. Our parents weren’t okay with this. When in ninth grade, we had been struggling and our schoolwork was suffering. Our tutor asked us to tell him what was going on. We wrote it down. Then our tutor told our father, who worked at our school. He refused to disclose what we’d written though. I understand this, but it got our parents angry and led to an incident of bad mental abuse.

Anyway, like I said, this tutor was our safe person. He was the first one to know about our being multiple other than a handful of readers of my online diary at the time. He wasn’t impressed by it as much. In fact, he told us we’re just manipulative. This got us to go in denial and not tell anyone else.

It still upsets us that we could’ve had a chance for real help if we hadn’t been in denial at the time. I mean, the tutor told our first psychologist about our experience. This psychologist suspected DID, but we denied everything. It’s understandable, because we were still in somewhat of an unsafe situation at the time.

We trusted our high school tutor, but he betrayed our trust in some rather overt ways. He told our parents that we suspected we were on the autism spectrum. Not that there was no other way for them to find out, as we wrote about it in our public online diary. However, he told them that we’re a hypochondriac for it. In this sense, he was on our parents’ side. And yet, we didn’t see it.

Then again, is it okay for me to think in terms of being on someone’s side or not? I mean, our parents were supportive in some ways. Our mother was at least. Our father was and still is too self-absorbed to actually care about anything other than his intersts and opinions. It’s not black-or-white. People can be good and still do bad things. Or something like it.