Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com
An Enabler To The Covert Narcissist
At my dad’s worst, he would always take the side of my mother when it came to her need to blame anything that happened during the day while he was at work on “one of the children”. I was most often to blame for arguments in the house that she would instigate and then immediately use against me no matter how much I tried to defend myself. It was always the fact that I backtalked her even though I would not necessarily label it as backtalk.
Believe me, I have experienced my fair share of backtalk and attitude from youth, but most of the time even youth are not truly backtalking to be disrespectful. Youth are most likely trying to defend or express their point of view which often gets taken as backtalk and disrespect because of the way they express what they have to say in the tone that they say what they have to say. Nine times out of ten, it is the adult who will label what a young person has to say as disrespect because the young person is right in what he or she is saying, the young person has called attention to the adult’s lack of intelligence in a particular area, or the adult has forgotten what is is like to actually be a young person with a lot of expression.
Children and adolescents are most often just matter-of-fact in the way they express themselves, and unfortunately, many toxic adults have chips on their already tense shoulders and easily take offense to the confidence that children and adolescents exude forth. Instead of attempting to actually listen to my side of the story, my dad never saw that I had a side of the story unless there was a benefit to him finding out information about my mother’s activities or when I finally put my foot down when I was old enough to no longer care about suffering parental consequences.
Yet, it did not matter what we [the children] said to defend ourselves, my dad always took my mother’s side. He always believed the lies that she told. He always believed and accepted her word over ours. It did not matter if the sky were blue, if my mom told him it was red, he would believe it all while staring at the sky and seeing for himself that it was blue. This is a man who prided himself on having great discernment and being able to detect things until he realized that I was the one in the family actually born with this gift [of discernment and being able to detect things below the surface]. Ha! I have to laugh! My mother did so much shady stuff back in the day that my dad still has no idea of all the things that she did behind his back.
My dad was an enabler of his covert narcissistic wife. I wonder if he even knew she was a narcissist. He only knows the term now because of my usage of it to describe her ways. Back then, I saw him as a blind man who had no idea of the level of masterminding games that my mother played all while he was working hard to provide for us. I think, like most people, he was captivated by my mother’s beauty and charm. She always came off as dumb and submissive around him when those attributes were nothing like the real person of my mother at all. My mother is one of the most calculating and manipulative people I know. She puts on many different character masks to deceive others, and she deceived my dad for years. Yet, he had to know at some point that she was a phony. He had to know. He did know because he eventually divorced her.
How My Dad Enabled My Covert Narcissistic Mother
My dad enabled my mother by simply turning a blind eye to all that she did to me. Rarely did she do things to all of the children. Her divisive punishments were meant to deflect from what she was really doing while my dad was away. My mother would only punish me but coddle my other siblings so that when my dad asked them, of course, I would have fingers pointed towards me as the guilty party. My dad never knew that she had bribed my siblings with extra toys, food treats, and money. My dad never knew and never seemed to have a reason to question anything that my mother said about what was happening. The only time he would be doubtful is if my grandmother was mentioned in some way.
My dad was an enabler of covert narcissistic abuse inflicted to be by my mother. In particular, I recall countless times of being awakened from deep sleep around 3 AM to listen to my dad rant about something my mother said that I had done to her. I would be forced to apologize for things that my mother had lied about. In fact, much of what my mother said was true but she had twisted to make it appear that I had done bad things when she was the one who had done bad things. In fact, my mother knew that I would be too tired to wait for my dad to come home. She would scheme and wait until the wee hours of the morning to tell him when she knew that he would already be agitated and set to go off. In retrospect, she was very instrumental in keeping him at an unhinged level of anger without doing anything that would make her guilty of inciting his anger. My dad was too blind to see what she was doing, and at such an early age of 7 and 8 I could see so clearly.
I knew who I was dealing with from the time I was three years old when it came to my covert narcissistic mother. I just had not way of expressing what I experienced to anyone else. No one believed me. No one came to my aid. Everyone seemed blinded by my mother. She was a creative mastermind. She played her role oh so well. My dad played his role oh so well too. He was just clueless that he had been cast in a role. On the surface, he viewed himself as the amazing husband and father who provided support and protection for his family. He just had no idea! He was being played for a fool by his very own covert narcissistic wife. He fell blindly to her lies, thereby, aiding and abetting in her wickedness against his very own children.
One of the major ways that he played into my mother’s hands was to join her often silent bandwagon to criticize. My dad could be one of the most critical dads ever. Stay tuned for more to this story in my next post.
My Voice Unchained 