If you had narcissist parenting it isn't true that there was no you before abuse

 

 

 There is  a term that survivors of childhood narcissistic abuse use, when referring to finding out who they were before abuse, and that phrase tells them that there was no personage, no them that they can go back to due to this narcissistic parenting. 'There was no me' they say to go back to. I find this phrase to be so disempowering for NA survivors. I don't know who started it but it isn't altogether true. It may feel as though it is true, now, but some time in the future you may realise that all narcissistic parents did was hide you from yourself.

 I was someone before abuse and also someone before I was born. I am someone now despite my childhood, despite abuse as an adult. Perhaps I alway had a strong sense of self, a strong inner core. I dissociated a lot as an abused child and split off parts of me helped me to survive. But I still felt I knew who I was. I was also aware that people wanted to take that from me. Wanted to destroy me and my sense of self. I hid myself from others because who I was wasn't good enough but I only hid myself I never disappeared totally.

I understand that after narcissistic abuse you feel lost but I also know it is possible to become more whole. To think about who you were as if you were nothing before your parents took you over and abused you into being who they wanted you to be is quite nihilistic. And nihilism I find an extreme view. 

When you go back to thinking of yourself as a baby, unless someone cloned you, you were unique. You were born with a personality. You can see it in babies, they are all different with individual personalities. Within that baby is the seed and potential for anything. If you are lucky your potential will be nurtured and it will grow. With narcissist parents unless that potential suits thier needs it will be ignored and stamped out. But still it is there waiting. Waiting for that right moment when situations arise, when things come together to make something light up inside you, and off you go. The opposite can also happen, depending on the circumstances. In Buddhism this is called karma or cause and effect. You are the only one who can make this potential arise as an adult.

But if you are healing from narcissistic abuse as a child and are now an adult but you have the idea that your parents made you into a nobody, that they took you as a baby and created a clone of them, how can you heal from that?

You have to know that you were born somebody, an individual, a strong little thing that lived through all that abuse and yet are still here. That baby is still there, waiting for you to hold it and help it to grow. There was a you before abuse it is just that you have no memory of that time, no words to express it. But a baby is not nothing, just because it can't speak.

My mother told me a story of when I was small. She said that when she put a dummy/pacifier in my mouth I would spit it out to the other side of the room. Yes that was me, I can see myself in that one scene. Fk this I don't want no dummy. I know even now that if someone tells me to do something I am likely to do the opposite. It was hard to tame me, but tame me they did. So I now look for that wild side of me, the one I am afraid of. The one who got beaten and abused, got the wildness scared out of them. 

So if someone tells you that there was no you before abuse tell them you don't believe that stuff and you are going to go back, rescue that you, that baby, toddler and nurture them yourself. You are an individual with so much potential. Maybe that potential never realised in you. But there is always another day, a new start. You can begin again wih a new you. Go back and rescue that baby from those abusive parents. Start there. Rebirth yourself.