My son is resilient and I know in my heart that he got that from me.. The shameful part though is that his resilience is rooted from emotional abuse from me. There's a lot of shame pouring out of me as I write that. We as children never deserve to be treated with any disrespect or any neglect or anything less than unconditional love. I'm not proud for doing this to my child but it's a big part of my story and my deepest healing as a traumatized child turned narcissistic mother.
My son is all over the place. His mind is left and right, out the door and in the abyss. He is constantly creating with his imagination and his effortless ability to express his creativity through his drawing and verbal animation. He has a beautiful mind... but when I get triggered in the early morning while they're getting ready for school, I don't see a beautiful mind. I see chaos, I see disorganized, I hear loud, I feel late. I feel overstimulation and all the things that were drilled and deeply programmed into my inner child. And don't even get me started on home work and school projects! My anxiety kicks into high gear and I'm driving at high speeds of impatience.
My voice and energy becomes something other than my own.
It becomes aggressive as my body's adrenaline kicks in and I'm in fight or flight and "hurry the fuck up" mode. My inner child is highly triggered as I have the emotional flashbacks of the same chaotic feelings... The inner critic screams through me and we've reached our point of no return.
Being shushed all the time and criticized and told to hurry up and to listen and to stop being dirty and to stop crying for nothing had shaped me into the type of parent I was unconsciously becoming. Everything that I was suppressed was now triggering me from my own offspring.
After an outburst from an attempt to control the situation and relieve any rage, I'd be riddled in shame.
It's all I would feel while I physically felt my body come back down from what felt like a sub personality possession that used the voice of my elders screaming at me as the child, but to my son. The past meets the present in that moment and I am filled with regret, anger with myself and sadness for my son who just took it.
I used to make excuses and say, "well maybe I'm a better parent at a different stage in life...". I knew I was trying to make myself feel better and justify my bad behavior because it was weighing on me and my household. I knew that I was an egg shell type person because my daughter constantly overcompensated for me. I knew she did that because she was terrified of my energy. Some days I was normal and other days I was possessed and couldn't get a grip on my shit. What does one do to make this better? My son was constantly apologizing even when it wasn't necessary. I could tell he was dissociating and it broke my heart because I was seeing myself so clearly through him.
After every moment of fucking up, I'd tell myself, you have to do better for them... you have to do better for her (inner child).
Being conscious of my behavior was a rude Awakening and it was so disappointing everytime the moment got the best of me. I was usually good at catching myself but why was this so difficult? I realized I was also overcompensating by trying to make it easy on them for dealing with this harsh world. The irony...
My inner child faced a lot of emotional neglect and abandonment. I can count on one hand how many times my love language of affection and words of affirmation were met. Maybe my reality of that was skewed because I was in a state of dissociation. The memory of my mom holding me came up during a healing session recently and I was elated. It was a lost memory that I was able to retrieve. I've long forgiven my parents for how busy they were. They were immigrants who hustled to make money in order to give us everything they couldn't have. They worked hard for us but there was no balance in that approach. They worked from a place of poverty and it reflected mainly in their lack of presence and starving us from love and nurturing. I was a sensitive child. No one knew how to raise a sensitive child because that wasn't even a thing. When asked about how I was as a child, they would always say I cried a lot. That's about all the feedback I'd get for a reflection. I cried so much one time that my dad couldn't take it anymore so he pulled my arm to the garage and left me there in the dark. I never cried again. I came out of there changed. I became tough and I dealt with everything with sarcasm and humor and I became resilient.
I had led a semi unconscious life in a state of dissociation. I was only held accountable upon waking up from the dream and realizing the depth of my responsibility raising two children without doing any inner work. I started shadow work in 2016 but have only fully faced my Complex-PTSD this past year. It was after we had 3 clients who spoke about their abusive narcissistic mothers was when I was shaken into self reflection because their story brought that mirror to my face. Hearing them speak of the energy of their mothers felt familiar within my household. I felt like a fraud but I pushed through that to ask the real question:
Am I a narc mom and can I heal from this?
The clients that we attract are always mirrors to our own journeys and reflections of where we need healing. This was a big deal for me. You couldn't deny that this was showing me exactly what I needed to do. The shame and guilt pulled my head up and forced me to honestly look at the consequence of my actions. It made me reflect at what happened to me and I had to ask myself some real questions. Do you want your kids to be fucked up too? Is this the unconscious program you want to instill in your children? There was an urgency of needing to do deeper inner healing in order to change the course of my life and ripple into my children. I kept hearing the echo of this truth:
He's resilient but you need him to be resilient for reasons that aren't exclusive to survival.
I went deep into a tail spin of feelings and one night found myself unable to stop an ugly cry from flooding in. My children were both there trying to understand what was happening and I confessed to them that I wanted to be a better mama. I was tired of being an asshole and unable to catch the emotional flashbacks in time. My son then says so gently, "It's ok mom, you're not that bad..." his comforting words painfully struck me that I replied. "But it is. I don't want to be bad at all. I need to be better. You don't deserve that." It blew me away that he'd protect me after I failed to keep him safe. But I promised to dedicate myself into doing better and holding myself accountable for healing my inner child and my relationship with them. What's amazing is my children are emotionally intelligent and can hold space, brilliant beyond their years. They held me and saw me for real; not as the authority but as a person who had some broken parts inside that needed their love, space and compassion.
This felt like the turning point of my biggest and deepest healing and it gave me motivation and comfort that I am accountable to do better.
I went in with the intention of healing all of my sub parts and fractalized parts that needed me to nurture and re-parent them. I started my healing regimen with deep somatic healing, deep core and trauma healing for my inner child using my trustee tapping technique. I went and bought this incredible book about C-PTSD. When the guilt started to consume me, I immediately ran to the internet to research any info or support groups for parents who wanted to heal their relationship with the core self and with their abused children. But I couldn't find it anywhere and it dawned on me that I am in a rare space where the narc in me had to heal the broken and traumatized child inside. There arent many people in this matrix who heal at this stage. Every where I looked, I found it from the perspective of my son and it stabbed me harder in the heart. It made me feel so many things and I sat there in disgust BUT that's what propelled me forward. My healing was two-fold: my inner child and me as the mom. I had a ton of work ahead but I was motivated. It's normal for parents to bitch about their children and to say yelling or spanking them is a good way to get them in line.
I don't hit my children but I've hit them in other ways and that's unacceptable.
I wanted to shift the way in how we raise our children. I had to break the pattern of our ancestral trauma and set my children free from functioning from that space. Love and dedication can set one free and if I healed the child within, then follows the parent of the present.
Being a mother wasn't something I longed for. My son was conceived while I was on the pill and he came out without an epidural. It's been an interesting dynamic from the beginning. We've had a rough relationship but if anyone has reflected all parts of me, it was definitely him. And when I birthed my son, I also birthed this intense feeling of love I never knew existed.
I was also not familiar when I birthed that kind of profound love. The love that comes from an experience like that changes you but I honestly had no idea what to do with it. It almost felt like my unworthiness kicked in and I sabotaged this experience in my unconscious slumber. Because I wasn't taught healthy love, I functioned from that place and was told it was normal. My son is all heart and super connected to spirit and I will never forgive myself if I am the reason his spirit is shattered. It's possible his existence could have been influenced by a negative force but I am not about to go and use that excuse for my shortcomings.
And if it was all planned with the plan of failure, they've chosen the wrong person to fuck with.
I don't want to be remembered by my children only as the scary, unstable mother, but I want them to remember both.. she was scary once but then one day, she changed. That's the story I want to leave this Matrix with. I've dedicated a lot of my latest healing to help the wounded child within. It's been my mission that I take accountability to change my son's story because neither he or my little self deserved what happened to us.
N.B. I wrote this when I started this specific healing journey and have had more ups than downs since. My children are really noticing the shifts and I feel that with more work comes better results. My son and I have worked together and it has become easier. I've decided to approach the mornings with attention and ease and home work with patience and humor. My son was frustrated one time that he had to study and I insisted that I help him. I folded laundry while we found tricks and solutions together. It was calm and neither of us frustrated or reactive. It felt good to finally get a point as a fully conscious parent. I've dedicated to meeting him in a space of compassion and intense love.. the same intense love that I now understand was birthed for the very purpose to heal us.
Karen A. Baquiran
November 2, 2022
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