I love your ID, "certain hope". That's a perfect phrase to describe the road to wholeness. I will keep that as a thought of faith.
I used the phrase "nihilistic shame" because my experience growing up under my father was complete nihilism. That must be a common thread among children of narcissists. But the ultimate crippling factor in my life, finally revealed to me in recent months, was the shame projected onto me by my father, my mother and my older siblings. I am hoping to find that someone else may have experienced something similar. Everything about being related to narcissists is alienating to me. I have not met others who have a clue of what it has been like, including my brothers because their role in our family necessitated accepting the line that the "problem" was me. Besides I have come to believe that one of my brothers is a narcissist like our father.
My father came from a prominent, wealthy family which he lorded over us - as though his family was better than ours - his own children's. How bizarre is that! Of course his family would be my family as well. (A couple of years ago my father's second wife had given me several boxes of beautifully framed family photographs. A few months later my father asked me for a particular picture. He came by my home - for the first time since my husband had died four years earlier - to get a photo and walked out with all four boxes saying as he went, "these are photos of MY family." As though I weren't related to his parent, grandparents, etc.) He simply does not see me or my child (whom I named for him) as related to his parents, grandparents, cousins, et.al. This is just one small way that I did not exist to him, one small sample of the nihilist part of being his child.
However, the way I have existed for him, is to carry his shame. He has no shame. When he experienced something that would be shaming rather than feel it he would simply immediately project it off of himself onto me. I carried it, I owned it, his and my brothers as well. Toxic shame, in and of itself, is annihilating. It says that the person, as opposed to an act, is bad. For my father, I became "the bad thing" on which he could place all his unbearable feelings. From a toddler on he expected me to get things right the first time - no learning curve allowed. When I was six, he took my brothers and me target practicing with a Colt 45. My turn came last so my ears were already ringing when I picked up the pistol. I was frightened to fire it but more frightened to not. The trigger was hard to squeeze and pistol heavy for my little arms. When I fired it the kick was so great that my arm jerked back over my head and pulled me backward to the ground. The gun, in my hand, slammed into the ground pointing uphill directly toward my brothers. I was terrified and traumatized and my father was ballistic. I was punished severely for committing such a horrifically dangerous act. Punished severely because I was not big enough, strong enough to handle a .45 pistol, because I had not wanted to shoot it. Punished because he had used poor judgment in forcing me to do something I was not capable of doing. Because he took on no shame for his mistake, he projected his shame onto me and punished me severely. This wasn't the first and wasn't the last but was one of the most dangerous examples. That is for me "nihilistic shame." I did not exist except to hold my father's shame.
Can anyone relate to my experiences?
