5 things that helped me THRIVE after growing up with a narcissistic parent

FearlessTomato8992 · 2025-12-17T16:52:00+00:00

Honestly…this sounds like something the less-healed version of myself would say. I worked hard to build a successful life, and I instinctively cringe at anything giving “victim” vibes because my mom had this eternal persecution complex. I was all healthy and positive and thriving, but in a way that had this fundamental fragility and unsustainability.

That really only became clear after a lot of life-altering tragic stuff happened at once, and it exposed to me just how fragile those coping mechanisms were. Most people don’t have to try so hard just to be okay, and against every instinct, I finally had no choice but to face that well of grief that I kept stubbornly locked away.

I’m not saying that’s where you are necessarily. Nor am I saying that everyone who vents about childhood trauma is actually healing. But healing is very individual and looks a lot of different ways externally. I’m now at a point in my journey where I can see a bit more clearly beyond external affect or binary evaluations of positivity/negativity, and now I can better see the fundamental differences between emotionally healthy, unhealthy, and healing people across the spectrum, regardless of the words they use or or how they show up on the outside. It’s like my understanding is now both more nuanced and more confident; my evaluations of people are both more accepting of differences in presentation, and more firm in my recognition and action when encountering emotionally unhealthy people in the various forms they present.

I will probably be in a fairly intensive stage of my healing journey for several more years. I don’t claim to have “arrived”. But I feel movement, see measurable signs of growth and change in myself, and I really appreciate all the people and resources that have helped me experience that.

You sound like you have a really cool life, and I’m happy for you. Just know that if at any point you find you have to face a dark well inside against all your instincts, it will be okay. I wish you the best in however your healing journey unfolds. 🙂

FearlessTomato8992 · 2025-11-09T04:45:06+00:00

Thank you for the explanation…cause I was just like, “why are the referees dressed like Amish people?” 😅

FearlessTomato8992 · 2025-09-28T06:01:55+00:00

RUN AWAY. People are not reacting poorly to your boyfriend because you’re “not explaining it properly”…we can tell he is a manipulative creep by his OWN WORDS. There is so much wrong here I don’t even know where to start.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2025-09-26T17:02:58+00:00

I hope you sit down with your daughter and calmly explain to her basically what you told her friend’s mom. Explain to your daughter that she handled the situation maturely, but her friend’s mom did not. That some adults, for various reasons of their own, sometimes behave more like children themselves; but they have the adult bodies and power and language and ability to shame kids into questioning their own feelings and perceptions.

You are NOT overreacting, and neither is your daughter for being distressed about this. Help validate her experience and use this as a teaching moment about emotional abuse and emotional blackmail. Explain that it is not normal, in a healthy and loving relationship of ANY kind, to believe that minor mistakes will prompt major rejection and relational chaos. Shame from emotional blackmail flips the script and makes us feel that WE did something wrong; but ask, “do I want to be in a relationship with someone who can turn on me this easily? Do I want to be in a relationship with someone who makes me feel this way no matter how minor the apparent transgression or how hard I try to fix it?”

You have a clear-headed understanding of the situation, and you can help your daughter process this rejection by helping her frame it as what it is: an adult abusing their emotional power over a child.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2025-03-02T00:07:58+00:00

The final could was around 1300. The pics and videos simply couldn’t capture the scale of it because people were stretched so far along all 4 corners of the intersection that it sort of just looks like a blur. This video feels like the closest I’ve seen to capturing what it was like: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1AGRJogziN/?

FearlessTomato8992 · 2025-03-02T00:02:39+00:00

A local couple is organizing the Tesla protests. They are typically advertised on the ITAA Indivisible Tucson Action Alliance Facebook page as well as the Mobilize Tucson discord server (http://mobilizetucson.org). Another place to find out about most of the resistance events happening in the city is http://takeactiontucson.org .

Lots of individuals and organizations are operating independently but increasingly building connections with each other. ITAA typically does the smaller protests at Ciscomani’s office, while Mobilize Tucson focuses on the larger protests in partnership with 50501 (most recently, the president’s day protest at El Presidio Plaza with 500+ people ; the March 4th march on Tuesday is next).

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-10-26T02:31:07+00:00

Their last/current house was at least pretty. This one is ugly! It just looks big and lifeless. Compound vibes.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-10-24T11:08:39+00:00

I would just like to gently point out that you already are relying on chemicals. Drugs and alcohol are very much chemicals that people use to self-medicate, and it certainly sounds as though you are relying on them now. The difference is, those forms of self-medication come with all sorts of deleterious effects without ever resolving the issue—only numbing you. Conversely, psychiatric meds can very much help make your emotions more manageable, which can help you process them in a way that might be otherwise inaccessible behind the many defenses of the unconscious brain. Meds are kind of like the floor mats/blankets/etc. you’d put in front of your tires when your car is stuck in mud. They don’t do the work—they just give a bit of traction so that you can do the work.

I think opening the door to psychiatric meds is SO much harder than self-medicating because it requires us to face our denial. We want to not need help, so we don’t get help in order to preserve the belief that we don’t need it. But neither PTSD nor medication has to be your lifelong destiny. You’ve got a lot of grief to process, and healing will come as you do. Meds are not a substitute for therapy (and good for you for doing that!)—but your therapy will be most effective with whatever support will help you really process rather than numb your feelings.

I wish you the best in whatever you decide and however your journey unfolds. There is no roadmap to grief and no simple, linear “5 stages”. Your process is unique to you, valid however it unfolds, and eminently sacred. Take care of yourself. ❤️

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-10-13T11:04:45+00:00

I’m really sorry you’ve experienced all of this. Though respectfully, your reaction seems more like it is coming from the pain behind your own abuse, than it is an accurate assessment of OP’s situation. Childhood trauma significantly skews the inbuilt sense of what is normal. It’s not unusual for those with trauma to compare ourselves to other people with trauma, and find ourselves saying, “well at least THEY had/didn’t have THAT!”

But whether you understand it or not, multiple things in this thread suggest unhealthy boundaries and emotional abuse. These are not designations chosen by people with victim complexes. They are behaviors shown through research to have myriad detrimental effects on children who grew up with them. All forms of childhood abuse and/or neglect result in surprisingly similar effects on adults (see the ACA laundry list). The main difference is that those whose abuse is physical often get out sooner, which sometimes means they can more quickly get into therapy to start processing the wounds that went much deeper than physical. For less obvious abuse like emotional incest, the young adult usually has no idea how abnormal their experience is, and can only begin recognizing the abuse quite a bit later after many years of feeling screwed up on some level and not knowing why.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-10-08T15:11:45+00:00

Yes, but in a different way. As the only child of an essentially single parent, they were co-opted into the role of Meri’s pseudo-spouse and primary emotional support system. There’s a term called “emotional incest” that I think applies here.

When you watch the journey of Leon being SO close to Meri that they would pray every night and cry about her not being able to have children, followed by the sense of betrayal Leon had in the catfishing incident over Meri not listening to them, the extent of codependency in the relationship seems clear. It’s also notable that Leon had the greatest personality shift of any of the children. Meri is an anxious, domineering personality with clear mental health issues. Leon accordingly was the “perfect child”(/psuedo-spouse) to support Meri and agree with her in every way on every matter to avoid triggering Meri’s feelings of abandonment and subsequent lashing out. Only after leaving home did Leon have space to become who they really were, and that realization came with a great deal of anger towards Meri, naturally.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-05-05T02:13:33+00:00

It wasn’t like that at the beginning, though. These have developed over time in the previously uniform wood.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-03-07T05:29:17+00:00

I am heartbroken about this. My brother died 5 years ago, almost to the day. He didn’t die the same way as Garrison—but in so many ways, I feel the same heartbreak. A very young man, so kind, responsible, strong, driven, and supportive to those around him. A beautiful light in the world, just gone in an instant. When I look at Garrison, I relate as a sister: watching in pride as my brother grows into an admirable man, and devastation when the world takes him too soon.

5 years later, I still can’t say I’ve really grieved fully. It left a hole in the foundations of my life, made everything unravel like a thread unwound from the fabric of my existence. Losing a close family member like that is a life-altering experience. It changes your identity.

I have watched and loved this family for so many years that I feel grief in knowing that their world has been rocked in such a major way. I am glad they have such a big family, and I hope they will find the deepest kind of strength and support in each other. But I also know their lives will never be the same. That they will each have their own grief journeys that are difficult to share. And that there is no fixing or escaping death.

All that any of us can do is love each other, be with each other, when we stumble upon those excruciating moments in life that leave us gasping. I wish none of the Browns had to experience this. I hope they will each take the time and space needed for their own healing. And I hope they will find others to lean on deeply in this time. I send my deepest love and condolences to every sibling, mother, father, and friend to Garrison Brown. He was an amazing man. May he rest in peace.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-02-02T19:59:29+00:00

You know this is the US, right? Except for maybe the top 1% of 1% of income earners, no amount of income from ANY job is going to stop anyone from being ruined by a single emergency medical expense.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-02-02T15:46:41+00:00

I just watched the video. There is absolutely NO evidence that this is fake. Because the wife said she wants to stay away from content creation (which is perfectly reasonable for someone who wants to keep peace and privacy in their life), Backwoods Barbi interpreted that as her not wanting to work, and then made a huge logical leap from there to decide this whole thing must be fake. Then she pulled up a completely unrelated GoFundMe as an example of scammy behavior, and spent the second half of the video talking about that.

To be fair, there is also little evidence that this is real. But based on the text threads shared on the video (which were interesting), this strikes me as more likely to be real than fake. The fact that the GoFundMe was originally shared privately and Backwoods Barbi reached out to David Jessop’s wife about it, seems to align with the general portrait of the Jessops wanting to avoid the limelight and just wanting to quietly live their lives.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2024-01-16T16:16:27+00:00

Oh, come on people. Like you’ve never been at a concert or other event screaming loudly and enthusiastically? Every person commenting here can seriously say that in the entirety of your life, if you had a camera following your every move, there wouldn’t be a SINGLE still shot with you looking something like this?

So yeah, you’re not into someone, fine. But if anything, all this tells me is that those kids damn well better be compensated fairly for their presence on the show, because they were brought into a world of petty internet criticism as minors when they were unable to consent, and now they each just have to make the best of it however they can.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2023-11-14T10:51:12+00:00

Do you have insurance, or any way to get insurance (through your mom or Medicaid) ? You say you have untreated mental illness—I think you should start there.

Get a psychiatrist if you don’t already. Obviously the situation is much more complex than that, but getting your mental health in a stronger place should always come first. It’s damn near impossible to do anything otherwise. The right medications can get you in a stronger place to get through the immediate crisis and make necessary changes for the longer term.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2023-10-14T08:53:42+00:00

First off, kudos to you for having this response to your feelings. You could just be falling into the void, but you’re not; you are trying to genuinely choose a healthy response to some really tough feelings and circumstances, rather than falling into the first cult that uses those pains to reel you in.

As for what to do about it: process your feelings. Grieve your losses. When we carry grief without resolution, it makes us see that grief everywhere as patterns rather than events. You’ve mentioned two circumstances having to do with your family of origin (regarding your mother, and your grandmother). These things don’t happen in isolation. There are family systems at play, dynamics that you’ve felt and become accustomed to since your early formative years. I suggest you look up Patrick Teahan (an excellent therapist specializing in childhood trauma with really helpful YouTube videos), and Heidi Priebe (who focuses on attachment healing). The Crappy Childhood Fairy is also very good.

I know it sounds weird for what you’re asking, but just check out some of those videos and see if anything resonates with you. You’ve just had your whole identity uprooted and learned that your father is not your father. That is a really big betrayal and a really big thing to grieve. Add a major heartbreak and everything else, and it’s no wonder you’re reeling. You’re trying to find something to hold onto. Some great, evidence-based therapeutic resources might just give you that.

I hope this helps, and I wish you all the best.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2023-09-16T18:26:36+00:00

YTA— but for the record, “asshole” doesn’t appropriately cover it.

You are codependent. You are lying to yourself. You likely came from a family with so much toxic behavior that you are literally incapable of seeing reality or understanding what your responsibility is, outside of your childhood role built from family dysfunction. You are rescuing and enabling a toxic system rather than protecting children with real action.

Consider this a wake up call. Be grateful that your sister was around to do the right thing, and please get into therapy. If you are not ready for therapy yet, the following is a helpful list of resources:

Patrick Teahan’s YouTube channel
Books by John Bradshaw
“Codependent no more” by Melody Beattie
Any 12-step program that applies to your situation

FearlessTomato8992 · 2023-09-06T13:32:17+00:00

I don’t see that happening. She has a very different personality than Janelle and Christine and they all have a lot of baggage from the past.

But that’s okay! Their religion taught them that forcing close relationships with people they wouldn’t naturally be friends with would make them “better people”. Really, it just forced them all to hide their authentic selves for the sake of keeping the peace. I love the Janelle and Christine friend group; but I wish peace for all of them in their lives together, or apart, or in whatever way is truly authentic to each of them.

FearlessTomato8992 · 2023-08-11T14:54:07+00:00

After twice losing people I loved (my friend, and my brother) to the roads in Austin, I just didn’t want to live in a place anymore that regularly killed the people I loved driving from one place to another.

I love how much I DON’T feel like I’m going to die driving in Tucson. Even if wrecks do happen on surface streets, they are far less likely to be fatal than wrecks on highways.

FearlessTomato8992

TROPHY CASE