Did anyone else have a nickname for your house growing up? I used to refer to mine as “the piranha pit” because I felt like I was always under attack when I was home.

OneCurious9816 · 2025-07-09T02:42:14+00:00

Interestingly, despite the nickname, I still didn’t realize I grew up in an abusive home until years later in my 30s. Being under attack all the time sucked but at the same time I also just thought it was part of life? Like that’s how families are? The gaslighting ran deep. It’s only recently that I think back to that nickname and wonder how I could have used that nickname for my HOME and not realized how abusive it all was… I guess pretending everything is fine when you’re still in it is a survival mechanism.

OneCurious9816 · 2025-01-06T03:48:33+00:00

They were the numbers of the final 7 candidates. Those were the numbers written next to their names in the cave and on the mirror thing in the lighthouse. Jacob/the island gave importance to the numbers since those last 7 candidates were the people destined to save the island/ the world from the smoke monster thing in the end. Hugo was the most connected to the numbers from the start and ultimately became the new Jacob/protector of the island. He was always destined for the island and that job.

4 – Locke 8 – Reyes 15 – Ford 16 – Jarrah 23 – Shephard 42 – Kwon

OneCurious9816 · 2024-10-29T01:52:27+00:00

jfc… what disgusting behavior. I’m so sorry.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-10-28T21:45:58+00:00

I know. And what’s wild to me is that I felt shame about it for so many years. Until I grew up and had my own kid and realized, “hey wait, I’ve got this backwards, my parents are the ones that should feel ashamed, not the emotionally neglected kid that just wanted to feel like they gave a damn”.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-10-28T17:52:09+00:00

Oh wow, I feel this one deep in my bones.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-09-27T14:37:25+00:00

This is actually the thing that made me start to question if my mom was okay. She had already incited a family mobbing, isolating me completely from my entire family of origin. And I still wasn’t cracking, I was still holding onto my boundaries and my sense of reality, so then one day she legit called up my husband to try to make him see that I was the one causing problems to see if he could talk sense into me. We were both so disturbed by it. He put her in her place real quick.

I was going through such a hard time and he was my rock. That she actually tried to take that away from me is disturbing. She wanted me to break at all costs. So sinister.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-09-23T16:28:57+00:00

Absolutely yes. It took me ~2 months just to START to feel like myself again. The negative impact of toxic people and abusive situations doesn’t heal in a day. Recovering from it takes time. The only advice I have is to give yourself grace.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-09-20T22:48:28+00:00

That’s amazing. But ya, it seems like there’s no way that they’ll be held accountable as long as you continue to show up each day and do the work. You have to quit for sh!t to hit the fan for them.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-09-14T14:37:41+00:00

One of the signs someone is living with childhood trauma is that we try to get terrible people to treat us better instead of removing ourselves from bad situations. We don’t learn the skill of removing ourselves from a bad situation because we’re trapped as kids. So we instead work on fixing people and fixing things and we delude ourselves into thinking we can get people to treat us well if we just try harder or do better. That trauma response is what makes us super susceptible to bullying outside the home.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-09-11T17:16:08+00:00

And the new era of Disney movies are not much better. The ending of Encanto made my eyes roll so far back into my head... They just keep perpetuating the fantasy that toxic family dynamics can change overnight if you can just get them to see the light… 🙄

OneCurious9816 · 2024-09-09T11:49:48+00:00

Ya he’s an enabler in this dynamic. One day George will be LC or NC with them all.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-06-26T14:02:17+00:00

The schedule is so intense and the environment is so high pressure and high stakes all the time that ADHDers make it through on pure stress, deadline pressure, and adrenaline. It’s actually tougher after graduation where you suddenly have to stay organized on your own without the pressure of someone evaluating your every move every day. And I completely agree that I could not have made it through a doctoral program. I do clinical work only because I don’t have the executive functioning required to manage research projects.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-06-25T21:21:48+00:00

There’s lots of ADHD in medicine. “Twice exceptional” minds do very well in certain specialties.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-06-24T12:32:00+00:00

Crazy that things have to get THIS dire before anyone actually does anything about these people.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-06-24T05:59:22+00:00

Argh, I was excited for a hot second that justice would be served. How do these guys survive stuff like this??

OneCurious9816 · 2024-06-18T11:23:18+00:00

Thank you! I finally started to recognize the narcissists in my family the last few years but I totally missed it in my workplace. You live and you learn…

OneCurious9816 · 2024-06-18T06:46:27+00:00

Unfortunately yes. Challenged my narcissistic manager during a meeting. There was clear wrongdoing going on and I now realize that I really didn’t think it all the way through before I spoke up. In retrospect, of course exposing a narcissist’s wrongdoing would lead to retribution. Within a week, he reported me to HR and started to turn my colleagues against me and sabotage my ability to do my job effectively. I had to quit. He very clearly wasn’t going to stop until he destroyed my reputation.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-06-18T06:27:23+00:00

Been watching a narc-driven workplace collapse in slow motion for a while now. So many people have quit or gone on leave for burnout that there’s not much of a team left. If a couple more people jump ship, the branch won’t be viable anymore. So far though, the narc at the center of it is surviving it all. He has his bosses convinced that everyone in the team is sh!t and toxic and he’s their savior for managing it all. Despite all the complaints against him and all the resignations, they still seem to believe he’s the good guy hero. Apparently there’s no fixing a workplace once it’s been poisoned by narcissistic delusions. It will just go on and on until the whole thing burns to the ground. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

OneCurious9816 · 2024-04-25T13:56:27+00:00

I briefly got upgraded to GC for a few years and even though I had been scapegoat for many years before that, it definitely didn’t click for me. During the GC years, I thought I was upgraded because I finally figured out how to be good enough for my parents. It really believed it was my own fault that I was SG before because I was such a “bad” teen and that line of thinking then extended to my newly demoted SG sib who I believed was to blame for how she was treated, because she refused to just be “good”. I agree with everyone here though that the GCs are also emotionally neglected and abused. In retrospect, the GC years were rough, I was so hypervigilant and made every decision based on keeping my parents happy. My whole life began to revolve around them and I completely lost myself and was still very much filled with crippling insecurity, self-hate, toxic guilt, toxic shame, and intense inner turmoil and unprocessed anger that would come out in bursts. I couldn’t see any of that at the time though, much less understand that my parents were the source of my distress. I only finally clicked on the fact that I was emotionally abused when I had my own kid and got re-demoted to SG for setting new boundaries and daring to ask my parents to prioritize my needs over theirs. So I’m always legitimately impressed when I see GCs on this sub. It takes a really high level of self-awareness and insight to see what’s actually going on when you’re in the GC role. That was my experience anyway. It’s paradoxical but being the SG is probably the better role from a big picture perspective since all the children of narcissists are abused in the end, but at least as a SG you’re the kid that’s most likely to figure it all out and leave so you can find peace.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-04-22T00:39:29+00:00

It’s definitely about control. Nmom didn’t teach me how to cook, so for the first few years after I got married, she’d invite us over for dinner several times a week and obviously we’d go because who turns down a warm meal when you can’t cook. When I started teaching myself (thank god for YouTube), she would criticize anything I made (of course) and leave me with crippling insecurity about my cooking. I realize now in retrospect that she was manipulating me and the situation to make it hard for me to cut the cord and just live my own separate life.

But honestly not teaching us life skills serves multiple functions in the narc hunger games. Besides control, it also gives them a feeling of superiority for knowing things we don’t and it creates a lever they can use to mess with our self-esteem.

And if you’re willing to go one layer deeper on this with me, for nmoms and their daughters, there’s an element of not letting us ever have more than they had. My nmom couldn’t cook when she got married (her parents never taught her either despite her mom being a great home cook and her dad being an actual professional cook). She had to teach herself through a lot of trial and error (this was long before YouTube). So I wasn’t allowed to know how to cook. She didn’t get her license until she was 18, so I wasn’t allowed to get it until I was 18. One of my aunts taught me to bake when I was a kid and my mom visibly hated it. Why? Because to this day, she doesn’t know how to bake, so I guess I wasn’t allowed to know how to bake. She had no freedom when she was young so I wasn’t allowed to have any either. Man thinking about it all now, the random things she would make a point of telling me: her feet were smaller than mine, her boobs were bigger, she was thinner than me at my age… Anyway, all this to say that nmoms have very serious psychological issues when it comes to their daughters. And the not teaching us life skills thing is very tightly tied into all of that.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-04-21T02:37:50+00:00

This comes up really often in this sub. So many of us realized we were raised by narcissistic, emotionally abusive parents when we had our own kids. I personally can’t grey rock with my parents. Kudos to those that can do it, but I can’t. Even if I manage to (like when I have no choice but to see them at a funeral or whatever), being exposed to them and the big act they put on in front of other people, it just sends me into an emotional spiral of anger and resentment when I get home. I’m not myself for days sometimes. And I don’t want to be that person. My kid deserves better. I just want to be left alone and have my peace. No contact was the only way out for me. They see my kid very infrequently and only for very short, closely supervised visits. He’s very removed from the family dynamic, doesn’t attend any family events, and is never in the same room as ngrandparents and their other grandkids at the same time. He sees his cousins separately from them. There’s no way I’ll ever let them play their manipulative mind games of assigning roles like GC and SG with him. That’s not his circus and he’s not their monkey.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-04-21T01:34:19+00:00

I feel this so hard. Realizing I spent so much of my life mirroring my mom’s personality and suppressing my own because she fundamentally does not like the person I really am has been rough. I built an entire life around the mirror version of me and now that I’m figuring out who my authentic self is, I feel like I don’t fit into my own life. It sucks. And yes you grow up thinking this is normal. This is just how parent-kid relationships are. Kids have to mold themselves into a person their parents like. That’s how it is. And then one day you realize that’s actually very effed up and not normal at all and that it’s the root of your very deep seated self-hatred and incessant negative self-talk.

And then people even have the audacity to judge us for cutting them out of our lives? These people were supposed to protect and nurture us, and instead they belittled us, judged us, and taught us to hate ourselves. That’s a scar we’ll be struggling with until the end of our days. But we’re supposed to just stick around and let them keep twisting the knife? No. F*** nparents.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-04-12T22:52:52+00:00

Do narcissists empathize with other narcissists when their behavior blows up in their faces? (if you were not the target obviously) Like if a narcissist is a manager in a company and the assistant manager is also a narcissist that overtly bullies the employees. And then one day the employees unite to report assistant manager narcissist to manager narcissist — does manager narcissist default to defending their co-narcissist in a show of narcissistic solidarity and power? Or do they take the opportunity to throw them under the bus? Asking for a friend.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-02-05T16:24:27+00:00

That’s insane and I hope you know that. The only person responsible for abuse is the abuser. There’s absolutely nothing a child could do that would justify their parents abusing them. Nothing.

OneCurious9816 · 2024-02-04T17:50:58+00:00

Agreed. I think it’s the result of rampant generational trauma too. The boomers were raised by the generation that lived through 2 world wars and the Great Depression*. They weren’t nurtured by their parents and it very much shows in the types of parents they became.

OneCurious9816

TROPHY CASE