Complex PTSD, disorganized attachment, and BPD
Anyone reading this who knows me in real life has probably witnessed me being completely unhinged or at least unusual. It's what being raised by a pair of narcissists from hell does to someone.
La version en español de este articulo
My emotionally and financially abusive narcissist parents, Karen Sandman and Sandeep Mulgund, gave me complex PTSD, all the traits of borderline and histrionic personality disorder, and a disorganized attachment style. Traumatized girlboss!!
Part 1: Attachment styles
The first way my parents fucked me over as a literal infant was by giving me a disorganized attachment style.
According to the Attachment Project, children raised by supportive and emotionally sensitive parents develop a trusting and stable bond with them and end up with a secure attachment style, meaning that they are psychologically well-adjusted and feel comfortable relying on other people. On the other hand, children raised by problematic caregivers develop insecure attachment styles (anxious, avoidant, or disorganized) and then have extensive problems with their self-esteem and interpersonal relationships later in life.
The anxious attachment style is the result of neglectful parenting in which the parent doesn't give the child the approval and emotional support that they need in order to build up healthy self-esteem. The child ends up becoming excessively clingy, needy, and desperate for the attention and approval that their parents never gave them. Adults with anxious attachment styles tend to need constant reassurance from their partners that they're good enough and are constantly afraid of being rejected or abandoned. I'm not sure of the data on this, but I believe that there's a connection between histrionic traits and anxious attachment.
The avoidant attachment style is the result of a child's emotional needs being neglected by their parents. This teaches the child that they have to be emotionally independent and self-sufficient, because nobody else is going to help or save them. Avoidant adults tend to be isolated and steer clear of romantic relationships due to their pathological independence and deep-seated psychological need to view themselves as not needing anyone else to be happy or successful.
Finally, the disorganized attachment style combines the anxious and avoidant attachment styles and is considered the result of childhood abandonment or abuse. Children develop disorganized attachment when their caregiver acts as a source of safety and approval, but also as a source of fear and stress. They never know what to expect or how to act around their parents, who should provide safety, security, and emotional support, but instead are abusers from hell.
People with disorganized attachment end up simultaneously desperate for the love and approval that they never received as children, and inclined to sabotage relationships or lash out at loved ones due to their emotional dysregulation and strong fear of rejection or abandonment. As adults, they tend to have borderline traits and form relationships quickly and intensely before having an avoidant swing and pushing away people they care about for no clear reason.
I've always been desperate for close relationships and friendships because of how histrionic my mother made me—and how badly I need social approval in order to feel good about myself—but at the same time, I've feared that the other person will abandon me or change their mind about me after realizing who I really am. And I never understood how people are able to be happy in relationships despite the possibility of their partner breaking up with them someday. I avoided pursuing a romantic relationship despite deeply wanting one for years and instead only sought out casual sex due to my fear that nobody would love me, or that they would end up hurting me.
I tend to alternate between being anxious and avoidant, meaning that I'm either in a clingy and sociable mood or am self-isolating and trying to convince myself that I'm fine on my own. The two extremes of being anxious and avoidant are both so painful that throughout my life, I've inadvertently ended up yo-yoing between complete social isolation as a trauma response and high sociability due to how little I can stand being alone.
As a result, my friendships are incredibly inconsistent and chaotic. I usually make friends very quickly and intensely but then suddenly push the other person away—I will literally ghost friends. This is due to my fear of the other person abandoning me once they get bored of me or realize who I really am, but also because I tend to socially isolate myself when I'm at an emotional low point (such as the vast majority of the first 21 years of my life).
That's why I had high levels of social anxiety when I lived with my parents and could barely talk to new people, but in Mexico, I've become incredibly extroverted—much more of a classic histrionic than I was in Boston—and only socially isolate myself when I'm experiencing a CPTSD emotional flashback. (Emotional flashbacks are absolutely miserable. The fact that before running away to Mexico, I endured 21 years in a state comparable to an emotional flashback [living with my parents] is amazing. I don't know how I did it.)
I've always felt like my social anxiety and the interpersonal problems that tend to come up for me have been my fault; I hated myself for being so bad at maintaining friendships and sabotaging everything. I've never understood why relationships are so hard for me and always felt so jealous of other people for the way that friendship and romantic relationships seem to come to them so easily. But now I know that it's because being raised by narcissists means that I was never able to develop the emotional maturity or intelligence that other people seem to possess effortlessly.
Part 2: Anger
Complex trauma (the result of long-term interpersonal trauma such as child abuse or intimate partner abuse, in contrast to simple trauma such as war or seeing your house get burned down) destroys your self-esteem and your ability to regulate your emotions on a daily basis. This is why people with borderline and histrionic traits are so emotionally dysregulated, whereas rapid and intense mood swings are not a classic feature of antisocial or narcissistic personality disorder. Antisocials and narcissists are abusers who are perfectly in control even when they act as if they're experiencing a violent loss of control due to anger (like abusers claiming that they hit or murdered their wives or children because they were too angry to think clearly); meanwhile, histrionics and borderlines are abuse victims who have had our mental processing systems permanently altered.
That's why I am so ANGRY over everything that has happened to me, especially because my parents conditioned me into repressing that anger along with my own self-preservation instincts, which was like an emotional cancer. They did this by punishing me for my anger, by making me believe I was toxic or irrational if I expressed distress over something they'd done to me. Their abuse also stamped out my fight-or-flight instinct, because listening to my own instincts would have meant seeing them for who they are and standing up to them, which wasn't possible until the last few weeks.
So for all my life, I was unable to be assertive, only ever froze in stressful situations, willingly walked into lions' dens and ignored any guy feelings telling me to not do so, and felt like I didn't even have a fight or flight instinct because of how timid I was. But luckily, in Mexico, I had an experience back in February while tripping on 300 micrograms of LSD that pretty much unleashed 110% of all my latent instincts, and now I'm actually overreactive and way too ready to fight whenever I perceive a threat. Fun!
Anyway, back to talking shit about my parents. When I was 15, my mother read my diary and learned that I was in the middle of an eating disorder relapse. Of course, she and my dad got all mad at me for that. They always acted like the victims of my eating disorder, because in their eyes they were; a mentally ill kid can't be a trophy, can she, and I was mortally offending them by being in a state where I couldn't live up to their expectations.
When I got mad over my mother reading my diary, she and my dad invalidated how I felt and claimed they had to do it for my own safety. They said that I was going to get taken away in a straitjacket if I kept acting the way I was. (Side note, they and other people who have abused me have very frequently labeled me as unhinged or out-of-control and used my "mental health problems", which are all the result of complex trauma, in order to invalidate my anger or distress and keep me under control.) I was extremely angry at first but eventually accepted that they loved me and did it for my own good, just like with everything else they did to abuse and gaslight me.
According to Verywell Mind, one of the worst aspects of BPD is the anger, which we often refer to as "borderline rage". This is definitely true. Prior to running away to Mexico, I always viewed myself as a very calm and adoptable person, because despite having so much borderline rage inside of me, my parents had conditioned me into repressing all of it. I appeared to be a total go-with-the-flow type of person; nobody would have guessed that I had decades of repressed trauma.
On top of that, I was reluctant to ever openly express anger or act like anything other than a doormat out of fear of being like my father. He is the Indian version of Donald Trump and flies off the absolute handle whenever he is provoked in the slightest. I always thought it was because he has anger management issues; that's what my mother said and what my therapist agreed with. In reality, I now recognize that he does not have any anger management issues. He isn't an out-of-control borderline like me, unable to regulate his emotions. He is a narcissist completely in control when he yells at people or rudely gaslights them.
However, I didn't realize this and genuinely believed that he cannot control his response to anger. This benefited him, because it made me scared of the seemingly uncontrollable narcissistic rage episode that would happen if I stood up to him.
Despite what a jerk he is, the way that he terrorized me and my sister when he was in one of those narcissistic rage episodes made me afraid to ever display anger because of how I might make people feel. I was unable to openly express anger or distress because I believed that people would end up hating me. (And since I'm histrionic and borderline, social rejection—or even just the threat of it—feels traumatic.)
Anyway, ever since getting to Mexico, a lifetime of hidden anger has been hitting me all at once, now that my parents aren't gaslighting me into emotional repression and social isolation, and it has been... intense, to say the least. I'm incredibly irritable now and always looking for an opportunity to insult someone. You can listen to the recordings of my calls with the Acton police department if you want to really witness my borderline rage.
According to Psychology Today, the destructive behaviors and emotions associated with BPD tend to worsen in early adulthood. That might be because of child abuse victims becoming independent from their abusers and then suddenly accessing all of the anger that was trapped inside of them, like what happened to me. It's also because you have more opportunities to act out when you're not living with your parents anymore. And this coincides with navigating all the new responsibilities of adulthood, like working full time, paying your rent, doing well in your college classes, handling romantic relationships, etc, which all tends to be challenging for people who DON'T already have the emotional dysregulation and executive dysfunction associated with trauma.
You know what I'm really mad about? Complex trauma and being a victim of narcissistic abuse actually sets you up to be traumatized again, and for the resulting mental health effects to be more severe than they would be in someone with a functional emotional regulation system. Personally, I ended up in abusive situations and friendships that I didn't even realize were problematic at the time, because of how my parents had conditioned to me into accepting gaslighting and believing that if someone treats me badly or humiliates me, then it's because they know me better than I know myself.
Furthermore, my lack of social support due to how my disorganized attachment style affected my ability to maintain friendships meant that I didn't get the emotional support I needed when I was in difficult situations. It also meant that I didn't have conversations with my friends where I told them what was going on, they told me it was fucked up, I realized it was fucked up and got outta there.
So my parents can go right back to hell where they came from! ✨
Anyway, it's perfect that I paid for 4 months worth of Airbnb's in Guadalajara, Puebla, Yucatan, and Acapulco right before realizing that I have complex PTSD due to being raised by narcissists. I'm able to heal during a several-month-long vacation in Mexico much more effectively than I would be able to if I were a student in Boston, or, God forbid, still living with my parents. Being physically in the Boston area, where all of my trauma took place, makes me much more likely to have CPTSD episodes and makes it harder to recover. I had an absolutely terrible 3-week-long emotional flashback the last time I was there.
In contrast, the change of scenery that I’ve experienced here in Mexico has been amazing. I actually spent about a month and a half here in total before even realizing that my parents are abusive narcissists, and I had no clear idea of why I'm so much more extroverted and happy in Mexico. On top of having a higher baseline level here, my emotional flashbacks don't last nearly as long, since I'm able to identify and regulate them better.
And all along, it's been because nobody is gaslighting me here. It's only American cunts like Dispatcher Wallace of the Acton police department that I have to worry about. You can listen to some of my friendly conversations with him here.