“Feelings buried alive never die.”

Karol Truman

Siblings: We are all terrible at communication.

Me: Speak for yourself. I am good at communicating and you were taught to ignore me.

Siblings: wut?

TW: Angry Rant/Vent

Fighting the world tooth and nail so my brother doesn't become a glass child because of my mental illness. Like istg if my parents and his dad don't start getting their shit right and treating him with the amount of care and compassion they do with me to him I will actually cut them off and fiercely protect him. He's my baby, I basically helped raised him all my life. HELL AT ONE POINT HE CALLED ME MOM BEHIND OUR ADULT LIFE FIGURES BACKS. Yes I'm fucked in the head. Sure he may have been "okay" for years but he's not okay now. Stop having you stupid fucking heads in your goddamned ass. My brother is important too. If not more important than me. I can survive, he can't. Not alone. And I'll be damned if I let you people hurt him more than he already has been. All those years of him being "okay" and basically the golden child was to get all of your guys attention; any attention. He imitated me for so long because he wanted the attention I got, he didn't care if it was bad or not. YALL BASICALLY MENTALLY AND EMOTIONALLY NEGLECTED MY BROTHER JUST BECAUSE I WAS SUCH A PROBLEM. Yeah I'm part to blame, and I feel hella guilty for that but I never once ignored him. I always listened. I always was there. Especially when shit was going down I was holding his hand. For so long he was my only reason for not dying. So yeah, fuck with him I'll kill you. Ignore him? You're gone. He deserves better. He will not suffer like me or suffer in general. Fuck you.

me, to me: damn, maybe my trauma wasn't so bad, maybe I was taking things the wrong way and really did make a monster out of my mother

my traumatized brain:

My therapist told me I haven’t been loved on enough in my life and that explains so much… I have always received genuine love from my mother but never from anyone else, father included. Love was conditional. It was only when he was on his deathbed that he had clarity of the damage he had done to me by withholding love and affection while holding me to impossibly high standards and apologized… I’m surely a mess but I would be a bigger mess had he not had that awakening at the very end of his life and apologized…

"distant relative" i assume you are referring to my father?

The interesting thing about Jiang Cheng is that he refuses to be his mother's golden child to Wei Wuxian's scapegoat; he actively chooses Wei Wuxian again and again. He defends Wei Wuxian from her until she dies. It's unusual.

This doesn't mean that Wei Wuxian's experience was any less fraught--being hated by a caretaker is awful even if everyone else loves you. But it was an interesting choice by MXTX.

The people who gang up on you end up turning on each other

The people who gossip about you gossip about each other

Literally me with my birth family 😂 took me a while to get here but there’s no going back now 😂

totally normal and regular about them + two thoughts

Sketch..

I think another mistake I've seen is people genuinely believing transphobes who cry out that they're just so concerned about the poor children. It was never about concern; it was about control, it was about "I'm just asking questions"-ing your way to advocating for the subjugation of all trans people, especially trans children.

thinking

it appears to me that when a person is exhibiting malignant projection, it may be a reflection of how they would treat someone else if the roles were reversed, or it may be a reflection of fear of past events repeating

but an outside observer may see both as a tactic of manipulation. and it is, but the motivations are different. both have elements of an attempt to control the narrative. both are rooted in fear.

but I don't think it's bold to assert that some fear repercussions, and some fear repeat trauma. and treating everyone like malicious actors will not help differentiate the two. maybe there really isn't much difference, both can sprout from the same root of abuse

if we could start from a place of compassion for people who are projecting and recognize it as a fear behaviour, there is a chance of saving those who are eager to be saved

not to suggest anyone needs to demonstrate grace and kindness for abusive people. I'm mostly considering mental health professionals, who are meant to be helpers. my developmental trauma and autism went undiagnosed and labelled as borderline personality disorder just because I am complicated and hard to understand. my complex ptsd and asd looked like emotional warfare to so many professionals over the years due to a near absolute vacuum of compassion and only negative and discriminatory bias to fill it. "but your mom didn't hit you? [takes notes]" fuck off. she systematically destroyed my psyche. psychic wounds are wounds.

mental health professionals are supposed to be the skilled people who can make these distinctions clear, and provide care accordingly. I am so saddened by how many people get chucked into the cluster b bucket and then stonewalled against accessing effective care based entirely on a disgusting prejudice

Odin's Family Dynamic - Part 7

It's been days and I still can't stop thinking about What If 2x07. So I decided to write my thoughts down. While I did mention Hela in previous parts of this series, there wasn't enough material to do a complete analysis of her role in the family. But with this episode we have a more complete picture. Reading Parts 1, 2 and 5 might be necessary for a better understanding of this analysis.

Part 1- Odin: The Narcissistic Parent

Part 2- Thor and Loki: Golden Child and Scapegoat

Part 3- Frigga: The Enabling Parent

Part 4 - Can Loki Trust Thor?

Part 5 - Did Odin Love Loki?

Part 6 - Is Loki a Narcissist?

Hela: Golden Child Turned Invisible

In a relation to this series, I was asked what would happen to the golden child without a scapegoat. The answer is the dynamics of a dysfunctional family with a narcissistic parent are not set in stone. The roles the narcissist assign to members of their family can change based on the needs and desires of the narcissist parent. And sometimes a person can have multiple roles or change roles. Usually the only child of a narcissistic parent is given the role of the golden child by default, but they're also prone to having multiple roles.

We see Hela as a happy kid who loves her pet wolf and can't even stand seeing him chained. It is interesting that her first reaction is protesting his imprisonment not that Odin stopped her playing with Fenrir. The scene shows that she cares about others and doesn't want to harm anyone. But Odin seeks to control and tame anything that might be a threat to him, and as he chains Fenrir, he chains Hela too. He grooms her to be a fighter, to never pass on a chance to end a life, to be his executioner and consider that a great honor. He couldn't do that if Hela remained as sweet and caring as she was when she was a kid. And Hela reveling in the love and attention stayed his golden child.

Until Odin decided to stop at the nine realms. Now it's never mentioned why Odin suddenly made that decision. It definitely wasn't because of the goodness of his heart. He still sought powers he deemed others unworthy of with the excuse of "protecting peace". But what caused him to stop his conquests? The answer might be his "new girlfriend who is a dreadful woman" according to Hela and one of the people Hela has a quarrel with.

But why Hela doesn't like Frigga? They have two different personalities for start. While Frigga is a fierce warrior, she doesn't enjoy fighting or war. Definitely not the way Odin, Hela and Thor do(one of many similarities Loki has with Frigga). Also from TR we know Hela was aware of having a sibling but never met them. So her banishment happened when Frigga was pregnant. Stopping the wars and protecting peace might have been Frigga's condition for marrying Odin. It is also possible that Odin pitted Hela and Frigga against each other through triangulation, a manipulation method to provide him narcissistic supply.

"Basically, the game involves two or more people who get pitted against each other and usually they don’t even realize what’s happening. They’re just aware of the conflict between each other and there’s always this conflict. Maybe they can’t figure out what’s going on or where the conflict is coming from. Or maybe it’s very clearly this parent or this other person. Essentially the narcissist does this because they want you to turn on each other while having the loyalty of you both."[1]

The prospect of having another child could be the reason why Odin banished Hela without a second thought. But that's not all. Narcissists don't see their children as people with their own thoughts, feelings and needs but rather as an extension of themselves. The golden child is the positive extension of narcissist but only until they act exactly as their parent wants.

"Narcissists will turn on the golden child when the golden child stops being a source of validation, admiration, and reassurance. Even though narcissists give the golden child many opportunities, privileges, and resources that the other family members don’t get, they still view the golden child as expendable."[2]

That's because the "love" the narcissist parent has for their child is conditional. And if the golden child do anything that contradicts the narcissist's sense of self, they become the negative extension of narcissist and therefore will be treated as a scapegoat. Which happened to Hela. She was banished and imprisoned and forgotten for more than a millennium. Odin turned her literally and figuratively invisible to the world, because she was a reminder of his shameful past and his failures. No surprise that she went mad. She was treated like a tool and discarded as soon as her usefulness ran out. She didn't have any place in Odin's new future.

WI Hela on the other hand got the chance to know herself and choose her own path when she realized what she wanted all along was freedom from Odin's control. Which is a theme that repeats both with Thor's arc in TDW and Loki's arc. Because what Odin did to his children for all their lives and every punishment he sentenced them to, was ultimately for controlling them.

Sources:

[1]Scapegoat & Golden Child | How and why narcissists assign these roles (and not just in the family!) 

[2]Does the Narcissist Ever Turn on the Golden Child?