It's Okay to Hate Your Parents Sometimes: Surviving CPTSD and Munchausen by Proxy
The above title gears us up for a cutting and tragic story that is unfortunately based on true events. *TRIGGER WARNING
*TRIGGER WARNING: This post may contain mentions of domestic violence including physical, emotional, and mental abuse. Proceed with caution.
Difficult doesn’t describe the emotions tied to what I am about to share with you, lovely reader. For many years I’ve been processing some very personal and traumatic information, taking my time to really deconstruct an indescribably brutal truth.
In a therapy office in small town Kentucky my therapist said two things in one session that would forever change the trajectory of my life.
“I think…” he paused, unsure of whether he should divulge his suspicions. He continued:
“Clearly, you have been conditioned. A lot of what you think is real, isn't - it’s been conditioned into you to believe. Have you heard of something called Borderline Personality Disorder?”
“Yes, of course,” I said cooly. BPD wasn’t something I was unfamiliar with at all; in fact, I thought it might actually be my diagnosis after all of these years of repeated ‘anxiety’ diagnoses.
“Good,” he began, “I think your mother likely has a personality disorder, [my best guess being] borderline personality disorder.”
This hadn’t surprised me. Rather, it validated what my prior therapist in Indiana had already told me three years prior. The personality disorder explained some things about my upbringing, but I still felt some components were somehow missing. Then, he said it.
“I also believe you may have been a proxy for munchausen’s syndrome. Is that something you’re familiar with also?” he asked.
Most people have heard of munchausen’s syndrome in the context of the case of Gypsy Rose. However, at that time, Munchausen’s by proxy wasn’t as widely in the news or discussed. I indicated to him that I was familiar with it somewhat, but not entirely.
“Isn’t that when, like, a parent makes a kid sick? Or something? For attention?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he began. From there the conversation blurs into obfuscation. Vague recollections of terms and phrases swim in my mind, but mostly I remember staring into oblivion, pondering my entire childhood. As I sat on the couch in the last ten minutes of my session, I cried silent tears as my therapist watched. What needed to be done was done, and he encouraged me to research it a little and call the office if I needed an appointment before my next scheduled visit.
As soon as I got to my car, I called my cousin. She’s like a sister to me; she even lived with us for a year or so when I was a child. I needed someone to validate my past, to validate what my therapist bestowed on my emotional doorstep. I called, and she answered. Quite quickly, I broached the subject bluntly.
“Did mom condition me to be sick? Do you ever remember her telling me I was sick, or exaggerating my illnesses? The fucking therapist just said I was a victim of munchausen by proxy. Did she condition me to worry about becoming ill? Is this why I’m so compulsively anxious about my health?” The questions rattled off at her one after another. The simple answer?
“Oh, yeah.” she replied, matter-of-factly, like this was common knowledge. I sat silent. “You didn’t know that?” she questioned in a curious tone.
“No.” A lump welled in my throat. Was the lump indicative of distress, or was I actually holding back a truth I’d known subconsciously for many years?
“I’m sorry sweetie, I thought you knew,” she continued. “She was always telling you to watch out for things; things that weren’t really reasonable to be so concerned about,” she began, but I drifted off again. She spoke as my thoughts whirred in the recesses of my trauma brain.
Like a giant tidal wave, a tsunami of memories washed up on the shores of my frontal lobe. Memory after memory, from as young as I can remember, surfaced in which my mother was overly concerned over small things and making mountain after mountain out of mole hills. The funniest part to me was that it wasn’t always consistent, so for a few years it was hard to truly accept that this had happened. After researching it, there are mild cases of munchausen by proxy, and they’re almost always women with co-existing personality disorders. It occurred to me that during the times where she wasn’t compulsively obsessed, it was likely because she wasn’t searching for attention at that particular moment. Some of it I truly attribute to her own crippling anxiety, which inevitably spilled out onto me my entire life.
Wrestling with that diagnosis took some time. Coming to terms that my reality, everything I had been shaped to believe as a child was tainted with anxiety, and the need for my mother to receive attention and validation for her mothering skills. All of the illnesses I’d had suddenly weren't as bad as they seemed; all of the doomsday foreboding intended to ‘prepare’ me for the world had been an awful illusion. Instead of gaining helpful life skills, I gained a lifetime of anxiety and a profound belief that the world was a dangerous place.
A year later, I recognized in therapy once again that I didn’t just have a PTSD diagnosis; I had a complex PTSD diagnosis. None of my providers have officially diagnosed me with CPTSD (just PTSD) due to the high co-occurrence with personality disorders., which I have been told repeatedly that I do not have. Alas, I did a ton of research because that’s who I am post-pandemic, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I suffer from CPTSD, which is another heavy, tiresome diagnosis.
How does this tie in to the title of this mess? Shame is ubiquitous with CPTSD. Shame is the one component emotionally that prevents most people with this diagnosis from experiencing a degree of healing. For five years, I’ve been on my way toward healing while carrying the burden of these two labels on my back. Some days, I find myself floating the burden is so light. Other days, I find myself suffocating in the muck that is the past. Not the past as you would emotionally interpret it, but the body’s recollection of the past.
In CPTSD, the body remembers all of its coping mechanisms it used in order to keep itself alive in dangeorous situations. Unfortunately, I lived in fear for my life for five and a half years. The body, after such a long time of exposure to fight or flight hormones, tends to get ‘stuck’ in what many refer to as ‘survival mode’. Survival mode is not just a turn of phrase, but an actual term depicting an individual whose internal alarm system is continuously activated instead of cycling through sympathetic and parasympathetic responses. This causes what’s called hyper-vigilance, where the body not only continues its existence in survival mode, but it constantly scans for threats in the environment in an attempt to prevent dangerous situations. This is why so many soldiers end up with PTSD and CPTSD. Their nervous systems have been primed to be on alert for attack for weeks, months, or years at a time. What we know about CPTSD now is that hyper-vigilance is not exclusive to actual threats; but to perceived threats as well. This means that the body doesn’t just react to a lion chasing it; it reacts to anything it has previously labeled a threat such as a lion - or to something as simple as a balloon. Something as simple as a doorbell ring, a balloon popping, or even a baby crying can send someone’s body into a flashback.
In CPTSD the individual doesn’t just have a mental flashback and fall into the past and relive the trauma. Many people with the diagnosis actually don’t experience the typical mental flashback into the past. Instead, what many experience, including myself, is the trigger happening (the body’s perceived threat) and then the body physiologically reacting to that trigger. So for instance, if a baby crying is a trigger, the person with CPTSD many have many bodily symptoms that occur shortly after that cry, triggering their nervous system to react automatically. Symptoms range anywhere from panic, heart racing, breathing trouble, mental flashbacks, agitation, screaming, crying, uncontrollable sweating, to much, much more. In many cases, it isn’t the mind that is the obstacle, but the body’s memory of danger and how it dysfunctionally processes danger that is the real hurdle to recovery. The physical recovery from CPTSD takes years of working with the nervous system in order to desensitize it to triggers. However, someone can only begin this process in a consistently safe environment, which is not always available to people with CPTSD. Unfortunately, many people never become successful at getting their bodies out of a chronic state of fight or flight. This leads to potential immune system damage, autoimmune diseases, and early death.
Even after five years, the journey is ongoing. I find myself considerably lucky to be in a consistently safe space, having access to the best healthcare in the world to continue to address issues that arise. But, every once in a while, that shame creeps back in and she comes to P-A-R-T-Y. Let’s just say, I am all partied out.
The shame manifests in many ways. Aside from physically through chronic pain and autoimmune disease, shame consistently manifests as what expert Pete Walker calls, ‘the inner critic’. This critic is volatile, degrading, and downright abusive. The critic is a combination of the disparaging voices we heard as a child that always repeated to us that we were not enough, in conjunction with a dysfunctional remnant of the body’s alert system thinking that the criticism itself is keeping us safe, isolated away from the prospect of pain. The critic will resurface any negative experience in an attempt to reinforce its position as the regulator - if you never try, if you don’t have friends, if you don’t live - you cannot be harmed. The critic’s favorite weapon in enforcing conformity to its warped definition of safety is shame.
The critic is sneaky, subtle. It is cunning and brutal. The worst part is that the critic knows you as well as you know yourself.
For years, I read so many spirituality books, self-help books, DIY health books, and still felt massive amounts of shame. Shame for feeling emotions like bitterness, vitriol, and hatred. Shame for cursing God, for not believing. Shame for embracing nihilism when I couldn’t cope with the abuse. Shame for emulating the narcissism of the people that raised me because it was all I knew. Shame for manipulating, for doing whatever I needed to do in order to meet my needs as a young woman. Shame for losing control. Shame for hating my parents. Shame for going no contact with my mother. It was only when I delved into the medical research and experiences of people with CPTSD that I understood that this shame wasn’t a character flaw, but instead a function of my inner critic tasked with attempting to keep me alive.
Shame weighs heavier on a person than almost anything in our existence. Remembering this in my interactions with my own inner critic, I use self-compassion to ease the load. When someone is so violently violated, brutalized, and entrapped for years and years of their existence, in a time they should’ve been learning about flirtations with boys and makeup and slumber parties, they lose not only their autonomy but their identity, their very existence. Repeatedly I must remind myself that not only did I not get the support and education about being an adult that I needed, but I was actually robbed of a childhood, of being a curious and blossoming person. Truly, it’s unimaginable that I do as well as I do now at 35, but somehow I’ve identified a resilience in me that I hang onto in order to continue this journey, one foot in front of the other.
So what do I do with the shame, other than compassion? What do I do with the hatred? I feel. I feel all of the feelings I was never allowed to feel. If I hate my mother today for her role in all of this, then I sit in that hatred a while. I explore it. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “I befriend my emotion.” I acknowledge the anger, the resentment. However, I want to point out that I never ruminate on it. Rumination, I find, creates problems where none currently exist in this present moment. But feeling the feelings is vital to signaling to the body that it’s okay to feel, that it’s okay to explore all of the things about being a human that we were never allowed before. Feeling opens the gateway to healing.
In short, it’s okay to hate your parents - sometimes. Hate isn’t something I advocate for in general, because it’s counterproductive to all that is, which is love. The truth of our existence is profound love. Despite us not always experiencing that profound love, it remains so. Just don’t stew in your own bullshit for too long, because that signals to the brain that the past is actually happening in the present, and we begin to relive our traumas in the present moment.
But sometimes, when I am at the doctor with a flare of my autoimmune disease, or I’m getting treatment for my chronic muscle tension and TMJ, a little voice in the back of my head says, “I hate my mother for this.” And in that moment, I acknowledge it, nod, and move on to the next part of my day. On rare occasions that the hate keeps coming up, I realize that the hate isn’t just hate - hate is rarely an emotion that crops up on its own. The hate that I feel is almost always accompanied with its bestie: grief. Grief for the fact that my mother also didn't have the support she needed as a child. Grief for never properly having grieved the loss of my childhood and autonomy. Grief that no matter what I do or do not do, that I will never have a mother that can show up in the ways that other mothers do, or even in the basic ways that I need for a mother to show up. Once I allow myself to feel the grief, the hatred dissipates, almost as if it was just the vehicle in which the grief had to arrive. I find grief the most difficult emotion I deal with, personally, and if it manifests as sadness or another emotion, I often times repress it. It would only make sense that hatred or anger would have to be the vessel in which to trojan horse my grief.
Humanning, as my friend Evelyn puts it, is difficult. It is messy. There is no handbook. There are feelings, there are events, there are restrictions. There is love, there is hate, there is grief. Learning to embody personhood is an everlasting task, one to which I spend a significant amount of my time dedicated. There is arguably no right way, or wrong way. What I have found works for me, is that the only way out is through. Feel everything. Hold onto your inner resilience, and walk in this life as we all do - one foot in front of the other.