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welcome samwise! nice name!

When I read your post, I started to get the hair-raising feeling of my own situation growing up, where I was guilted for who I was. Other family members were always the victims and I'm the one who had to make concessions without being allowed to really have a voice (or perersonality). I came to realize that there were quite a few narcissists in my family (my m being one suggested by a previous t), and my gm a covert one which I too felt difficulty in diagnosing at first.

Hi! yes, unfortunately there is more than one person in my wider family with narcissistic traits. It's sad how you can sort of see a flowchart going down through the generations of abusive behaviour.

I'm definitely going through a self-discovery period, too, and it's hard because it's so easy to immediately fixate on how behind you are and not knowing where to start. I hope you're further along than I am and doing well!

@NarcKiddo hi! I do recognise you from the other forum. I think I'm lucky in that DBT rather than CBT has been mentioned - however yep it is going to be a long wait first. I'm not able to afford private talking therapy, as I'm saving up to move out, but maybe after that.

I start to ruminate and fixate on something when I am not listened to, what I'm saying is ignored, or I'm disbelieved. Obviously this can happen accidentally, I mean when it's deliberate - when it's like I'm being dismissed.

It's not common or rare, it's repeatedly happened, and often later on I will be proved right or someone more popular than me will repeat what I said and get positive feedback. On the times I get an apology, sometimes the apologies feel like the people are soothing their own ego by coming up with a reason why they couldn't have avoided ignoring me, or talking about how they would have behaved differently had they known 'to actually take me seriously'. It's infuriating and happens with both men and women, but more often with men.

I guess their default assumption seems to be that I'm exaggerating, if not lying, when there is no reason to assume that because I don't. My guess is that I come across as overly insistent from a history of not being believed at home, whereas to a normal person seeming insistent for no reason, could be a sign of lying. Or I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt - it's not everyone, it's often people who are a little self-important or expect a lot of sympathy themselves with little to give in return.

I know I can't control how others react to me, but afterwards I can't even control the fact that I feel emotionally alert / distressed for the rest of the day afterwards, and it makes it difficult to move on to other things.

Does anyone else deal with this and have any advice on how to self-soothe in these situations?

Recently found the out of the FOG forum and from there found here. I'm going to post essentially the same introduction post/s, so if you're also a member of both forums you may have already read this (also, it's long):

I am in my early 30s, and had to move back with my parents just before Covid. It was a simultaneous one-two-three punch of my grandmother dying, a financial crisis, and my friend group imploding, that just flattened me, and I told myself that it would be okay and I wouldn't be there very long Unfortunately my situation has been very up and down since then, not helped by them as you can imagine. I wouldn't feel comfortable attempting to apply any specific diagnoses to either one, but obviously I felt like this was the right place to come to vent about them. They are consistently inconsistent and when it's not one, it's the other.

My father has done quite well for himself out of being a self-employed contractor, is now retired, has a group of friends who have done even better for themselves and like to show off. He believes and has always believed that wealthy people are some kind of special group of more important humans than the rest of us, and that he is one of them, but is also afraid of losing his place among the special people. He is fine financially, but wants to match the level of wealth his friends have, and has recently developed a scratchcard addiction. Sometimes he buys a scratchcard 'for me' because it's my birthday or sometimes just because he saw a lucky sign that morning, and then watches me while I scratch it, because I have to scratch it straight away. It's very awkward but there's nothing I can do about it so I just tell him to do them for me.

My mother feels very hard done by, despite also having done well enough for herself, and feels like nobody appreciates her or understands what she's been through. It is impossible not to understand what she's been through because you can't actually get an answer to any question without an unrelated anecdote that takes twenty minutes. She constantly claims that I visibly become disengaged or disappointed when I enter a room or answer the phone and realise it's her, although by this point that has probably become a self-fulfilling prophecy because I know the accusation is coming either way. She's also starting to lose the friends she made through work over time and while she works part-time in a different area now doesn't really seem to be making any new ones, so her focus is very much on me to entertain her or keep her occupied and stop her from feeling lonely. I've set boundaries around this but she is relentless.

The weird thing about them is that when I moved back in with them, it was like they had switched personalities. When I was a teenager, my dad was the always miserable one who felt like he wasn't fulfilling his potential and he would accuse me of undermining him and his achievements, and my mother was the one who always had a new story about how she'd done this amazing new thing at work, and she had all these influential connections in her field, etc.

I feel very embarrassed to be stuck back at home at such a late age, and honestly it's probably a flea of mine that sometimes I feel jealous of women who have kids and have left a bad relationship (although I don't want them) because it feels like they will have 'something to show' for that time whereas I feel like the time I spent away from home has essentially vanished without a trace or become meaningless.

I'd previously known they were a problem if not why, and I think perhaps not knowing was why, when I did live outside of home and was NC with them, I had serious problems with attracting selfish or hostile people, often addicts, and ending up in some complicated living situations. I think moving back at the time felt 'better the devil you know'. I'm hoping to do more self-work this time and hopefully get it right when I'm able to move out financially next, although I'm not sure when that will be - at least a year, probably.

I have a ptsd diagnosis but not cptsd but I believe that applies because as I said I've previously attracted other abusive people and experienced trauma outside the home as well. I am on a waiting list, but if you're from the UK you know the state of NHS waiting lists right now.

Cautiously optimistic about joining here!