Living Guilt Free

I am an Empath. Raised by a father who was a violent psychopath and a mother with narcissistic tendencies (survival mechanism for her). I don't feel guilt, I don't remember ever feeling guilt. My conscience is driven by empathy; my own survival mechanism growing up. If I could accurately intuit the needs of my parents and meet those needs in meaningful ways, I would be safe... Safe from their anger as well as safe from experiencing their personal pain which was even more difficult for me than dealing with my own.

Being an Empath without guilt means I don't blame others either -- no self blame, no blame of others. So I "forgive" easily.. It's not really forgiving because I don't actually blame... But I do let others off the hook easily and am very accepting of others however they come, I don't judge. I am able to love easily. It also meant that I had to learn how to discipline myself and others through love, or easily be taken advantage of repeatedly while never holding the other person responsible for their actions.

The emotional pain of others is painful to me and I avoid being the source of that pain. If I inadvertently hurt someone or even make them uncomfortable, I feel bad because they feel bad and I don't want them or me to feel that way, but I don't feel like I am bad or wrong. Sometimes things happen that are undesirable and I'm just as human as anyone, so I make mistakes... And I ask myself, how can I help make it right or at least better?

I also tend to get a bit annoyed with people who carry a lot if guilt, because I see guilt as selfish... Self-protective, as in "don't hurt me back, see I'm already hurting, nothing left for you to do to me to make this right." If you have done something that caused pain or discomfort in someone else, your focus should primarily be on helping the other person feel better for them, not assuaging your own guilty feelings. That would be like hitting someone with your car and crying on their shoulder at the hospital because you feel terrible about what you did -- it doesn't fit.

I grew up being treated like a prize or a pet, not a person. My parents' focus and mine was on them, not me. In order to survive and be useful, hence worthy of being loved, I needed to focus on them and their needs, not me and my needs. Because I wasn't important enough to have a meaningful impact or to be a source of impact, I didn't need to develop guilt. Instead I developed a hyperactive sense of empathy, which drives me to move people past feelings of pain and discomfort and to avoid being the cause of pain and discomfort, not because I feel guilty or responsible for causing their pain, but because their pain is my pain, so I feel responsible for alleviating their pain in order to alleviate my own.

I'm not invested in making their pain go away, it just helps me feel better to know I am actively participating in moving them through it. Although I have very little tolerance for personality types that enjoy wallowing in misfortune. It feels right that someone should take their time healing, but it seems perverse to me when people revel in suffering.

I think I survived my parents' relationship because I don't feel guilt. I didn't feel responsible or even connected to their arguments and fights, even if it was about me. When my mother blamed me for things she did that bothered my father, it didn't phase me because I didn't feel guilty anyway. And if I got in trouble for something she did, I didn't blame her because I felt worse if she got in trouble (was that hard to follow?!)

I also don't obligate others to feel guilty on my behalf -- except when I'm being playful, or deliberately using it as a tool to inspire change in someone who is attached to guilt (leverage). I already mentioned that it's a self-protective feeling, so it's useless with me because I'm not blaming or trying to get back at anyone anyway. If someone does something that makes me feel bad or causes an inconvenience, I may get angry or feel hurt, but I don't blame or obligate them to be responsible to me, that's up to them to obligate themselves to contribute to making things right. I just look to what they could have done differently and what I could have done differently to avoid feeling bad.

Even with the traumas in my life, I don't place blame in myself or the perpetrator of the offense(s). I simply see it for what it was. It contributed to who I am today, and I love who I am.

I am also not easily offended. What offends me is when my morals are questioned, my family is threatened, my intentions twisted to create misunderstanding. I'm not immune to being hurt, or experiencing self-doubt if someone is mean or does something hurtful, but I'm not "offended" in that I don't feel indignant, like how dare they. I might turn inward and ask myself, what is it about me that made them feel it was ok for them to speak to me that way... How could I have expressed myself differently so they could understand.

Growing up, I was punished whether I did something wrong or not. I was blamed whether I was responsible or not, so my guilt meter is broken. I do things because they are the right thing to do, not in avoidance of guilt.

I don't even believe in punishment. I see prison as an appropriate consequence, not as a punishment. We control our children until they develop self-control. If they don't develop self-control, then the law controls them and police officers will deliver that control, while the courts enforce it through imprisonment. Energetically, if you are violent and malevolent, then you need to live where violence and malevolence lives... Prison.


- Lilly S. Blue

All works past, present and future are protected under a CCC. Creative Common License, Lilly's Blue Life by Lilly S. Blue is licensed under a Creative Common Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivs-3.0-Unported License.

Child of psychopathic father and narcissistic mother

You can’t turn off darkness; just be the light. This has always been my personal philosophy even before I knew what a personal philosophy was. I was the first of two girls born to a psychopathic father and narcissistic mother in a volatile marriage filled with abuse, drug use, poverty, chaos, secrets and lies. The darkness of life with my family meant I was molded to shine a brighter light, to make life ok to live for all of us. In order to inspire the expression of love that I needed to thrive, I had to be accepting and non-judgmental of the people in my life who were my primary source of life. But in order to be able to accept their darkness, I had to learn to see their light. So from the time before I even formed memory I was shaped to be a person who can find and identify the source of the slightest glimmer of light in darkness and if I couldn’t find the light, I became the light.

Throughout my early childhood, my mother used me as a scapegoat when she did things that would make my father unhappy. If she threw out his cigarettes or marijuana or disconnected the phone so his friends couldn't reach him, she would blame me to save herself and "keep the peace" since the abuse he piled on her was much worse than what he would do to me. We developed an unspoken agreement, I accepted it without complaint because it was more painful to experience my mother being beat up than it was for me to get a beating or other punishment. So I naturally became my mother's protector and her caregiver, the one responsible for her, but I also still had to respect her position as my mother, so that left me without a real position or place in her life... I was nothing, invisible, except for my usefulness to her. But of both my parents, she was the responsible one. She worked and made sure we had food to eat and a place to live. She made sure I went to a good private school even though we barely had enough money for the uniform and shoes, or food and rent or toothpaste and toilet paper for that matter. She made sure our family had the necessities. She prides herself on being a great mother... and on paper, she really is. So I never contradicted her, she wouldn't believe me anyway, neither would anyone else.

I felt loved by my father. I was his prize. He did homework with me, took me to the park to watch him play soccer. I was a source of pride for him. He was a source of fear and pain for me, at the same time I needed him to value me. I later came to realize that his personality disorder didn't allow him to experience real love, what he felt for me was pride in an extension of himself that he perceived as perfect. If I was an extension of him, he had to ensure I was perfect. So while his abuse of my mother was brutal and vicious with an explosive malicious intent to punish and hurt, when he punished me it was controlled, calculated and it always seemed like he was doing it for me, to make me a better person, not because he used me as punching bag or viewed me as less than human, like my mother. 

The relationship between my parents was a violent one, emotionally, verbally and physically abusive, so most days I woke up to the sound of cursing, yelling, screaming and my father brutally beating my mother; kicking, choking, punching, ripping her clothes off, stripping her naked and throwing her out of the house. If it persisted for a length of time, I would insert myself to de-escalate the intensity. When he ran out of steam, I would be there to clean and console my mother… those times were not about me, what I had to offer, or what I had to do, I was gratefully invisible, but not inconsequential. When my mother finally found the strength and presence of mind to leave, bred from her desperation (if she didn’t leave, he would ultimately have killed her), she left me and my sister behind since she didn't really know where she would go. She snuck out of the house one morning, with whispered good-byes to me, while my father slept. When he woke up, he was angry, frustrated and seemed lost. He had a few days of rageful, defeated tears and what felt to me like gut wrenching grief; peppered by frantic phone calls to find her. Then one morning I woke up to find my father in the living room, standing on a chair with a rope around his neck, mouthing soundless whispers to himself, he was praying and crying silent tears. I had to talk him down, but he wouldn’t even look at me. I just kept crying, pleading and praying with him, I don’t know how long, it felt like hours. He finally got down, but he told me I wouldn’t be able to stop him, that he would do it anyway when I wasn’t around, then he went to sleep. I proceeded to “clean” the apartment… I threw every rope, pill and knife that I could find out the window. When he woke up, he threatened to stick his head in the oven… I was 9 (my sister was 3). I decided I could never leave him and he was satisfied with that. So when my mother got settled and petitioned the court for custody, I told them I wanted to live with my father. They were smarter and sent me to live with my mother, but she never forgave me for that betrayal and I had enough lessons in keeping secrets to know not to tell her that my father tried to kill himself, even if it meant she might forgive me. I believed my mother loved me in her own way, but this dynamic continued to play out in many different ways throughout my childhood and teen years. Although I was a reliable and obedient child, I don’t think she ever regained trust in me. She judged me without seeing life through my eyes. She was blinded by the trauma of her own life and it was all she could do to keep us safe from the world.

Today I don't have a relationship with my psychopathic father, it's too difficult. But I still love him and feel connected to him. He's just too dangerous to be a part of my life today which includes a husband who loves me to the point of worship and three beautiful children that together we work really hard to provide a stable life filled with love and magic. My mother is a part of our life, but I have recently had to draw some boundaries that she is not happy with, so our relationship is very strained. More on that in later posts.

Love,

Lilly



All works past, present and future are protected under a CCC. Creative Common License, Lilly's Blue Life by Lilly S. Blue is licensed under a Creative Common Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivs-3.0-Unported License.