"The problem is is that the stuff that really hurt us was a million small things. The 'death by a thousand cuts' deal, and it's hard to explain how all those little things add up.

For someone who doesn't have the frame of reference, they will simply relate it to their own experiences, which might be similar, but only happened once or twice. A moment of thoughtlessness versus a childhood of a campaign of demoralization.

Conversely, I find my mind skips over some of the stuff that makes their eyes bug out. For instance when I tell them when I was ten my parents went on a two week vacation to Europe and left me at home with a sixteen year old babysitter checking up on me occasionally. Or when I moved back home them made me live in their garage (not a finished garage, mind you. They backed their cars out, set up my furniture inside, and that's where I lived for a few months). Sometimes you have to use the big boundary crosses to illustrate your point, even if for you they weren't that big of a deal in the context of everything else.

Even then, people tend to try and rationalize what happened, trying to put themselves in the parent's shoes and understand why they might have done such things, either finding a rationalization, or disbelieving our account because they can't find one. A lot of people don't understand how far removed the mindset of a Narcissist is from someone with functioning empathy." -Anonymous

Survival Diaries

"Death By a Thousand Cuts"