A crash course in lying to yourself in Stuff about stuff

It helps if you start young. With one overly indulgent, he-can-do-no-wrong parent and one abusive and manipulative parent who is great at seeming great. Don’t get me wrong, the my-baby-can-do-no-wrong parent should be abusive and manipulative as well, just in a more blatantly obvious sort of way. The sort of blatantly obvious sexually inappropriate stuff like offering to rub your ass after another paddling.
A sociopath parent and a narcissist parent make a great coaching staff for a team of enablers and predators.
He can throw shame around like nobody’s business, and you’ll think you’re the problem. Eventually. Five-year-old you will vividly remember the sexual abuse he forced you to watch and briefly forced on you. At five, you’ll rebel and refuse to participate. You’ll spend the next ten-plus years taking out your anger, shame, and fear on the target problem child, who was purposefully directly related to the sexual abuse that you at some point start to feel guilty over.
By fifteen, your memories of that day will have been relegated to dreams, which can be ridiculously easy to dismiss for one reason or another. You will also no longer imagine that he broke your nose on purpose with the baseball seven-year-old you saved proofs of purchase for months to get. And it will never even have occurred to you that when your mom pushed you back and said, “No! Stay outside!” she wasn’t concerned about the blood gushing from your nose getting all over ‘her’ floor, because you weren’t trying to get inside at all. You were a scared, injured child running to your mother. It was unthinkable that she knew what was coming when your dad took you out to play catch, and unfathomable that she would push you away in any state, let alone terrified and bleeding.
Fifteen, twenty, thirty years of fear, pain, shame, and anger will really screw with a person’s head. It’ll go a long way toward convincing a person there really is something inherently wrong with them, that they will never be okay on their own, that their true self is truly unlovable.
Everyone likes him, why am I so afraid of him? He’s so calm and laid back and put together every minute that he’s not exploding. How did I convince myself he was loving and caring and kind?
By lying to myself. Telling myself I’m the screwed up one. The evidence was/is certainly there. The school problems, the horrible dreams, the tendency to act without thinking, the laziness, the anger.
How did I refine self-deception to such a pinpoint, razor sharp instinct, though? How did I learn, for example, to pay enough attention to wait for an out-of-context sentence fragment I can disagree with, or use distancing language to the extent that I never committed to anything, even in my own head? When did technically true become the same thing to me as honest?
There was something Michelle and I were supposed to go to. Meet up with someone or something like that. She asked what time we were supposed to be there, and I said the time I thought. She asked if I was sure, and I said yes. I turned out to be wrong, and she flipped her shit. She kept saying, “You said you were sure!” So I realized that if I hadn’t been sure, she wouldn’t have been so upset, or we would’ve double checked. Either way, I wouldn’t have pissed her off, and young me, who had so much sexual confusion and shame attached to my older sister (which they did deliberately), would have been spared her anger. So I decided to stop being sure. I didn’t know the term “distancing language”, but that is exactly what I adopted.
I also didn’t know that distancing language is a key element of an abusive person’s vocabulary, but it absolutely is. “She got upset” is so much more innocuous than “I said/did something that upset her.”
The “technically true” thing makes me think of avoiding getting into trouble. “Did you hit your sister?” when I pushed her or tripped her, but technically didn’t hit her. “I’m not afraid of getting my ass kicked by [name].” I am afraid of what his threat represents and what it means for me, but I’m not technically afraid of taking an ass kicking. I deserve so many ass kickings at this point, it might actually help.
Avoid responsibility by playing word games. Out loud as well as in my head.
It’s so much easier to get away with lying if you actually believe the bullshit coming out of your mouth.