Are you crazy? Yes and no.

“Does this make sense?” he asks me during our session. “Tom” asked me the question nearly every client asks. It’s the same question I’ve asked my friends, my shrink, random strangers on the Internet.

First, I want to tell you who I’m writing this article for primarily. If you, reader, are someone who had a fairly normal and stable childhood, you are the reader I most want to reach. This article is an attempt to make real for you the existence of people who have been so badly wounded by abusive parents that their thoughts and actions seem “crazy” to you. You can’t believe that these abused people really think what they think; you can’t believe they’re so disconnected from reality that they’ve lost the ability to understand when their life is in danger.

These people are real and you know some of them. You just don’t know who they are. They won’t tell you, because they’re scared and ashamed. They will tell me, or a priest, or a shrink, sometimes.

“Tom,” in this article, is a composite character made up from the kinds of experiences of people I have worked with. While the exact events I describe below did not happen in this sequence to a man named Tom, the composite vignette below accurately represents without exaggeration the kinds of extremity that many of my clients have lived through. Though I’m not a degreed or licensed professional therapist, I offer sessions with people (call it coaching, call it consulting, call it whatever you like) that are “therapy-adjacent.” People from troubled backgrounds can come to me and talk to a peer who has lived the kind of life they have with families beset by mental illness, abuse, and personality disorders.

Tom had just got done telling me about the time his father tried to murder him. But Tom didn’t know his father tried to murder him. I had to tell Tom that his father tried to murder him.

It was 1990 and Tom was home for the holidays. Living on his own and having his own car was the first time Tom really understood that he was an adult. He got to decide where he went and when, and he knew he was no longer legally obliged to obey his parents. But emotionally, and really, he didn’t know that he wasn’t morally obliged to obey them. He didn’t know that he didn’t have to believe their warped narratives; he didn’t have to accept responsibility for “provoking” his mother into hitting him. He didn’t “make” his father scream at him at a restaurant and lie to the rest of the family about a sin, or a theft, that Tom never committed.

To Tom, he was what his personality disordered parents had always said he was: ungrateful, stuck-up, defiant, mean, and provocative. These were the justifications that came out whenever Tom found himself berated, lied about, or smacked around during childhood by his parents. And what kind of people were his parents? His mother and father were clearly Cluster B personality disordered. In other words, they were bad people with bad character. They were emotionally and physically violent to Tom since he was a little boy, and they had convinced him that it was him. He was a bad boy. He was born to irritate them. He got in their way. He was never good enough, and he’d better start showing gratitude right quick for the fact that they fed him and kept a roof over his head, because no other parents would want a boy like him.

So Tom was home for a visit. The family had just gone to a restaurant to celebrate a holiday. That’s what Tom went to the restaurant for, but his mother and father had different reasons: they wanted a staging ground to kindle an emotional blow-out to punish their son in front of other people to help justify their escalation later at home.

On the front doorstep, Tom made an off-hand comment about how nice a rock wall border would look on the front lawn. His father had always wanted a sculpted yard, and Tom thought a careful stone border around the foot path would set off his father’s work in a nice way visually.

“I’m not putting any GODDAMNED ROCK BORDER on my walkway and you can stop starting shit with me,” his father said. Tom was frozen. What? Why was his father so hostile? What had he said to his father that provoked such an angry response? Why did his father seem to believe that Tom’s good-natured participation in Dad’s project was an act of provocation or insult?

Tom asked me these questions during our session. I answered. “You didn’t say anything to provoke that response. Your father is unstable and insane. Do you understand that, Tom?”

No, Tom did not. I know this because Tom finished the story of what happened that day, and it was clear that Tom had no idea about something real and obvious when it came to his father. I’ve talked to many “Toms” who couldn’t see the truth, and I’ve been “Tom” myself. You’d be surprised how blind an abused child can be; the need to believe in a loving mother or father is strong enough to derange.

I was not prepared for the end of the story. It is this. After his verbal outburst at his son, Tom’s father grabbed Tom by the neck and started strangling him. As he strangled, Tom’s father pushed Tom’s head into a concrete wall repeatedly. Tom doesn’t know how many times, because he blacked out.

Some time later, Tom came to on the floor. Neither his mother nor his father had checked on him when he blacked out and collapsed from the strangulation and concussion. They were still screaming at each other. When he could stand, Tom gathered his phone and made for his car, dialing 911 as he went. His father saw him.

”If you call the cops I’ll kill you. Hang up now.”

Tom hung up.

This is what I said.

“Tom, your father tried to murder you. He meant to kill you, he wanted to kill you, and he tried to kill you. Do you know that, Tom? Do you know that strangling your son and concussing him, causing him to black out, then leaving him unconscious on the floor, is attempted murder?

Tom knew, now, that his father tried to kill him. He knew that his father was an attempted murderer. Tom did know this, deep inside, but he did not functionally know it until I said it plainly. Like many, he needed to hear it from a third party observer. Someone outside the family. When I was working my way up to accepting that my borderline-narcissist mother really did mean to hurt me and her children, I needed someone outside of my mind to help me functionally know the truth, too.

Reader—normie reader—from a good-enough family, this is real. This is what narcissistic abuse in the home does to people like Tom. Smart people, good people. Cluster B abuse from a parent is so fully and completely deranging that it can take a man with an actual genius-level IQ and make him “unable” to “understand” that when his father was trying to murder him, that meant, yes, his father was trying to kill him.

I know it reads an unbelievable to some of you, I know. But it’s true.

Narcissistic abuse, the kind of abuse perpetrated on children by a personality disordered parent, can make a child-then-adult believe LITERALLY ANYTHING.

Literally. Anything. It can and does disconnect children-then-adults completely from reality. I’ve seen it make children believe they were possessed by the devil which is why their parents starved and burned them. I’ve seen it make grown men believe they deserved ass-whippings that left blood running down their legs at eight years old. It has made girls-then-women “not understand” that their father digitally penetrating their vaginas was, in fact, their father digitally penetrating their vaginas. That is, that their father raped them.

I am telling you all this in hopes of helping you to understand how all-powerful Cluster B is. If you can eventually come to accept and understand how mentally deranging this abuse was for someone like Tom, then you have a chance to understand how evil ideas like “transgender children” come into the world.

You have a chance to finally understand, and more importantly, to accept as real, that truly evil parents exist. And that you see them everyday, not thinking of them as evil, because everyone around you is applauding them for their “bravery” in “helping their child accept that he was born in the wrong body and needs surgery.”

You have a chance to accept that narcissistic abuse is so powerful that the friends, colleagues, and family you thought you once knew are completely disconnected from moral reality. This is why they cry over the idea of violent illegal aliens being deported from the U.S. while wishing physical violence, misery, or death on their fellow Americans who say “I have a right to live in a neighborhood where my daughter is not in danger of being raped by a Venezuelan gang member who broke into the country.”

We are living in a Cluster B society. We have been for at least forty years. We have seen complete, 180-degree, perfect-mirror moral reversals. We’ve seen actual murderers called loving saints. We’ve seen men who defended themselves from attempts on their lives called depraved psychopaths for trying to survive when an actual psychopath tries to kill them. We’ve seen children called seductive sluts who “made” grown men and women teachers molest them.

This, pathological narcissism and its fellow travelers, is what evil looks like. And it is powerful enough to make you and any other smart, accomplished person believe literally anything.

If you’ve believed any of these things about yourself, about other people; if you’ve ever been persuaded to see the world in moral reverse, are you crazy? Yes, and no. You’re not really any different from most other humans. Most of the time, you’re sane, and connected to reality. But if you’ve fallen into this perceptual trap about yourself because of abuse, or if you’ve been goaded into believing that other people suffering from this abuse are the real problem, the real evil, then, yes, you are also crazy.

Sanity and craziness can come and go, and they can wax and wane with context. You need to know the difference. There is a difference. I’ve been crazy, and I’ve been sane. Sanity is better. It’s not easier, but it is better.

And you don’t have to stay “crazy.” You’ll want to stay there, because the devil you know is more comfortable than the work it takes to get to sane. That’s because getting to sane requires you to see the truth and tell the truth. Fully. Telling the full truth might mean recognizing that your mother has always hated you. It might mean recognizing that while your father loves you, he’s too weak a man to have been a moral, upstanding father, and that’s why he failed to protect you from your mother. It might mean accepting that your father is really just a garden variety sociopathic rapist who just happened to end up with kids along with your mother, but he’d rather be pimping.

This is your permission to see, and say, what you know is really true.

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