Breaking Free from Narcissistic Systems
The Hidden Reality
Looking back on my life, it feels as if I spent a long time in an emotional void. Growing up in a family and society that failed, and continues to fail, to actually recognize what I’ve gone through, I learned early on to silence my experiences. I was told to "move on," to pretend as if nothing happened, as if emotions didn’t matter. Both family and society self-deluded themselves into seeing us as robotic figures, and in doing so, projected this onto me. Any hint of emotional pain was quickly redefined as a mental illness, or worse, a "disorder" I supposedly had. This was not an isolated problem, it was the pattern of my life. But it wasn’t just the emotional neglect. I was branded as different, and the bullying I faced, compounded by being associated with a family that others despised, was minimized and dismissed. As a child, I was made to believe these were just part of life’s neutral events, non-events, even. Meanwhile, the real pain, the deaths of the few people who truly saw me, who were truly interested in me, not as a tool for their gain, but as a person, was disregarded and ignored. Places where I could find support seen as dangerous. This is the framework of a narcissistic family system: an ego-based reality that distorts everything.
In my family, my voice never truly mattered. There was no genuine interest in my well-being or in understanding my struggles. Instead, I was seen only as an extension of their desires, a puppet to control, shape, and mold into what they wanted. When I suffered, it was framed as a symptom of something wrong with me, mental illness, personality disorder, whatever label fit. Even talking about these struggles openly was sacrilegious, a breach of the family code. But the truth is, my family never showed any warmth or genuine care, only a desire to manipulate and suppress. Their treatment of me had less to do with me as a person and everything to do with maintaining their ego and emotional comfort.
They saw me as the “victim-child,” the one to carry the burden of their unprocessed pain, their fragmentation. They couldn’t see how the true dysfunction lay in the family system itself, in the societal structures that perpetuate such patterns. But instead of reflecting on this, I was trapped in the role of "broken," a “sin bearer,” someone to be fixed, no matter how much healing I had already done. This is the culture that tells people like me, and like others I’ve known, that suffering is a necessary part of the equation. The system that dehumanizes and erases the individual for the sake of comfort and illusion.
Lor, Corey, and Christina were all victims of the same societal system, yet their lives were treated as insignificant. Their stories were reduced to mere statistics. Numbers that didn’t matter in a system that has lost all empathy. Lor was just 23, Corey was 36, and Christina was 29, yet their deaths were seen as their own fault, or worse, selfish. The very abuse they suffered was ignored, brushed aside as if it was somehow their responsibility. These were people who fought to uplift others, to bring light to the darkest parts of existence. But the powers that be, the wealthy, the out-of-touch, the ones in positions of influence, turned a blind eye. They erased good, kind people from society, because their comfort and delusion were far more important than human life.
Society often hides behind a veneer of caring. People call themselves helpers, saviors, and supporters, but what they offer is often just a veiled attempt at control. Beneath the surface, it’s all about shaping others into what they think they should be, not listening to their true selves. Real care is about sitting with someone in their full, raw humanity. Acknowledging their pain and their experience as something real and valuable. But in the narcissistic family system, emotions are seen as diseases to be eradicated. The suffering of others is reduced to something to be fixed or ignored. Just "move on," they say, while they live in their gilded cage of denial.
They don’t care about the stories behind people like Lor, Corey or Christina. Or what of the marginalized? What of those suffering on the streets of Freiburg, or anywhere else, or those trapped in cycles of abuse? Some are stuck for over a decade, while others, young and vulnerable, are rejected by a system that refuses to see them. So why are their lives erased, their pain ignored? Society chooses not to recognize their humanity, stripping them of dignity and abandoning them to a fate that leads to suffering or even death. Not because of a fault of their own, but because of the neglect and abuse they suffered.
Yet the narcissists frame this as their fault, and they fear the poor, foreigners and the abused. They see those deemed other as something to be eradicated, to be round up and shot, or put in camps, as they are all mentally ill and don’t deserve to live. As what is human live worth to them other than a mere causality, for their “comfort” of course. This has been a inter-generational rot. To hate foreigners and refugees, want LGBTQ and all what is other, to act “normal”. That would be talked about in dismissive and harmful ways. Or implied through context. A narcissist family system might thus frame the family as “morally upright” and “progressive,” but the reality is that their real views are far from that. Yet that remains behind closed doors. As much as in my personal situation me actually being part of the LGBTQ community was supposed to be buried.
However, most people don’t have the luxury I’ve had to break free. The actual time and space to free myself from the internal programming that keeps one trapped in a cycle of suffering. I had the time in Finland to work through the deep internal wounds and begin to understand the systems that shape our reality. Not everyone has that luxury. For many, the struggle against the ego and the super-ego is a daily battle. It’s a battle they cannot afford to lose, even though it’s not a fight they wanted in the first place. They must keep going, day after day, in survival mode. But survival is not living.
Yet in the end I have realised one thing in life. It is worth more to live for a short while as your true self, then to live a long life to merely survive. It is the realisation I had sitting one night in the cage that is a narc family. As in the end this is the choice any narc family or society holds over people. To pick authenticity is to choose rejection and death, and to pick survival is to be erased and enslaved. Yet is true liberty not something worth more than mere survival? Is it not worth everything?