Garden of Life Counseling

11/23/2025

She was born into a family where her brother could do no wrong and she could do no right.

Her parents did not say it out loud, but she felt it long before she had words for it.

He was the pride. She was the problem.

It started early.
If he slammed a door, he was tired.
If she closed one gently, she was disrespectful.
If he forgot something, they called it normal.
If she forgot the same thing, they called her careless.

The rules were different for him. They always were.

He was the golden boy.
He shone effortlessly.
Every achievement was celebrated.
Every mistake was softened.

But for her, there was no softness.
Only responsibility, pressure and criticism.

She learned to apologise before she spoke.
She learned to walk quietly.
She learned to shrink herself in every room.
Not because she wanted to, but because staying small kept the peace.

The painful part was not that they loved him.
It was that they needed someone to blame, and she was the safest target.

When he was angry, it was her fault.
When he struggled, it was her job to fix it.
When he succeeded, they said she should try harder.

She became the emotional punching bag.
The fixer.
The peacemaker.
The strong one.
The girl who carried the weight of everyone’s feelings except her own.

And the world outside the home never understood why she was so quiet, so cautious, so afraid of getting things wrong.
They did not know she grew up in a battlefield where the enemy smiled at guests and called itself a family.

But here is the truth she never heard as a child.

She was never the problem.
She was the one who saw everything clearly.
She was the one who questioned the lies.
She was the one who refused to play the game.
And in a narcissistic family, truth is always punished.

The scapegoat is not the weakest one.
She is the strongest.
She is the one who breaks the cycle.
She is the one who grows up with empathy, depth and emotional intelligence no one else in the family could ever match.

Her strength was never an accident.
It was forged in every moment she survived.

And one day, she will leave the home that blamed her for everything
and she will finally understand something her family never wanted her to realise.

She was never hard to love.
They were simply unable to love her without conditions.

11/22/2025

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09/11/2025

09/10/2025

Narcissistic family. This is the family where the healthy ones eventually run, not because they are heartless or incapable of love, but because they finally wake up to the painful truth that no matter how much they explain, justify, or beg to be heard, nothing will ever break through the thick walls of denial that hold this family together. Denial is the glue, and illusion is the foundation. The image of “perfection” is more important than the reality of dysfunction, and appearances always come before authenticity.

In this family, truth becomes a weapon turned against the one who dares to speak it. If you tell the truth, you are called a liar. If you set boundaries, you are labeled selfish. If you distance yourself for survival, you are accused of betrayal. Sanity itself is treated as a crime, because a healthy perspective exposes what everyone else is working so hard to hide. Silence is expected, obedience is demanded, and loyalty is enforced through shame, guilt, and fear.

The golden children are praised, not for who they are, but for how well they reflect the family’s false image. The scapegoats are blamed, criticized, and punished, not because they are bad, but because they dare to reveal cracks in the mask. Affection is transactional, love is conditional, and worthiness is determined by how well you play your assigned role.

And yet, within all this dysfunction, there are always a few who see through the performance. They are the ones who question, the ones who resist, the ones who cannot fully betray themselves just to keep the peace. For that, they are turned into the villains of the story. They are whispered about, painted as unstable, rebellious, or ungrateful—when in reality, they are simply the ones strong enough to recognize the truth.

The ones who leave carry both freedom and grief. They grieve the family they never truly had, the love that was always conditional, the relationships that could have been real but never were. But they also carry strength, resilience, and the courage to break generational cycles of dysfunction. They leave not because they don’t care, but because they care enough about themselves to stop living inside a lie. They are the ones who refuse to sacrifice their peace, their sanity, and their identity just to maintain an illusion.

The ones who leave are not the enemies—they are the survivors, the cycle-breakers, the truth-tellers, and in the end, they are the ones who prove that healing is possible, even after being raised in a world where denial was stronger than love.

08/30/2025