Thanks for writing this essay. It's so comprehensive! I would like to add a few points and observations/my own experiences.

1. Chronic gaslighting and being told that I was the perpetrator by my father made me believe for the first 30 years of my life that I was the aggressor and the person in the wrong. Narcissists project their faults onto others. When they're called out, they will rage, deflect and accuse the other person, even if it's their own child that the child is at fault, not them. I remember being forced to apologize to my father after he hit me and the police came. I had to say that I was the abuser. This screwed up my sense of myself and even reality--creating mental health issues later in life.

2. As part of the child development cycle, children need their parent to validate their reality and experience for them. When the child has a narc parent who gaslights and projects, the child's entire sense of reality & personal identity comes into doubt. Children in these situations grow up into adults who continue to doubt themselves and doubt their reality. Hence, the child or scapegoat can really come to believe and continue to believe that they are intrinsically wrong and is the person at fault. The thinking goes, "If they are just better, their parent or the aggressor wouldn't treat them that way."

3. Children and even adults learn through experience and modeling. Therefore children learn to copy the character defective parents around them.

4. The more trauma bonding and betrayal bonding there was, the more I put my parents on a pedestal. It was very strange. The more that they hurt me, the more I wanted to earn their love and approval. They became the center of my life.

5. Society enables and event aggrandize these types of relationships. Books, films, and love songs seem to believe that this is what "love" is. We are all in a sort of trance about this whole thing.