On Healing

For a long time, a seemingly endless, enduring amount of time, I've been doing this work of healing from narcissistic abuse. Depending upon how you frame it, eight or nine odd years now--give or take--from the waking up point in the Matrix, through the hell, fire, and brimstone of getting the fuck out of the marriage, to the moving away, to the starting afresh in the mountains and again now in the east. Looking back on the pilgrimage thus far, nearly nothing is the same. I'm a different creature than who I was upon waking up in the NPD Matrix. Red pill swallower that I am, the overhaul has been overwhelming at times. And exhilarating. And terrifying. And heart wrenching. And sorrowful. And strangely joyful. And relieving. And infuriating. There have been paralyzed moments where the upside down felt inescapable. Where death felt next to me all blanket-esque and truly living felt so far off it almost couldn't exist even in my imagination, and the Shaman priest, alone, held onto the golden thread to find the way out of the web--a way--any way.

The gift of this much time spent climbing out of the Matrix is the gift of perspective. Only now, am I beginning to see the bigger picture. As I gaze backward like Lot's wife looking at the glowing, obliteration of Sodom and Gomorrah (which by the way, I'm not sure why she was crystallized into salt for that?) patterns emerge. Also gratitude emerges. 

I see that somehow, Healing in all her grace has climbed out of the gauntlet with me. Walking beside me, my ever present companion of original lovingkindness, she afixed herself to me, all glue like, all over me like my shadow on this journey. Hovering so close, shading me from the bombastic sun, even as I've felt completely lost, wandering the desert of narcissistic abuse--Healing was there hunting me down.

I now see that I haven't actually been alone on this journey--in spite of it seeming that way--in spite of seeming as though there was no one in the pitch black, cave like dark. She's been there. Right there. So close, I couldn't even see or feel her breath.

As of late, the healing She has settled a bit, as the traumatic tentacles have loosened and receded back like the falling tide into the abyss or where-ever tentacles recede to, a mild sense of forgetting has come ashore. She--the healer hasn't needed to be parked upon me, pulling my lungs up to take in oxygen, or pressing on my chest to remind my heart to contract, or restlessly compelling my legs to take another step.

Panic no longer greets me everyday at dawn. Anxiety no longer paces my room far into the night. Sadness no longer steals my breath from my chest nor my throat.  

Peace is a newish companion. 

There is this amazing bearded wonder that has been hanging around a lot, capable of connection on so many levels--emotional, intellectual, spiritual, physical. He shows up. All there and then more. He feels. He gives. He loves. 

And with gratitude, I love. 

Already, I feel as though I can't live without him. Already, I feel a wonderous intensity of bliss beyond reason.

Somehow, this blissful feeling, in all its glory is also terrifying and triggering. For in it, I feel the remnants of the narcissistic tentacles on my mind. The warped, poison words of the past echo in my spinning head, the lingering brainwash from someone who was supposed to love me, but never really did. The perpetual, painful, embedded, You're not good enoughs and Why can't you be such-in-such and No one but me would ever want you.  

I know that we all have to do enough of the work in order to engage in a healthy relationship. We have to be whole again. We can't go in thinking, This person will heal me, fill up all my emptiness, and complete me.

And yet, the paradox is that we do heal in relationship. A regulated nervous system guides another adjacent nervous system back toward self regulation. A thumping heart in the midst of fight or flight, slows down to parasympathetic levels when another nearby heart beats at a slower rate in peace.

And so I lean in to healing and love with courage and tenacity. I lean in and hope that the demons in my head find there way out of my head. I pray that I give them the right amount of attention, but not too much and that healing and love relentlessly chase me and always find me. And that this amazing bearded wonder has all the courage and patience and compassion and love that it takes to keep on coregulating. Amen.

after the storm

Lately, I don't write as much, because I don't need to. My days are no longer consumed with thoughts of how to get out, or how to get away, or how to rebuild my life from the ground up. I suppose that is the gift of 8 yrs of separation from the narcissist. The spell is finally broken. Ding dong the wicked witch is dead. And the flying monkeys have moved on to their next target.

I've now been back East for a year. My mother is dead and I'm trying to move forward with my life. Why has it taken so long?

I'm getting closer to being ok with being alone without a partner for the rest of my life. And while I'm not totally there, yet, I'm at least getting closer. Almost resolved to the fact. I don't actually think there is somebody out there for me. Why should there be? Not everyone gets that. And some days, I'm ok with that. 

False Shen

I remember not knowing what to do with hope surfacing as I tried to divorce the narcissist. Tiny snippets would emerge where it seemed that he was quite possibly trying to change, trying to be nice. Doing normal human being things--such as the time he offered to change the oil on my car. 

Sure, that sounds great! I heard myself saying. Bring the kids over for dinner and a swim, he said. I'll change the oil on your car. Just get a filter and 5 quarts of oil. 

I remember thinking that I had put him in a box--wanting to demonize him. Obviously, I had not fully seen him. Obviously, I was the one, not owning my shit. He was normal after all. Just like any other divorcing male. 

He made dinner. Offered me wine while I sat by the pool watching the kids swim while he went to work on the car.

I felt strange after the wine. Disoriented. Somehow almost paralyzed. Somehow not able to move. Dizzy. The room spun around me. This after two glasses. I remember thinking I knew my limit with wine. And 2 glasses was far below my limit. Also, I knew that driving even the 2 miles to my apartment was a bad idea. And so I took him up on his offer of the couch in my old house. After that, I don't remember much. 

Next day, one of my patients whom I told of my strange experience suggested that maybe hope had gotten the better of me and that I'd been roofied by my ex. 

Somehow that seemed impossible to me. After all he wasn't that bad. After all he was a decent human being. I almost couldn't try on this idea. But, I also couldn't understand how two glasses of wine could affect me so differently than at other times. 

But. Hope. Hope can sometimes be the lizard's tail that keeps regrowing after it is chopped off. 

I had hope that he could do decent things. Hope that he might want good things for me, in spite of the divorce. 

Sometimes hope can be a terrible regrowing lizard's tale. Today, I saw that same ridiculous hope in my dad. 

My mother is dying of cancer. This week the oncologist finally leveled with my parents--there is no chemo that will help. Radiation may help the bone pain. After that, hospice is the option. It is all over her bones. Splitting said bones at will. She is beyond the hope of geniuses. She is beyond all of it. I am moving across the country to hopefully have a few weeks with her. 

And today dad thought she was better. He seemed to see betterness as hopeful. That somehow God is curing her. That somethow there is hope. Just as I saw hope in my ex reaching out to help me change the oil in my car, then roofied my drink. 

Oh the false shen.

There is a concept in Chinese medicine called the False Shen. The Shen is the life look in the eyes. Often before death people magnificently improve, seemingly better they manifest a bright, light in the eyes as though they are healing. It is the False Shen. A brightening before death comes for them. I'm hoping that it is not yet time for the false shen. Real people have a false shen for a short time before death. The narcissist has a false shen for an eternity, perhaps that is why I recognize it so well.

On Bikes and Cancer

I had to speak with him--the narcissist, yesterday. Pressing matters dictate. Reason being I'm oh-so-abruptly uprooting myself and my no-longer-littles back East. Reason being my mother was diagnosed with the big C. Way too abruptly, she has Gastric cancer with Mets to the bones. Sometimes, I hate being a physican. Unfortunately, I know what this means. The oncologist world peeps need not do their evasive, vague communicative practices. We might have weeks. I'm hoping for a few months. My mother, the woman who has been my unfailing supporter through everything in life is leaving soon to pass behind the thin veil that separates some of us from the others of us.

I am in a shock of sorts.

Of course, logistically, I had to communicate with the Narc. I wish that were not the case. My little Irish princess warrior recommended that I not speak with him at all. But that was not an option.

And all he could seemingly focus on, was how he will lose the kid's bikes to the East Coast. Swallowed whole into some moving truck that will move us all across country. The BIKES. He could only think about the inanimate objects of the BIKES. Because people do not actually matter. He might lose the  BIKES since my kids brought them skyward and now we are going East with nowhere to store them here. The BIKES. And this is a picture--a metaphor of what is the problem with the narcissist. People dying are of no consequence to a narcissist. But, material goods. BIKES. Inanimate objects. These are the things that he clings to. These are the things that matter to the narcissist. Not people. 

He and A Gun

Mostly, I have been telling myself that there might be thousands of reasons someone, such as my ex, might purchase a gun. Thousands of reasons he might want to ensure that I know that he has one. A glock. Thousands of reasons he might bring such a purchase on a twelve hour drive to drop off the kids at my house in another state. Thousands of reasons he might choose to spend time with his son at the shooting range "for fun."

But he obviously wanted me to know that he has a gun. And he brought said gun to the state.

Any and all of these thoughts rattle and unsettle. Does the gun purchase portend some event?

I once again feel a bit of a space cadet. My old friend panic has come for a visit. 

I'm trying to keep my reason married to my feelings, holding hands and keeping close company with one another. I suppose if he truly wanted to kill me, it'd make more sense to keep this gun-owning-status a secret from me. So this whole kit and caboodle is just another intimidation stunt.

And I definitely feel intimidated. Fearful. Anxious. Rattled.

I'm back to spending two hours at the gym six out of seven days of the week. Aiming to get strong again. I'm sure some of this is the post covid lockdown thing as I couldn't work out for six months. But more so this obsessing about how much weight I can push or pull is tied to my trying to feel safe. And all the gym obsessions time makes it is more difficult to obsess about how unsafe I feel.

And so I'm acknowledging it--the fear. I'm allowing it. I'm feeling it. And all the same I'm not feeding it. 

Instead, there is and must be a way to carve a little patch of safety on the soul, hidden from all at the core. Victor Frankl writes that this little patch was how he and others survived Aushwitz. This little patch is the thing that they can't ever take from you, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how hard they try, no matter how much you suffer, this little patch can instead decide to find meaning in it all, even in the suffering created at the hands of the ex aiming to intimidate. 

on True Presence

Sometimes I wonder at the irony in investing so much of my self, my everything in learning the art of listening, in the art of being-ness with people in their pain, some sort of attempt at actual true presence. And yet, I've failed miserably in finding such a reciprocal sort of listener in my personal life. 

No one would argue that the narc can ever deliver such. Rather, the partner of the narcissist wakes up alone in the relationship. But of course the loneliness in the midst of a relationship is worsened by a fake togetherness. So no one knows you're actually, alone. Your loneliness--invisible to the world. Worse yet, you find your soul being sucked away.  

And then post narc, you think your chances of finding someone who can listen should naturally increase, because you've eliminated the whole category of serving the narcissist. You just want to find someone who has the capacity to listen to pain.

But, apparently people are losing their capacity to listen and be truly present to each other, the world over. 

In my work, I give everyday one of the things I most value in life, to all who seek my help. Something I consider a true gift. They don't know that almost always, I won't even let my mind wander--I concentrate so earnestly at listening with every cell of my being. It demands tremendous energy. I won't allow myself to check my phone nor surf social media. That kind of listening most of my people can't necessarily tell when the "whole being" listening isn't present, but some of my more sensitive patients can. And I can feel the difference. And the true, real, authentic whole being listening is the only time I've experienced other healing shit spontaneously happening. And so, most days, almost always, I give fully, the one thing I most want the Universe to give back--the thing I've given a thousand times to people, but have never experienced in the context of a significant other relationship. One day I hope this bit of irony ends. 

Entangled

The specialists would say I'm supposed to be over this--him--by now. Supposed to have moved on. Supposed to have gone and gotten myself a whole new revamped life sans abusive ex.

But every time I try to go and get myself another life I look at the black and white photos on the wall staring back at me. The big, brown eyed baby that used to say woo-ah, woo-ah, woo-ah, when he first learned to walk with the Winnie-the-Pooh walker looking out at me. And I remember the three babies I pushed out of my own body created with the evil one I'm supposed to now erase from my mind. And once again I feel torn apart. I feel torn in two. 

I am haunted by the beautiful pictures in my mind of these lovely person beings. 

How do I share the beautiful memories in my mind with a monster?

No, I never see him anymore. No, I never speak to him anymore. No, I go out of my way to be far from him--to keep him out in every way imaginable. But he is there in the memories. What the hell do I do with the memories entangled with him? What the hell do I do with the most significant pieces of my life buried in the same tomb with him?

 

on Lost Caged Friends

I've only heard snippets about them--the couple that I used to know--tiny snapshots of their lives now, percolated through overheard fireside conversations with the ex, filtered through the eyes and ears of my Littles. I've never seen them. Haven't heard anything from them since things went south with the Narc. Apparently, they've been sufficiently entombed inside his lies. The camping rendezvous where they met my Littles and the Narc atop a mountain triggered bits of the old pain seeping in again. 

Now, don't get me wrong. They are gone. The N divorce truth serum revealed the absence of integrity and character in them. But, as always, somehow, I don't want to believe these things about them. I thought they were different. Of all the old friends, I would not have pegged them as the ones that would never question the stories they've been told. They seemed to be different. But, the narc truth serum applied to friendships is just that--the best damn truth litmus test on the market. You may hate the results, even want to challenge them umpteen bazillion times but accuracy levels are off the charts and while sometimes Time has a way of deteriorating the results, the truth is ultimately there if one is willing to face it.

And so I am facing it. I grieve once again, the loss of friendship, made more acute by the accompanying pain of wanting to reach out to those that once were familiar--those that once seemed to see me--the real me. I grieve the pain of intensely wanting to share the truth of my experience in what happened while a marriage imploded in upon the collapsed soul-less shell of a man. The haunting images of the past of what might have been--of sitting round a campfire, atop Dallas Divide, sipping a glass of wine, sharing conversation and laughter, reminiscing about the old stories of yesteryear.   

 

Each time I have to let go in these kinds of ways, I get a little more of the sense that I am backing away from a prison that bars them in, as much as it bars me out. 

On Narc Relationship Pandemic Parallels... Isolation

I’ve been here before. And this is what I learned. No, it wasn’t a pandemic last time I was here. Instead, it was my experience escaping the toxic relationship in question, the subject matter of this blog. But many of the relevant details are similar enough. Perhaps, the Narc lessons have some usefulness. Perhaps, drawing from the Narc past, we might glean tips of navigation through current circumstances. 

First of all, there's the isolation thing. Many of us the world over are currently being encouraged to isolate, to physically distance. For the past few months, we’ve been encouraged or ordered to stay home, to shelter in place, to limit our human interactions. Thus the isolation. Feeling cut off. In the dark. Alone. As though we’ve awoken on some alien planet in 2020.

Certainly, the reasons for why we are currently isolating are complex. We are aiming to do something for the greater good on many levels by slowing the speed of new cases enough to keep our healthcare systems within capacity in terms of the number of cases. But to stop our thinking at that point is to ignore the nuances of the situation. Isolation is not an especially neutral enterprise. The tactic of isolation often favors those in power--the rich, those in control, those at the top. Isolation can be a powerful means to obtain the upper hand in many situations. It is often one of the first tactics in the coercion game. Physical isolation. Case in point, Jeffrey Epstein and his toxic, isolated island of abuse.

I suspect a question worth asking in this pandemic is who benefits from our collective isolation? Who asymmetrically gains more power from all the physical distancing going on? And who loses power in all the physical distancing?

But physical isolation is not the only kind of isolation. My experience suggests that to be isolated in the mind can be utterly horrific. When you reach the conclusion--even if the wrong one--that you are entirely alone in the world--that there is no one to reach out to--that there is no one who will listen, the pain cuts deep. It can quickly drive you with an almost religious fervor toward wanting to escape the pain so intensely, that taking yourself out of the equation starts to look like a good option. 

I recall this level of despair when my ex managed to cut me off from my own family. About the same time, I experienced being cut off from various friends. Previous social gatherings that had been regular events suddenly became off-limits. I was shut out, uninvited from places that had once welcomed me. Oh so stupidly, I believed him when he told me that people didn’t want me around, that I would make the event uncomfortable, that people would prefer my absence to my presence. These lies fed the downward spiral of my already obliterated self esteem. These lies also added to the sense of feeling trapped in warped funhouse, overwhelmed. I couldn’t see his lies as tactics to further isolate and thus control me.

This leads me to a second set of questions worth asking in this pandemic. Whom has control of which reality gets supplied? Which powers dominate the message? By what venue does said supplied reality get to us? How does the reality further our sense of isolation?

In my past, if I would have recognized the point of isolation--that it is often to control the supplied particular reality, perhaps I would have been suspicious of he whom wanted me to ingest a decidedly gloomy perspective of my experiences.

Isolation can also trigger you itself, especially when coupled with gaslighting--getting you into a flashback, into a state of panic, into an easily manipulatable state, in despair, and not capable of making rational decisions. This is why it is such an effective tactic of control.

Which leads me to a third set of questions we ought ask in this pandemic. In what ways are we being gaslit? How are we being manipulated? What information can our own emotional responses tell us about what is happening in this pandemic? Are there other perspectives we are missing? If so what are they?

On the Pain of Hope

Today, a few hours before our date that we were supposed to have tonight he told me he thought we should back off a bit. As in I should probably never expect to hear anything else from him, ever again. No, he didn't say it quite like that. But the hope bubble of a potential relationship is popped.

He put it quite kindly. He was exceedingly gentle. He said it quite mildly. And this I know.... he has a good heart--this is absolute. He's not evil. He's not vile, like my ex. He's a genuine, kind person. He's totally one of the good-guy types.  I can only hope he finds someone else equal to the grandeur of his soul. The soul that he has no idea how different it is from the standard. 

Because he's living in some kind of organic bubble where there are tons of cool, authentic people living on the planet--people you might bump into at any moment. Because they are everywhere.

Really. I hope that.

Because nothing in him is evil. He was so honest. And I was too. And I know from my own experience it takes courage to be that honest. And he doesn't yet seem to know how rare that level of honesty is. Clueless. In my experience, you don't throw that away. Even if it is potentially moving away to another state. Because you don't find it often enough to throw it away on the altar of potential moves. You grab on and hold on. No matter what...

But instead we both get to drift in the pain.

what to Do with Regret

Regret might be the worst emotion to encounter in the getting-out-and-healing process. When you stare down the years--nearly two entire decades in the prime of life--it can cut deep along the soul lines. The years seemingly wasted that wash over the deadened bits like the tide, dragging your rag doll soul out to drown.

I did nearly drown in regret. Sometimes I'm not sure how I didn't.

But the sick feeling of wanting to rewind time, going back to give your younger self a few keynotes about how things actually are and will be. The after of how it strikes you when time slips through your fingers and life sneaks past.

Regret is birthed in the polarity of your disparate emotions. Regret is birthed in the incomprehensibility of the worst thing and the best thing in your life somehow ending up fucking each other and have a child that is your life. Strange bedfellows.
 
Somehow he is quite literally the worst thing that ever happened to me. And, somehow he is quite literally the best thing that ever happened to me.

Both of these things are somehow simultaneously true for me and so the question remains, what the hell do you do with that?

the Revolution

There are things I'm grateful for and then there are things that I basically cannot express enough of my gratitude for. These things extend so far beyond my ability to be grateful for them--that I almost don't know how to describe them. Things that literally revolutionized everything. Lately, I've been mulling over those things. Which relevant pieces essentially revolutionized everything? That is the question I have been pondering, as of late.

First, there was a listener. A revolutionary priest. A grizzly, bearded, long-haired tatted, F-bomb dropping priest.  Prolly goes without saying but not your typical rigid-religiosity-instilling-personhood-bashing-priest. No. A listener--and that's relevant. A priest with (in fact) something on par with turning-water-into-wine miraculous listening skills where I could bump into myself somewhere on the bookshelves near the magic-eight-ball Jesus in his office.

I remember the startled feeling of not being interrupted. I remember the long pauses. Half the time, I would interrupt myself. Only then would he speak.

I hadn't had that experience in seventeen years. Always talked over. Always repeating myself because the narcissist never actually heard anything I said, except way back in the beginning when it was something akin to ammunition to later use against me way down the road. But I didn't know that then.

So a bad-ass listener. Key.

That and the screaming dreams was how I started to wake up in my own life. 

That was how I started to arm myself for the hellish battle of escaping the Matrix that I didn't know that I was about to undertake.

For something like a solid year he--the Priest--listened while I unloaded--verbal diarrhea for hours every single week. It seemed endless once the Dam broke and uncontrollably the water ran. Sometimes the literal waters ran. Sometimes I gut wrenchingly sobbed for most (all) of the appointment. I had no idea that I needed a place to park my sorrow. Hell, I didn't even know that there was so much unattended sorrow underneath. I had so effectively walled myself off from it that I didn't even know it was there. And certainly, didn't know it was mine.

I think he did know it was mine. He had a sixth sense about those sorts of things. Shaman-esque.

He would do what priests ought to do, but most don't or won't, and just hold space. That is something that should be taught in Priest 101. He could endlessly hold space like nobody's business. And finally then I could breathe. It was one of the only places in my life I could actually breathe freely. But I didn't even know that--that I needed a place to breathe--cause I wasn't really breathing elsewhere.

I started to notice that. I started to notice that I was breathing mostly in his office. I also started to notice that I was not breathing when I was around my ex the narcissist. I started to toss and turn a little bit in my narc induced sleep.

And so that was how the revolution started.

There were others who joined the cause. Others who listened. Others who pointed things out. Others who oh-so-directly spoke into my life. Others who helped imagine a way out.

But his bad-ass listening skills are like none other. The root of the revolution. The revolution would not have ever existed without them.

A string of therapists were certainly helpful. Important. But if I can point to only one person--one significant person that made the revolutionary difference--the person that single-handedly triggered the rebellion--it was this one human who listened like I was the only person left on the planet to be listened to, like there wasn't anyone else, like judging other people about weird things they think or do didn't even exist. And that in a nutshell is how and why I escaped.