You Do Not Matter

I'm not so cynical or jaded in life that I think it odd to care for another human being. In fact, some non-caring harsh things, I cannot do. Offensive psychology and street smarts be damned. Perhaps, I am the lesser for it. Or not.

But, I cannot say to just anyone, You Do Not Matter, no matter what they do. Somehow, that is a threshold, I cannot cross. Even when I imagine truly evil people from the past or present, I don't think I can say such. In fact, I don't know many people at all, even enemies--people I hate--my own ex-narcissist, that I could say that to. I'm not sure I could say that to the parents--of some of the people I help--whose awfulness has most obviously contributed to some of the awfulness of the trauma I am treating. These the same people I've heard terrible tales of. In fact, I'm not sure I could say that with certainty to anyone on the planet. I just cannot imagine scenarios where I could say such intense words.

And recently, someone typed those words to me in an email.

This person knows some of my intimate secrets, in fact they were supposedly acting in a helper role. They know some of my most vulnerable points, including the fact that I have often felt like I do not matter. And this was a particular point we were working on. Perhaps, this is a common theme in being intimately connected to a narcissist--feeling as if you don't matter--feeling invisible. Whatever the case, someone I thought I trusted slung those particular words back at me.

It seems my treated wound became the weapon to harm. How does someone, anyone think that is ok? How does someone supposedly seeking to help hurl those words? Ever?

I have been trying to get my head around it. And I can't.

Shock effect? I don't really know. I'll probably never know.

But somehow the over-reacting slinging swing was too much. It backfired. Perhaps, the principle of like curing like really does mean something. Cause the words seemed to almost have the opposite effect of what I suspect was intended--to inflict pain or abuse? I found myself easily disconnecting, discounting, writing off the words. After all, the words sounded way too exaggerated, too hyperbolic, too over-the-top, too out there, too much of a fantasy to be taken seriously. And so, I was able to separate from them.

You do not matter. 

Yes, I do. As all human beings, do in fact, matter.

Somehow, this you-do-not-matter sounded so intensely ridiculous, that I was able to see it, for what it was. For the first time, I was able to relate to the silliness of it completely outside myself.

And the irony is that this is not something I could see through when uttered to myself inside my own brain, for years. But when someone you trust, someone who once seemingly cared about helping you, says such, it sounds absolutely ridiculous, almost straight out of some sort of Ripley's-believe-it-or-not-warped-mirrored-fun-house, as in most obviously, distorted. And the over-the-topness of it struck me. And I was able to separate from it like never before. Strangely healing.

Yes, I do matter. No, I'm not perfect. In fact, I'm kinda fucked up. And somehow, I matter all the same. Being a part of the human race, we all matter. Even truly awful people, actually matter. And truly incredible people like Mother Theresa also matter, though they have passed on. And I guess the point is all human beings do, in fact, matter. Even fucked up therapists, working out their own shit, do in fact, matter. Well, ok.

Down is Optional

Down is optional. Up is mandatory. Words posted on signs in a National Park in the West that reflect the sentiment of where I'm at.

I climb up out of the depths.

I tell myself to just continue. Keep on walking. Put one foot in front of the other. Don't worry about the rest.

Though my quads yell, though my lungs doth protest at the limited oxygen, though my people doth vanish, keep walking, I scream at myself. Get out of the Grandiose Narcissistic Canyon. You must.

Don't expect anyone to get this. It is ok. One day the straining will be less. Forgive those that do not have the endurance for this marathon climb up with you. Maybe, they carry too much already. Maybe, they are too hurt themselves. It is ok. You will survive. Down is optional, but up is mandatory. Remember that.

After a Destructive Encounter

Now that you have entered with an open heart
into a complex and fragile situation,
Hoping with patience and respect
To tread softly over sore ground in order
That somewhere beneath the raw estrangement
Some fresh spring of healing might be coaxed
To release the grace for a new journey
Beyond repetition and judgment,
And have achieved nothing of that,
But emerged helpless, and with added hurt...

Withdraw for a while into your own tranquility,
Loosen from your heart the new fester.
Free yourself of the wounded gaze
That is not yet able to see you.
Recognize your responsibility for the past.
Don't allow your sense of yourself to wilt.
Draw deep from your own dignity.
Temper your expectation to the other's limits,
And take your time carefully,
Learning that there is a time for everything
And for healing too,
But that now is not that time... yet.

--John O'Dononhue (Irish poet, philosopher) 

Brick Walls

It hurts to be misunderstood. Especially, when you realize someone seems to believe and see only the shadow, dark side of you—the repressed stuff that you’ve done your damnedest to allow space for.

Sometimes its tough when the sledgehammering most obviously misses the mark entirely. When it triggers the old wound, charging it once again with invisibility.  

I know you will not respect my request to not be contacted and so you will try to contact me via false emails and such and I will warn you now, you will be blocked.

Yes, that is absolutely who I am in some sort of counterfactual world.

I guess my naivete is jumping up and down on me. I'm no rocket surgeon, but I gather that this is something people apparently do to one another, in your counterfactual world. 

I see that people have slung such arrows like this at you in the past. Or perhaps, this is something, you've done to people. Ok. I’m really sorry people did that to you. I’m sorry they hurt you in so many ways. I’m sorry for the pain they and I caused you.

And here is the weird truth of the matter, I actually felt safe with you. Expressing things I haven’t to many people at all. I realize now, it was too much for you to handle and I’m sorry. You did take it personally. I knew that with certainty when you claimed, that you absolutely did not.

This is not personal. I see who you really are.

No, you don’t at all.

Apparently, I'm invisible to you. You do not see the real me. Because, you missed some significant factors. Like the fact that it has never even occurred to me to do the things you are so worried I will now do. Wow. Even the power of suggestion or projection is not enough to compel me to behave in such ways. I can't believe that after all of this, you still don’t actually know the most basic premise of who I am.  

And that, kind of hurts. This does feel remarkably similar to that which I am trying to heal.  

But, not at all for the reasons you might suppose.

And, no, I’m not actually that girl that you clearly think me to be.

I am inclined to speak with you, only because of the denied opportunity to close things off with the sort of respect human beings ought give one another. I respect your need to end things. I have no intentions of persuading you otherwise. I just don’t understand not allowing space for humanity in the process. Isn't that what you've taught me the narcissist does? The human being part of me that reaches toward peace wishes to speak my piece. I do feel like contacting you—not out of some sort of frenzied desire to lash out—but in order to understand my role in all of this and to communicate the space from whence I resonate. I’d like to speak with you, in order to learn how not to repeat the mistakes I made with you. But, you don’t seem to know how to “fight” fairly--though you seemingly have always known a lot about fighting. Perhaps, that is part of the problem. You don’t seem to understand that respect for human dignity means that even when we least expect to see the other person’s perspective, we graciously give opportunity for the other to try to persuade us. Instead, you brick walled off in your unclaimed pain and never offered the chance to respond to your words, to have the other half of the conversation as human beings ought to do for one another.

You are so rigid...

Perhaps. In my so-called rigidity, I'm trying on your ideas. But, I don't believe I'm the one acting like a brick wall, here. This is your emotional cut-off tactic. Any human being would feel inclined to want to respond, to defend, to explain—but you abruptly slammed the door on such and projected out the idea that in wanting to respond to such, one would necessarily need to see oneself as victim. And that is not necessarily the case. One might need to respond not to claim victim-hood but rather in order to be a human being. To understand, to clear the air, to see the whole, to not be rigid, to learn from one's mistakes. 

But, in keeping with your request, as I'm re-framing it. I shall not respond to this. I shall treat you with respect.  

I shall endeavor to take you at your word. Perhaps, no one ever really has in the past and so you don't know what that feels like. I shall respect your request to be left alone. It is all I can do. And because, as human beings, who actually respect each other, that is what we ought aim to do for one another. I am sorry for your pain. I even wish that I could heal it.

But, I cannot.

Volcanic Eruptions

For many years, in living and coping with a narcissist, I have suppressed my anger. Pushing it down somewhere into the dark recesses of my soul, I have separated from it—partial coping strategy, partial delusion of not wanting to see the shadow side of myself as angry person. Denial will only go so far. Suppression will only go so far and then the closet door, bulging at the seams violently bursts open.

This week, I oh-so-nastily went off on one of my helper, healer people, someone who has, in fact, helped me quite substantially. My suppressed rage erupted from the deep. In projecting my own massive pile of shit onto my helper person, the volcano burned up the already strained therapeutic alliance. Somewhat understandably, my helper responded by lashing out, giving me quite the ass whooping by oh-so-accurately attacking me at my known weak points. It hurt and will for some time. On some levels, the striking was over the top, complicated further by poor communication and misunderstanding—but then so was my own initial lashing out. Not surprising, raw, dark energy matched with equally raw, dark energy proved combustible.

I get it.

Unfortunately, I get it too late.

The damage is done. The alliance dissolved in an acidic, toxic soup.

And I am left staring at the bleak, blackened landscape, oddly enough, that I largely created through my unbridled, destruction percolating from the deep.

Perhaps, there could have been more understanding, more space holding for my shit, but, I don’t fault my helper person. Everyone has their own individual capacity for shit holding. The rain barrel overflowed and my helper person turned over and emptied the rain barrel. Fair enough.

I find myself deeply longing for the opportunity to look this person in the eyes, take responsibility for my bad behavior, and apologize. And while I deeply regret the harming, that likely sounds too flowery and too altruistic. It is what it is and is part of the whole. Partially true, yet incomplete. There is another side of this desire to apologize. If I am truly honest with myself part of my longing stems from my own discomfort in seeing this destructive, ugly, awfulness in myself—the very thing that created the bulging closet of destruction in the first place. I feel compelled to push it away—to see it outside myself—to not look closely at it—to numb my own wound with the Novacaine of apology, rather than sitting in the stew pot of my own dis-ease.

And so I shall sit deliberately in my own discomfort with my own destruction. In so doing, I hope to one day right the balance betwixt destruction and creation, death and rebirth, endings and beginnings. I choose to trust experience to lead me and guide me. In the words of John O’Donohue, “Experience has its own secret structuring. Endings are natural. Often what alarms us as an ending can in fact be the opening of a new journey—a new beginning that we could have never anticipated; one that engages forgotten parts of the heart.”  

Oh, wounded healer, thank you for your dark work. I am deeply sorry. I send my words out with the breath. May they rinse your soul. I bid you adieau and wish and hope that healing chases you and always finds you.

    

Loss

At least more days than not, it feels as though you have lost everything. The rhythm of the waves of loss can crash you down, dragging you out to sea in the undertow.

Intermittently interspersed on other days, you chart a little progress. A sense of doing a bit better seeps in. Mild hints of a new rhythm take shape—like the faintest shadow of a six pack emerging on the abdomen of an obsessive gym rat. The new habit of passing the kids off through school numbs the pain in your heart, a little bit. Somehow, it is easy to imagine them merely spending a few nights at a friend’s house away from you. Until the dog looks around, whining for the children that play with her and all the kid chores remain undone—little post-it note reminders call your bluff in your pretensions--your life is not the same, and never will be.

You live in a small apartment, now.

You look out the patio door at an apartment advertising sign.

You share your kids with someone who doesn't love you anymore and maybe never did.

You sleep alone without somebody next to you snoring or talking in his sleep.

And while the sleeping alone part might be an improvement over the nights of hearing him talk out loud while he dreamed of their lovemaking, as he moaned her name again and again, you still miss the comfort of lying in another's arms. You miss having your Other--your someone.

Being forsaken is hard. Difficult.   

And moving forward, of course, the predictables are hard—the anniversaries, the birthdays, the Christmases, and the Thanksgivings—all the events and celebrations, sometimes with the children, or without, sometimes alone—now you relate in your grief to the presence of an absence.

The predictables are difficult, but the unpredictables pummel, blindsiding you, catching you off guard at just the wrong time.

Taking your 13 yr old son to the Symphony—it’s not the Symphony, but rather the drop off at evening’s end, where the strangeness of it all punches you in the gut. You pull up to your house and your boy scrambles out of the van to run inside as you fight the same inclination, the automatic default habit of turning off the engine and walking inside to tuck him into bed like you’ve always done. Instead, the boy you pushed out of your own body is walking away from you and the air is catching in your throat and the drive home is fostering the need for tiny windshield wipers on your eyes.

Even the house--your own home--seems to mock you. Looking at the trim--that you begged him to help you paint--that you spent weekends painting alone for months, you are struck by the fact that it remains unfinished. Mimicry of your unfinished relationship. The house seems to stare back at you, looking into your soul. The windows clearly, wondering what-the-hell you are doing in backing up the van and driving off.  Even the burgundy Bougainvillea—that he would not let you have for so long—that he always resented because its flowers might drop into the pool—that you fought so hard to have—feels traitorous as it cloaks the house in beauty and continues to grow skyward, as if there could be something, anything, not entirely dead in the world in all of this loss.     

the Music of the Sirens

Sometimes their music calls me out of the ship. Hypnotized, I want to jump in the water and swim or change course and move toward that most compelling music of the Sirens. The ethereal songs of love of the past that would draw me back towards certain shipwreck, again onto the Island of Narcissism. The old friends enchant by believing the false music that I sang for so long. Somehow, they think that I cannot hear the beauty in the delusions. They think I don’t know this seductive music. They think I must be killing the music.

These people—attached to the carcass of who I became in order to survive. These people—attached to the carcass of the projected false image. These people—attached to the unreal me—the ghost shell of a girl I used to know well. These people do harm. I must pass this island that wields my own self as weapon back at me. It is as if I am fighting me—the mi who knows all my habits, my deep seated needs, my fears—the self I became in order to survive does not want to fold on this hand to the core me. My true neglected self must somehow regain strength. I remind myself that embers can smolder a long time away from the fire. My true self, like a smoldering ember must hold onto its cold, almost snuffed self. Waiting. For itself, like a soul friend waits for another half to recognize its other half. Thus, I paradoxically journey and wait the long way back to self, a pilgrim, a voyager, a friend paused on the way—moving and waiting for the me I am at my core—for the me that almost was no more.

No, I cannot explain how one journeys and waits, at the same time, I just know it to be true, somehow. I know I am quite used to an external locus of control, so says one of my therapists. Perhaps that is where the waiting and journeying occur. I am journeying by waiting to round the corner on the island of the Sirens and be out of earshot where I am no longer at risk of being dashed against the rocks. 

I must complete this odyssey. Therefore, on this passage, I have strapped myself to the mast and hope everybody on deck has waxed their ears to ignore the wailing of the Sirens.

I worry when the therapeutic mast gets a little shaky and sways in the wind. Is the mast sturdy enough? I worry when the mast doesn’t seem to take the strapping to—seriously enough. I worry when the mast gets a little pissy because I have emailed too much in a week. 

But the point is to escape the narcissist and his Sirens--to break from it all. I think that means I have to sail past alone, as they beckon me back to the traumatic familiar. I know I might die if I go back to the island. And I might die on this voyage, as well. But, nonetheless, somehow, I must find the courage to fight the haunting voices of the old me the Sirens sing of and journey on without that music. I must go it alone without accompaniment in order to find the new me. I must find the rhythm of my own haunting song and let it call me back to myself, for it will not dash me on the rocks.

  

Feast on Your Life

Most days, I forget to eat.

Not that I have some sort of underlying, anorexic aspirations of being a waifish, Kate-Moss type. No rather, food has just fallen off the To-Do list, beat out by all the other overwhelming tasks.

Until, I look in the mirror and wonder why the woman looks gaunt and skeletal. And the clothes hang strangely and I am reminded that I have no money to buy clothes and my pants are once again falling off. I used to be pleasantly plump—a little extra padding around my organs.

Now I wonder at the stranger staring out at me from that world behind the mirror. Who is she? Will she survive this? How do I nourish her?  And the lovely words of Derek Walcott float out…

Love after Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door,

in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

Give wine. Give bread.

Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

The Ultimate Oh-So-Average Divorce

The perpetual temptation is always to give up—to stop fighting—to lie down in the middle of the trail and succumb to the pestering flies and vultures; since the straps would stop cutting into your shoulders then—to allow the funnel cloud to rip you back into the emotional and psychological vortex. Because disentangling yourself from the narcissist takes absolutely everything in you and then some more. You have to seemingly dig down to the earth's core and hope that you can withstand the Dementor shop VAC sucking your soul back up through a pipeline he has fashioned out of Kryptonite.

   

The almighty, oh-so-powerful delusions you helped create—so that he could pretend to love himself--repeatedly slam against you like gale force winds that tumble you around, crumpling your iron will like the child’s toy bendie man. Escaping Medusa’s snake hair seems like it might just be easier.

Redundantly, you are hypnotized like a firefly back toward the bug zapper's flickering light of a thought—maybe I got it wrong? Maybe, I overstated things? Maybe, he’s not as bad as this? How could he actually be this awful and unreasonable?

It fucks with your head. Zapping you to the ground. Terrible Lie.

You find yourself fantasizing about the ultimate-oh-so-everyday-average-normal divorce as if it is some sort of delicious Boston Creme Donut—cause right about now—average seems like child's play.

How the hell did this become your life? Well, you hooked up with a narcissist long ago.