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.   

Healing Decisions

This week I quarantined a decision I had to make--separated off from it--put it in isolation far from any bit of residual, entangled, bitterness or anger--not because I needed to in order to survive as I have needed to in the past, but because I wanted to for the sake of the real authentic me that I am aiming to become more and more. I quarantined said decision in order to isolate the amazing healer part of me that does beautiful compassionate things in the world. That healer needed to be in isolation from the damaged, sad, sometimes spiteful parts of me that are still learning how to be in the world again, post narcopalypse. It was the right thing to do.

All the same it was a mighty struggle to do the right thing that healer part instinctively could do without even thinking or batting an eye.

I'm certain all the therapists and narc abuse recovery experts would likely tell me to draw a boundary line in the sand. They'd encourage me to hold my ground, to not give valuable information to the narc. I'm sure some might deem my actions a fawn response of cPTSD variety in some manner and therefore a trapped-in-trauma-and-thus-unhealed or "stuck" response.

But that was not the space from whence the decision originated. The decision was born of the rich ground near the heart of healing--the soul space. A sacred, powerful space, it flows as the source from whence any healing runs--something that gets tapped or touched upon when real healing shit happens. Compassion, unfettered kindness, empathy, and mercy linger there. It's not a space controlled by said healer, its more a space visited by healer types, entrusted to healers to protect or to act as guides to. It's not a space anyone ought fuck with, generally speaking, as I'm not sure the kharmic righting of such would be good for the fucker. Almost like if you curse that soul space the curse ricochets back upon you.

And so I made a decision to mercifully give helpful, information to my ex. The as of yet still wounded parts of me wanted to hold back said information, clenched in spite.

But this time I chose to authentically give--not out of some sort of fawn response, not out of obligation, not out of guilt, not out of fear--I chose to give because I am a healer and that is who I am. And that is the most powerful, authentic source of everything good in me and who I want to become more fully, and so I walk further towards my own becoming. And that choice is oddly enough, furthering my own healing.