Narcissistic Abuse in a Nutshell Take 2

Anonymous is

one day waking up and finding yourself

missing

from your own life.

Replaced

by an alien you helped create.

Invisible

you slip toward absence.

Narcissistic Abuse in a Nutshell

The sense of being missing

gone, invisible

from your own life

permeates your being when the Alien takes over,

in time, transforming

anonymity into pure absence.

The Story

One of my favorite books is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. An apparent, loosely related collection of short stories, with one repeated over and over where Tim kills the punchline and tells you the ending of the story over and over, as the reader, you almost reach the maddenly, irate point at the redundancy. You feel like you've got it already, as if Tim is deliberately insulting your intelligence as a reader. That arrogant writer, who clearly thinks I'm not paying attention to the Curt Lemming story?  Enough, already....

And then it eventually hits you, that you've never felt the story. And this matters to the story. In fact, this means that you've never really heard the story in spite of his telling it over and over. Somehow, you didn't quite get it that Tim held back the pieces that matter. Until, you've really heard the story--which incidentally, is the uncircumcised poignancy of the story intact. And that's when you finally feel it all most acutely.

Today, in this new land of towers. I told the first layer of the story I've been hearing and telling to those that want to hear for nigh on 20 years. The backstory, really--of how my ex came to be evil. The story that birthed my ex on the path to narcissism. How the darkness of death and grief at the ripe old age of two started the cascade and transformation to being a pathological lying sort of person that feels no empathy, in spite of anything.   

As I told it, it struck me in quite a different way, a rather new way, more than it has in the past. My experience of different people listening to the story shaped my sense of the story, itself. Telling it was such a different experience. It was an entirely different story. For the first time, I felt a large distance from the story. And this--this little bit of distance was good.

For the first time, I didn't feel entirely entangled up in the web of compassion and empathy for my ex narcissist. While I was in touch with the traumatic circumstances of his childhood, I could see the steps he has deliberately taken; whereby he decided to sever himself from compassion, cause it might get in the way of getting your way if you're a narcissist.

And I saw anew the power of the story. The power of telling it over and over again. The power of retelling it in a different way, to a different crowd. I saw anew the story itself transformed by the telling of it. And somehow the sense that, just like Tim O'Brien, I've never really told the story in such a way that the emotion gets understood by the listener. And that is the story that most needs to be told.

This is Complicated Grieving

Complication number one. He's not dead. There is no body in the ground with a stone above it. No way for outsiders to recognize that he is as good as dead. The soul went and flew itself away up to heaven or hell or where-ever souls abandon themselves to when those who own them do not take them seriously.

Complication number two. He's not even aware he is dead. Due to complication number one, perhaps because he's not physically dead. But he is very much dead on most every other level. Kind of like the walking dead. Kind of like a Bruce Willis character in the Sixth Sense. Going through the motions of living, but not really there. Hanging around. Haunting the living. Pretending.

Complication number three. His tentacles entangle little people you love--people who aren't dead. Little people who are very much trying to learn how best to live life deeply and passionately from someone who is mostly dead. And right now they have only this example of a dead man walking, ever pretending to be one of the living. And due to complication number two, the lack of awareness factor, they have to live a life amongst the dead.

So there you have it. The complicated parts. Kind of like an open wound of an unsolved murder case where they never found a body. You know you ought get on with your life except that you lack the closure you think you'd gain with the finding of a body. The closure you think you'd gain is just beyond the reach of the grave you don't have. Oh, and there's that ex zombie walking around causing trauma. And maybe this is why you sometimes wish for the closure his death would bring. This is complicated grieving.

Someone Else's Life

Most days it feels as though I've woken up in someone else's life. I don't recognize my surroundings or the people I interact with. Everything and everyone is new.

The constancy of being a mother, a parent is gone, far off in the distance. I suppose this must be something like what happens when your kids leave the nest, except I am the one who has left what was left of "the nest." What family I have is a long way off.

My former colleague and friend is no one I recognize. She's not the person I thought she was.

I don't suppose I've ever felt more alone.

But, even still, I am here. Me, myself, and I. I keep on reframing this as my golden opportunity to return to being the me that I neglected when I was swept up into the narcissistic vortex of my ex. His all demanding world meant that there was no me, by default. I didn't really exist. I only mattered in so much as I was there to do what he wanted or demanded, it was never about me.

And maybe this is where I wake up in someone else's life. And that someone else's is my own. I suspect that my own life feels foreign precisely because I haven't been here so much. I haven't lived the life I'm meant to live. Somehow I must find the courage to get back to owning my own life and make my way through all this weirdness to the new day.

Gaslighting

True story. Late one night recently, a couple of glasses of red wine already imbibed, I saw on that all powerful FB feed that a band I've enjoyed since college is coming to town. Small venue situation, tickets in the realm of reasonable, conditions seemed almost perfect. Even my musical friend who enjoys these sorts of venues agreed to go with me. So I clicked on the link to make an in app ticket purchase, and the deal was done row G seats 32 and 33. Or so I thought. I texted musical friend and went to bed.

About a week later I realized I'd never seen the email confirmation. Hmmm. Why not? And this is the point where the gaslighting, the it's-everything-that's-ever-been-wrong-but-it's-all-she's-ever-known crept in. You see, when your memory is always questioned, second guessed, deemed unreliable at best, for the better part of 20 years, over time you develop a mistrust of your own memory. Because you were manipulated into mistrusting your own self. So that you could more easily be controlled.

Did I really order those tickets? Did I only think I ordered those tickets? Where was the email confirmation? I did have a couple of glasses of wine that night... These are all things my ex would have suggested or hinted at...

My own mind conditioned as it has been by the Narc ex in the abuse for all those years started doing what he would do.

But she cuts herself on you every night.

As in, You know that never happened? You know your memory is unreliable. You didn't really order those tickets. You only imagined it. You wanted to go so badly that you emotionally got attached to the idea of going and you thought you ordered those tickets. But we know, you're not quite right in the head. It's understandable, really, you're under a lot of stress these days.

And on and on my brain stewed and swirled. And then the anxiety crept in and started growing into a mountain. My body tensed up, the adrenaline raced through my arms, the thoughts took flight, the overwhelm, the cyclic edge and the feeling of being lost in the drowning ocean of cPTSD swirled....

But, I've been doing a lot of work in healing. And eventually something snapped. And I went, wait. Do you see what you're doing? You're fucking gaslighting yourself!!! You're perpetuating his shit again! You're scared and anxious and losing your head, not because you're going crazy but rather because the PTSD got triggered and this experience took you back to the Matrix. There is another explanation for this rather than faulty memory. Take a deep breath. Figure it out. 

It was only then that it occurred to me to check my bank statement. And I've never been happier to see money charged to my account! Hallelujah! That charge felt like a bona-fida certificate from the school of Narc Abuse Recovery. I grinned. I'm not crazy!!! I did order those tickets! And then it occurred to me that the email tied to my FB is a rather old email address that I never check. And the confirmation was probably emailed to that address--the app having been a FB app. I accessed the email and found further confirmation that I need to keep restoring self trust!

And this felt like progress. This felt like I can do this thing called recovery. And I don't have to be perfect at it. There will be hiccups. There will be bumps in the road where I wander off the path and get a little lost. But the further I walk down the healing path, the more certain I am that I will find my way in recovery and continue in realizing that He's just a blade too dull to raise.

And in some sort of twisted irony, the band in question, Over the Rhine, has one of the most apt lyrical descriptions in song format of narcissistic abuse and the struggle to recover and get oneself out of it....

She

What she would like to do
Is get you out of her head
She's tried every trick
She's so sick of thinking about it

What's so special about you
You're an ache she's learned to crave
You're a blade too dull to raise

But she cuts herself
On you every night
She's just dying
To lay down the knife

What she would love to do
Is get you out of her bed
She's played it over and over and over
In her head

But she cuts herself
On you every night
She's just dying
To lay down the knife

She clings to what's familiar
She thinks a change would kill her

What she ought to do
Is put a gun to your head
For all the things you said and did

But what she will not do
Is let you go before you're gone
It's everything that's ever been wrong
But it's all she's ever known

So she cuts herself on you every night
She's just dying to lay down her life.
What she would like to do

Is get you out of her head....

-Over the Rhine

Why Not, Beautiful?

Why couldn't he have just said, some of the time, you are beautiful.

I hear this from strangers on dating apps.

Some of the time, they might have agendas. To get into my pants, etc. But why? Why couldn't my lover, my ex, my husband have told me that he thought me beautiful? How do you never say that to someone you are married to for something like 17 yrs. I work through this shit, daily, perhaps. It's not that I want to be special, or extraordinary or model-esque or some kind of wonderful. I just want to be and feel some kind of normal. I want to feel like there is this one guy out there that thinks me to be great. Beautiful even.

I never got that from my narc. No. Rather, I was tolerable, at best.

Sometimes, he wasn't embarrassed to be with me. Like the time he told me to start using flash cards to memorize GRE words so that I might not sound so low brow, so midwestern, so uneducated at the Philosophy Grad Student gatherings. Sometimes, I didn't sound quite so dumb, to him.

I mean I was never enough. But sometimes, I was not quite as bad. Sometimes he didn't interrupt me or talk over me to tell my story to the philosophy wives standing in a circle around the mustard potato salad.

God forbid I open my mouth at a philosophy picnic and talk to the chair of the Department! Shut up.

I was always less than. Not enough of anything. One that ought be interrupted so as to minimize the damage of what the hell she uneducatedly said.

Never quite right. Just try harder. Be smarter, you dumb ass.

Speak to the philosophy wives about black bean dips. But never ever open your mouth to engage my professors. You are and will always be beneath me and them. You will never be....

But why not, beautiful, just the way I am? Without flash cards or GRE or words or scripts memorized? Maybe for a split second, I am enough. I don't know. Please. Thank you. Perhaps. In the future? Someday? Never?

Fly me Away to the Moon

Everyone in post-narcalypse-therapy-world says you have to go No Contact or Minimal Contact if you ever want to heal from narcissistic abuse. I've been chewing the fat on this truth for three plus years now. With my going back and forth between my two locales I've watched myself lose ground, lose energy, lose momentum in my recovery. Reentry into the narcissistic orbit has seemed more difficult each time I do it, which has been about every other week for the past year and a half.

My own body bears the scars. Organs slip and displace themselves. They tell the story of what is really happening. The carrying is heavy. Perhaps, too much.

You can't keep this up.  It is too much. You must listen to us or we shall scream louder, telling you things you don't want to hear. 

And so, I've had to do the most difficult thing I've ever done (other than leave my narcissist). I've had to move away from my kids. The people I pushed out of my own body. I've had to hug them and tell them they'll be ok, even when I wish I could protect them. I never thought it would come to this. 

I never thought I would have to do this. While things have changed in the past few years and slowly I've pulled myself out of the massive spider web, bit by bit. And I'm back to being more me now than I've been in perhaps eons, I never thought that this would be the path. That this would be the end. I mean who goes, "I'll take the Narc Abuse for like 17 years, Alex, then abandon my own children for $200." But, I tell you dear reader, that there is no other way. The Raven says there is always another way. So let me rephrase that. There is no other way that I can see at this point without some sort of XRAY superwoman vision.

The financial abuse has strangled, controlling so much. Now, my hand is forced. I have to be where I can grow in order to get myself further out of the narc orbit and heal. So that I'm not a shadow of the girl I used to be when I'm with my little--now big people.

And so I've sprung. Done that thing that intensifies parental guilt and pain and shame. I've moved away. My narc says so many things. Of course, he'll spin this in a particular way to them. He'll do everything to brainwash them as he did me. And I can only hope that I've laid down enough of a foundation to help them see through all the funhouse smoke and mirrors trick show he inflicts on all around him.

Pain has a way of teaching us the lessons we don't want to see or learn. It certainly did for me. They are bright, brilliant kids even. And in these past few months, I've spoken more openly with them about some of the painful topics they are only now old enough to get.

And so I must do this, step back into myself and into whom I'm meant to be, for them. So that I can be the parent they need me to be, even if from afar. So fly me to the moon, please now.  

On Grieving the What Mights

Sometimes the most tragic piece punches me unexpectedly in the gut. You'd think after all the abuse, all the hell in trying to escape the narcissist that in escape there would be only relief. But there is a hidden sadness that can sneak up behind you. You mistakenly think, if I can just get the hell out... If I can just survive and move on.... Why then I'll be fine.

And then there you go imagining like you've always done. Thinking of what might have been, if he'd only been able to choose something different. Just when you think you're finished with all the drama, all the death, all the grief and endings of dead relationships. There is a little spot that gets in.

Call it the what-might-have-been grief.

After you've invested so many years trying to love someone who for all intensive purposes can not ever love you back, you've come to intimately know the good friend of what-might-be. For many years, what-might-be has been one of your steadiest companions. What-might-be has been your hope, your citadel. And then what-might-be flies away into the air, evaporated just like everything else.

And this can be completely ungrounding. Cause who thinks of grieving the loss of the shared dreams, the future, the hopes of the growth, the butterfly transformation. But, you've lost so much. Why not this, too? After all, the snake goes on as perpetual death and life cycle.

Untitled

I moved my life around for you. I trusted you and your dreams. I let my guard down.

And you went off and let someone advise you that doesn't know much at all. Someone who has no idea about all the players. You listened to someone you've known for a solid month. Someone who only knows how to flatter you and your ego. Someone who knows how to manipulate you into sending more money than you can pay him, so that he can advise you on how to cut off the relationships that were meant to be the Divine in your life.

So go ahead. I dare you.

I'm sorry if the Divine in me bites you in the ass.

On Mattering post Narcissist

Maybe one of the real reasons I was able--am able to be escaping the narcissist in the first place was because my work compelled me to do so. You see, if your work is intense enough, obvious enough, especially on the helping people front, it will teach you things, in spite of what the narcissist says. 

And when your work gives you a reason to believe otherwise, or directly contradicts what the narcissist says, you have some thread to hold on to. Mostly, he told me shit like that I was terrible at what I do. Mostly, he was quite critical of my every flaw, even my skill that clearly wasn't on par with his. Mostly, he was the one pulling--dragging us along. Mostly, his work mattered, not mine. But, the facts are that when it comes down to what I do--helping people, well most days, I think it does matter. 

Some days, I can point to real people who might not be around, but for my work. There are folks that might have taken their own lives. On those particular days, I think it does matter, this thing that I do.

But, anyhow. I'm definitely not perfect.

All I can say is some days I do help people. I can't say it's an easy thing, talking someone out of suicide who is dead set on it. (Really, no pun intended). That space opens up and you feel swallowed up. so inept, so small. The emptiness hits you. A human being is waiting alone in the dark for somebody--anybody--to contradict the screaming worthlessness in their own head. And mostly you don't really know if you have the right words. Maybe, you don't have any words.

Please don't kill yourself. Please don't take your own life. Please give it more time.

That's all you have. And it feels so ridiculously inept. After all the specialists, all the people who tried but somehow couldn't reach them, and you might be the last stop?

And there you are trying not to hear the narcissist screaming about all your flaws and shortcomings cause honestly, that might get in the way of helping. You can't go into helping someone in a really dark space with your own demons.

And the psychic space where someone wants help often has its own set of demons. Sometimes that person throws out attempts to sabotage any and all help--sometimes they legitimately want to alienate, to abuse, in order to get someone to give up on them. That is most difficult. It is most heavy. And that is the space inhabited, in this kind of work, a lot of the time.

It is saturated with the great weight of a storm cloud.

And you have to do best to talk them back from the ledge. You have to remind them that they do matter. Sometimes, it sneaks up on you that you are there reminding yourself as well as the other person..The world needs you. There is no one else like you. This is what it means to be human, after all. Unique individuals trying to contribute to the good of the planet.

You say it to yourself as much as to the person in front of you:

Please don't kill yourself.

They don't know you're saying it outloud for both of you. It's not supposed to be about you.

But, sometimes it happens to fall on a day where the narcissistic brainwashing lingers loudly in your head. You try to force feed the good stuff into your own brain as much as into the brain of the person sitting in front of you.

And sometimes the act of doing that helps. The action reminds that what the Narc said about you wasn't true. Your work does matter. At least, sometimes. For the other. For you. For us all, as human beings. Which is something the narcissist really can't understand and never will.

And sometimes you just have to go on clinging to the fact that your work, imperfect though it be, is beneficial. And it helps others and yourself with the narcissistic deprogramming.

A Morning Offering by John O'Donohue

I bless the night that nourished my heart

To set the ghosts of longing free

into the flow and figure of dream

That went to harvest from the dark

Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me

Welcomes the wonder of this day,

The field of brightness it creates

Offering time for each thing

To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:

The quiet loyalty of breath,

The tent of thought where I shelter,

Waves of desire I am shore to

And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today

To the invisible geography

That invites me to new frontiers,

To break the dead shell of yesterdays,

To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today

To live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more. 

--John O'Donohue