Leaving

Somehow my postage stamp sized flat feels empty after the Littles that are no longer littles leave and go back to my ex. The air weighs more. My abdomen becomes a den of squirming baby snakes. I want to climb out of my skin and float away. Instead there are things to do.

Lately life seems to be a freshly skinny dipped body ripe for swarming sand flies.

Things I Remind Myself of When I Start to Waver

One. I swallowed the Red pill. This hell of being awake is still better than the hell of being in the delusional narc matrix.

Two. Even if I'm alone the rest of my damn life, true aloneness is still better than false togetherness which is really just hidden aloneness.

Three. The hidden, narcopalypses that will emerge along the path like trip wires and bouncing betties, start to form patterns. Take for example this Christmas. Predictably, when I have my kids and am engaged in being present to them, my ex will do something to sabotage the time. This is absolutely predictable. There will be a letter or email or phone call or text designed to wound me in some way. Since I've gone "minimal contact" it will be embedded in a communication that has the guise of being kid related. I therefore already have a plan. No opening of anything, no matter how "urgent" until my time with my kids is over.

Four. Focus on the progress. The rattling and emotional abuse used to throw me off for months at a time. Lost in the fog, I couldn't find my path or my way. Now, I'm thrown off for a few hours or a day and then back on track. Decreasing your being rattled time is progress.

Five. I swallowed the Red pill. I chose the Red pill. While it would be much more difficult to choose the Red pill if prior to swallowing I had the horrific knowledge from these past four years of this hellish Odyssey, even still, I would choose again to wake up and get the fuck out.

A Blessing for those Entrapped in Narcissistic Abuse

May you move with an ease that defies the web you find yourself in,
As you awaken in someone else's life and find your sticky spider feet again.

May the light of healing always find you,
As you trudge forward through the dark night of the soul.

May the love of the Ancestors, the history of the beautiful smatterings of humanity surround you and encompass you as you walk through another planet that utterly confuses you.

May the goodness of the Universe infuse your soul, binding it to all things compassionate, all things empathic, all things good, such that you taste kindness in the air around you.

May you sweat this same loving kindness that the Divine breathes on you always
such that you do not feel the flames of the hatred from one whom has no place for love.

Above all, may you find your way out of the deep, dark pain purported by an absent soulless being that has given itself up to the destruction embedded in the lie.

On Imagination

An awakened imagination enables you to inherit the riches of yourself--heart and soul. It enables you to find some of the outlines of the shape of your destiny. And it certainly is the only force of the heart that will enable you to carve from the dark slabs of fate some beautiful sculptures of possibility and healing and reconciliation.

--John O'Donohue

Dear Woman I Never Knew

I don't know what to say to you except perhaps well, you got out. Sure you had to die to do so, but on some level I have come to see your passing as a kind of mercy, a severe one, but a mercy nonetheless. I've supposedly gotten out but alas it doesn't end. Your son, the one I was tethered to all those years, well it just doesn't matter that I moved away to escape, he continues to entangle me. And this, this is the sticking point. I've certainly thought about death, more as a means to escape than anything else. I don't necessarily want to die, its just I'm so tired of the endlessness of the emotional and psychological abuse. Hope as it turns out seems to be a terrible thing. For in spite of all the terrible things he has done to me over and over again, my brain stubbornly refuses to comprehend that someone like him can exist entirely without any compassion or empathy. He grows worse by the day. And in spite of me losing almost everything, he wants to suck more life out of me like a dementor. Why? He has already won a million fold over and over. He now has my children full time. Even still he wants to take more. He bullies. He stabs. He wishes me harm. All that to say, your murderer (your ex) whom fathered this thing that I was tethered to for so long, in so fathering spawned another alien just as his father spawned him. I wish I could say that your tragic death changed him--that he was able to rise above it and break the cycle of narcissist creating more narcissicism. But, I have no such news to write you. I fear for my children. I am hoping and praying that in spite of my not being able to be in proximity to them that they will somehow see through all these narcissistic enchantments and mirrors. I am hoping that I have somehow burdened them with overpowering tools that help them separate wheat from chaff, truth from lie. I pray that the narcissistic propaganda does not penetrate their spirits and souls. I pray that they hold onto compassion, empathy, hope, and kindness toward humanity and that they begin to recognize that there are things in proximity to them that are more alien than human. I'm so sorry that I failed you. When I first met him, I only wanted our relationship to be a source of healing from all of this shit for him. It still grieves me that he ultimately chose this path. They say that the narcissist cannot ever recover. But, alas I am cursed with microscopic hope that somehow this new mother figure in his life will somehow trigger healing in spite of the damning odds. And regardless of what happens with your son, I am hoping that the pattern ends with him. 

Evil Thus I Know

Evil is the other genetic half of your lights in the world as you fight to keep their light--your babies that you pushed out of your body many years hence. Perhaps, because that other part that is mere shell doesn't understand how a mother loves, no matter what. That other part didn't have her--a mother long enough to attach, so He only gets the detachment part. Oh, what a loss.

Evil is the always lying, to keep delusions intact such that one is not causing, nor ever will cause massive pain to one's own offspring and to other peoples on the planet. Perhaps, because everyone is just a pawn on a chessboard.

Evil is a conversation on the phone designed to sabotage sanity in your ex. Where one only cares about destruction and chaos. Where one doesn't care about outcome, other than that it thwart things and people and healing. One that only cares about inducing harm.

Evil is the opposite of the first principle of medicine. First do no Harm. Evil is first and foremost, only care about destroying, causing pain, wielding a sword, even if it causes terrible things to happen to the people you think you might care about. Cause evil trumps people you care about any day.

Evil is stepping into living without meaning and kindness and healing of any sort.

Evil is knowing only the dark side of the moon. Evil is inducing in others, in people who loved you, in those who would have done anything for you the wish that somehow, you'd never, ever met. Evil is in the lie, thus I know.

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