Do it for your kids

My mom (RIP) and I shared in common that we were both victims of narcissist abuse from our husbands, but our stories unfolded very differently.

While my ex-husband was more a “neglector” than a “dictator,” my dad’s specialty was being the king of his castle. His word was law. My mom was not a wimp in many ways–she was a career woman in the 50’s, for one thing–but she learned early that the penalty for bucking Dad’s system was almost always too high to pay. She herself said to me it was easier to go along with his demands than fight, and that was how she got by.

childThere was one glaring exception to this approach throughout my mom’s life. When I gave birth to her first of two grandchildren while living in another state, she wanted to come and stay with me for a few days to give me a hand. My dad told her in no uncertain terms that he forbade her to do this. I don’t even know if he gave a reason, but I suppose he didn’t want to have to fend for himself or something.

Knowing my mom, I’m sure she really wanted desperately to see her new grandchild (funny how my dad expressed no interest in this). But more than that, she didn’t like the thought of me (only 23 years old), far from home with my already noticeably unhelpful husband, dealing with a new baby on my own. So she did something amazing–she defied my dad.

I can imagine how hard this was. I can imagine the price she paid. I know because the one time in my life I defied my dad, by taking away his car after his third accident in two years, he totally discarded me as his daughter.

Why did my mom pick that one single occasion to go rogue? She did it for me.

I think now if I had ever realized while Mom was alive what a monster my dad was, and made my choice then to go no contact, that might well have been the impetus to get her to do the same. If it came down to losing me, that might have motivated her finally to get free. She could deal with her own suffering most of the time (as could I with my own narc husband), but I was the one person whose suffering sometimes she couldn’t bear to see.

Don’t get me wrong: there were times when she coped with Dad’s acts by teaming up with him against me. Sometimes Stockholm Syndrome does that to a person–I get it and I forgive her. Sometimes submitting to evil makes you a bit of a monster too.

That’s why I say, to those of you hesitating to leave your narc spouse because of your shared children…

DO IT FOR YOUR CHILDREN.

Your children need you to have the courage, to stand up and fight. Don’t think about “saving your marriage,” think about saving your children. If you can’t find the will to save yourself, find the will to save them.

All my adult life I have treasured that one act of bravery my mom performed, out of devotion to me. If she had loved herself as much as she did me, she wouldn’t have lived out her 78 years with an abusive husband.

Love your kids…love yourself…get away from your abuser.

What will help me to restore the person I was before my narcissist got me?

As we discussed in the last post, victims of narcissists typically find themselves stuck in the state of mind their narcs have fashioned for them. Most suffer from poor self-esteem and a sense that they are unlovable. Most are afraid to rock the boat and risk the consequences of fighting back. Those who do undertake to separate themselves feel guilty, or like failures, or inexplicably like they won’t be happy until they are back with their narcissist. Even if they are free physically, many still obsess on what their narc is doing without them, or ways they could have saved their narc, or whether they will ever be able to recover from the post traumatic stress they are suffering.

Needless to say, all this can feel like too much to bear.

In any situation of conflict with another person, you have no control over what they do and feel, only what you do and feel. But in cases of the torment that plagues victims of narcissists, the sad and scary part is that they can feel like they have no control over what they themselves do and feel! It may seem like there is no good answer for this, at least in the short run.

But I do have one suggestion, which I base upon many scientific studies as well as personal experience. I recommend meditation. I understand the reaction that meditation is some New Age-y hocus pocus only for Buddhists and flower children, but before you reject it out of hand, consider these results of scientific studies:

 

  • 10 minutes a day of simple meditation, even by a novice, reduces stress and anxiety
  • This amount of meditation can repair damage to the nervous system caused by stress
  • Meditation increases brain activity that demonstrates positive thoughts and emotions, and reduces brain activity that demonstrates negativity
  • Meditation can lower blood pressure and boost the immune system
  • It boosts the brain’s abilities to regulate emotions and increases focus

This is a very short list of ways science has shown that meditation helps. I can’t think of anyone more in need of this kind of help than we victims of narcissists!

Please know that meditation is not, at least not necessarily, a religious activity, and no particular viewpoint of God or the soul is required. It works for atheists, born-again Christians, and yes, Buddhists alike.

Meditation comes in many varieties and styles but the essentials make for a very short list:

  1. In a quiet, private place, sit comfortably with your eyes closed.
  2. Breathe deeply and a bit slowly, and relax.
  3. Start focusing on your breath, on the feeling of it as it happens. Or, instead focus on a mantra (a word or short group of words). Or, listen to the directions of a guided meditation.
  4. Think only about what you are focusing on: the breath or your mantra. Clear your mind of everything else.
  5. If your mind drifts to physical sensations, feelings, or thoughts (and it will!), don’t worry or judge, just once again gently return to your focus.
  6. Continue to do this for the time you have chosen. Then open your eyes, stretch, let yourself come back to the world surrounding you.

That’s all there is to it, really. Ten minutes a day will make a difference, a real difference. It doesn’t seem logical…you’d like there would be some sort of trying, some work involved on your part, but there isn’t. Your mind does the repair work for you, all you need to do is the list above.

There are countless great sources online for more about the process, experience, and results of meditating, as well as many wonderful guided meditations (recordings you listen to). For a really simple, easy, great guided meditation to start, I recommend Tara Brach’s “Gateway to Presence” which you can find on this page. Deepak Chopra’s works are also wonderful in my opinion.

Victims of narcissists need to fight on many fronts to restore their lives to happiness: psychological, practical, emotional, legal, and social. This is just another tool in our arsenal to support and strengthen all our other efforts. In my own life, meditation and mindfulness (focusing on the here and now) made all the difference in my freeing myself of guilt, fear and anxiety when I broke with my narcissist father. I encourage you to try just a week, ten minutes a day, to see if it makes a difference for you.

Even after breaking from a narcissist, we find that in so many ways he continues to abuse us through our own minds. Getting him out of your head is harder than any other part of the fight. Meditation might be the weapon you need to start to make progress with that. I truly hope it helps!

Why am I still in love with my narcissist?

There is no question in your mind that your narcissist spouse/partner/lover is ruining your life. He’s manipulative, cruel, abusive, controlling, horrible in every way. You are miserable with him. Perhaps you’ve even left him, broken up with him already.

But you still love him.

You dream of being back together. You fantasize that he will beg you to come back. You think about him all day. You just want him to love you.

It’s quite likely that you also feel like the world’s biggest fool, that you are still holding a candle for someone who has done nothing but hurt you. You alternate between pining for him and beating yourself up for being an idiot. Your emotions don’t make sense but you can’t make them stop. You wonder if you’ve lost your mind.

Well, you aren’t crazy, you aren’t stupid, you aren’t a fool. You’re simply being the exact person your narcissist has spent months and years molding you into. This situation is less about you and any shortcomings in your personality or sanity, and more about the amazing talent your narc has for molding and shaping other humans into what he wants them to be.

Over the course of your relationship, the narc has subtly, craftily convinced you that he is the true judge of what makes a woman desirable. If you can make him love and want you, then and only then will you have proven your worth as a human being. Meanwhile, he has rewired your brain into abject devotion to meeting his needs. Maybe he used the approach of making you want to be the only one who truly understands him, or the only one who will put up with him, or the only one who can make him happy. So now without that purpose to your life, you feel meaningless. Or maybe he used a more negative approach, punishing you with ridicule, anger, or criticism whenever you failed to devote yourself to him and let him have his way. So now you’re terrified that you’ve rebelled in heart or in action, and wish you could escape that fear by being obedient again.

Whatever the technique the narcissist has used on you, the result was some form of this: he trained you to stay in the relationship. So now, of course, you find yourself wanting to stay in the relationship. You think it gives you purpose, proves your self-worth, keeps you safe from retribution. Loving him, even though there are so many reasons to hate him, is safer and easier and can in fact seem like the only solution.

This is exactly how the psychological condition called “Stockholm Syndrome” works. Wikipedia explains the syndrome thus:

Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with them.

There are logical reasons for why victims of abuse experience these feelings that seem on their face to be so illogical. As Wikipedia states, “Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be perceived as a threat.” In other words, you coped with the narc’s abuse by perceiving it as a kind of affection. If he was cruel to you, it was because you mattered enough to him that he chose to give you that intense attention. No matter that the “attention” was negative and abusive–in order to bear up, your mind found ways to look at it as acceptable, deserved, positive.

The result of this is that your brain has been trained so that you no longer have normal means of protecting yourself. If another woman who hadn’t been abused by a narc was dropped into your place, she would dump your narcissist within a day of experiencing how he treats you. Family and friends may have been telling you for a long time to leave him because they look at his behavior clearly. But your psyche is your narc’s life’s work…he put his whole effort into making you into a creature that takes what he dishes out and is happy to come back for more.

So you do still feel love for him. But you shouldn’t. That love is not coming from your heart but from your programmed brain. The only way to get yourself free is to break through the fear, anxiety, and shame and look what has happened to you right in the face. Strip the mask off your narc and let yourself feel genuine emotion over what’s been done to you. That can be very scary, but after you’ve processed that real emotion, trust me, you’ll come out a whole person on the other side. Figure out his games, unravel the lies. Do not have any contact with him, including cyberstalking and following him on social media. If he tries to get you back, DON’T DO IT. And recover your self-worth not by caving and going back to a hellish existence with him, but by seeing clearly the great person you are and all you have to offer the world.

Lean on anyone in your life who understands, supports you, believes in you, and thinks you are a good person. Have patience with how hard it can be for others to understand what narcissistic victims go through, and look for the well-meaning behind their actions. Do things you enjoy–revive old hobbies, find the things that used to engage you before life became all about him. Choose to do what’s right for YOU…this is the time for that.

There is one other thing that I personally believe can make a huge difference to narc victims who are trapped in feelings of love and stuck in their efforts to change. I will talk all about that in the next post.

Are there any exercises that would help me make sense of the confusion my narcissist causes me?

Any victim of a narcissist has experienced lots of confusion. First, there’s the fact that as a normal person you cannot fathom the way the narcissist’s mind works, so you’re frequently surprised or even shocked by his behavior. Second, there’s the fact that in order to stay in control, narcs often lie and do all they can to convince their victims to believe in the alternate, fictitious reality that suits their purposes. Third, the narcissist loves confusing you just for its own sake–it’s a rush to see your head spin, your conviction crumble, and your emotions go into turmoil.

You can fight your way out of this confusion, but it will take effort and time. I’d like to give you a few suggestions to encourage this process.

Hold Court

In my case, the first exercise I found really helpful was to do all I could to prove to myself my father and ex-husband truly had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I literally copied off the web several lists of traits of narcissists and wrote specific examples from my experience that showed these guys had NPD. Whenever I felt guilt, shame, fear, or loss of resolve, I reread the “rap sheet” to remind myself through concrete example that I had been the victim of messed-up people who had wanted nothing except to use me.

I found the lists on this website particularly helpful in my case. Search the internet for lists that hit home to you and your particular situation. Do as I did (I do recommend actually writing it down for later reference) and hold a little trial for your narcissist, making the case to yourself and proving a conviction. Every time you feel yourself schwaffling, reread your trial transcript. Add more examples if it helps you. And remember, just because you can think of times when the narc seemed to care or did something nice doesn’t get him off the hook. Any criminal “does things right” when it serves his purpose. But innocent people don’t make a lifestyle out of cruel behavior like your narc did/does.

Let Your Feelings Out

 

Victims of narcissists spend their lives appeasing the one they serve. More often than not, that includes stifling the normal human response to abuse. A classic example from my life is when my then-husband confessed an affair he’d been having just as it was falling apart. He was in despair over losing this love interest and actually told me about it just so he could get sympathy and understanding. Believe it or not (maybe you do!), I buried my feelings of betrayal and despair and devoted myself to listening to his sob story and comforting him! Classic Stockholm Syndrome at work there.

I have no doubt that you can look back on your relationship with your narc and find plenty of occasions when your needs and feelings went unnoticed and it was all about the narcissist. You may well have not even taken particular notice that this was happening. Well, it’s time to look back on those times and let yourself feel and express what you should have been able to experience then. It’s time to let it be about YOU. Imagine or write down how you would have reacted had you not been in thrall to the narc. The more you do this, the clearly it will become to you what a warped, unfair, lopsided relationship you had, and how much you suffered at the hands of your narcissist. It won’t be long before you start losing the feelings of guilt and fear that plague you now. Reality will have its way!

Mindfulness

If you’re like me, your narcissist’s-victim-training included indoctrination into a world of fear. Now that you are daring to consider rebelling against the will of your narc, naturally your emotional response is terror, panic and terrible anxiety. No matter what logic you apply to the situation to convince yourself you are not in danger, these emotions will assault you. I found myself not only terrified, but also hyper-vigilant. I couldn’t help but run scenarios in my head all day and night of what might happen. My father would call me up in the middle of the night to yell at me. Or kill my pets, or burn down my house. All these imagined torments filled me with as much fear as if they were really happening.

One of the best ways to deal with imagined horrors in any circumstance is mindfulness. Mindfulness brings your attention back to what is really happening to you and around you, rather than what is happening in your imagination as you fret and worry. It breaks the cycle of your fear causing you to envision frightening things, which in turn maintain your fear. It can be as simple as switching your attention to the sensations around you right now, such as how your clothes feel, what you are smelling, and the objects you see in the room. The whole point is to get out of your head and into reality, where at the moment you are perfectly safe.

This webpage has an excellent explanation of how anxiety works, as well as a simple introduction to meditation to alleviate it. Meditation simply involves focusing on your breathing in order to direct your thoughts away from the imagined terrors. Meditation and mindfulness were key elements to my setting aside the crippling fear that came along with splitting with my narcissist.

What these three exercises have in common is helping you to escape the world the narcissist has trained you to believe in, and reconnect with the real world, your true feelings, and your actual circumstances. Working on these things will not only break the narc’s power over you but start you down the path to emotional recovery and a much happier life.

Why shouldn’t I just cooperate with my narcissist?

There’s absolutely no question that the easiest approach to having a narc in your life is to cooperate with him. That, of course, is the way he has deliberately arranged life for you: do as he says, and things will be okay, but disobey and there will be a price. The thing is, there is also a price to be paid for chronically complying with a narcissist’s demands, and it’s much worse in the end.

Sometime before I born, my mother learned to cave to narcissists. Perhaps her own father or brother were in that category, or perhaps she only had my dad to deal with. At any rate, from the earliest moment I my childhood that I can recall, there was one overarching principle in place in my house: do NOT do anything to irritate my father. Rebellion of any kind was absolutely out of the question for us both. Sometimes, being a small child, I failed to anticipate my dad’s requirements, or just didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to meet his demands. The cruel response to these misdeeds drove me all the more to avoid such situations at all costs. My father didn’t apply physical abuse, but he sure knew how to belittle, shame, and terrify. My mom was sometimes sympathetic, but more often upset with me for upsetting my dad. I knew his abusive tactics were the same for my mom, but I didn’t fully appreciate the horrors of her life until the poor woman had passed.

My life story eventually had a happy ending. But the sad story of my mom demonstrates what can happen to the narcissist’s victim if she never fights back. For over 50 years Mom stayed in a largely miserable relationship, not even recognizing that she had other options. She was a professional with a college degree and excellent job experience throughout her adult life, but she couldn’t muster the courage to leave the misery behind and strike out on her own. I have no doubt that she was crippled by the same fear of my father’s retribution that prevented me from disobeying him even when he was elderly and almost helpless.

That’s what happens eventually: Your mind is warped by the years of emotional manipulation until you can’t even see any way out. And you can also have the classic traits of the sufferer of narcissistic abuse forced upon you: chronic anxiety, depression, poor self-image, hyper-vigilance, confusion, lack of confidence, etc. Meanwhile, you develop the classic symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, experienced by kidnappees and prisoners of war. You sympathize with your abuser, make excuses for him and defend him, and devote yourself all the more to trying to please him.

With such a warped view of yourself and the world around you, you cannot function as a healthy, successful person. These issues affect your relationships, your job, and your health, both mental and physical.

Imagine if you lived in a house full of mold, and for some strange reason were convinced there was no way to get rid of it and nowhere else for you to live. Eventually that mold would destroy your health. Well, you are sharing your life with a person who is just as toxic as that mold. You can continue to sit in your chair and breathe in the mold until it kills you, or you can eradicate it from your life.

Just imagine that clean house, and how wonderful it would be to breathe freely….

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