Now that you’ve shown a less than perfect side, they have an upper hand. They make demands. “I asked you to believe me”. “I asked you to just trust me.” “I asked you to stop.” See, they think that because they are “asking” vs. “telling” that this is somehow camouflaging their controlling ways.
Yet when confronted, they will often say “I told you the truth now back off,” “ I told you many times how I felt, I’m not going to repeat myself” or “I told you over and over again about why, now can’t you just let it be?"
Incidentally, they have a very odd vocabulary. When they do speak its like a tower of babble bullshit, and they might as well be speaking in tongues, because what they say, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. They get tongue tied, say outrageous things then back peddle to say “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that.” They will express that they have a hard time “opening up” or “talking about emotional things.” And they do. It’s almost impossible for them and they grapple with this the same way a child is trying to master reading. When they speak, they sound exactly like a child who is stumbling through a book. Its very frustrating. But this is only when asked to speak in a vulnerable, “emotional” like “tell me how you feel” sort of way. Otherwise, they are the masters at glib and conversing, using unique words, word structure and have a rather extensive vocabulary.
In any event, this relationship can drag out forever-because while you may end up yelling, screaming, name calling, “threatening” and cajoling-you don’t DO anything. You don’t leave him, or you keep taking him back. Sometimes, you even seek HIM out. He will keep coming back, and you will keep taking him back, and vise-versa. While you wouldn’t wish him on anyone, you sometimes are hoping he will just find someone else to be the main source of his narcissistic supply. You’d gladly hand your crown over even though he thinks you’ll be mortally wounded if he does. After all, you were once. You reach a point where you hope for someone else to get him off your hands to get you out of it, or become obsessed with trying to change it.
You constantly step into a WayBack machine and transport yourself back to your very first meeting, and re-invent the whole relationship in your head. What you SHOULDVE DONE. What you COULDVE DONE. How you should, could or would’ve been different. If only’s and why didn’t I’s and I should haves become a mantra that you can only mindlessness mumble like a thorazined out psych patient, the things you wish you said, the things you wish you didn’t say, the things he said, the things you wish he HAD said and now all the things you WANT to say. If you are lucky, you didn’t have children with this man, if you are lucky, you didn’t lose everything you financially helped invest in-a home, a business, credit cards and the like.
He probably financially abused you too if you wake up and realize one day that without him, you’re not sure how you’d economically survive or that you are out thousands of dollars. You think of the opportunities lost if you lived with him or was married to him- the times you wanted to go back to school, the career interests you’ve had-all put on a backburner because he’s effectively convinced you somehow that “good mothers stay home with their kids” or he has you working for him. I will blog about if you married a man like this.
Eventually, you feel defeated, depressed and deflated. Whatever moxy, mo-jo, spirit and fighter in you, the survivor in you, is stymied. You have no energy anymore. You have no spunk left in you. You “give” up. All your anger turned inward and resulting in depression and anxiety. Any self-confidence you once had, destroyed. All your dreams, discouraged because you hate yourself and don’t even know it. And you wonder how you will ever pick up the pieces of your heart, love again, trust again.
You want desperately to be loved and desired, yet the idea of anyone else even touching you makes you sick. You wonder if you will ever enjoy sex again, can ever trust a compliment. Your intellect knows better, you know and are even close to good men as friends, as family members, as ex boyfriends. But this one man, or a history of people like this, has null and voided them all, because there must be something horribly wrong with you that those “good” men never find you. And that’s what you are left with. Just as you are “labeling” the narcissist-you yourself are now struggling to put a label on yourself.
The point is that it shouldn’t matter how he got in so much as it is that he did. Yes, we may need to figure that out when the relationship is over. But it is unfair to say “Well if you had felt better about yourself, this wouldn’t of happened” because in my opinion, it further adds insult to injury by taking away the bite of just how BAD the abuse was. That’s why its called ABUSE. Someone took your mind and RAPED it. You didn’t “let them.” They took it by force. They played you. AND YES IT REALLY HAPPENED. Consider it like date rape. You spent time with the guy, agreed to go out with him because you liked him and trusted him, and you were attracted to him. Does that mean he had the right to push sex on you and take it from you without respecting whether you were ready or wanted to? Of course not. Same with emotional abuse. Just because you gave signals that suggested you were open to him, didn’t mean he had the right to do all that he did to you. Yet you are labeled the crazy one.
On the contrary, if you get out of it, if you are now seeking out professional help of any kind, getting yourself into therapy, googling for YOU-you are NOT the crazy one, because remember-those who are truly crazy don’t know it, don’t question it, don’t obsess on the state of their own mental health. After all-you don’t see him running to a therapist and remember-YOU were the “scary” one, you “abused” him! His therapy is to just start seeing someone else-and starting all over again with a new, pliable, naïve and ignorant to his ways woman-like a sick collection, to see if this one will not see through him. The more women he can collect to re-assure him that he can’t be that bad, otherwise, why would anyone be with him at all? `is all the therapy he needs.
All those “trust issues” he complained about seem to fly out the window when a “new and improved you” comes along. For someone with trust issues, he bounces back very quickly, lets another woman into his lair of deception and chaos, and never looks back at you. Unless she dumps him. Then you are the FIRST one he will look up, to see if there’s anyway or anything left to manipulate out of you, to test his “skills”, to remind you that seems to have forgotten him and moved on that he’s still around, to taunt and haunt you all over again, because he CANNOT be forgotten. He can be hated, he can be despised, but don’t you ever strip him of his power over you, and render him meaningless in your world.
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