2. A relationship with a Narc ruins your health, both physical and mental.
3. Narcs sponge off the woman/man they claim to love.
4. Narcs wait until you are completely charmed and reeled in and then start disappearing or mentioning other women, or throwing you off balance.
5. Narcs often take satisfaction when they have driven a woman/man to a mental break-down or suicide.
6. Narcs are charming and difficult to forget. They give us highs we’ve never experienced, and once they know they ‘have’ us, discard us, or keep us around like a second option.
7. Narcs never say sorry in a genuine manner, only with qualifying or sarcastic additions to twist the “apology” inside out.
8. Narcs will ill speak you the way the ill spoke the woman in their previous relationship making themselves out to be a victim.
9. Narcs are incapable of introspection. They have a small range of emotions such as lust, greed, rage, and sadistic satisfaction at knowing they have the power to hurt others.
10. Victims of narcs often wonder if karma will get them as they seem to land on their feet.
11. The truth is Karma has already got them as they are troubled souls having to look for new supplies to feed their broken egos and wounded selves. Their karma is they will never be happy. They will get less happy as they age and their charm starts to look ridiculous and has no impact on potential supplies.
12. The best thing about having had a relationship with a narc is that we get to examine our own childhood woundings, to reflect, to get insight into ourselves, to understand that we are survivors, and if we are determined and stay the course with the no contact rule, we CAN heal and thrive again. We also learn that the greatest love of all is with ourselves. Once we learn to love ourselves, to stop waiting to be ‘saved’, we will attract amazing people in our lives, not out of need but out of joy.
13. The other good thing about no contact is it teaches us how strong we can be. If we can go no contact, we can quit smoking, we can quit drinking too much, we can run that 5k, hell we can run a marathon, we can give up bread, we can finish that novel, we can start that business, we can laugh with our friends, we can help those who are less fortunate. We can find ourselves again.
15. Its a blessing to have survived a narc as we see just how capable we are of loving others, of moving mountains. If we can do it for them, we can do it for us.
Some days I want so badly to scream my story from the rooftops and just throw every sordid (and possibly boring!) detail into the air like confetti .
Other days, I wish there were even one person in my life who knew it all already and I wouldn’t have to struggle with words and sordid (or boring!) facts and stories at all. I realize at this late stage in the game after all the damage has been done and my eyes have finally and painfully been pried wide open to the truths of it all,that is no longer a feasible possibility or option.
So I challenged myself to try to wrap the whole thing up in one sentence…just one solitary sentence that might somehow encompass the feel of the whole thing. The entirety and bitter irony of my entire life to this exact point in time.
And this is my sentence:
They cut off my wings then crucified me because I couldn’t fly… and blamed me that I couldn’t grow them back from their mangled feathery bloody stub-bits that were left behind.
I read an article that made sense of my specific experience with parental alienation. My children were turned against me at 13 and 15 and while quite vulnerable due to the recent sudden loss of their beloved Papa. I know the level of pathological narcissistic qualities my mother and their father have. I realized while pregnant with my first child that I had indeed gotten into a relationship with the male version of my mother. They are cunning and confusingly efficient narcissists.
I grew up in desperate fear of turning into my mother or of sharing any similar traits as she. For many years I vowed not to even have children when I grew up because the fear inside me of being a mother like she had been was not worth the risk. I would rather die than treat any child the way I had been treated! For many years, I wanted to be a nun, thinking if I devoted my life to serving God, I could never hurt anyone like I’d been destroyed by her.
I’ve pondered so often if sociopathy is genetic. How much of narcissistic personality disorder is narure versus nurture. When I become unexpectedly pregnant and realized my baby’s father was pathological like my mother, I really worried. I worried that I would have a narcissistic child. I vowed daily that I would love and protect my child at all cost; that my child would know joy and understanding, fun, compassion, kindness, security, self esteem, encouragement, and love, love, LOVE.
So although the sequence of events was more horrific and painful than I have words to describe even, I have never once blamed my children for their cruelty and lies intent on destroying, demeaning, and tearing every single thing about me to shreds. I know the evil that was pulling them to do such things. I know it personally and I know it well.
I also know my children after raising them alone for 13 and 15 years. I know their hearts and their souls, their struggles and their loves. Or so I thought…
After the extent to which they have gone to assist in crucifying me, my character, my parenting, my career, and even my own childhood, I’ve had terrible moments when I wondered if I created monsters. Had I loved them too much?!? Was that even possible?!?? No. I just can’t believe you can love a child too much. You can’t possibly give children too much understanding or compassion. They’re children! Perfect, innocent, loving, amazing children whom are entitled to all the love, compassion, and understanding in the world!
Maybe the vicious streak was severe parental alienation and narcissistic brainwashing? Maybe it was genetically predisposed for them to be cruel and discompassionate? Maybe all the love in the world wouldn’t have been able to soften their souls when they got old enough to think like their father and grandmother that kindness and emotion are nothing but weaknesses to prey upon? Mere vulnerabilities of “weaker” people who are to be destroyed if possible and perhaps for no other reason than that you can destroy them because if they’re foolish enough to trust and weak enough to love another more than they love themselves, then they get what they deserve when you stomp on them and laugh in their face as they cry in pain?
That’s how narcissists certainly think. I’ve researched a great deal on nature versus nurture with narcissistic personality disorder, but I’ve come to no definitive answer. I only know my children weren’t abused or ever shown anything but love and compassion and accepting their actions against me has been the bitterest pill I could have fathomed ever having to choke down. I’ve rather believed it was brainwashing and survival mechanisms for them. That they were victims of this abuse exactly as I and maybe worse.
It’s hard to fully accept that when I see that my oldest is possibly a pathological liar with a vicious streak of cruelty that I’ve only seen in her dad and my mother before in my life. A hateful, punishing, extremely selfish nature combined with a quick and easy willingness to lie to get whatever she wants.
It’s painful to realize the level of this. And it’s been much easier to blame the narcissists that abused me in my past for her ugly behaviors than it is to blame her and allow myself to wonder if she is a sociopath as well.
I’m just not so sure anymore though. She has embraced cruelty and manipulation and lying at a rapid and efficient rate as to actually be frightening and deeply unsettling to my soul and wrenching in my heart when I picture her the first 15 years of her life… so precious, so kind, so sweet and loving, so easy going and sweet natured that I literally thought of her many times as an actualangel on earth and I couldn’t believe after so much abuse and terror and heartbreak all my life that God had deemed me fit to raise a child so perfect and precious and angelic like this one. And then one day a few weeks after burying my daddy, she was my abuser.
This beautiful, amazing sweet child of grace and love like I’d never known in my entire life, lies without conscience for no purpose other than to hurt and smear me as a human being, as a mother, and as a daughter. She is cruel and vicious and literally laughs at my pain. She seems to actually think watching me suffer loss as a mother is funny. She has crucified me like Jesus and burned me at the stake like a witch in Salem without a trial or even honest accusations. The more I hurt it’s almost like the more it feeds her fury and cruelty!! I’ve known two people like that in my life… two sociopaths… her father and my mother.
Then I read this article and suddenly it all became painfully clear.
I have all my life been deeply fascinated and intrigued by evil, by its sheer existence, its diabolical methods, its sinister purpose, its complex functioning, its hateful motives, and its intricate inner workings. I imagine my fascination is like a child born in the tropics wants to literally and figuratively grasp the concept of snow.
I’ve finally realized theline. The actual line! It seems simple and obvious and most of my “eureka” moments of epiphany ( like in this revelation of The True Face of Evil ) were all pointing directly at this line, but I hadn’t figured out the veryspecific equation that differentiates between good and evil, bad choices and bad people, selfishness and pathological narcissism, etc., etc…
It’s definitely not just that evil feels nothing when it lashes out to inflict pain on others. True evil, actual pathology, literal sociopaths and narcissistic disordered people ENJOY it!
Here it is in all it’s simplistic glory: the ultimate defining line between the two:
They. Enjoy. It.
They feed off it.
It brings them actual pleasure.
Now, I was raised by a cruel mother who’s “mothering” tactics easily represent something like Samuel Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction as displayed in the “say what again” scene here:
The last severe, pants and panties around my ankles leaned over the bed, beating I received was at 14 years old. I was in the 8th grade and my actual crime was I said “I promise I didn’t do anything mommy” one too many times while being questioned of something I had, in fact, not done. Thus, I had no other options for a truthful response to her raging hot-breath-in-my-face interrogation. I was 14. I didn’t know what other answer to give except the truth and lying, even just the perception of lying without any actual lie, brought down furious and lengthy punishments. I couldn’t lie. So when she shrieked, IF YOU SAY ‘I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING ‘ ONNNNEEEE MOOOORRRREEE TIMMMMEEEE, I WILL BEAT YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR LIFE, I truly had no other honest answer to her question. Believe me, I desperately wanted to give her another answer and I’d gotten pretty good over my short life at learning how to guess what answer she was looking for and wouldn’t stop berating and accusing me until she got it out of me, but in this specific situation I truly had no idea what the “right” answer was. I was clueless as to what magic reply would satisfy her and make the threats and screaming stop.
Yup, I defied her demand and gave the only answer I had available to me and yup, she dragged me into her bedroom made me pull down my pants and panties, lean face down over her gigantic red velvet bedspread, and beat me up and down from my ankles up to my lower back (wherever the flesh was naked and exposed) with the buckle end of one of my step-dad’s big leather belts.
This time was different for me than the others tho. Usually I would cry and beg and plead for her to stop. My brain would frantically try to understand whatever I had done wrong so I could be sure not to do it ever again. And no matter how confusing and truly innocent I’d felt, I could find a way to blame myself and accept responsibility for something… anything… to justify her punishing me.
This time, just like I had no other truth to give her no matter how badly I wanted to give her the “right” answer; this time I knew absolutely I had not done anything wrong. I mean not even a “sassy tone” or a “salty face”. For the first time ever in 14 years of life, I truly knew I had done nothing wrong.
So I couldn’t cry. It hurt… yeah, it burned and stung like millions of wasps attacking my bare naked backside. And as she went back over the areas she’d already hit once or twice, it felt like my skin had been set on fire. I couldn’t feel the specific sting or cuts into my flesh anymore. It merely felt like she’d set a match to my ankles and I was drenched in gasoline. It just burned with wild painful fury .
Yeah, it hurt like a mother fucker. But I couldn’t cry this time. I just couldn’t. My faith in my innocence was too solid to beg and plead and cry and wail like a toddler… not even at the pain of it. I just was unable to cry. I just lied there silent and patiently waiting until she might run out of fury or energy or motivation… or whatever it was that was driving this senselessly harsh furious red hot beating.
I lost time waiting. So I can’t know for certain how long the beating went on before she paused to snatch my head back by my hair and glared rage directly into my face, and snidely screamed, OH YOU THINK YOU’RE TOO BIG TO CRY NOW, HUH? WELL, I WILL JUST KEEP GOING UNTIL YOU DO.
So I knew I was really fucked this time. Just fucked. I would have gladly given her the pleasure of me bawling my head off to make it stop, but I literally could. Not. Cry. I just couldn’t. I realized she would keep going until she killed me. And that I would lie there docile and quietly accepting it until my death. I definitely knew better than to fight back or try to run. So she dropped my face back down in the red velvet bedspread and continued beating me with a new gust of furiously determined energy.
I have no clue how much longer the beating went on. I lost time completely and removed myself from my body in order to tolerate the pain and accept my inevitable death. Until at some point, I came back to present awareness when it suddenly stopped and I heard my sister say, “Mom, stop. You’re going to kill her.”
I remember those words vividly and they snapped me back into the present moment. No one had ever dared stand up to or stop my mother!! I instantly became afraid for my sister. Even though she was the golden child, mother’s fury once at this level, could unleash on anyone. I couldn’t believe my sister was willing to risk her life to save mine and I was petrified because I was scared I couldn’t save her like she had me.
This, made me cry. I sobbed both in gratitude and fear for my sister. Tears of shame came running out of my desert-dry eyeballs worried that I wouldn’t have the same courage to stand up to mother if she chose now to direct all this fury onto my sister.
She didn’t though. And the rest of the night is a blur. I only remember trying not to bleed on the sheets when I went to bed that night. I slept face down without any covers trying to keep my wounds from staining the sheets. I prayed the bleeding would stop before I fell asleep in case I turned over in my sleep. I remember how excruciating it was trying to put pants on for school the next morning so I wore an old pair of my sister’s sweatpants.
After everything, one wouldn’t think I’d be so dense and slow to figure this definitive line out, but I’ve come to understand that those without this evil really are blind to understanding something so thoroughly foreign to their own nature. I have spent my life desperately looking for reasons why some behave this way; looking for understanding rather than pinpointing the definition. I’ve always believed if I could just understand why they did this, then I could choose not to let it affect and traumatize me or maybe I could even help them overcome their pain and love the cruelty out of them. Good souls will never understand its definitive opposite. It doesn’t have the ability to accept evil and cruelty for the mere sake of being evil and cruel. This is another way some are repeat victims. The light can’t see darkness for what it is. Once light shines to look and see the face of darkness , the darkness is gone. We can understand logically that darkness and evil do exist, but we can’t actually ever see it. Our vision and sight flow first through our soul spreading lights of compassion and kindness into our very eyeballs and sprinkle it over our logic a little as well so that good can’t truly see the face of evil or understand it for what it is. By the time it reaches our eyeballs to see or our mind to understand, it has already been touched, tainted, and altered somewhat by the light of goodness from our soul before we ever gaze upon it or attempt to sort through it for the understanding light souls want to have for everything and everyone.
My previous assessments were mistaken. These people don’t just “feel nothing” as they hurt and destroy others, it actually gives them pleasure.
I don’t understand enough yet to know exactly which aspect pleases them enough to motivate the cruelty, though. Is it your actual pain and suffering? Is it the control they feel knowing they can inflict such pain and agony onto another person? Is it the satisfaction they get when they’ve taken bits of your soul and crushed them in their hands laughing until they’re dust ? Is is the sense of accomplishment they get knowing they’ve completely snuffed out all the tiny desperate-to-survive slivers of light inside your spirit?
Just thought I’d share a teeny tiny little piece of the “crazy” pie of my life these days. Btw, just so I leave nothing vitally pertinent and ugly about myself out of the slice of crazy pie I’m sharing here, my other pathetic unforgivable faults in addition to my disgusting “low self esteem” are drinking wine at 3 am in my living room while talking on the phone to an ex boyfriend after my dad died, and having sex 9 years ago with said ex- boyfriend after we had broken up!
Pathological narcissism y’all… it’s not a joke or a trendy insult. It’s devastatingly real and frighteningly, senselessly cruel. #WelcomeToATinyGlimpseOfMyNightmareThatNeverEnds
I am so fucking sick of being told to bequiet… of hearing, just let it go, of advice from ignorant people clueless of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Parental Alienation, child abuse, and domestic violence or how far reaching the torture goes no matter how hard you fight to recover, accept responsibility even if it’s not yours to own, forgive, bounce back, heal, let it go, and move on.
One man today actually compared this to a bad date. You know, when he goes on a bad date with a gold digging bitch, he doesn’t make a fuss. He just takes them to an expensive restaurant and leaves after they order an expensive entree, then just never talks to them again. It’s that easy. Just be quiet and move on!
Yeah, that’s such an accurate analogy of trying to heal from narcissistic abuse and reclaim and rebuild your life after mass destruction! Just walk away from those people. Just don’t let them in your life . It’s THAT simple!
You need to just let it go and move on quietly with your life.
Meanwhile, I was quiet growing up abused, then I got free and decided to work on myself and my own shortcomings and faults rather than blame Mommie Dearest for how fucked up my head and heart and self esteem was. I quietly moved on. Straight into the arms of another pathological narcissist just like her. You know why? BECAUSE I JUST LET IT GO AND “MOVED ON”… because every fucking stupid mindset I’d learned came full circle back to everything my sociopath mother had spent my life convincing me: I’m unworthy of love. Love is only real if it hurts. But I must have deserved it. I’m only lovable and safe when I’m quiet and don’t complain and accept my due punishments, whatever they are. I just have to try harder to be better and if I try to be perfect then maybe I’ll have earned a tiny right to be loved and accepted, maybe I’ll get lucky enough even to see a flash of kindness if I’m really super convincingly quiet and accepting…a second of kindness perhaps for my fake persona that I have to wear convincingly in order to be loved at all…even cruelly “loved”.
Why can’t you just let it go? Ummm… like I let it go when he pinned me down on the floor and spit on me and choked me when I was 3 months pregnant after he came home from being out all night screwing another woman and I dared to ask him where he was because I’d been up all night scared he was injured or dead ?
Like I let it go when he spit on me and my infant child as she nursed at my breast for asking what a woman’s clothing receipt had been for? After he had told me months earlier that he “needed me to start holding him accountable for his actions ” if he was ever going to “learn how to be faithful”?
Like i let it go when he admitted to his sex addiction counselor that he even though he’d told me I was crazy and paranoid for months, that yes, indeed, he had been cheating the entire time and then coming home to abuse and belittle me after he did it? And confessed that he was so scared we were having a girl because he might be sexually attracted to her or her friends once she was a teenager?
Like I let it go that I didn’t have food for almost two full weeks when I was 3 months pregnant with our child and that wasn’t his problem because he was in sex addiction rehab and was “dealing with hurtful childhood memories” that had caused him to be an abusive cheater all his life?
Like I let it go that I asked Mommie Dearest to loan me $25 for groceries when I was 3 months pregnant and hadn’t eaten in almost 10 days and she told me, that’s what welfare is for…?
Like I moved on and left him asking for nothing but my child and my freedom to prevent her from seeing a man ever treat a woman with the disdain, disrespect, and cruelty like her dad treated me?
Like I just moved on and didn’t enforce child support so that he could have an easier time seeing his kids in another state? So that I wouldn’t make him resent and punish his kids for having to pay child support to their mother for them? So I struggled and fought to raise two kids by myself without his physical or financial help while he bragged that the amount of money he made was “obnoxious “… while I was trying to decide if I could splurge on name brand macaroni and cheese for the kids this week? All so his life would be easier and I could convince myself I could keep my kids safe as long as I didn’t rock the boat or upset him or force the issue of responsibility, truth, or child support?
Like I just walked away and “moved on” when my mother came to my hospital room in the ICU when I wasn’t able to speak or move on my own after a massive stroke and told me I “deserved what I fucking got”? 4 hours after having a brain blood clot, going without oxygen for an hour, and finding out I was pregnant, all while lying on an emergency room table not even understanding what in the fuck was happening ?
Like I let it go and just moved on that when I was hospitalized for three full months unable to walk or feed myself or sit up in bed on my own, neither my children’s father or my mother (who love these kids sooooooo much) stepped up to help with my 18 month old baby at home? That my 60ish dad had to take care of my baby himself alone? Plus take care of me too, like an infant when I was released 3 months later? That no one but my dad stepped up to help during a severe physical trauma while I was pregnant and the years of physical rehabilitation it required afterward just to develop the skills movement and brain cells to reconnect in order to just be able to pick up my child and hold her in my arms?
Like I just walked away and “moved on” to find another place to live after my children’s father deceived me into trusting him and then deceitfully stole my house that was never his and that he hadn’t paid for at all? Like I just replaced everything we’d ever owned after he told me I had “30 days to get the kids and me back to our home, forcing me to choose between everything we’d ever owned and the home we loved so much … just to go ahead and take our home anyway when we arrived 3 days later in plenty of time of his threat? So then my children and I forfeited everything we owned in the world and still he scammed our house from us anyway because I’d trusted him earlier to have his name on the deed even though we weren’t together? Because I’d stupidly trusted that he cared if his children had a roof over their heads more than his fury to punish us for not doing what he wanted us to do? Which was allow the very abuse I had left years earlier to protect our children?
How many times are you supposed to walk away and just “move on” from the horrific abuse and terror and devastation these people go out of their way to inflict upon you, your life, and everything you love…. EVEN WHILE YOU’RE QUIETLY JUST “MOVING ON”?
The abuse never stops. Somehow they find a way to keep hurting you as long as you live and you’re quietly trying to just stay out of their radar of torture and cruelty?
But for fucks sake, start talking about it and it’s not 5 FUCKING minutes before I’m defending MYSELF for perpetuating the “drama” by not just shutting the fuck up about it and moving on…Again .. and again… and again… from their destruction, lies, and abuse.
In 2001, after finally successfully freeing myself from my children’s father, I was newly married to a decent and handsome man. A man who struggled with his own demons like we all do, but who innately was good st heart who carried the burden of conscience even when he made mistakes or bad choices. Although I divorced him and he made some choices that really hurt me, I could never hate this man. I believe in my heart, he never had the intention of hurting me or anyone nor did he receive pleasure or joy at knowing he had.
This is a remarkable reflection for me and led me to a stark realization of bad versus evil. I have certainly made bad choices myself… I have a great many regrets and things I would choose differently in hindsight if I had that option.
I was raped at gunpoint in 2002 while walking to the little store close to my house. Without getting into the crude details of that experience, I’ve recalled one very poignant moment within that over and over throughout the past 14 years since it happened.
I was scared and confused when this man pointed a gun at me and instructed me to walk quietly a few yards to the baseball dugout in the park I was strolling through. All that flashed through my mind in those moments of terror were me 4 and 6 year old daughters faces; their tiny little hands and arms reaching for me, their beautiful eyes looking up at me as I read them bedtime stories each night, and their little voices saying, I love you, Momma“. All I feared was a flash of their lives without their momma and what that might look like for them. Of course I wasn’t the perfect momma by any means…. but they were loved beyond reason and treasured with my whole soul and I would without hesitation die protecting them from pain or harm. So although I’ve always been very critical of my imperfections and my biggest daily prayer was to keep learning to be better and better every day, if not for the world and myself, at least for them, my gifts from God whom had entrusted me to be the best mother to them I knew how in spite of my imperfections as a human being.
I did not care in the moment of a gun pointed to my head of dying, I did not think of my husband, I did not think about my job, or even my beloved daddy. The only picture and thought in my head was of those precious, perfect babies.
So when we had walked to the dugout I pleaded with this man only one thing, I have two babies at home who need me. I’ll do anything you say but please don’t take me from my babies. He did not respond to these words, he demanded I remove my pants.
I did as I was told and only then did anything but my children flash through my mind. I had the fear of him being inside my body, my husband, and my wedding vows and quickly wondered to myself if this would be considered a violation of my sacred vows. I wondered if my husband would ever make love to me the same again or see me in the same light after another man had been inside my body. Strangely enough, this was a brief thought as I was taking off my pants and my panties, standing vulnerable in the outdoors even though somewhat hidden inside the baseball dugout.
As the man came closer to my body, pulling his pants down, my thoughts went immediately back to my children’s faces, voices, hands, and little toes I loved so much to kiss after their baths and when I tucked them in at night. I lost all sight of my husband’s feelings or broken vows and thought only of their lives and futures without a momma. I pictured their little toes growing as time went on and easing into adult shoes rather than the light-up sneakers or tiny little sandals they currently wore. I wondered if anyone would think to kiss their “angel toes” after I was gone and I wondered why I’d never told anyone of our nightly “angel toes” kiss-fest so that their papa or their daddy or whoever would be tucking them in from now on, would know this was an important nightly event to my children. Angel toes matter !!!! Why hadn’t I told anyone about this important routine?!?!!??
This is when I started pleading out loud to God and to this man pushing himself up against my half naked body. I don’t know where the words came from even, but I pleaded, God, where are you? Then, Do you even believe in God? My children have angel toes!
I looked in this man’s eyes as I said those words. And I saw a flash of recognition… or conscience.. or consequence… I really can’t know what it was, but I saw it and I believe it was his conscience. I’ll never know why this man chose to pull a gun on me to rape and rob me, but I will never believe this man is evil. I have seen evil and it has no conscience. I clearly saw a flash of conscience in his eyes right then. He told me to shut up. He told me to turn around. But it obviously affected him and it certainly ceased his momentum of the moment as it seemed he could no longer continue while I looked in his face.
I turned around as he demanded. He then roughly said he would just give it to me in the ass then. But something had changed… something I can’t define exactly. His voice and his words were still gruff and cruel and his hands on my arms were still harsh but something had changed. Almost as though he had lost his motivation, whatever it had been.
This man, a rapist and robber, had a conscience. I would swear to it. The energy changed completely after those last words I’d said and after I turned around, it was as though his heart was no longer in it even though his words remained in control and demanding to finish this one way or another.
This is the defining difference between bad and evil. I have looked in the eyes of a narcissist as I pleaded for mercy or compassion. I have had my heart bleeding and aching in pain and misery as I begged my ex or my mother in the past and there was zero moments of conscience or regard of any kind. When they are destroying pieces of your heart and soul and spirit, their eyes are like snake eyes. Flat, cold, and sinister… void and empty of any feeling, compassion, or conscience. I may as well have been pleading with a snake not to bite me or to apologize for biting me after the fact.
In fact, in my experience, narcopaths actually seem encouraged when I’ve plead for mercy, as though that has given them the ultimate pleasure of total control. In that moment of pleading for mercy, they know without a shadow of a doubt, that they are/have inflicted intense damage and have absolute control over the well being of your mind and soul. There is no moment of pause. Begging for mercy motivates and encourages them by handing them complete control.
I have many years spent with my mother and the father of my children and can recount so many times my shaken heart was desperate for them to stop inflicting pain; moments of literal and utter desperation where I looked in their eyes begging for mercy or even just a moment of compassionate reprieve from whatever their destruction of that moment was.
Never once did any flash of recognition or conscience come to their eyes or did they respond to my pleas with even a second’s pause or thought of the pain they were inflicting, either physical, mental, or emotional pain . They were energized to continue inflicting pain by my pathetic, weak pleadings for reprieve or understanding or compassion. Never before their acts nor after in the aftermath of their acts.
My monsters and murderers did not come to me wielding axes, brandishing revolvers, or wildly grasping shiny blades of gutting destruction.
No, I was not so lucky.
My assassins arrived with big smiles masking snide smirks and as time slowly passed, the effort to mask the sneers were less and less. The mask became an unnecessary effort as I ceased to understand the difference between a heartwarming smile and a sadistic snake-like sneer of sinister inner satisfaction at my growing confusion and chronic futile attempts to see the mask again… the smiley mask I mistook for reality… to find a way to perform the same circus act (whatever it had been?!) that I had unknowingly performed in the beginning to cause them to grace me with that smile they’d presented at the start.
The man who approached me for a comforting hug and pulled a pistol out of his pants saying, ” you’re not going to scream are you ?” was far more compassionate than my monsters. He ripped his mask off in seconds and I knew exactly who he was and he told me specifically what he demanded.
I would choose being raped and robbed with a gun pointed at my head all day long over my lifelong monsters. Mr. Rapist released me when he was finished. Other than a few lingering occasional nightmares and anxiety attacks when I see people in hooded sweatshirts, Mr. Rapist didn’t prolong the torture nor send it out in decades of ripples washing out to every aspect of my life. His hell was fast and furious and the confusion faded over time. Mr. Rapist destroyed a tiny piece of my soul.
My insidious monsters came straight to my door as life, spirit, and soul demons intent on sucking every last piece of joy I had known or could have ever known in my future. They left a desolate wake of barren lands where once there were lush waters of hope and green trees of faith. They did not release me until their burning destruction was complete and final. And I opened the door to them.
This is what true monsters are. This is the after effect of dancing with the devil of narcissistic personality disorder; the Trojan horse blasting into every nook and crevice of your life, you love, your joy, and your spirit with furious fires of destruction that don’t stop until it’s cleared every last root of love and hope for the future.
Yeah, I’d most definitely choose Mr. Rapist’s brand of hell over the sadistic narcissistic monsters any day.
I fell deeper into that pit of despair a few weeks ago when my daughter reached out to me because her boyfriend had roughed her up. Previously, I had thought I had already hit the bottom of that pitiful pit. True to my inability to fully accept that it can always get worse (which I never seem able to let penetrate my mind), I’d enjoyed (for lack of a better word) the belief and feeling that at least I had hit the bottom of the misery pit. That provides some relief in itself. As I lie there on that cold hard scratchy floor from several different drops lower and lower over the years, I breathed a sigh of relief that although it was miserable and I was confused and terrorized from the various drops, I could breathe that I was, at last, on the actual bottom. There could be no more sudden shocks as that floor disintegrated and I fell another story or two or twelve down the pit.
What a false sense of desperate relief! More was to come as my daughter dangled the carrot of hope in my face…inches from my mouth…so close my mouth watered at the thought that I might actually get to taste this carrot of her love again.
As I scrambled, crawled, and begged for the dangling carrot of my daughters love and presence, I stumbled upon a thin part of the floor of my misery which broke it open. I tumbled further down the Rabbit Hole of despair and confused bewilderment.
For several days, I simply plotted my death. Desperate for the final solution to end this pain and prevent the possibility of more carrot dangling in the future, I had the answer, but not the sure-proof means and this is one thing in my life I simply cannot allow failure.
Without the means, I reached out for help. I started taking antidepressants again after nearly a year free of them and I went to a local domestic violence shelter that provides free counseling. It took some pleading and finagling to talk them out of calling an ambulance to have me scurried to the hospital and admitted, but I did it! In exchange, I agreed to try counseling (sigh….again).
Today will be my 2nd appointment. My task given at session #1 was to find the one trauma point from which to begin this trauma treatment: a pivotal point, if you will.
In terror as though my life depends on it (no pun intended), my brain has scrambled for a week trying to select the point from which to begin this process. It’s as though I have one bullet to hit the moving target.
Was it when my daddy went on vacation and only his dead body returned?
Was it when I was gang raped at 17? Or raped at gunpoint again later at 31?
Was it from the beginning, any number of soul-injustices and spirit-murders I endured at her hand in my first 26 years of life?
Was it when my ex abused me mentally, emotionally and physically while I carried our first child only to add more abuse after she was born? Or when he cheated over and over and then yelled at me for asking questions? Was it when he spit on me and our infant daughter when I asked him what a receipt was for when I was reconciling our checking account? Was it that moment I held her nursing and he looked me cold in the eye and said, “I’m on a downward spiral. You and Lexi can come along or get the fuck out?”
Was it the moment my beloved oldest child attacked me verbally after my dad died and fabricated the ugliest lies I could imagine to set me up for her plan with my ex and my mother to destroy me once and for all?
Was it when I lost the only man I’d ever loved other than my father and yet he strung me along for years afterward declaring his undying can’t-live-without-you-love until I’d believe him finally and then he’d take it back again?
Was it when I was molested by the janitor at my elementary school? Or when my babysitter Marcy molested me repeatedly a few years later, but I didn’t understand it was molestation because she was a female?
Was it when I trusted my ex enough to move our children across the country to make his life and relationship with his children easier only to watch him break their hearts in the very ways I thought I had protected them from?
Or when he stole our home and tried to make us homeless by threatening my dad not to help us to punish me for not accepting him breaking our children’s hearts every day? Was it when I listened to my children sob in depths I had never before had to sit helplessly and watch over this cruelty from their dad? My heart ripping and the first time I felt rage in my life?
Was it when I was 2 months pregnant with my youngest daughter and suffered a massive stroke and told I’d never walk or work a job again on my own or be able to raise my babies on our own? Being too ashamed to take a shit because I was mortified at the thought of someone having to wipe my ass for me at 28 years old? Or that the prognosis given at the time destroyed my every idea of being a momma as well as lynched my independence and autonomy?
Was it two years ago when I spent 40 thousand dollars in court pleading my ex for a visit with the children I had raised alone for 15 years only to be granted the right , fly across the country, and was told (in so many words) by my oldest and youngest to fuck off because they changed their mind when I brought up a promise Lexi had made to my dad, her papa, about piercing her face?
When was the pivotal point of trauma from which I haven’t returned or recovered?