How narcissistic abuse healed me
There is a dangerous spiritual belief that there are no victims in this world.
That we choose our suffering before we incarnate in order to learn the lessons we need to learn.
I am not disputing what our souls may or may not decide before we are born.
What I AM warning of is the danger of using the shadow side of this belief to stay in situations that ultimately are causing us harm. Read my past article on the dangers of spiritual new age positive thinking here.
I used to buy into this belief.
The result is that I struggled to take about my experience with a narcisst because:
-I didn’t want to speak badly about anyone
-I didn’t want to play the victim
-I believed it was necessary for my growth
The truth is there ARE victims in this world.
And then there are perpretrators.
These are two sides of the same coin.
In order to move out of this dynamic you first have to SEE and UNDERSTAND the mechanics at play.
In this newsletter I wish to talk about a particularly nasty flavour of perpetration called NARCISSISM.
Narcissism is hard to spot and hard to pin down for the following reasons:
–narcissists are very charming
–narcissists are very good at logic and justification
–narcissists don’t show their real side to anyone else but you
They are hard to spot because they are adept at making THEMSELVES out to be the victim of something they perpetrated.
Narcissism is a difficult one to manage because you are brain washed into thinking that everything that narcissist says and does is right.
Meaning that YOU are always wrong.
It sounds ridiculous when you have not been through it yourself.
It sounds ESPECIALLY ridiculous that it can happen to strong, powerful, independent women.
In the meantime these people wreak havoc on your life and relationships, and tell you that you are to blame for it.
It´s very difficult for me to speak about, even years afterwards, because of the brain washing that I received.
But there were clear signs:
- love-bombing
- sudden, extreme changes of temperament
- saying one thing with conviction and later saying the opposite
- believing that they are RIGHT and everyone else is “stupid”
- using logic and “double binds” to make you wrong.
- Talking the talk but not walking the walk
- Holding you up to impossible standards which they don’t follow themselves.
- Making you dependent on them to take any decisions
I thought I would celebrate my 2.5 years of being free from narcissists by sharing my short, intense, devastating story of dating a first class narcissist.
My story of a narcissist
I met by ex partner in summer 2020 at a retreat.
The way we met was so magical.
He was spiritual, musical and into coaching, just like me.
He had curly hair and played the drum.
I thought I had met my soul mate.
After the retreat he came back to mine to stay for a few days until he got his flight back to the UK at the end of the week.
He never went back and that’s how we ended up living together, a mere 5 days after we met.
At first everything was great. I remember thinking I’d finally found someone that loved me in the way I needed to be loved.
The compliments came thick and fast.
He was charming, attentive and said all the right things.
I thought this was it. True love.
I didn’t realise it had nothing to do with love.
I was actually being groomed by a technique narcissists use to win you over.
I remember very clearly the first time things started to change.
We were in Ibiza and his mood changed VERY suddenly. He was a completely different person. He was very angry and he blamed me because I hadn’t wrapped a cable in the way he wanted.
Because it came out of the blue and I’d been spoken in the same way in the past, I blamed myself and thought this anger was warranted.
I didn’t realise that I had a pattern of attracting narcissists into my life.
Submitting to him was the start of the downward spiral.
He violated many boundaries and manipulated many situations to make himself the victim and me the perpetrator.
Here are 3 examples of him turning things around on me:
1) Disrespecting my rules. He would leave food on the floor. When I told him that was not OK he went to a lot of trouble to persuade me that I needed to relax and chill out. I believed him (even though he had been living in my home just 2 weeks). He even persuaded me that I needed to do a 3 day Vipassana in my room (where I had to be in silence and meditate…but he would come in every day to talk to me whenever he was bored).
2) Making me feel there was something wrong with me. I’m usually up at 6am so when I came into my own bedroom needing something he would tell me I was too much and that it was stressing him out. (…after living in my home for just 2 weeks).
3) Terrorising my pets. He would chase my cats around the house until they were terrified. When I told him this was not OK he turned it around on me saying I needed to support him rather than judge him. He ignored my boundaries and did it again. The next time, seeing that my cat had defected on the kitchen floor out of fear, was the final straw. I was able to connect with my righteous anger.
But still things were declining.
I started to become very confused.
He told me I wasn’t remembering things correctly.
He persuaded me to think that I wasn’t good with people.
I remember thinking “I used to be so good with people…what has changed?”
He made me think that all my decisions were wrong and that I needed to consult him before talking any decision.
Whenever someone spoke to me badly he would agree with them, giving me no empathy and listing all the reasons why I was in the wrong.
Things went from bad to worse when he started involving himself in my finances. He persuaded me that it was stupid to have my life savings in a fund and that I should hand a large amount over to him to invest in crypto. He would be my crypto manager.
He was 26 and had no experience in crypto.
So I handed it over because I TRUSTED him so implicitly.
He had promised to manage it and I had believed him.
But then every time I asked how it was doing or to see it, he would talk back with frustration and resentment. He told me it was my job to make him sit down and look and it.
Around the same time we had the idea to open up a “spiritual centre”. The initial plan was to have a small place to play music and do some shamanic activities.
The idea quickly grew as each commercial space we looked around got bigger and bigger.
Eventually the idea got so big we realised we would have to bring other facilitators on board to lead the classes.
His idea was that we were creating a community that would eventually buy land and be self sufficient.
I wasn’t so excited by the idea but I just wanted to do what he wanted to do.
I had him on a pedestal thinking that he KNEW the way and that I didn’t.
Very soon after Jenny came onboard to join the founding team and help us with Finances (although she ended up supporting with much more than that).
And that’s how Anahata was born. But at this point it had a different name: Temple of Ra.
I put all the investment into the project.
Despite this, he persuaded me and Jenny that he needed to have a monthly salary because he was the CEO. We didn’t get anything.
He told me I couldn’t be involved in the interior design because I had no experience and I would slow the project down. So he brought a friend of a girl he met on a dating app to do that. And expected them both to be paid (from my investment).
During the renovation I started to feel something wasn’t right. Our chief engineer, Dani, messaged me to ask if everything was OK because he hadn’t received an answer from my partner for 10 days.
The rent of Anahata was 4k a month, so not moving on with the project for over a week was a loss of over 1K.
I felt this deeply because I was the sole investor.
When I asked him why he hadn’t replied he said “there is nothing to reply to”.
At that point I realised that things were taking a drastic downward turn.
He started paying a business coach 300€/hour. Apparently she connected with the universe to say if something was a right or wrong decision. Every small decision, including the placement of lightbulbs, he needed to check with her.
Everything was spiralling out of control.
In summer 2021 we went to the Rainbow Gathering. On the way back he started screaming at me, calling me his “doormat” and other abusive terms.
At that point something clicked inside of me.
I told him he was getting out at the next town.
I left him in a carpark and told him to make his own way home.
He kicked the car door and refused to return my ipad.
In that moment that pedestal came crashing down.
I saw him for what he was -a scared little boy – and I drove away.
It was on that drive home, having just broken up with the project´s father, that the name Anahata came to me.
I wanted everything we did to be heart based.
The next day I met with Jenny and asked if she would be up for carrying on the project just the two of us.
She absolutely did.
And that is how Anahata was born.
What did I learn from being with a Narcissist?
Those 11 months were tough and I am grateful to have come out the other side.
I saw 3 things about myself; some things that need to change, and somethings that remind me how strong I am.
1) I saw the pattern I have of justifying staying in situations that are harming me because “it’s good for my growth”. I realise that, yes, it was good for my growth, but only AFTER I had seen it and had extracated myself from the sitation.
2) I have a well of inner strength! As soon as I saw what was happening, I was able to walk away. EVEN THOUGH he was the person I (believed) I loved most in the whole world. I´ll always be grateful to be inner strength and the courage it took me to do that and to be firm that he would not be part of Anahata anymore.
3) I saw afterwards that the signs were all around me, I just didn’t want to listen to them. There were so many signs – from things people said, to changes in my own temperament, to the way people reacted to him. I just wasn’t in a place to accept it.
And that brings me to the most important question of this newsletter.
Just because someone is not in a place to hear something you have to say, does it mean you shouldn’t say something to them?
There is an argument that everyone is on their own journey. That we shouldn’t interfere and that they are learning the lessons they came here to learn.
After everything I have lived through, I actually believe that to be a very damaging belief.
It justifies us not having the difficult conversations.
It justifies us not taking action to support others when they are vulnerable.
And if taken to its macrocosmic conclusion, it justifies us staying silent during a genocide.
I have a friend who is with a narcissist and I didn’t say anything at the time. I regret that so much now. I see how much they are suffering, how much their health has declined and how worried their families are.
I wish I had said something.
Not to be right or even because I believe I could have even changed the situation.
In fact I genuinely think she would NOT have been able to receive my words and would have got angry.
But I wish I would have said it anyway so that in her moments of doubt, in her moments of questioning, she would have had one voice that she trusted in her mind saying “this is not OK.”
We live and learn.
My psychologist always tells me one thing about Narcissicism.
She tells me that ultimately labels don’t serve for anything.
And she’s right.
A person can know they are with a narcissist and accept that about them.
Another person can witness the suffering that a Narcissist creates and enable and justify that destructive behaviour.
It’s not so much about the label.
But about connecting with how that person makes you feel.
Do you like the way they talk to you?
Do you like the way they treat you?
If the answer is no, then something needs to change.
And you have the power to do that.
The first step is to SEE it.
I hope this article was useful to you.
Wishing you a beautiful weekend,
Abbey