Hard to believe but true : how narcs sniff out your wounding and poor boundaries

https://blog.melanietoniaevans.com/6-ways-narcissists-fact-find-to-expose-your-weaknesses/

If you are the type of person who steps in to fix things for people, such as bailing them out of trouble, taking care of their fines for them, making phone calls or paying bills for them or helping sort out their court cases or other issues then this delights a narcissist. It means that they can act like a narcissist, only caring about feeding their ego, their False Self, without the boring necessities of life that they often believe are beneath them.

This is your remedy … letting go of your harsh self expectations and being hard on yourself, and instead, learning to be self-loving, kind and nurturing so that you will never again accept a level of love less than your level of love for yourself. Your important relationships are going to reflect that kindness and that care. You won’t accept anything else when you treat yourself that way.

Loving an Emotionally Unavailable Mother

This really resonated for me..

I'm Just Jason

I never knew what a happy, healthy family model looked like. When I started my own family, I led based only on what I learned growing up that happiness at home is earned through hard work, and being accomplished through the day. I remember growing up, there was a small wooden wall decor in our kitchen that read, “One should be rewarded by his deeds, not his needs.”

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Grateful to be alive

Even though some days living can feel crushing I am still grateful to be alive, especially on Saturdays.. In the letter Mum sent to me in 2001 that I found and read in therapy this week, she mentioned how painful the effect of my accident was on her and Dad but she said she could not have ever imagined how hard it was for me.. I think it also must have had an effect on my sister who has gone through so much, especially considering the fact that our other sister almost died, less than 6 months later and hovered for a long time in a state of suspension in a coma.. So the period of September to late February is fraught with a lot of past resonances that in terms of the spiral vortex of hidden inner life can still manage to have an impact.

There has been no word at all from my nephew about my sister.. I have not called either. I have just pulled back.. I know this may not be good but I just don’t want to do or say the ‘wrong’ thing and it is so hard to know what the ‘right’ thing is anyway and even writing those two words is pretty dualistic and black and white which is the way it can go when I get caught up on the mental level.. Maybe the truer statement is that, at this time I need all my own love and care to keep my own mental and physical health on an even keep. That is why lately just getting into my body and out of my head and negative or worrying thoughts seems essential and when trauma imprints call I just have to notice and anchor into the ‘Now’. Success with that today… I managed to stay upright after both breakfast and lunch today when the head neck lower back trauma cascade hit.. I am doing some of the vagal nerve exercises too that I found on line and that is helping me too…

My therapist thinks part of me.. a huge part did dissociate after that 1979 trauma and in 1981 I took myself away but got emotionally overwhelmed and in a difficult relationship. That is why, in 1982, when I pleaded with Dad to let me go back to my teaching degree it hit extra hard when he blocked that avenue alienating me from a lot of my good friends I had at the Canberra College of Education.. Possibly this kind of severing was a huge part of the reason why I later in life found it hard to feel like I ‘belonged’ and often took myself away or kept up a great distance from old connections. Luckily since coming back to my home town in 2011 I have been able to restores some of these..

As I see it any way so much goes silent in trauma and then gets displaced onto relationships or projections or appears as myriad mysterious bodily symptoms as well as profound push pull dynamics in attachment.. Lately I see how, as soon as I long to attach, I can fear and pull back and not being ‘got’ or seen can be a big trigger. What I began to realize only very recently is that it is not how the other person is reacting so much that is the problem but what that echoes for me of a past in terms of a flashback., when I can get a handle on that I can bring myself into present time and feel more grounded and ‘safe.’

Today maybe I felt safer in my body.. I was more self supportive and self loving when the shit hit the fan with Scott last night and this next demand for money.. I did not get that huge abandonment cascade of anxiety, I held myself and told myself I am safe.. I can cope alone and that I do not have to give away myself to be related to anyone.. I used to do that a lot. (give my self away or bury my painful feelings just to stay related). Then you get those who shame dump you or try to say you are being selfish for not doing things they need, that also can be a difficult issue to figure out for some of us with high levels of emotional confusion, alexithymia or poor ego boundaries..

Being able to manage these things does make it easier too, to want to live and feel gratitude for a life that comes with a deeper inner intuitive connection to our authentic self not so grounded or fed on toxic shame…. When we know somewhere deep down inside we are not getting what we need and are settling in order to keep the peace that can be damaging for both parties especially if we use various philosophies to deny the truth.. there seems to be a lot of that in our society.. platitudes people spout calling on some text or other that actually can derail us. What really is needed instead is for us to become even stronger in our own inner knowing as well as our connection to what others have called the higher self or loving inner parents, when those are no longer attacking us from within as much it becomes far more likely we will begin to feel more of the positive feelings in life that come with knowing our own heart, mind body and soul well and trusting that we really can and do have the answers to what helps and hurts us more under conscious control or encompassed by conscious present time awareness.

On the painful consequences of vulnerability and loneliness

I have been thinking a great deal about Ross Rosenberg’e concept of pathological loneliness that he explains stems from the core wounding of emotional neglect, abuse and abandonment and of how not having our drives, needs and emotions contained, reflected and mirrored leaves so many of us vulnerable to disasters in relationships with the lack of access to forming and implementing healthy boundaries of self love and self care that do not block us off from openness to outer relationships, too.

Thinking over my involvement with Scott I am both shocked and saddened to see what I put myself through with him, how vulnerable the childlike part of me was to promises of connection and I cannot demonize either of us because after Mum died in 2017 it was a painfully lonely time. The death of a parent and a grandparent who also carried neglect trauma and passed it down can open up a can of worms… In the case of my Mum the situation was also made complex by the fact she gave little to the sons of my older sister who died and made it my responsbility to take care of them.. As it is the inheritance became complicated by me loaning money to someone who just kept asking for more promising each time to repay it. .. Money is not really the issue for me any way it was that someone was ‘there’, even if only briefly when my parents and family could not be.. And its only lately I see how young I really was inside and how many healthy boundaries I lacked..

In addition the lastest issue of me having that outburst over email due to the stress of seeing my sister shocked into an even more damaged state and how it rebounded has really made me take a good cold hard look at what I do and how I react as well as how much my own poor boundaries and magical thinking leave me susceptible to a ‘madness’ that I could not help another person with when I was flat out trying to contain my own form of it.

I turn to my Al Anon readers a lot lately for wisdom as well as they seem to offer a lot of sane wisdom for dealing with the complex issues present in co addicted families and families of long term emotional neglect.. I came to grief at meetings when my own anger burst out and it was not well handled in that particular group. It is one of the reasons I really needed a lot of one on one therapy since I now understand neither of my parents were contained or knew how to contain emotionally. Dad shut down, Mum over reacted and the reading I just read in Hope For Today concerned a person who grew up in a home where there was a lot of anger flying around and they were often the target.. They then saw the ridiculousness of trying to deal with that issue in their family of origin amidst those still not dealing with the feelings or trapped in addictive or medicated pathways. There is a lot I see of this in my own family.. everyone trying to deal with someone deep in alexithymia and struggle to accept or contain or express and process any emotions at all and someone pretty much addicted to pharmaceutical aids they were wanting possibly to get off but not having another alternative.

Today I know I have to deal with my own emotions and reactions instead of trying to displace them.. It may be necessary though for me to act them out first and get that negative consequence only to learn more effective ways to deal with emotions and expression as well as more complex issues of inter personal boundaries. So much went down in our family that never got spoken about.. and seems almost impossible to address right now.. And as far as Scott is concerned I just have to keep pulling back.. I cannot help another human being with the problems it is their responsibility to deal with.. When they refuse to see this and respect my boundaries, it really makes me so angry and I then know I have to set an even firmer boundary despite ‘pleading’ and various other forms of emotional manipulation could not see before.

I also have to go easy on myself for making so many ‘mistakes’ over this issue.. people did try to stop and warn me but I wanted my own authority over my life.. Anyway we live and learn and it will do me not one amount of good to blame myself for things that were not possible for the earlier me to see and know before enduring more painful consequences… Serenity and sanity are big issues in 12 step recovery and I only get them when I find the power to go gently on myself for past mistakes while not sidestepping necessary pain that will lead to growth and learning.. that is where the sanity part comes in.. and to me lately these two are becoming honestly just as important as fresh air and nourishing healthy ‘food’.

Under the cover of silence

Even as I tell of things

Wringing out of my fingers

This wonky poetry

Struggling to articulate

My tormented ‘truth’

Where is the proof that

This is in anyway

The unchanging reality?

When really all of this

Expression is for me

A way of working through

While trying my best to contain

A bodily anxiety

About an unspeakable reality

Lately I question

How useful it is

To blame ourselves

Or any other human being

For seeing differently

Or apprehending with their own particular version

Of ‘reality’

So what if they are different

From the person

We feel we need them to be?

Can we find a way

To feel okay

Deep in the midst of all of this

Uncertainty and chaos?

I hurt you

That much seems to be true

Even if it was only my intention to express

Things I felt flying under the cover

Of deep silence

And frenetic activity

I did not just pretend to like you

Or be interested or kind

I was trying to understand things

Feom your point of view

Even as the things I saw seemed, at least to me

Detrimental in retrospect

In the end I am not here to judge

God knows I struggle

With so many things that were

Too much for me

Can we find a common ground

Standing shoulder to shoulder as you say?

Maybe was also so hard for you

Not knowing really what to do

But having to do something

Anyway

It must be tough but this is just our life

I did not mean to criticise

I was only trying to find a way to address and express

The pain of so much

I sensed

Had fallen deep under the cover

Of silence

Unnecessary Heartbreak

There are pains beyond

My soul

To fathom

And there are those who seek to judge

Situations they know little of

I open my mind in love

But then I decide

I will close the door

We cannot meet and you say only

I am selfish

Fine by me

You’ll never never know

The ins and outs of my soul

And I really do not care any more

Or wish for the caring over such painful things

To pierce my soul

God only knows there can be pain enough

In living

Every

Single

Day

I’d rather focus on

The green field

The soft breeze

The shadow your own pain casts

On me

Is not mine to bear the darkening of

You do not really know me

You never will

So for me now it’s time

To close that door

That only leads to letting in

Unecessary heartbreak

Christmas 1985

I was reflecting on the subject of terminations a few nights ago.. I thought of how it can be a wise choice not to bring a baby to term we did not have the loving resources to give.
I cried a lot reading a chapter in Lorna Byrne’s Angels In My Hair sometime last year where she received guidance from the angels the babies terminated know and accept it as part of their soul journey. .According to Lorna they stay close to the mother in spirit.
I came across this post today.. As part of my healing after getting sober I began to deal with the grief over all of my 6 terminated pregnancies writing a letter to each soul and naming each one.. The one shared about in this reblogged post was one of the most painful close to the 1st anniversary of losing my Dad…
I hope one day the shame and stigma surrounding this difficult topic is lessened.. we have made steps in that direction, but there are still those who love to demonize those of us who had to make such difficult and painful choices.

Emerging From The Dark Night

As Christmas 1985 drew near she was feeling more and more lonely, left behind in Switzerland by her friends who had jobs to go back to in the UK, she found a job working for cash in hand through a drinking buddy they had met on the Greek Islands and moved into to live with her in Lausanne for that winter.

That Christmas was the first anniversary of her father’s death, as it loomed how could she have been conscious of the forces driving her into the arms of a man one night when drunk who she didn’t know was in love with someone else.   It was with sadness and shock weeks later in that cold February that she found out she was once again pregnant and then the accusations came from her friends flatmate, saying she was lying about the truth of the father.

It was decided that…

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love for someone : when it becomes challenging : some thoughts

You may feel love for someone and they might not feel your love, its a thought occurring to me today.. sometimes we really try with people but we miss each other, or one of the people involved in a connection or interaction comes away feeling mis-perceived or misunderstood.. Come to think of it we are all separate in our individual self, some of us are very strong in who we are and what we know.. For some of us it is easier to look at others and pass judgement like the blogger who told me today I am slow on the uptake, it could be the reality from his or her point of view, God knows the places my own head goes into some days and the head injury I sustained keeps my focus there several times a day especially when I eat, then its hard to orient in my surroundings and sometimes its hard to take in what someone meant by a comment or a poem they left on a post of yours just to be tongue in cheek or funny or even, possibly to take a veiled barb at you. I am not the sort to delete a lot of comments even those at times that give me a bit of a start.. I try to keep an open forum on here. there have been challenges around this of late…

I know I am far from perfect, when ever Scott tells me he loves me unconditionally, my first thought is why? In my family I was never enough of something at times and then at others I did not know how to connect at all.. Thinking back to what my sister wrote to me back in 2001 about coming home and not expecting us to be close that has most certainly panned out with part of her family.. For a while I kept my distance and then it became harder to connect, I did try though I know when Mum died I did pull back into my shell around the time of the funeral, I went alone and arrived very close to the start, I gave a eulogy and connected with one of my nephews but felt distance from the other.. It was an intense time.

So much had gone down in the weeks before with my older sister’s third son visiting out of a desire to build a bridge of connection to Mum from his own daughter and Mum was not all that keen, in fact he asked for her help to come down in terms of finances and she got shitty about it and I got involved which may have been a mistake I ended up loaning him some money after his daughter had a seizure on the final day after resting on the couch at Mum’s before they were due to leave for their flight that afternoon.. The seizure was scary and in many ways a repeat of what happened to Lyra’s grandmother (my older sister Judy) back in 1980 I remember that day how distressed my nephew was as Lyra lay frothing at the mouth on the floor and he yelled at me to call an ambulance, my other sister and Mum just stood close by frozen to the spot with fear and panic written all over their faces. Lyra was in hospital for some time and a few days later Mum had the fall that eventually took her out of life about 7 days later.

Lately I am trying to accept maybe most of us just will never be close as a family.. At the moment I just feel myself pulling back.. I got to the point yesterday where I felt the only solution was in the words of the AA Big Book to let go absolutely… I send love when I can but words have been written and said and they hurt someone. I do not take that lightly but I know how distressed I was by the treatment my sister was receiving this last time and somehow I just felt I needed to find a way to vocalize it..

Who knows ultimately what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and perhaps there is no absolute black or white answer especially when it comes to maladies of the soul and spiritual life.. When we lose our connection to the fire of spirit that sustains us and can see no light ahead, that is indeed a dark time but it can bear a lot of fruit for some of us.. For me lately I feel I need to panic less and meditate more.. I will keep writing but I am going to try to keep the focus on me..

It occurred to me over past days too that I forgot the words from Al Anon which state “let there be no gossip or criticism of one another, instead let peace love and understanding of our fellowship grow in your hearts” I did forget to do that and its rebounded………… I may never be close to or trusted by my sister’s oldest son and family ever again. I just do not know.. but in time I will be far more mindful of my words. While none of us like to be silenced sometimes silence is best along with a recognition of what truly lies within and outside our own particular sphere of influence ‘control’ or power.

inner knowing

When the outer voices

Have drowned out

Go within

Be still

Listen to your heart

And call on love

When loneliness grows

Around your soul

Seek the comfort and the healing

Of the inner one who knows

How to grant you

Peace and strength

There is a source of healing

That lives within

When you give your power

To the nasty things others say

Then you so often forget

And end up betraying

The powerful wisdom

Of your inner truth

Trust in yourself

And in the power of love

To make sense of these fractures

For truly

You are never ever really alone

As long as you center your soul

Deep within

The force field

Of your inner knowing

Dreaming us

I dreamed of you

It was a mellow waking dream

The sewing together in imagination

And memory

Of the torn apart scattered fragments

Of our spiritual and earthly life

And then holding my self close

In love

Some gentle soft tears fell

Onto my pillow

I loved you then

But not in the way you needed

I love you still

For love like this does not end

With the tearing

Indeed it lives on

With each laboured breath

Each slowing heart beat

Even if in our physical life

Nothing much remains

To show of

The deepest ways

In which

It changed us