The cold shut down thing that narcissism is was never your fault

I get a bit triggered by recovery rage in terms of narcissistic abuse/recovery.  I still have a spot of compassion for the narcissist somewhere and when I think about it why should this be?  They act hurtfully without any care for our feelings putting their own needs first at every turn and then can act shaming and disparagingly towards us at the end when they dump and discard and blame us the victim who fell for it over and over and over again nurturing the seed they planted that some where, some how there was some fatal flaw with us.

Really it would be right to be raging mad and show no forgiveness.  But maybe the one we most need to show forgiveness for in this situation is ourselves.  If we continue to feel sorry for and or make excuses for the narcissist it will end up badly and we can and do feel ashamed for not having seen or for sacrificing our own tenderness and hurt on the alter of their devaluation or abuse.

The freedom for us only comes when we have the courage to walk away with our wounded heart.  We need to find those who will nourish our heart and help us to deal with the fallout.  I look sadly back on where I ended up around this time of year six years ago when the narcissist dumped me.  I had moved in with him, reluctantly and then accompanied him away on trip that I didn’t enjoy, sacrificing my own needs for his the whole way along.  I was not a victim as I chose to go because I had the empty hungry heart that was full of unresolved need from childhood and so many other ‘dumpings’.  Come to think of I it now I never had one partner who really every connected to me emotionally and I am sure that at the time of those other partnerships I was so scared of being hurt due to my past that I had massive defences in place against being hurt again and so at the first whiff of abandonment I would act out.   I now see in those earlier relationships before I got into recovery I too was emotionally unavailable.

Anyway this time six years ago I ran back to Sydney driving all night in my car ending up with a narcissistic relative who then kicked me out. I had a disastrous attempt at online dating, well not totally disastrous as I actually met a couple of good guys who treated me well, but at that point the wounds the narcissist had planted in me where growing into plants of pain that twisted their tendrils around all of my internal organs and made it impossible to sustain a new, loving connection.  And then sadly the realisation began to dawn that this was a deep wound that needed to be tended and healed from within, not outside.

I am so grateful that I eventually found myself a good therapist and for blogging and online information and support which really pulled me through.  But I also now know that a therapist only takes us so far in this healing, in the end it is our deepest self that needs to step in to love us and make us know that we were never worthy of the kind of abuse we had to put up with in the narcissistic relationship.  We didn’t fall for it because we were stupid, we fell for it because we longed for love but it seems to me we were naïve when we fell for the bait in that we had no reference for what a narcissist could do to us our of their injured self.  Because we have pure hearts that want to give and love that kind of thing is not on our radar and when it hits us out of left field we are punch drunk.

Come to think of that analogy when I first spent the night with my ex narc I got really dizzy.  It was the most bizzare energetic thing. I had been sober for 14 years at that point and I actually felt drunk.  I was so spun out by his energy that I got out of bed and then fell down and hit my head on the bedside table, that was the first of three ‘falls’ or going unconscious that I had in that relationship.  I wont go into all the ins and outs of the others on here but its clear to me many years later that something intense was going on energetically.

My ex narc had deep wounds.  He was deeply defended against grief.  Expressions of grief or compassion could send him ballistic.  For me to be with someone like that was impossible due to the grief I was carrying from all the hurt of my past.  I look back on those dark lonely painful years that led me into that relationship, of the accident I had had only 2 years before as a result of pain over the ending of my marriage when it proved to be deeply emotionally unsupportive and see how much my deeper self was trying to tell me something was wrong. For years coming out of the later relationship I blamed myself, if only I had done something different it would not have ended that way and the narc reinforced this view in email after email.  I now know that is DEFINATELY NOT TRUE.

I was only ever an innocent child longing for love, but that child also had to mature to understand that the world is full of pain and those who have been irrefutably deadened and damaged by it. There is no magic cure for narcissism.  For the narcissist to heal they would have to face depths in themselves which they rarely can.  So if you escaped and survived, please do not do what I did for over 4 years, do not blame yourself.  Do get informed on narcissism and learn about their damage, know it wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do or could or couldn’t change.  For in the end it was a learning experience; a  bitter, painful and excrutiating one for sure but one that led to a deeper darker education of your soul. The only one you have any power over is you and you need all of your power to heal and recover the wounds left by the narcissistic relationship.