With the current political climate there’s been a lot of talk about narcissism, specifically Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Our society is beginning to realize that people with this particular affliction are really bad to follow because they’ll joyfully lead us to the cliff and watch us all jump off thinking that’s actually the best thing in the world to do. But that makes them sound crazy, the sort of crazy that you’d expect from an unmedicated homeless man screaming to himself in the streets. That sort of crazy is easy to identify and avoid if we wish to do so. What makes narcissism so toxic is the fact that these people cannot be immediately detected in fact they’re likable. Not just a little either, they really can lead whole swarms of people over a cliff because they’re just that good at manipulating people’s emotions. How do I know? Because I wasted a good deal of my life romantically involved with one. So please, if your curiosity is intent, sit down and read my little tale – see for yourself how someone as intelligent as myself could have been sucked into the delusion so hard and maybe, just maybe, I can get you to understand what we’re dealing with here.
- Identifying the Vulnerable
Narcissists love people who have high empathy and low self-esteem. It’s even better if they’re in a vulnerable position in life – they’re easier to manipulate that way and all that empathy can feed their ego like a spike in the veins.
My story starts with me living my life long before I ever knew about him. I was living with chronic illness which had previously caused me to stop my education in ninth grade. My friends left me soon after and by the time I finished up my teen years I was intensely isolated and didn’t have much reason for living but I did have one good friend who I talked to every day online. Her life was also a train wreck and we just clicked. For a while life was OK. We were the closest of long distance friends.
But a few years into this unconventional friendship she started talking to me about a boy she’d met online. He was kind of weird, didn’t speak great English, but she liked him. I didn’t think much about it. I mean I was always romantically cynical especially of online relationships (which were very new at the time) but whatever makes her happy, you know? But then this boy started talking to me on private chat. Why? No idea, I thought maybe he was just trying to improve his English. So I was polite. I talked back a little bit but thought little if nothing of him… until he started asking every girl he knew in the US to marry him. He asked my friend who by now had really fallen for him. When she declined he asked me four times to which I declined thinking he was surely some sort of nutter. He also asked a few other girls I was aware of. I told my friend that I didn’t think his intentions were good and I think she should steer clear of him but she really was into him so she eventually agreed to marry him.
- Triangulation
Triangulation in the context of narcissistic abuse is the act of bringing another person or a group of people into the dynamic of a relationship or interaction to belittle the victim and make the victim “vie” for the attention of the narcissist
Of course when that happened guess who was invited to the wedding to be the witness? That would have been me. So I let them come pick me up and drive me many hours away to another state to perform my duties as a friend. When I met him he seemed normal enough. He was friendly, healthy, sane by all appearances. I wasn’t quite convinced but I wasn’t going to not show up either.
Little was I to know that even before the wedding a long process of triangulation had begun. I wasn’t aware of it and I don’t honestly know how he achieved it but before I knew it my friend was feeling very self-conscious, like she was competing with me and I was the better person. Only I had no interest in her husband and told her this repeatedly and I wasn’t lying. I was not there to steal him in any way shape or form. In fact that first trip down there I spent all my time actively avoiding him at all costs. I didn’t even make eye contact. I just pretended he was a piece of furniture because I was there for her, not him. But things only got worse. She remained married to him for two and a half years and over that time he weaseled his way into my life as a “friend.” All the meantime my bestie was getting increasingly crazy about this. I kept reassuring her that I had no romantic interest in him but then on my last trip to see her she finally snapped and accused me of sleeping with him which blew me out of the water. What?! I went home and spent the next few weeks in emotional torment unable to eat because in one fell swoop I lost the only friend I had to paranoia and I lost her husband’s friendship as well because I was not going to keep talking to him, that’d be tantamount to treason in my books, a severe violation of the Women’s Code of Ethics.
- The Crazy Ex Girlfriend/Boyfriend
Narcissists never speak well of their exes, in fact they’re usually demonized and painted to be completely irrational and crazy – totally insufferable individuals that will make you feel sympathy for the narcissist while listening to their story.
The next few months were an emotional hailstorm. My friend never did start talking to me again which was intensely unfortunate because in her absence her husband was still trying to talk to me and he found my one weakness – my genuine concern for my friend. He weaponized this and would e-mail and call me constantly asking for advice on how to deal with her. He claimed she was crazy, she wasn’t allowing him to do anything by himself, she even had him working from home! I offered a listening ear, sometimes a suggestion or two, but nothing ever worked and they broke up. She still wasn’t talking to me and I was FAR from OK with him starting to pursue me romantically but that’s what he did and it put me in a very bad position.
- Love-Bombing
When a narcissist wishes to win over a romantic prospect they indulge in love bombing – that is overwhelming their new interest with time, attention, flattery, gifts, and everything they could possibly ever want from a romantic partner.
Life for me hadn’t changed in those years. I was still living a miserable existence and I still hadn’t made any new friends which meant I was completely alone. As much as I HATED the situation I found myself in I couldn’t help but feel a certain fondness to the only person still talking to me and he took that and ran with it. He told me how bad it felt to him to betray his wife like this, how he wasn’t OK with it either, but by now he was e-mailing me five book length e-mails every day and calling me every few days. It was more attention than I had ever received from anyone and he seemed genuinely interested in everything I had to say – hobbies, books, movies, life experiences, everything. By now I was twenty-five years old and had never had a boyfriend. I found it increasingly difficult to keep rejecting him. Over time he eroded my sense of what happened and substituted his own narrative. His now ex-wife and himself were never going to make it. They were a terrible match and as horrible as that was it shouldn’t affect us being a better match, should it? He offered to take me on an epic road trip across the entirety of the US, a dream I’d had since I was 16. He told me about how great life could be in an actual home by ourselves without having to live with my parents. He flooded me with gifts and affection and eventually I caved and we did visit all the Lower 48 States while he continued to tell me how special and amazing I was. It was a heady time. I was high as a fucking kite on all the attention.
- Disrespect & the Gradual Erosion of Self Esteem
Narcissists aren’t content just sucking in all the love and adoration of their partners they also have to feel better than them something they frequently do by starting a routine of breaking down their partner in an abusive cycle of disrespect, disregard, and blame.
But in these early days there was still a few hints here and there that things just weren’t always what they seemed. For one he seemed to be oversharing the intimate details of our relationship including when we were having trouble working around my virginity in the bedroom. He told a female friend of his, asked for her advice, as well as a random online forum. I was HORRIFIED. That was no one’s business but my own and maybe my gynecologist’s. Besides being a huge breach of trust I felt this little slip up was also insanely disrespectful of me. When I tried to voice my concern it was far too late because I didn’t figure this out until months after the fact and by now I was made to think I was just overreacting to long dead history.
He always seemed happy, never really got angry. He was sure to tell me this was because our relationship and communication skills were just so good there was no reason to fight. I felt so assured. Maybe perfect relationships did exist after all… but then there would be times he’d say something weirdly disrespectful that seemed to come out of nowhere and be a complete slap in the face. Once while trying to find a game to purchase he said out of the blue, “We won’t get this one. It’s a game of strategy. I’d beat you in three moves, maybe two, and that wouldn’t be any fun.” I know people often joke-spar with their partners but something about this statement didn’t seem like a happy little joke it seemed cruel. When I asked what he meant by that he just continued to stroke his own ego and tell me how badly he’d beat me at this game neither one of us ever played because I was just so bad at strategy. I brushed it off. Maybe he was emotionally color blind and didn’t realize he was hurting me. I went on with my day but over the years he was sure to casually mention how bad I was at a lot – cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, doing dishes, painting, putting up drywall, lugging heavy things, solving math equations, making money, making friends, taking care of myself. Some of these things had a grain of truth in them as I wasn’t overly fond of domestic chores but I still did them, all of them, as he stayed away twelve or more hours a day at work. I brushed off these comments even as they started to throw me into a depression and make me want to not bother doing anything. Why fucking bother if I’m so bad at it? And if he’s so great at everything why isn’t he doing it?! I stopped cooking. I still did everything else but as quickly and poorly as possible.
- Fostering Dependency
Narcissists love to be the center of their romantic partner’s universe. They like to feel like the world would collapse if they weren’t in it and they make their partners believe this as well.
Life went on. By now we were living in our first proper house. I was running the farm of my dreams and VERY happy. Everything I could have ever wanted was here. I had a reason to wake up in the morning, a job to do, fulfillment, purpose, and everything was expanding, growing, and becoming absolutely beautiful. Even my health had improved in leaps and bounds. I still struggled but not like I did before. Even on bad days here I was still able to get up and feed and water all the animals and even if that was all I did that was still a huge accomplishment. I knew none of this would be possible on my own. I was still incapable of holding down an outside job because of my health so I was completely financially dependent on him and he made damn sure I knew this by constantly telling me what a great job he had, how wonderful he was paid, and he continued to lavish me with gifts and outings which he flashed just as much as cash. And if being financially dependent wasn’t enough he made sure he was the emotional center of my world by telling me how flaky, unreliable, and just plain terrible all my friends were and how sad that was I couldn’t seem to achieve anything better for myself. I hadn’t yet realized that the farm was what was making me so happy. Increasingly hanging around him just made me feel exhausted and shitty.
- Sleep Deprivation
Since narcissists must always maintain control they often employ sleep deprivation to keep their partners easier to manipulate fully knowing that an ill slept mind does not work at full capacity.
- The Ever Moving Goal Posts
Narcissists expect nothing less than perfection from their mates. This means that whatever they accomplish it isn’t enough and they will be continuously “encouraged” to do more, accomplish more, be more.
By now the little hobby farm I had wanted had somehow turned into a near industrial size heritage poultry breeding facility that I was solely taking care of. And even that wasn’t enough. Now it had to be profitable. Somehow my vision of having a flock of 30 or so birds had morphed into 250 which now needed to be tested by the state so I could sell hatching eggs in the mail. And we had to go to the town to become an official business because…. Well fuck if I knew. By now he was barely coming home at all and when he did he slept for at most six hours a night and expected me to get up with him. I hated weekends because I knew I couldn’t sneak any naps in and I was not functional on 4-6 hours of sleep a night. Mondays became crash day – the day I slept and recovered from my weekend and did little else. Three and four day weekends which used to bring me great joy at the beginning of our relationship now only brought existential dread. I knew he’d want to not only not sleep but also do an impossible amount of heavy duty tasks (usually building or home repair) in an insanely small amount of time and I was expected to have the strength and drive of a twenty year old man while assisting in these projects. When I repeatedly told him I was strong for a woman but still a fucking woman he would brush off my complaints like I was being silly – until at one point exhausted, fed up, and knowing full well I couldn’t hold a 400 pound door above my own head, I told him he better start sucking cock if he wanted to have a partner that could do these things. This was probably the beginning of the end – because I was starting to show he’d pushed me as far as I could go and now I was starting to fight back.
- Being the Center of Attention
A narcissist is only happy when they are the center of attention. If their partner starts to outshine them it’s not going to end well for them.
A few things had happened in those few months. For one I was actually making the farm successful against all odds, I was predicting we’d actually be in the black the following spring. I was already signing people up for classes I was going to host there. I had found my niche! In addition to this my once shy persona was slowly slipping away and I was beginning to socialize, this included shooting the breeze one sunny afternoon with one of his musical crushes, a musician who as chance would have it grew up in the same town I did. I knew something was off with him that day but I didn’t know what. He seemed aloof, standoffish, somehow annoyed with me. This would be the last time he ever had me meet anyone. I’d done the unthinkable – I took the spotlight away from him. And to be frank I think my ghost was haunting him in the office too where I am fairly certain the women were asking how I was doing with my chicken farm since it was becoming abundantly apparent that I was the one doing everything except the building. I was feeding the animals, choosing stock, running the business side of things. Hell I’d even gone on at length with some of the women in the office about how it was me and only me who was in charge of doing home slaughter and processing of extra roosters. That was the last time I was in the office.
- Disregarding Personal Boundaries & Maintaining Relationships with Exes
Narcissists need love, attention, and affection from as many sources as possible to feel good about themselves. This is why they frequently keep contact with exes – both to fill their endless need of ego boosts and just in case they might need to use them again in the future. The needs of their current partner is never as important as their own.
By now I was getting a churning feeling in my gut but when I would ask what was wrong and why my love was acting so aloof he would tell me it was nothing. It was also nothing when he just casually mentioned he was talking to his ex-wife again. This was the ONE thing I had asked him not to do in our relationship because things at one point had gotten so bad I was actually afraid she might cause bodily injury to either one of us. Basically I was afraid of being shot and he agreed never to talk to her again – but now? Now he was showing me the e-mails he was writing her to prove how good he was being and that he at least wasn’t talking about me (he’d wait until I wasn’t watching any more to do that.) In the meanwhile he had started to flaunt his relationships with the women at work telling me how great it was I was so trusting that I didn’t even ask for him to call me to keep me updated on his whereabouts when he was out having dinner with them. He’d say this in front of me to other women making it seem as if he was complimenting me when really he was doing the opposite – pointing out how stupid I was to trust him. At home when we were alone he’d gotten into a new routine of ignoring me as much as possible. Our once vibrant sex life became a twice monthly chore where I once again took on 100% of the work as he played the part of a warm dildo. Our excursions to fun places became the whispers of possible plans. He’d long since stopped spoiling me with homemade dessert crepes and gifts. And the more I looked back the more I realized he stopped being a conversationalist before even moving in with me and by now he scarcely said a word to me. Now he was spending up to six weeks away from home in the company of a woman he’d admitted he had feelings for but he wasn’t cheating on me, I should just trust him!
- Trauma Bonding
One way to keep someone within your control and keep them coming back for more is to treat them as shitty as possible and then at the end of it all say, “Look! We’ve survived the worst! We can do this!” Mutual trauma, even when it’s caused by one of the individuals involved, can act like a drug on the victim.
- Becoming the Permanent Center of Attention
When a narcissist is ready to break up with an individual they often plan to it correspond with some big event in the victim’s life – a promotion, a new job, the birth of a baby, the wedding or funeral of a loved one, or in my case my birthday. This is so that whenever you think about this event you’re also forced to think about them even long after they’re no longer in your life.
The break up came out of nowhere to me. Although I knew he’d been distant in the past few months I attributed this to his work putting too much stress on him. It’s not like we were fighting – in fact we’d only had one fight in five years and it revolved around dog poop. I won with “shit happens,” something that was again confirmed by a series of dog owning coworkers. More triangulation. I hadn’t realized that literally everything I said, including personal opinions, had to be confirmed by at least one other individual before he’d listen to or believe them. The day he told me he was breaking up with me he seemed like a completely different person, he smiled as he told me. There would be no “talking it out” or closure for me because, “I’ve made my decision and you can’t change it.” Even though I was the worst person affected I was never a part of the conversation.
- The Blame Game
Narcissists never take responsibility for their own actions. They will always blame their victims.
Of course the break-up was all my fault and none of his. He painted this rosy picture about how he couldn’t possibly be happy with me when he could get himself a career woman, again rubbing it in that I was unable to work. He even called me a burden and when I started yelling he dropped the B bomb on me and called me a bitch. He said he couldn’t stay with me because, “it’s not within your nature to have children.” We’d never talked about having children. He never asked. He never actually saw me with children, this was something he made up after I complained about a problematic dog and goat we had. Because clearly babies are exactly like that. Also on the roster of things absolutely wrong with me was the fact our sex life had dissolved into shit. If I was concerned he was courting another woman I should have “upped my game” and telepathically known he was into lingerie (which by the way I would have never worn because THAT’S NOT WHO I AM.) All the things he cited for the reason he loved me in the first place he was now saying was the reason for ditching me.
- Narcissistic Amnesia, Word Salad, Gaslighting, and other Crazy-Making Behaviors
Narcissistic amnesia is when denying responsibility a narcissist will claim they don’t remember what they’ve said or say outright they never said such a thing. Word salad is a series of nonsense they sputter when you have them cornered that makes no sense at all. Gaslighting is when they make you question your own reality by substituting their own.
After the breakup my world fell apart. He wanted me out of the house immediately as if I was instantly disposable. He already had plans to move 12 hours away the next day and didn’t want me in his house even though by now we had 250 chickens, 30 ducks, 3 goats, and 4 rabbits who, “I would have dealt with.” (How?! By calling the Humane Society and saying you just abandoned them all?!) I FOUGHT and I fought hard not to keep him, who I was already repulsed by, but to keep the life I had there. I had nowhere to go. I had no savings, no job, and sure as hell didn’t have anywhere to bring my animals which I had worked so hard on. So over the next six and a half months I lived in that house alone, disbanding my flock, watching my entire life dissolve. In all that time he refused to talk about the relationship AT ALL, and made me chase him for attention while being super boring and only talking about work and what he ate for lunch, meanwhile expecting me to tell him about all the great adventures I was going on in my “post break-up vacation” living in the house. This was one of the many things he said that made no sense. Whenever I cornered him and got him to say anything about our relationship ending it’d be complete Gibberish, something you might expect to hear from someone with dementia. The beginning of the sentence would directly contradict the end and then he’d say it made perfect sense and I was the crazy one. He told me in the last months of our relationship it wasn’t him who’d stopped engaging it was me. I didn’t have any friends [except the ones he was always badmouthing or ignoring] I was the one who, “stopped taking care of yourself.” Not him, even though by now he was at work for so many hours he’d usually take one shower every week or two. But in his head it was me who stopped taking showers because he didn’t witness them. I was taking them while he was at work almost daily. It all made my head hurt. It made me think he had gone off the deep end. I wondered if he was on drugs. If he’d kept his entire shitty personality a secret from me for five years what’s a little drug use thrown in? The more days that went by the angrier I got, the more I resented him, and the less I made contact until one day I just left. I was a month early from the date I said I’d leave but he was coming home to tell me something – I knew what it was, that he was involved with another woman, and to prevent me from murdering him on the spot I just packed up the rest of my things, cried a sad goodbye to the animals I didn’t have time to home, and left them in the care of a sitter.
He tried to engage me from there. Called me a monster for leaving the animals, said I was criminally responsible for abandoning them (unlike him several months earlier.) He demanded I take down the FaceBook page I had created for the farm. I renamed it, left up a sweet note saying what had happened in only the glossiest of terms, “We have separated and the poultry farm is no longer but the goats remain on the property and if you wish to keep updated on them contact my ex. I will be using this page for my new future farm wherever I may end up. Thank you for all your support and patience.”
- No Contact Policy
The only way to prevent further emotional damage from a narcissist is to go cold turkey and never speak to them again. If you don’t they will suck you back in with all the ‘good’ before bashing you over the head with the ‘bad’ which will be far worse than it was the first time around because this time they know how far they can push you.
We never talked again. The spell was broken. I wasn’t vying for his attention and he no longer had any use for me. Several months after this he was married to the new woman and a month or two after that she gave birth to their new family. Again I said nothing. In all honesty I felt bad for that woman and thanked her for taking that bullet for me. I was within months of actively planning for a baby when the break-up happened because he was talking about marriage at the time. Little was I to know he wasn’t talking about marrying me. How silly of me to assume!
- The Aftermath
People who survive narcissistic abuse are among the strongest people you will ever meet. They are emotional Olympians and fiercely independent because when you’re in a relationship with a narcissist you learn how to take care of ALL your own needs. Every. Single. One.
Narcissists seek to destroy those who they think are better than them. Joke was on him. He misjudged. At the beginning of our relationship and throughout it I was shy but I didn’t have a low self-esteem. I shrugged off all his cruelty because it didn’t affect me. And at the end of our relationship you know what I felt beyond the dread of the future? Relief. Freedom. Pure unadulterated JOY. I was liberated from my shackles! I now knew what the world looked like, I had a shit ton of new skills under my belt, and I knew I could accomplish anything. That’s why I never cried over losing him. Not even a single tear. I just brushed it off, realized he was never worth my time or attention, and went on a new adventure. Even better two years after the relationship ended, on my birthday, I published my first book about the whole experience officially taking the power of memory away from him. Now whenever I have a birthday I’ll think of it as the birth of my professional writing career not the end of my existence as I knew it. Yeah. I’m stronger than anyone thought and I’m not stopping. Instead I am taking all these experiences and going into the future with a knowledge I hope to share. If it works perhaps I can spare someone else from the misery of a similar relationship or provide a bit of comfort and support to someone who finds themselves in a similar situation today. And if that happens… I win. I always win. Genuine kindness is far more powerful than emotional manipulation ever will be.
**All images in this article are from photos taken by the author Theophanes Avery. If you’d like to read her full story buy their book Honoring Echo on Amazon.**