Psychological Abuse Is Real

It’s been a month now since realizing what the last year of my life was and learning that I was able to put a name to it.

The truth about narcissistic abuse; or any psychological abuse for that matter is that I find it’s hard for people to grasp.

If I painted a picture of my abuser hitting me or if I had visible bruises or broken bones it would be much easier for people to make the connection between that and abuse, I get that.  I was talking to my mom the other day (because we all still need our mom no matter what age) and I was upset and I said “Why does it feel like some people think I’m exaggerating about this? Why does it feel like I need to shut up about this or something?” and of course my mother’s answer as it normally is was “Who cares what everyone thinks”.

She is right I realize, I mean who cares.  There are going to be people in your life that understand what has happened and who are able to empathize with that.  There are those people in your life that know  you so well and know that you’re not exaggerating in fact you’re holding a lot back and they love you and they want you to be okay.  Then there are those that have gone through the same thing; the easiest ones to talk to because they completely understand the lonely feeling of talking about it openly and then there are those who have never experienced an abuse like this before and perhaps they thought your abuser was a really swell guy (because most narcissists come off as really swell guys) and through no fault of their own they just simply lack the ability to empathize with you.

After talking to so many people about these types of psychological abuses, my survivor sessions and believing in the importance of sharing information so that it may help others I have decided that I do care.

I do care what people think.

I am a pretty confident and obviously a very ‘open’ person.  If I am feeling like I need to be quiet about what has happened to me or if I am feeling like there are those that think my story is exaggerated or that I’m blogging for their sympathy then imagine how hard it is for someone who’s not quite as confident or who’s not quite as open to come forward and talk about how they’ve been treated and the abuses they’ve suffered if they feel no one is going to believe them?  It’s a vicious cycle and so in that way, in line with my Mother’s thinking, I don’t care anymore.  Victims of any type of abuse need to feel like they can come forward.  Until we change society’s way of thinking about that, then abusers are able to continue year after year, person after person because no one is going to talk about it.

I know this isn’t healthy but I don’t want sympathy.  Although I’m writing about this my truth is that I’m still very much ashamed and embarrassed about letting myself be abused this way.  (I’m working on it)

For the most part I am lucky.  I have in my ‘tribe’ both men and women who are there for me and who believe me and who support me. I have people that will hug me and I have people that will be straight with me and tell me all the reasons I need to let go of something and I feel blessed, because without these people, this whole healing thing would be almost impossible.

I have people who have reached out to me through my blogs to tell me that they don’t have anyone, and I find this unimaginable. 

I do not have a broken arm and I never needed stitches but I will tell you about what a psychological abuse does, and in telling you I’m only going to skim the surface because trust me an emotional and mental abuse can be detrimental.

In the beginning of these relationships the narcissist collects the information they need to hurt you later.  To break it down there are a few main things that they collect such as:

·         Your flaws, insecurities, fears and any secrets you may have told them.  These abusers make you feel that you can trust them and so you tell them everything in the beginning.  They are the ones that were sent to you to save you from all others and you tell them everything that there is to know.  I told him old childhood wounds and my deepest fears.  He would ask me things like “Have you ever thought about suicide? To what extent?” They are so great at pretending that they are your soul mate and that they support everything about you and everything that you’ve been through and they empathize with you but later during that devaluation phase they use these things to provoke you and to demean you.  They like to see you hurting and so they take your worst fears and re-traumatize you with them over and over; it makes them feel good because they are exercising a power over you.  They will re-traumatize you and then hug you if you can picture that; it’s all a big game.

·         Your accomplishments and your strengths.

In the beginning that’s all the narcissist talks about; how awesome you are.  How he admires you so much for being such a strong person or a good writer.  He admires you so much for all that you’ve gone through in your life and still came out on top.  They love to be associated with people that other people like and who have accomplished something in their life because hanging out with someone like that makes them look good too.  In my case he would say I was incredibly sexy and that he loved how I was into fitness and how I could talk to people and write about things.  He used to tell me how he found me to be so smart and so interesting.  When he started to devalue me confident and sexy turned into me needing to be humbled or me needing to work out more.  My intelligence turned into me being a know-it-all.  He told me I didn’t have friends and that the people I called my friends were not my true friends. For a year I received my value and my worth from him and for the last year of that relationship he told me in so many words that my value and my worth were not real.  He degraded me, minimized my pain or my joy, and ignored my accomplishments.  I started to notice that he was also trying to change the opinions others had of me, or at least give me the impression that there were those that were less than impressed by me. 

·         You need to constantly please them and make them feel good but they are never satisfied.

 Like me, many people become dependent on the praise of their narcissist.  In fact they condition you to believe that the highest praise you will ever receive will come from them.  When they stop, they stop so suddenly and abruptly that it confuses you.  They stop talking to you, they always seem like they’re in a bad mood and even when you try to do something nice for them to make them feel better you’ve probably done it wrong.

Imagine for a second living for two years with someone who is manipulating every aspect of your life (sadly for many it’s much longer than that).  I know for the first year things seemed so incredibly awesome, but it doesn’t negate the fact that you were being manipulated.  Imagine then if you will having this person treat you like you’re god’s gift one day and the very next day they hate you.  They answer you sarcastically, they throw condescending remarks at you and blame you for everything.  During intimate moments they stare at you with cold dead eyes and you try to reason in your head that maybe they’re just tired or maybe they had a bad day.

Imagine the person you love laughing at you cruelly and making you feel like you’re not good enough.  They demean you and degrade you and for an entire year you walk on egg shells.  You don’t want to talk to the wrong people for fear you’ll be caught ‘flirting’.  You don’t want to wear the wrong clothes for fear they will send the wrong message.  You don’t want to say the wrong thing, even a little joke is misconstrued as an insult to them.  You hope that no one asks you to go for lunch or for dinner because you feel the need to report back and it never goes well.

You become so fearful of doing anything that you kind of just stop.

For me the biggest change was my fitness, I just didn’t do it anymore.  I spent so much of the last year trying to make myself better and work on the list of issues he said I had in order to please him and in order to once again gain his praise.  It was exhausting.

Someone asked me what the difference was between breaking up with someone and breaking up with a narcissist was and why it was so psychologically challenging when breaking up with a narcissist.

First of all, you don’t really ‘break up’ with a narcissist.  They discard you.  Like trash.

Secondly, when you break up with someone that you’ve had a relationship with you are able to look back on all the great times you had together.  I’ll use my last marriage as an example.  I am able to chat with my ex-husband about the time we all went skating or about the time we went to Alaska; how fun, what great memories.  Unfortunately relationships don’t always work out but in a typical relationship you have memories of the years you spent together and most of them are fond.  When a narcissist discards you is when you realize that nothing that happened before meant anything.  You are not able to draw on the memories of the times you spent together because they were painfully not real.  You thought they were real at the time, but they weren’t and so thinking about that and talking about that is torturous.

Yes, that is the main difference and of course the fact that you’ve given so much of your life to someone who didn’t actually want it is something that’s very difficult to come to terms with also.

Psychological abuse is very real.  You need to be open to this in order to support the men and women around you who are suffering from the aftermath of such abuses.  They need you.  They need you to be their friend, to talk to them and to listen to them and yes once in a while all they will also need a hug.