I would lie awake at night and wonder how he could have looked at me the way he had if he did not love me. 

When love is a lie, can people fake enlarged pupils and do they look at you with their lips slightly parted, as if they are dying of thirst and you are a pool of endless water? 

Do you look into their eyes and see yourself reflected back like rays of gold illuminating a forgotten darkness? 

Do you catch them staring at you like maybe you are made of magic?

Could I really have been so wrong?  Could I have misread him so completely?  Was it all just a game to him then, and was he just pretending?

And yet if he loved me that much, how could he have betrayed me so deeply and on so many levels, again and again. 

And how could he, when I confronted him, say the cold, cruel things to me about his betrayals? 

How could he shut me out so many times as if I meant nothing and discard me to be with someone else, when all I ever wanted to do was be his girlfriend?

I spent hours out of evenings, that amounted first to days, and then, ultimately, weeks, turning this question over again and again in my mind. 

For two years, I went over the details, putting each one I could recall in an imaginary “yes” or a “no” column.  Where does this incident go?  What about this one? 

I’d have myself convinced that he did love me. I’d remember things I’d discovered by accident that he’d never intended me to know that seemed to indicate that he did– text conversations he’d had with other people, pictures of him wearing my bracelet on his wedding day. [Read: 5 Reasons Lovebombing is a Stealth Danger]

Why would he have taken these actions or had these conversations unless he loved me?  He couldn’t use them to impress me if he had not intended for me to find out about them.

Then I’d also remember the secret things he had done to betray me that he’d also never intended me to find out about, the things he’d never meant to show me because they would have tampered with the image he wanted to present to me: all the other women he’d said he loved, all the horrible things he’d said about me to them.

None of it made any sense.

While we were still together, I asked him if he loved me dozens of times, waiting to hear something that would make the world he had called love when he constructed it stop circling me so I could stop feeling crazy. 

His responses ranged from loving (“Of course I did. You’re the love of my life”) to enraged (“If you can’t see my love for you, then nothing I did was ever good enough for you”). Neither of those responses, nor anything else he ever said that fell in between those extremes, put the pieces in place. [Read: Things Narcissists Say to Give Themselves Away]

Did he or didn’t he?

Settling on love/not love as the final answer was the puzzle I could never solve.

In all honesty, I know that he is the only one who will ever really know whether he loved me or not. No one can read his mind, and no matter what he says, no one will ever know whether it is the truth when so much of what he does and says is a lie.

Yet, it’s not normal to come away from a relationship unclear about whether or not you were even loved. What I wanted was a way to reasonably reconcile his contradictory behaviors in a way that made sense in the way that I had experienced them.

There had to be a way to explain how it was possible that he could engage in acts of love and acts of betrayal nearly simultaneously. Even if I didn’t like the answer, I needed to understand how that was possible in order to make sense of my past.

Reading most books and articles on narcissists were no help. 

Almost everything I read said that narcissists were incapable of love. In other words, he meant only the acts of betrayal and his acts of love were false– meant to elicit what he could get from me. 

This explanation seemed incomplete and incompatible with what I’d experienced, however.  It also seemed like a blanket statement, given that the literature does not even agree on what causes narcissism. [Read: The Unlucky 13 Different Types of Narcissism]

I continued to research to find out whether it was even possible for narcissists to love, which would indicate an experience more in line with the one I had had. 

I did indeed find some research to support this idea.  It all stated, however, that there are limitations on that love. [Read: Can a Narcissist Love? It’s Complicated]

They can love you as long as you do not criticize them– and they perceive bringing up any of their wrongdoing, no matter how gently– as criticism.

They can love you as long as you keep supplying whatever it is that brings them happiness.

They can love you as long as you are happy and as long as the focus of attention is primarily on them.

They can love you as long as you let them control enough aspects of your life so that they do not feel threatened.

If you do bring up how you have been hurt or do not provide them with enough attention or do anything that feels threatening, they feel wounded, as if you are the one who doesn’t love them, and can engage in horrendous acts of “revenge.”

They lack something called “object constancy,” and are unable to remain a consistent, trustworthy person when you have an argument or do something they don’t like. You cease to be “good” in their eyes. [See: The Ultimate Narcissistic Abuse Dictionary]

I kept searching for more answers. One of the primary underpinnings of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is that two seemingly contradictory ideas can be true at the same time.

For example, I can accept myself the way I am at this moment and I can also know I need to change something about myself. Through acceptance of these ideas, we can validate where we are now and also empower ourselves to do something differently.

Could this idea be applied to a narcissistic relationship? Did he have to love me or hate me? 

With this idea in mind, over time, my question changed. 

I no longer wanted to know if he loved me or not. I began to think philosophically about what love really is and who gets to define it. Is this really love?  If I am not allowed to be a whole person with my own concerns and desires and still have him love me, is it love?  If he felt it as love, does that make it love? [Read: Getting Over a Narcissist Means Reflecting on Love]

“I never lied to you about my love for you,” he said to me many times.

I believe that he believes that.  And yet the strength of that love could only ever be as powerful as the worst of the things he ever did to me all those times he couldn’t pretend to be blind anymore, and, still, he did them anyway.

His inability to understand this is what so clearly illuminates him as a narcissist. [Read: When Did I Realize He Was a Narcissist?]

Don’t forget to check out these resources:

• Why Can’t I Just Leave?
• Comprehensive Narcissistic Abuse Dictionary
• The Best Resources for Narcissistic Abuse Recovery

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The post Does the Narcissist Really Love You? appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

I was so innocent.

There was the incident where he told me to stop going out with other guys before we’d even met in person. I’d mostly found it amusing. Surely, he couldn’t have been serious.

It was like a joke. Like, why should he even care if a woman he barely knows and hasn’t even met yet is having a date? No one is jealous like that in real life.

Right?

[Read: Why Cognitive Dissonance is Trauma to Narcissistic Abuse Survivors]

There were also the early days when we’d go to dinner, and he’d ask me what I was thinking of ordering.

“Probably this salad right here,” I’d say, pointing at the menu.

He would scrunch up his nose and frown. “Ah, baby, you don’t want that.”

I’d raise my eyebrows at him, again, amused. There was something about his response that was a little intriguing. Was he serious?  Who would seriously say that on a date?

I mean, I’m an independent woman. Men don’t tell me what to do. But instead of getting indignant, I sort of laughed. “You can’t tell me what to order.” And he’d back down, smile, make his own joke.

It was like a game we played. What were the edges beyond which I would not let him play?

Then there were all those funny things he used to say after we became a couple.  He would look hard into my mirror, flexing, and say, “Baby, you’re lucky to have such a sexy boyfriend.”

And I’d laugh. No one says things like that seriously. What a sense of humor.

How was I supposed to know these were red flags of narcissism, too? It was too obvious.

Invisible Red Flags Become Suffocating Red Gags

Later in the relationship, things weren’t so funny. He didn’t like it when I stayed out late.

“Are you home?” he texted me one night while I was still out with my friends.

“No, not yet.”

“Clubs close at three,” he responded, as if he thought he was catching me doing something scandalous.

“This one closes at four.” It was a new place to which I had never gone out before that night where they had live shows.

“I want you home by four-thirty.” Oh really? 

And again, back to me calmly explaining fundamental principles, this one about basic respect toward another person’s autonomy. “You can’t tell me what to do. As long as I’m not out cheating on you, you can’t tell me I can’t be out like that.”

“Fine. You do you and I’ll do me.”

It was the first of what would be many threats to come over the years when I stood up for myself and asserted my basic rights over my own life. 

[Read What Do Narcissists Want?]

If I didn’t do as he said just because it was what he wanted and for no other reason, he was going to … [leave it to my imagination]. But I could bet it would be something that would extend beyond merely spending his time as he pleased unhassled.

Still, even then, as I explained my basic human rights to my newish boyfriend, I’d thought I had it all under control. 

I thought he said and did these things because he was the innocent one. I chalked what were red flags of narcissism up to a lack of experience. Maybe he didn’t know how to behave in relationships and his insecurities were getting the best of him.

I had no idea what I was dealing with. 

[Read: Five Warning Signs of a Sociopath]

All I was really doing was projecting my own innocence onto him.

In time, he finally figured out that if he wanted my compliance, trying to dominate me was never going to work. Instead, all he had to do was pry my heart open with his own and I willingly complied by myself and beyond his wildest dreams. 

He had it all under control.

Join the community to get more articles like this one delivered straight to your inbox. 

If you like this article, you’ll also enjoy these:

• Things Narcissists Say to Give Themselves Away
• 7 Narcissist Lies That Are Easy to Spot
• The 5 Stages of No Contact with a Narcissist
• How to Know When a Narcissist is Finished with You
• What a Narcissist Says About Breakups: They Never Let You Go
• Love Bombing: Signs You’re in Danger

The post I Ignored All Those Red Flags of Narcissism appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

I understand everything now.

They are two sides of the same coin, neither truth nor lie. They are only the distorted reflections of your sickness.

It feels like a grenade just went off. The shrapnel falls, scattering. All the clues flood into the right cracks all at once, but too quickly for me to absorb each in isolation.

I begged you for answers so many times. But how could I have expected you to give them to me when you did not understand any point of view other than your own?

You could not find the disconnect between our perspectives anymore than I could, so how could you provide any answers other than the ones you had already given me–the ones that hadn’t made any sense to me?

I am humbled by how differently two people can see the world, how a fraction of a shift in worldview can create realities so vastly different it is almost as if one of them dreamed the other up.

Which one of us was the dreamer?

Idealization as Narcissistic Self-Hate

The narcissistic cycle of abuse comprises three stages:  idealization, devaluation, and discard. During the idealization stage, narcissists love bomb their partners, bombarding them with an overwhelming amount of attention and flattery, and dramatic, quickly-occurring declarations of love. [Read How the Narcissistic Cycle of Abuse Keeps Us from Leaving]

Narcissists put their partners on a pedestal, but their own hidden needs at that stage are more significant than what their partners can ultimately fill. 

Author and self-described narcissist H.G. Tudor writes:

“It has been amazing so far, hasn’t it? I told you I would love you like nobody else ever has, and I delivered.

“Okay, I was actually loving your praise, love, admiration, and adoration of me, but to you, it felt like I loved you in a way which went beyond anything you had ever experienced before. That certainly kept you happy. You told me every day how happy you were…

“You told me every day just how much you loved me. You cared for me, looked after me, and helped me in so many ways…

“Of course, it was not all one way. I gave you everything I could. I only did it, though, to get your fuel. I give to receive. I do not know any other way.

“You sometimes told me about your love for me being without condition. I didn’t understand what you meant. No, that is wrong. I understood what you meant, but I struggled to imagine doing this.

“I love you with so many conditions, the chief one being that I only actually love you for the fuel that you give me. Not for who you are. It will take you a long time to understand this and even longer to accept that this is the case…

“You gave me absolutely everything. Your heart, your soul, and you poured every essence of your being into the concept of us. I know you did this because I could see you doing it. I had to because I needed that in order to sustain me.

“The more you gave, the more brilliant I became, so you gave even more in return. It was an upwards spiral. Two people working in magnificent harmony. You because you believed in us. Me because I needed your fuel. Not that you ever realised this. Why would you?

“I became the perfect partner, complimenting you, praising you, and loving you in that oh so spectacular way. It was intense, it was scintillating, and I made sure I became everything that you would want from a relationship.

“It was a great deal for us both. I made you feel ultra-special. You gave me the ultra fuel that I need. Does it matter that what I provided to you was based on something else? I would say not. You still got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

Idealized Then Devalued

You created such an elaborate world for me. 

Do you remember this?

This idealized place where you made me “the one.”

Where you had only ever kissed girls who were your girlfriends, who numbered on the one hand, where almost all of them had cheated on you.

Where various other edges were flattened or blurred to fit the narrative you wanted me to have.

Where when I gave you a tiny piece of my heart, you just held onto it patiently until I gave you another one… and then one day, you were holding all of it.

You created that reality for me, but those moments were real ones. This, I know now.

You always insisted… insisted… insisted over first months and then years, “I never lied to you about my love for you.”

I was so confused about all those tears you cried to everyone about how I was the love of your life and what that gesture of wearing the bracelet I gave you on your wedding day could have meant. It used to drive me crazy trying to figure out how or why you would do these things and then hurt me in the ways that you did.

In one of the very last conversations we had, I begged you for closure. I begged you to tell me you never loved me before we stopped talking because I wanted to hear the truth from you. I wanted your words and your actions to align for once finally.

And what was your response? “I love you, and I always will. There’s your closure.”

I was infuriated, finding it the most selfish response you could have given me. Nothing about that response or your actions at that time said “love.”

But that’s because I wasn’t thinking like you.

I know you don’t even know that you loved me only because I loved you so much.

How could you know? This is what love feels like to you, and you know no other way. You didn’t love me in this way to hurt me, and if you could love me for myself, maybe you would have. But you can’t.

What you really love is the way I loved you– the way I mainlined your love like it was heroin and then poured myself all over you.

And here’s the worst part–you were hoping I would be the one who would never let you down, who could love you every moment of every day, no matter what you did, for the rest of your life, while feeling deep in your heart that that would never be the case.

And then it happened… I did let you down.

It was the self-fulfilling prophecy that I understand, but you won’t.

When I found out about the others, my despair at what you had done felt like criticism to you, a lack of gratitude for all you had given me.

When I withdrew my trust, to you, that made me selfish and self-absorbed.

But most importantly, when I tried to encourage you to go about things the legitimate way and earn my trust back, that request threatened to blow apart the entire world you had built for us. It challenged the fragile perception that the man you had created for me was beautiful and perfect.

To you, everything you did after that was just insurance against being rejected and alone as I continued my inevitable downfall in your eyes from my position as your favored one.

Once I had seen that the reality wasn’t real, there was no going back, and you knew it. To me, it was all just an inexplicable pattern of behavior by someone who claimed to love me that was damaging what we had together.

But you didn’t value what we had together, or me. You wanted only my admiration back, that pure, unfiltered worship.

Devaluation as the Narcissist’s Self-Hate

During the idealization stage, the partners fall deeply in love with the narcissist and form a bond that is difficult to break. Narcissists, however, may idealize their partners, but they do not form an attachment. [Read Can a Narcissist Love? It’s Complicated]

When the idealization stage is over, the relationship begins to deteriorate during the devaluation stage when the partner starts to disappoint the narcissist in inexplicable ways. The “real world” penetrates the fantasy, and the partner begins to turn to other interests.  The chemical “high” caused by the initial stage of falling in love begins to fade. 

The narcissist’s mask begins to fall away as he or she loses the feeling of being “special” and adored. They begin to treat their partners the way they feel about themselves on the inside.

Idealization and devaluation are two sides of the same coin. They are both projections of the narcissist’s self-hate.

They idealize to receive your love and negate their self-hatred. When that doesn’t work for them, they devalue to project that self-hatred onto you, so they don’t have to own it.

It’s a trick mirror.

Seeing the Idealization and Devaluation Distortion

The answers were right in front of my face the entire time. We were looking right past each other.

I dreamed that you were just like me, and you dreamed that I could live in a cage, without thoughts or plans that contained anything but you. 

The difference was, you sold me my dream while stealing my soul with your lies, keeping from me the truth that would show me the dream was only an illusion.

I’d see love on your face, and you’d tell me you love me. “Why don’t you believe me?” you’d scream, as my heart would peel away in strips with each new betrayal. Your lies would force me to confront the false reality you created.

He’s not who I thought he was, I would think.  And you’d see the pain on my face, and I’d tell you I was dying. “Why did you hurt me like this?” I’d scream, as your heart would harden to ash with each fresh tear.

And you’d be forced to confront the false reality you created too, run away from the shame of your actions with the back-flip: She’s not who I thought she was, you would think.

Of course, I’m not. I’m a human being. I came from my own world, and I have my own reality.

You would go to your death insisting you loved me. And believing it too. This, I know. You said one day I would know how much you loved me, and you were right.

You loved me in a dream once, where no one ever cries.

Join the community to get more articles like this one delivered straight to your inbox. 

If you like this article, you’ll also enjoy these:

• 7 Reasons Why Narcissists Won’t Give You Closure
• Can a Narcissist Love? It’s Complicated
• How to Know When a Narcissist is Finished with You
• What a Narcissist Says About Breakups: They Never Let You Go
• Narcissist Gaslighting Examples in Romantic Relationships

Source

Tudor, H.G. (2016). “Reality Check.” Knowing the Narcissist. Retrieved at https://narcsite.com/2016/08/08/reality-check/

The post Idealization and Devaluation: Why Narcissists Flip appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

The injury was accidental and occurred because of my own stupidity.

“Did anyone give you this injury? Push you? Hit you?”

They kept asking at the hospital, and I knew what they really wanted to know. I thought of everything I could say to reassure all of them. I live with a roommate. I don’t even have a boyfriend. There were people with me at the time the injury happened, I said. The last one I kept repeating to indicate I had witnesses who could vouch for my story.

It was all true.

But it was a very triggering day overall.

It reminded me of a time I’d been to the urgent care clinic during my relationship with my ex-boyfriend with a story prepared ahead of time about what happened to my jaw when I’d been asked almost exactly the same set of questions.

It happened during that messy grey area after I had found out about all of his secret lives and he had moved out of our apartment but I still needed to interact with him for a few months longer until our legal and financial obligations together ended completely.

On that morning, I’d woken up and my face felt as if a freight train had smashed into it. I peered into the mirror. The right side was bright red with a deep bluish tint under my cheekbone.

My phone was full of messages: “Last night I got out of hand, but you didn’t have to make me leave. If you were a good person, you would have let me stay. I was drunk and I drove home. I could have died. You don’t care about me.”

My head was pounding. I couldn’t even process what had happened the night before or think through the implications of the texts waiting for me right then. I had to think about what to do in the next few minutes. At work, we had a staff retreat. Someone from outside was coming in to guide us through some bonding exercises that would hopefully help us “gain a deeper understanding” of one another’s work styles then we would have a working lunch. I couldn’t miss work that day.

What was I going to tell everyone? I wanted to laugh at the absurdity. It was like a riddle that I had to solve: what was heavy enough to cause facial bruising this severe and could get close enough to the face, but wasn’t a fist? I couldn’t think straight.

I swallowed some Advil and pulled on clothes. On the Metro on the way to work, I finally came up with a story. As we filed into the conference room to start our activities, I could see people start to look at me, their eyes lingering a little too long. I tried to smile, but it wasn’t until I opened my mouth to speak, my first time that morning, that I realized I was going to have trouble doing so.

“You won’t believe what happened last night,” I said to my supervisor through gritted teeth and a pounding head that felt stuffed full of cotton. “I was in the lobby of my apartment building last night when I got home and this kid was twirling around in a circle with his book bag and accidentally hit me with it.” I pointed at my jaw. Did that sound stupid? Surely, she wouldn’t believe me. Then what would I do?

But she only shook her head hard and made a tsk sound in sympathy.

I tried to focus, but my jaw was throbbing. What I couldn’t understand was how he had punched me on the right side of my face which felt as if it was on fire and was where all the bruising was, but when I had tried to open my mouth, it was the left side that hammered with pain. Was my jaw out of alignment? Could that even happen?

By the afternoon, when the retreat ended, the pain was so severe that I had taken to not speaking at all and all I could think about was putting ice on it.

I decided to go to the Urgent Care Clinic. An x-ray verified it wasn’t broken. There was tissue damage and bone bruising. And I had a concussion. I went home and went to bed.

I woke up to several missed calls from him. I’d let him know earlier that I was going to the doctor. His tone had changed considerably to blaming me for “letting” him drive home drunk to concern over my injury and wanting to come and see me.

I never told anyone the details of this story. Or any of the stories like this one. Until now. It wasn’t the only time he ever did anything like that, although he preferred to do his damage in the shadows and create wounds in thoughts not flesh.

I kept the medical paperwork though and put it away carefully, so I would never forget that this had happened… to remind myself of what he was capable of doing.

* * * * *

He had scraped raw everything inside me and dug down to the bottom. Where once I’d been loving, gentle and trusting, he’d scooped all that out and trounced on it. He’d turned me wild or dead inside. Every method at his disposal he used to create a climate of fear, humiliation, and despair, and I’d been afraid to tell anyone about how bad it really was.

And yet he’d told everyone I was the horrible one.

Things were always upside down somehow. Lies were truth. Love was betrayal. Blame was twisted onto me for expecting basic dignity and respect, while my very act of living and thinking independently of him was framed as disrespect. He always maintained control, yet he found a way to make himself the victim.

As in– his ex was “crazy,” a stalker, who wanted to use him for things. And then there was that other one who abused him. And they were all cheaters and “whores” who took him for granted. And yet they were all oh-so-obsessed with him.

Then suddenly it was me.

Sitting in an urgent care clinic alone with a concussion telling made-up stories about how I got it, while he gleefully let everyone believe I was awful, knowing all he’d done. Upside down.

Yes, he scoops out everything good. And he pours himself in just so he can see his own reflection. The cheater. The abuser.

And the liar.

Ah, the lies we tell on their behalf…

And, ah, the lies they tell on ours.

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The post How Narcissists Get Us to Lie For Them appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

I never knew quite what to do with it when he said that to me. How do you answer a question like that? It wasn’t something he asked me a couple of times.  It was one of his favorite compliments.  I mean, I guess it was a compliment.

I remember the first few times he asked, I would laugh and shake my head in amusement. It was a silly thing to say, really. A silly thing to ask.

I always had the impression though that he was waiting for me to say something in response. When I was younger, I probably would have said something like, “I’m not,” or told him to stop asking such things.  Now, I don’t really think it’s a good idea for women to denigrate themselves like that and so I try not to engage in that kind of self-deprecation, even if I find it hard to take a compliment so I suppressed the urge negate his question.

But I just found the whole thing awkward.  He’d ask and stare at me.  A beat would pass.  Then another.  It was as if he enjoyed the fact that I was speechless and didn’t have any way of answering the question.

So one day, I answered, “I don’t know… I guess because… I was born that way?”

He scowled and pulled away from me.  I didn’t get it.  What was the right answer?

What I didn’t understand was that my discomfort was the right answer.  One of them anyway.

He didn’t stop asking, and after that, it just seemed like a test. Sometimes I’d say nothing and sometimes I’d respond the same way just to see if he would still get upset.

But then one day, I changed the answer:

“Because you love me?”

His eyes lit up. “Yes, that’s right.”

I didn’t understand why that was the right answer, but I had finally solved the riddle.  I knew how to make him happy and make my own discomfort go away.

And yet it all makes sense now.

My response was the “ultimate response” to a narcissist.   My response turned his own compliment back around and made it all about him, and it gave him total control to determine the value of some arbitrary characteristic about me.  Merely by deeming me loveable in his eyes, something about me was hence worthy.

And if that love ever disappeared, well then…

What kind of person would want someone to believe that anything about them revolves around his or her love for them?

One guess.

The post When Narcissists Compliment You, It’s All About Them appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” -Sean Spicer, Press briefing, January 21, 2017

I was lounging around on my couch in the living room that Saturday night, exhausted after a long, strange weekend in the District, where the one-two punch of Donald Trump’s chaotic inauguration followed by the record-breaking Women’s March had brought the city to a point of fatigue and uncertainty.  The news was on and I, like a lot of the rest of the country at that time, could not stop watching it.

It was Sean Spicer’s first press briefing, and chills went down my spine as I heard those words. I sat up. For no reason I could explain, my heart was suddenly thudding in my chest and blood was rushing into my head. My eyes laser-focused on the screen as he continued to speak, but I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so anxious all of a sudden.

Spicer made several statements to try to back up his conclusion. He discussed ridership numbers on the Metro, the use of whiteboards in past inaugurations to protect the grass, and whether the news media had provided crowd estimates. They were all facts that were either true or they weren’t. We could all look them up and come to the same indisputable conclusions.

Yet I had heard most of these discussed on the news already and they didn’t support Spicer’s conclusion.

My breath was continuing to quicken as he spoke and I felt my throat tighten.

This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration–period.

He was not making statements. He was trying to erode my confidence in my own ability to perceive something accurately.  To erode my confidence in my very reality.

This was a subtle but hostile act of erasure with which I was very familiar and from which I was still very much digging myself back out and now it was happening again.

* * * * *

Something told me to check his list of Instagram followers. Maybe because he was always commenting on mine.  Something was off.  I could feel it, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.

I clicked the button to open his list of followers and right at the top, her picture appeared. I took a screenshot and texted it to him: “What is this?”

Immediately, the text came back from him: “I didn’t add her.”

“What do you mean you didn’t add her? You unblocked her and added her.  How else is she there?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Confused, I checked his list again and she was gone.

“She was just there. Didn’t you see what I sent you? You must have re-blocked her.”

“It must have been an Instagram glitch.  I don’t know what to tell you.”

For six hours, he proceeded to try to tell me that he didn’t know how she had ended up on his list of followers, that he had nothing to do with it.

Six hours.

During that time, I kept opening the screenshot I had taken just to make sure I hadn’t been wrong. If I hadn’t taken it, I would have started to doubt that I had seen her picture there at all.

But I wasn’t wrong. I had the evidence right there in front of me. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?  Then he got angry and accused me of not trusting him.

So I had to be fair and stop to ask myself if it was possible that he was telling the truth and it really had been an Instagram glitch.  Was I wrong not to trust him?  What if it really had been a glitch and I was refusing to believe him?  Then I would be the one who was wrong for not giving him the benefit of the doubt.

But I just couldn’t buy that story.  It was too much of a coincidence for me to believe him and the way he had reacted when I’d told him had not been the way someone would react if it had been a glitch and I had to go with my intuition on it.

But I couldn’t believe it.  He would rather lie to me in that manner than just tell me the truth?  I was shaken by that fact and let him know that I didn’t think I could be with someone who would do such a thing.

His message came back, immediate once again.  “Okay, I added her.  I’m sorry, but I wasn’t thinking that it could hurt our relationship that bad. I’m really sorry. I wasn’t thinking right.  I love you and I didn’t mean to hurt you.  Why would I hurt you if I’m madly in love with you? I spend five nights a week with you. I spend more time with you than my family or my friends because you make me happy. You complete me. If I knew it would hurt you, I swear on my life I wouldn’t have added her and I wouldn’t have lied.  I love you. I can’t even think about one moment without you in my life.”

From one tactic to another.

(that event) x 100+ = realitysplitsintwo

What about the times I didn’t have a screenshot?

I didn’t say that.  You heard me wrong.

My GPS is wrong.  I was at work the whole time.  

I just talked to her because I missed you and I was lonely and didn’t have anyone to talk to.

[x] is lying.  He likes you and just wants to come between us.

I have to pretend like I’m happy because that’s what everyone expects.

You always have to try to prove me wrong, don’t you?  You never trust me.

Her number is saved in my phone because I had to block it.

You’re reading too much into this.  You over-analyze everything.  You think too much.

Everyone knows I’m not going to marry her.

You’re remembering that wrong.

Stop asking me if I really love you.  If you can’t see it, then nothing I do is ever good enough for you.

I didn’t say that about you.  Do you think I’d disrespect you like that?

That’s not even cheating.

I was giving all of myself and my love to you.  Don’t tell me I wasn’t.

I just tell her what she wants to hear.

You’re the only one I love.  I’ve never felt this way about anyone else.

I’m just doing this because my family wants me to.

That’s just a girl I went to high school with.

[x] is lying.  She is jealous of us and wants to come between us.

She’s obsessed with me and won’t leave me alone.  

It’s a trap.  You can either:  

1. Avoid saying something when your intuition knows you’re right, (because that’s what you’re being conditioned to do), but then fall into a deep pit of despair knowing the truth but believing a lie. 

2. Speak up and demand the truth or ask to have a discussion and be made to seem petty and paranoid (AKA, “the one causing the problem”).  

Trevor Noah, a comedian from South Africa, has an interesting take on the deflection that he’s observed when it comes to racism that’s relevant to the discussion:  “…[S]omeone can get more offended at you calling them a racist than the fact that they are a racist.  That’s become a new thing I’ve stumbled across. People go, ‘How dare you call me a racist?’ Well, how dare you be racist?”

I couldn’t have explained it any better.  Welcome to the narcissist’s funhouse.  When you attempt to stand them in front of any standard mirror and call them out on their behavior, they lash out:  How dare you be offended by what I did and try to talk to me about it?  Soon all the mirrors are distorted and you’re living in the funhouse too.    

Make no mistake– these attempts to re-write what happened are a war on reality.  Narcissists must have control of all of its versions and they usually have no intention of letting the truth of what they’ve done be any part of it unless they believe it will serve them in some way.   

* * * * *

Gaslighting is not a new concept.  It’s a specific form of manipulation, wherein an individual denies, provides conflicting information, or outright lies over and over again so that another person begins to doubt their own perception of reality.  The term comes from a 1944 movie where a man purposely tries to drive his wife insane by making the gaslights flicker, then telling her that she is imagining it when she points it out.  It’s a brainwashing tactic to which anyone can be susceptible.

It’s easy to let small things go at first, especially when someone pits their memory against yours and there’s no proof, but over a long period of time after being subjected to multiple forms of gaslighting, victims start to feel constantly confused about trusting their own judgment.  They may challenge the person less because it just results in more lies and even threats and retaliation and so they shut down and withdraw.  Or they may persist in challenging the person until their persistence is used by the narcissist to paint the victim as unstable.  The ultimate goal?  Narcissists want to wear down their victims in order to have control over them.  If you can control how a person sees the world, you can control that person.

That night in January, as the news briefing ended and the political pundits began to discuss it, they looked as stunned as I felt.

I was shaking. This was an old feeling, but not a friendly one.  I was so attuned to it at that point, that when it happened to me, I could feel it even in my joints.  When you know something is true and you’re being told a lie, something inside you feels personally mismatched and your brain screams for them to align.

I knew well what it was to walk with a jagged, disjointed reality and try to function in the world. As I watched first Sean Spicer and then the new President in clips from a speech he gave earlier that same day to the Central Intelligence Agency, I knew I was having an emotional flashback to the feeling of helplessness and anxiety that comes when someone tries to distort your reality.   “I get this network, and it showed an empty field,” Trump said. “And it said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a lie… So we caught them, and we caught them in a beauty. And I think they’re going to pay a big price.”

And I think they’re going to pay a big price.

I know the kinds of prices that people who want to distort your reality make you pay when you refuse to comply.

*  *  *  *  *

The bad thing about having a leader who gaslights is that you can’t walk out or escape it.  It’s on the television in your apartment lobby.  It’s in your news feed on Facebook. Sleep didn’t come easily for a while.

Yet, mercifully, over time, the way that the larger world had mirrored my smaller world began to change and the re-traumatization began to lessen each time I heard a new set of lies. I was buoyed and intrigued when I realized that it was because there were too many of us sharing the same reality for the effects of the gaslighting coming from the White House to set in for me. Real-world grounding by mass media refutations and personal discussions in which we could triangulate each other’s experiences broke the spell.

People in relationships with narcissists aren’t that lucky. The entire world around the narcissist bends over backward to accept and defend his or her narrative, due to careful impression management by the narcissist and often by finger-pointing at the very person who is being gaslighted.

A version of this article appeared on Elephant Journal, “How I Was Gaslighted By the President of the United States.”

The post Trump, Gaslighting and Re-Traumatization appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

“…Conscience…is an intervening sense of obligation based on our emotional attachments–including most especially love, compassion, and tenderness… Fortified with potent emotions, conscience is the glue that holds us together…”                                                                        -Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

I sit here reading this book The Sociopath Next Door for research into people who lack empathy, remembering vividly when the book was released.

I was in graduate school and I thought I was too good to read it.

I was too arrogant. I didn’t really believe in sociopaths.

I mean, I obviously knew they existed because I believed in and respected the field of psychology. Yet the whole thing was rather abstract to me.

Sociopathy seemed like a rarity, like something you only encountered when you were watching a horror film and a man in a mask chased teenagers through dark woods with a butcher knife.

I believed in the relative safety of the statistics I made up in my mind and in cheap thrills.

Which is exactly why the book pissed me off and I didn’t read it. What I didn’t believe in was the premise of the title, so I never even gave it a chance.

Sociopaths do not live next door, thank you very much, I thought.  I was offended by what I felt was alarmist.

Although I didn’t consciously flesh out all of this in my mind at the time, that book and the way it presented itself was contradictory to my understanding of the world.

It conflicted with and thus threatened my worldview that people are essentially good. I used to believe that people basically have good intentions, although we sometimes make mistakes.  Conscience, I believed, is inherent in being human, but people sometimes make a bad choice in a moment. 

Conscience is humanity.

There are exceptions, I thought.

Those serial killers out there. The ones who snap. They stand apart, I allowed myself that. But I hadn’t ever really thought about whether I thought that was an inherent part of them or if they had a conscience buried in there somewhere. I just never thought about it.

Even though “sociopath” is a buzzword, it’s also a diagnosis. It’s a personality disorder, but just like so many other people do, I made the mistake of using the former to substitute for the latter. 

But what does all of this really mean about my mistake (or anyone’s) in judgment when it comes to how to conceptualize sociopaths?  Here’s what I didn’t know or think through well enough that I know now.

1. Sociopathy is a subset of antisocial personality disorder.
2. To have a personality disorder means to have an unhealthy way of viewing and relating to the world that causes problems in many areas of a person’s life over a long period of time that doesn’t go away.  It’s not just a one-off.
3. Sociopaths aren’t just making a bad choice every once in awhile and then learning from it.  It’s a way of life, and they often don’t view what they are doing as wrong.
4. The criteria for having antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy don’t say anything at all about murder or even physical harm.  But what they do say is that people with these disorders do things without remorse, lack emotional empathy, exploit and manipulate people for their own personal gain, are pathological liars, and can be very charming.
5. People with these criteria can pass for normal or mostly normal in everyday life. These criteria could manifest themselves in a variety of ways depending on what a person wants and could cause a lot of harm.

Although Stout’s book was very popular, still the idea has not caught on in a mainstream way that people with antisocial traits engage with everyone else on a daily basis and have the potential to and do regularly cause a vast amount of harm.

I know and accept my reason for rejecting the idea even when I had a chance to become familiar with it.

Even now, it still feels really strange to me to know that I was once on the other side of this.  That once I was so innocent.  I can even think back and remember being that innocent.  It wasn’t that long ago.

I also remember the moment I lost my innocence. 

I didn’t think of it as losing my innocence at the time, but I remember something draining out of me. I could physically feel it in my body. 

It was at a moment that I was learning abruptly about a series of deceptions and multiple lives he had concocted.  I, also, somewhere in my brain that was not yet numb was having to consider that his life with me was a complete deception as well. 

The thought came into my mind that I was not dealing with a man, but something else entirely that was capable of such a thing.

Someone without a conscience.

*  *  *  *  *

“There’s one thing you will never be able to get back: your innocence. Keep in mind that innocence has nothing to do with ignorance or naïveté. It’s simply the well-intentioned belief that all human beings have some good in them–the trust and the love that you whole-heartedly gave to someone else. That’s innocence. Moving forward, you will never see the world like that again. That’s not to say you’re now hypervigilant and jaded. It just means that you’re going to view the world and the people around you in a more realistic light. Instead of automatically projecting your goodness onto others, you let their actions speak for themselves. You see, this is not at all a bad thing. It’s just sad at first, because you can never know you’re losing your innocence until it’s actually gone.”                                                                                                                                                       – Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free

The post I Used To Be One Of The Non-Believers Too appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

Dear ___________:

I don’t feel anything anymore.

That’s not really true. I feel an aching sadness that I don’t feel anything anymore.

I used to feel hope that you would change the way you treat me, and I used to feel hope because there was something to hold onto. Now I know that if you change, it isn’t going to be right now, and I also know that there isn’t any time in our past for me to look back on and believe we can get back to and be happy, because all of it was a lie.

If there is no past and there is no present, then there can be no future.

Back in October, I came back not just because you begged me to. After we broke up back then, I genuinely believed that we couldn’t be together, that too much damage had been inflicted. But then two of your best friends told me that you genuinely loved me and that you had changed and had never acted with any other girl the way you did with me. 

I was so confused. If you loved me that much, and if everyone kept telling me you did, corroborating what you said, surely that meant things could turn around. You bombarded me with your phone calls and your texts. You begged me for a chance to make it right. You said you know what you had done wrong, that you didn’t let me talk about the past, which was true. You hand-wrote a list of things you were going to do differently this time around and came over to read it to me and explain it. I told you how hard it was going to be. I had my doubts because I couldn’t trust that you would ever stop lying to me and talking to other girls, and you know I had my reasons. I needed to be able to express my fears to you.

You were so loving to me at first. You texted me non-stop to let me know you were thinking about me. Knowing I was going to have to give this a real shot, my wall had to come down and the pain would have to come out if I was going to learn to trust you again. It was scary as hell and I needed to talk to you about it. If we were going to get close again, I was going to have to deal with all those feelings inside of my mistrust. And you listened to me express my pain no matter when I was feeling it.

And you brought me the necklace you’d kept. You promised to fix the bracelet I gave you that you broke, and wanted to buy one for me. You brought me flowers. You kissed me and cuddled with me and told me that you wanted to marry me if everything worked out. You told me you saw our future together, that you’d learned your lesson and you’d been stupid before. You took me to my favorite city on earth, New York, and we walked all over, sharing dinner in Little Italy, cheesecake in midtown, and pizza in Brooklyn. We walked the boardwalk at Coney Island, huddling up against the winter wind, and walked through Central Park, sharing fruit I’d never tried and that you’d forgotten the name of in English. You ran out of your apartment to kiss me every time I showed up and carried my bag upstairs without me having to ask. You brought me chocolates and treats from ____________, and picked out new heels for me.  You complimented me nonstop, telling me how beautiful you thought I was. You wanted me to choose movies to watch. You cooked dinner for me. You even wanted me to come into the bathroom with you because you couldn’t stand to be away from me… and because you wanted me to trust you. The bathroom was often where you had slunk away to text other women when I was around, and you knew I knew that. You even gave me your passwords to social media sites to try to show me that you were now going to be a trustworthy person.

I was so happy. Could it be possible? Could things take a different turn? My heart wanted to believe, even in its still traumatized state. I started to have hope of a possible new version of a future with you, even though I knew there was still a long way to go.

Then it all just… started to fade away. Slowly your focus started to turn to other things. You stopped complimenting me, you stopped listening, and then you started insulting me. You got violent. You yelled and hurled insults again. I started to suspect there was something going on. I’m not proud of it, but I used one of the passwords you gave me. What I found out was that during that time period last year when we were so happy, the time I thought was still sacred, you were still talking to girls and telling them you didn’t have a girlfriend. You were trying to meet up with them… maybe you did meet up with them. But the point is– back then, everything between us was perfect. That was the time in our relationship when you treated me like you were really in love with me. I had thought that maybe that time period at least was real. But seeing that took it all away from me, and I have nothing left in the relationship to hold onto.

It’s over.

I’m a person. I’m not a toy. I’m not someone you can kick around.

I loved you. I loved you so much I would have done anything for you. I gave you everything I could possibly give you.

This relationship has changed me. I’m the person who likes to take care of everyone, but I’m becoming a shell. I can’t even think about anything except all these negative things that you’ve done. Only you and I know the full extent of the truth. And if we’re being honest, I know I don’t know everything. And I don’t want to. If I did, I’m sure it would darken the love I held in my soul even further than it already is.

I had a dream in my head of how this could have been. But you never treated me right. Not at any point in time. Even when I thought you were doing so, you never were behind my back. You have your friends who don’t know the tip of the iceberg, trying to convince me you love me. Yes, I believe you love me. But it takes more than love.  They also say at this point that I deserve better. And even you said if I have respect for myself I’ll stop messaging you.

You’re exactly right.

If I have respect for myself I’ll put an end to this.

This dream in my head is just a dream. You never belonged to me. You were always engaged to someone else or involved with your ex or fucking around with someone else or having your “just in case” girls or some combination.

What hurts is that it was a cascading fall of how I found out who you really were. I did not get the benefit of knowing how much you fucked around before I met you because I did not “grow up” around you and you presented me with a totally different person and kept me away from the people who knew you until months into our relationship.  I did not get the benefit of knowing that you had arranged your marriage until I happened to ask the right question of someone else a year and a half into our relationship because, again, you withheld the truth. I always believed there was something special about us, but no, every piece of it was tainted by something else.

I want a normal relationship.

I want to be part of a relationship where someone is open and honest with me. I want a relationship where someone naturally includes me in all aspects of their life.  I want a relationship where someone isn’t constantly suspicious and accusing me of doing things I’m not. I want to be respected and appreciated. I want to share all of the love I have to give with someone and have them appreciate it. 

This is not a game. It will never go anywhere with you because you won’t give me these things. Won’t, can’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m tired of words.

I’ll never forget what we shared even though I don’t understand which parts of it were real. I looked into your eyes so many times and felt you touch me so many times and it felt like the earth fell away and it was only us. I never in my life loved anyone like I loved you, and you may be the one true love of my life. That being said, I can’t be with someone who does the things you do, and it took me this long to realize this only because my love for you was so deep.

-K

 *  *  *  *  *

How many letters like this did I have to write before the relationship actually came to an end?  How many?  There were the ones in my head that never got written.  The ones I scrawled on paper at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, finally lying back exhausted, shoving them in a drawer unsent.   The ones I placed in his hand in despair as I walked away, only to be drawn back in days later by his plea to see him “just once more,” pulled by an invisible thread I wished I could sever, becoming myself more faded each time.

Dead letters.

The post Dead Letters to a Narcissist #1 appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

I’m not even sure what it is I really miss.  But it’s… something to do with you.  The shape that you once put in front of me, the presence that you had wrapped around me, the soliloquy of your voice that I can still hear in my mind sometimes if I try hard enough.

But you’re never getting back in.

All those excuses, all those lies, all those times you said you’d never hurt me again.  Then to come back and say you were sorry for hurting me… and expect that to be enough.  And all those lies about why you abandoned the relationship.  I mean, really.  I should have abandoned it years ago.  But you found a way to get a few of us in the rotation for awhile with plot twists that could only have come from a well-scripted drama.  You had to have known that wouldn’t hold up for long, but… still… bravo.  Well played.

Yes, I do remember those times you were there for me.  So what?  Let’s talk about who did those things.  Where is the consistent actor behind them, someone who behaves the same way reliably across all contexts and from person to person?  If you act in a manner that contradicts the good in those things when I am not around, they mean nothing.

I like to think that that man who did kind things for me, the one I was in love with, died because he existed only for me, and I’ll never see him again.  He’s gone.

You used to say to me, as a tactic to get me to stop talking about one of the many things you had done, “Nothing I do is ever good enough for you.”  Meaning, you were playing “magician.”  You wanted me to pay no attention to what was in the blue box while you tantalized me with what was behind the red box:  flowers, candy, dinner, sex, whatever it happened to be at the time.

Nothing I do is ever good enough.

Turns out you were right.  Nothing you did was ever good enough.  Because you’re incapable of doing what was good enough or even being good enough. 

I understand now.   It’s an issue of entitlement for you, the lying and the cheating.  All those times you wanted me to “start over,” you meant you wanted to see me as good again. Me.  ME.  You saw me as the bad one because I had seen through your lies, discovered your secrets and I wasn’t giving you the same level of positive attention you were used to.  If this is going to work, you’d say, you can never bring up the past.

So here’s the game:   You wanted me to start over so then you could start over.  You wanted me to shower you with attention again and you would see me in a new light as if I was the wrongdoer.  You’d stop the lies and the cheating, not because you’d changed, but because I’d done what you asked.  As soon as I fell off the pedestal again and failed to satisfy your need for attention (which was inevitable since I was traumatized, still couldn’t trust you, and you had done nothing to actually earn my trust back), you’d feel entitled to start cheating and lying again and blame me– well I tried to change, you’d say.  Nothing I do is ever good enough. 

Sound familiar?

I get it now, I just don’t want to get anywhere near that.  I may sometimes get a tinge of sadness about our time together, but it doesn’t move me because then I remember that dance you’d pull me into.  My next emotion is relief that I don’t have to walk a tightrope anymore and fall repeatedly into an abyss.

You never saw me as an equal.  You never saw me as a real person.

But you know what?  Now that I know these things about you, I don’t see you as my equal anymore either because you can’t feel what I can feel.  Not even close.

I deserve better.

The post I’d Be Lying If I Said I Never Missed You appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.

There comes a time in the recovery process when you have to face all those things that the narcissist did that you didn’t want to face during the relationship.

Yeah, those things.

The things you only heard about in whispers or learned accidentally.  The stories you could only corroborate with one source.  The things that seemingly crawled straight out of your own imagination, gristly and wet, as if the narcissist knew exactly how to reach into your own heart of darkness and pull out your deepest fears.

They are the things you can accept only in stops and starts once the narcissist is gone from your life and you can then turn each piece of the relationship over in retrospect and without his influence.

Yes, he probably did say that you were a whore and didn’t mean anything to him.

Yes, he probably did say that he was using you for money.

Yes, he probably did have Skype sex with another girl in your own apartment while you were in the next room.

Yes, he probably did sleep with other women he met while you were on vacation together.

Yes, he probably has slept with multiple women since getting married.   

Yes, he probably did sleep with one of your best friends.

When you’re with a narcissist, you get split in two.

Is My Boyfriend a Narcissist?

Here I am years later, putting each of these fragments in its separate and proper place, so I can become whole again.

In each of our stories as survivors, the exact details of how the drama plays out when trying to clarify these incidents and how each event rises and falls in importance during the relationship script and then absorbs itself into the overall narrative are familiar to anyone who has been through a relationship like this one. 

We all get thrust into our own horror movie we can’t shut off, even if the storyline varies.  There is nothing the narcissist won’t do, no line they won’t cross in trying to gaslight you. 

Your worst nightmare becomes the dream from which you cannot wake up.  It is panic-inducing.  It is mind-numbing.  It is crazy-making.

Above all else, what it does is force you to split in two.  This is how you cease being whole.  This is how you forget without forgetting.

The splitting happens when a choice has to be made.

First, notes are compared, souls are bared, casual conversations are had in passing with people you have been kept away from. 

The other participants in the conversation likely are not even aware of which revelations would be such daggers. 

Indeed, some of the things I learned merely confirmed suspicions and dropped unceremoniously into what was already a black hole of obliterating betrayal. 

And yet some of the things I heard, such as those above, would have ripped that hole open so wide I was afraid I would never be able to close it.  So the horror show begins.

Second, you confront the narcissist.  The stories will haunt you and the words from the conversations with others will be the only proof the events ever took place. 

Your voice will shake and your heart will pound as you ask for the truth, but the responses you get are prophesied:

“She’s lying.  I never said that.”

“I didn’t do that. Think about it.  He always liked you and he’s trying to make you think bad things about me.”

“Fine, believe her over me.  But you know she hates you.  She’s jealous of us.”

“Do you think I’d disrespect you like that?  Then why am I still here?” 

Finally, you make the choice.  Except, it’s never really a choice. 

The Double Self

From the moment you learned of the new and devastating betrayal from the lips of the person who told you, it has led you to this inevitable moment, the emergence of the double self. 

You believe the narcissist.  And yet you don’t. [Read 7 Narcissist Lies That Are Easy to Spot]

The double self has many purposes and helps you in many ways, but in this capacity, it helps you protect yourself.  It helps you answer the question, “Is my boyfriend a narcissist?”

It helps you preserve your view of the world, letting it dissolve slowly rather than be ripped away until you have something to safely put in its place.

Something you will not have until you escape from the relationship.

The post Is My Boyfriend a Narcissist? appeared first on Fairy Tale Shadows.