Category: What Narcissistic Abuse Feels Like

Letter from November 2015 (some identifying details removed) 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...

I’d be lying if I said I never missed you. 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...

Is my boyfriend a narcissist? I just couldn’t decide, even though a part of me already knew. 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...

He used to ask me all the time what I loved about him, and I’d ramble on about all the things I thought were wonderful about him.  Sometimes I’d return the question, curious about what he’d say.  Then much later in the relationship, I’d ask him why he kept trying to come back into my life, as so many of his other actions seemed to indicate he didn’t value the relationship. “You care about me.” “You take care of me.” “I can trust you with my life.” “You accept me for who I am.  I can be myself around you. ...

Letter from October 2015 (some identifying details removed) Dear ___________: This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever written. It is difficult to write because I know that there will never really be any closure between us. You see, I have this picture in my head of us and how things could have been and it kills me. There was so much good between us, and we learned and explored so much together.  I taught you how to order a martini and play craps and baseball, and you taught me how to fly a kite, make yogurt sauce, properly...

Most people believe narcissists can never really change.  I find that depressing and difficult to accept, but intellectually, I can see how it is likely true. Those that cannot even accept that they are narcissists can’t accept that there is a problem in the first place and are not introspective enough to recognize a pattern in their behavior.  In contrast, some narcissists are self-aware and those are likely to be the ones who get some enjoyment out of tormenting people and use their self-awareness to learn even more about how to calculate their actions so that they cause the greatest...

One day over two years ago I Googled the term “pathological lying.”  In one article, I read about how some people who are pathological liars do so about things that seem so small, it makes no sense. It would be so easy to tell the truth, and the truth may even serve them better, so the rest of us wonder why they would bother to lie. I used to wonder that very thing when I caught him in small lies.  Why would he lie about whether he had or had not had sex with a particular girl in his past,...