One reader describes this syndrome more tellingly than I could. Like many of us, after an abusive childhood she fell into other abusive relationships. She writes:
“I’ve had so much anger bottled up in me, and recently it was me who lashed out in anger at someone else .. mostly because he wasn’t being honest with me .. but even so, I don’t want to end up being an ‘abuser’ !”
I’d long since stopped caring too much about my own disappointment, yet I’ve been almost pathologically concerned with not disappointing other people. That was what I had learned to do. That is what you do learn to do when you are in an abusive relationship and you get disappointment after disappointment after disappointment. Since you can’t stop the disappointments happening, you learn not to feel the pain. You make yourself go numb to it. That was what I had done.
Our children don’t need us to be perfect. Yes, they need us to be good enough, but they are generally prepared to set the bar far lower than we might do for ourselves. They are more likely to judge us by our intentions than our results, provided we are honest and respectful with them.
We’d all like to be the ultimate authority on how best to live our own life. All too often we’re not; either because we have no ‘surrogates’ – by which I mean useful examples of people in successful relationships whom we can learn from – or because we have moronic surrogates, like Hollywood movies. It’s all too easy to get disoriented by feelings, emotions and self-doubt. ‘Life’ can be complicated sometimes.
Most times when we find life too complicated it is because we overlook the obvious, unpalatable truths.
The one simple law that holds for everyone is this: it can be as easy for you as it is for anyone else. You just have to believe it.
Sometimes that fear of the pain worsening keeps women in a hopelessly damaging relationship, because of an old –profoundly questionable – belief that even a bad partner is better than no partner. (It’s a kind of reworking of that dubious old cliche: ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’. How does that one work? How can you possibly know that the person/future you don’t know will be worse?)
Characteristics translate into behaviours. They are learned and can be unlearned. The essence of the individual, their character or nature in other words, may be eclipsed by those characteristics for months, years or even decades, but it endures.
Clear the characteristics – and let there be no doubt, you can clear away those characteristics – and your true character and nature will emerge, tempered, refined and strengthened by your experience.
Because you acknowledge your can of worms, it doesn’t mean you have to own it. Or even if you have owned it for a while, that doesn’t mean you have to stick with it for all your natural life. After all, you’ve owned cars and all sorts of possessions, until the day you parted company.
Inasmuch as it’s your can of worms, it’s yours to do with what you will. You own it. It doesn’t own you.
None of us can be good at everything. Women who find themselves in abusive relationships are, in all probability, not good at men and all the stuff around falling in love.
When it results in an abusive relationship it is, obviously, very damaging. But it tends to happen when we haven’t yet recognised, or owned, our limitations around choosing men.
Once we do, we have the power to rectify the problem.
Negative feelings are invisible and intangible so their power cannot be proved. In fact, the sole proof of their existence lies in our response to them; which is, of course, the only thing that we have the power to change. Because we have the power to choose our reaction.
I don’t know where most of you are on your journey to wholeness and self-worth. I do know, from my own experience, that recovery is a cocktail that you mix for yourself. The basic ingredients remain constant. The rest are a ‘mix and match’ selection that you add yourself.
Over the next 5 days, I'll send you some lessons and tips that I've found have really helped women to heal from narcissistic abuse. Starting with the basics.
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