The Long Term Effects of Growing Up Under Narcissism

Two Steps Forward

Two steps forward, one step back may feel defeating, but if you see it as a net gain, you’ll feel better overall. After all, in the case of emotions, the thoughts you think do count. The thoughts we think affect the emotions we feel. So to make progress in any area of your life, start with self-appreciating thoughts. Remember: what you appreciate appreciates.

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The lotus blossom, arguably one of the most beautiful flowers has to germinate in one of the most putrid and nasty environments. It has been adopted as a universal symbol of enlightenment.

Now, onto the subject at hand. My husband is constantly asking in some way or fashion, “why are you still talking about or thinking about this?”

I have been marinating on the root of why I had such a blind spot for recent mistreatment of me by a family member. As this family member has asked I never write about him/her, I am going to try to say this carefully and leave the whole thing as anonymous as I can while still addressing primarily my personal feelings in the matter.

My dad died. I have written on him in a whole chapter of my book. I poured out my heart to my dad while he was alive. We had some really good moments together. But, we also had some important moments which were helpful for my growth, but which I would not characterize as “good.” They certainly were less like “joy” and more like “challenge,” “struggle” and “frustration.” I was glad to grow the skills I needed to present him with the facts of our situation as they were. I told him how I wanted our relationship to be, and I explained to him what I needed from him for us to get to that place. In the end, doing that was a 100 mile leap for me.

The unfortunate thing of it was that my presentation, as eloquent in its execution as it was, ended up being received by him as a hard sell. At first, it was met with vitriol and backlash. “Don’t put your shit on me,” were his exact words.

Then, it was met with silence. It felt like a Mexican stand off in a Spaghetti Western or reminded me immediately of some old sales advice I once heard- probably from him. “Make your offer and wait. The first one to speak loses the negotiation.” I didn’t enjoy the feeling that compromising and negotiating to work toward a vision of a healthy relationship felt like a win/lose scenario.

I don’t think he did either. It was clear he knew the rule, though. Also, it wasn’t a win/lose. If he agreed, we both would win. If he didn’t agree, we would both lose. It should have been that simple. I certainly saw it that way. I delivered it perfectly. “We can’t get there from here, so do you want to have a harmonious relationship going forward or not?” He sat in silence for a long time obviously hoping I would betray myself and say he could keep undermining me at great peril to my family. (He had been feeding personal information about my life which I shared with him in confidence with a sister I had cut out of my life who misinterpreted what he told her-intentionally. She threatened to call CPS on us and have my children removed from me by the state if I didn’t meet her non sequitur personal requirements.) It was a pretty fucking serious deal.

Eventually, when he realized there was only the choice to be honorable or the choice to walk away, he chose to step up. At least, he chose it verbally. That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. He had come up with a very cunning third choice. Kudos to him on his cleverness on figuring this out. I wouldn’t have. He chose to lie to me and say something he never intended to live up to.

I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt here and say that I think he made the right choice. I think he intended to live by it. But, when I wasn’t around him, he figured it wouldn’t cause harm to just share little things, innocuous details of my life with my sister.

I kept finding out he betrayed his own word, and then, (like ya do) I kept assuming I just hadn’t conveyed the message clearly enough the first time. Although, how could one misinterpret “Keep my kid’s name out of your mouth when talking to my sister”?

Nevertheless, I assumed it was me who did something wrong which leads me to the point. There are a few things you learn growing up in a narcissistic home. One is that all you can control is yourself. And that one is true. The second is that if you control yourself enough, it ends up fixing other people’s apparent problems. That’s only true in so much as you realize that once you take more personal responsibility, relationships with others become easier to interpret and evaluate. It’s not true when the people who want you to be personally responsible manipulate you into apologizing for reacting in a natural way when they have done something really, squarely wrong, inappropriate or otherwise violent to you. When you look back on your life and see yourself complicit in your sabotage when you thought you were being onerous… This is where it gets complicated.

With my dad, I had to come to terms with the fact that despite my pretending not to notice he was still betraying me, he was becoming more passive aggressive, using uncharacteristic biting sarcasm when I thought we were having a nice time and had developed an overarching, cynical tone in all of our interactions. Something was amiss. Up until now, I believed he was angry that I had his proverbial number. Looking back, today, I suspect it had little to do with me, other than that I was a catalyst for pushing him to make an agreement he felt he had to lie to keep. Every time he dishonored his own word, he felt worse about himself-subconsciously. Every time he saw me, maybe he felt like a coward for lying or more likely, he wasn’t conscious of why he felt uneasy around me. Narcissists do not like to be seen.

Either way, for me, it got to the point of, A. I know you lied. B. I know you are still betraying me. C. I am pretending not to notice while having to subtly hint my addendum to the initial offer to include not even mentioning innocuous shit. And now D. You have become intolerable and wholly unenjoyable to relate to in any capacity.

He turned into a mega bag of dicks. That made it a lot easier to just not answer the phone or take it personally. Eventually, I diverted my time to writing, my kids, my husband and people and things that were more important and enjoyable to me. I was putting the good stuff in the old boundaries.

That was that. It was a sad, painful separation. It wasn’t quick. I had a lot of self-doubt. If only, I said it differently and got him to understand how important this is to me… It took about three, almost four years of profound grief and frustration to come to the realization that he was not healthy enough to share my vision. He wasn’t healthy enough to even keep his own word over something trivial and simple.

And this is one thing I know: a lie is a compromise to the integrity of your soul. Honesty is your soul’s cornerstone and foundation. All integrity forms from being honest with yourself and others. Here’s the clencher. Are you ready? A white lie is worse than a big lie. If the integrity of your soul’s foundation can be compromised by something trivial, there’s no way it can stand up to the test of a real storm or crisis. If the weight of a feather can undermine your integrity, what happens when someone drops something really heavy on you? Life does that. It can drop a lot of really heavy stuff.

After grieving, I was able to recover, get closure and move forward. My life has taken on a heavenly pink glow ever since. I was no longer seeking approval from someone who couldn’t approve of himself. After all, you can’t truly love others, if you don’t love yourself. Coming to terms with his limits and how they compromised my joy was very helpful. In fact, making the 100 mile leap of confronting him and offering him something really wonderful and watching him just devolve in my presence, unraveling… It was clear to me at the moment I was no longer taking his abusive behavior personally that my presence in his world was not helping him grow, change or advance in any way. Whether he could have relationships with others without lying or they didn’t know he was lying or if he didn’t know they knew he was lying, I don’t know. However, if my presence drove him to behave badly, removing my presence seemed a simple solution.

I loved him just the same. That’s why my grief ended in peace long before he died.

But, he died. That fact has impacted a relationship with someone I guessed was much more emotionally healthy than it turns out he/she is. It shouldn’t have. My relationship with this person was supposed to be its own thing. It wasn’t supposed to be contingent on whether my dad lived forever or turned out to be mortal. Whether he was happy or miserable with his choices at the end of his life should have even been less inflammatory for him since my presence was removed from the equation. It’s possible, though, without me there to play the receiver for his personal pain and anguish, as a surrogate for his pain, things got harder for him. It’s possible. Things near the end may have been really internally nasty. I don’t know.

I think it was my friend, Christina who said that she believes narcissists can’t process their own pain. She suggested they are often clever at throwing their pain onto others as surrogates so they can find some relief in witnessing others processing their traumas and feeling pains they can’t personally handle. That rings true for me.

All I know is that I have a relative after his death suddenly behaving toward me as if I personally destroyed my father.

The first response I had to this cold and reportedly vindictive behavior was to feel responsible. I had to be the mature one and cope with the tricky emotions other’s experience as a result of grief. Even when I saw the second sentence, I didn’t realize how much weight I put on the first one.

I felt responsible.

That may be a weird place to end, but that is the summation of this post.

Integrity to oneself is the cornerstone of the soul.