Healing After Narcissistic Abuse: My Story

TRIGGER WARNING!

I’ll never forget the first time I saw his black eyes. I had been working at the gym that we were both employed at. He came in to see me. I was excited because my back had been bothering me and one of the trainers had cracked it for me, bringing me great relief. We were greeting eachother with a hug and I told him that so-and-so had cracked my back and that my pain was so much better. He looked at me with the blackest of black eyes and his demeanor immediately changed. I literally felt fear. He pushed away from me and stormed out of the building, leaving me standing there in a state of utter confusion.

I, not comprehending what had just happened, chased him down and begged him to tell me what was wrong. He told me that he didn’t like other men touching me “in that way”. His fury was something that I had never experienced but I knew that a boundary had clearly been drawn. I knew, without a doubt, that he was jealous and that I had better mind my p’s and q’s where members of the opposite sex were concerned. I feared him seeing me talk to other men. I began avoiding having innocent verbal exchanges with men, even when he wasn’t around.

By this time we were co-habitating in San Francisco. We attended Friday Skate Nights wherein people would meet up and rollerblade through the city. It was April 1st and he invited his nephew to join us. Early in the day, my abuser had told me that he didn’t like April Fool’s jokes and told me not to play any tricks on him.

As evening rolled around we set out to skate the city. His nephew was in the lead, I followed close behind. Suddenly, his nephew went down. I didn’t know that it was a ruse so I stopped and knelt down. He pulled out a packet of ketchup and squirted it all over himself. Just then, my abuser rolled up, his nephew said “April Fools”! He took one look at me, his eyes turned black, and he said, “I told you not to play any jokes!” He took off.

Now, this sounds like an inconsequential story to share. However, over the next three decades, I kid you not, this was the incident that my abuser used against me to show “proof” that he could not trust me. I can’t even count how many times this incident was thrown in my face as the example of why I was not a trustworthy partner. I mean, seriously? I wasn’t even the person that played the joke on him, yet I paid a thirty year price for kneeling down.

Of course, I understand now that he was beginning to build up a list of flaws that he could use to devalue me, to accuse me, to make me feel inadequate and indebted to him to prove that I was trustworthy. Little did I know that, no matter what I did, I would never again be trustworthy in his eyes, ever.

The first time the abuse became physical we were having a heated discussion about something. I, choosing to walk away from the argument, stepped into the shower. The next thing I knew, his hand was around my throat, my back against the wall, my feet dangling above the seat of the shower, his black eyes were staring me down. He wanted me to be afraid of him. I can’t even remember what transpired from there because I was traumatized. I know that a new depth of fear of him was instilled in me at that moment. But, as I mentioned before, I am a fighter. I’m certain that I did not walk away from that with my tail between my legs. I made sure to voice that I would not allow him to fight with his fists. The “fight” in me was the thing, I’m certain, that caused him to begin seeing me as “the enemy”.

The fear that I had of him did result though in the beginning of a shrinking of myself as an individual. I began walking on egg shells. I knew that if I did or said something that triggered him it might result in him becoming that person that I feared. As a result, I started carefully choosing my words and my actions. I began overcompensating by constantly reassuring him of my love and admiration for him.

To explain more thoroughly the emotional dynamics would require me to also share the idealization that was occuring simultaneously. In between the extreme events that caused such fear, after I had secured my job with the SFFD and we had moved to the East Bay, I would come home from an overnight shift at the firehouse to a drawn bubblebath and a bowl full of peeled grapes, or love notes carefully placed in my gear bag so I would see them as soon as I got to work. All the while, knowing that my shifts ended at 8am, unless an overnight incident held me back for a while, he would time me coming home from work and, if I happened to stop to get gas, he would immediately barrage me with 20 questions about where I’d been and all but accuse me of cheating on him.

After several years of idealizing me, intermingled with intimidating me with jealous rages, physical altercations, and verbal abuse (I was regularly called a
B—-, and a C—), I became pregnant with our son.

One day we got into an arguement in our bedroom. His eyes went black and he kicked me in my pregnant belly. I fought back as best I could and he picked me up, swung open our bedroom door, our young daughters watching, terrified, as he tried to remove me from the home. I grabbed every door jamb available to me, making it impossible for him to exit our house with me in tow. He relented.

He began telling me that I was the only person in his life that caused him to rage. He was blame-shifting. This is a manipulation tactic used by narcissists to avoid taking responsibility for their behavior. Yes, it was my fault that he had these rages. I had never experienced these types of outbursts from a partner before. I began to think, maybe it is me. Maybe I’m doing things to cause him this much anger. If he doesn’t do this with anyone else, it must be my fault.

To his credit, and to mine, eventually, the physical abuse subsided. The emotional abuse, the type of abuse that leaves no visible bruises, generally happens behind closed doors, and contradicts the public persona that the narcissist projects out into the world, became the method in which he used to control me, having made clear that he was the Alpha and I, the Beta.