Healing After Narcissistic Abuse: My Story

During the first few years of my relationship with my abuser we were both going through our divorces from our spouses and feeling the fractions of our families. I would be lying if I said that it was easy in any way. I did what I could to provide for my children, despite my ex’s refusal to help me support them financially. I applied for food stamps to keep food on our table, worked to pay our rent, and tested for a job with 6,000 other applicants to compete for one of ninety open spots with the San Francisco Fire Department. Gratefully, I did well enough to be offered one of those spots, however, the entire process took more than a year.

As a response to my ex-husband witholding child support and undermining my ability to provide a stable home for my children, I made a decision that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would come back to bite me during my new marriage and recent divorce. I decided that I would never again rely on anyone else to support me or my children.

Throughout our relationship, my abuser took advantage of my dedication to support my family. He waffled between jobs, when he chose to work. He took years off at a time despite my “suggestions” that it would really help our family out if he’d get a job. He obtained myriad certifications with various titles, read self-help books, got involved in multi-level marketing schemes, read a book about investing in real estate, and then decided he was a real estate investor. Each time he did something, he did it under delusions of grandeur, that he was going to secure great wealth, live a lavish lifestyle, and that people from all walks of life would admire what great things he’d done and seek him out for advice on whatever that particular “line of work” was.

I was much more grounded. I had a tendency to ask the common-sense questions, to sort of bring him back down to earth, and reality, which he interpreted as my not “trusting him”. He would get angrier with each question. I began to shut down. I recoiled at being yelled at, being accused of not believing in him and his “God-given talents”, and not trusting his judgement. My realistic questioning earned me the devalued title of “a wet blanket”. In reality, I heard a lot of words and saw him independently taking my hard-earned family security and making risky investment decisions with it.

As a “real estate investor”, of the 4 properties that he invested in, 3 were foreclosed on. The house that we were living in, which I recently discovered that he swindled from his ex-wife in their divorce (he told me that she didn’t want it because it came with too many memories) was also foreclosed on. These foreclosures were a direct result of his poor financial decisions and my fear of being accosted for speaking up and trying to explain to him the reality of spreading oneself so thin financially that it wouldn’t be a sustainable investment.

Meanwhile, I was told that he felt emasculated by me for questioning his abilities. I was asked, time and time again, “Why can’t you just trust me?”. I was told that I should be supporting his decisions and that I made him feel like I didn’t believe in him. These were simply my attempts at having adult discussions about our finances and being an equal partner in making big decisions like these together, taking into consideration what was best for our family. But, now I knew that I had to prove to him that I did trust him, I did believe in him. Why? Because, as he insisted, that is what a supportive partner does and, because I was afraid of where his anger would take him.

It took many years of hard, consistent work to build up our nest-egg again and to recover from all of the terrible financial decisions that were made for, and without, me through the emotional blackmail of a self-serving, ego-driven man that wanted control over his narrative, even if it was fiction-based.

During the physically and verbally abusive time in our relationship, I began confiding in one of my mentors in the Fire Department. When I am troubled, emotionally, my energy changes. It becomes heavy and solemn. Anyone that is near me can easily pick up on my sadness. My mentor seemed to care to know what was going on in my life to cause me such noticeable anguish. I was bursting at the seams and began to spill my my heart out. It was such an emotional release that I felt so much better when our conversations came to an end. I began to believe that I was actually having feelings for this man.

Early in my relationship with my abuser, he suggested that we make a promise to one another. We promised that if either of us ever believed we were having feelings for someone else, that we would be honest about it with the other so that we would have an opportunity to work through whatever it was that may be causing our thoughts to go astray before it could go any further. This promise was ever-present in my concience and, once again, the heaviness and solemnity set in.

My abuser noticed that my energy was heavy. He asked me what was going on with me. The pact that we had made was screaming in my head, so I told him that I believed I was having feelings for someone else. I knew that it must have hurt him to hear this but I believe that making promises, and keeping them, shows a person’s character. I knew that, as difficult as it was, my relationship was being tested and I was responsible to our relationship, and to him, to share my thoughts. He asked me if I loved this person and I said that I felt confusion and that I honestly didn’t know.

What’s interesting, and typical for Narcissists, is that he has, over time, re-created the actual timeline, events, and conversations around this situation, and many other situations, to fit his desired narrative, making me look, and feel, like a hard, cold, perpetrator and he, the victim. This is a form of Gaslighting. This particular day has since been referred to, by him, as “The day you told me you loved someone else.” I allowed him to refer to it as such because, I thought, maybe it felt like I told him I loved someone else, and I just wanted to be there for him in his pain. However, the more he said it, the more he believed it and it is now “his truth”.

As soon as I shared my feelings with him I sought out individual counseling, was diagnosed with depression and began treatment for it, cut off all communication with this man, and held space for my abuser to express his emotional pain around this for years to come. I was so remorseful for having caused him pain that I sat at his feet, multiple times, in tears and begged his forgiveness for even thinking about another man.

Despite my deep remorse and efforts to get to the bottom of, and correct, my distorted thinking, my abuser weaponized this against me, yes verbally, but more so as justification for his future infidelities, and as I have now discovered, there were many.

~ NEXT WEEK I’ll be writing about some struggles around substance abuse ~