Healing After Narcissistic Abuse: My Story

Growing up came with it’s difficulties, as growing up generally does. As I have engaged in therapeutic work over the years, I have discovered that many of my challenges in adulthood stemmed from my experiences with my parental figures.

My mother suffered from significant mental health issues. She was orphaned by the age of 12 having lost both of her parents, one to an illness, the other to suicide. As a child, I viewed her as fragile and stepped into the mindset of being a “caretaker” and a “peace-keeper”. As I look back, I see her as one of the strongest women I knew. She endured a lot yet still had the will to live until the ripe old age of 83.

My father was an alcoholic. He was a workaholic. I swore I would never be like him. He was the “lesser” of his siblings and his parents made that known. Nothing in life was handed to him. He worked for everything. Independent from his parents he went to college, served our country, and became one of the leading salesmen in the country for Remington Rand. As I look back, I am more like him than I ever could have imagined.

Before I met my abuser, I rarely drank, out of fear of being like my father, or “partied”. I was a mother, a wife, a small business owner, all by the age of eighteen. I didn’t have time, let alone the desire, to live in an altered state of mind. I was actually pretty damned solid as a responsible human being, and mother, until I met my abuser.

When I met my abuser, suddenly, the party was on. He was a daily weed smoker and threw back the alcohol in a manner in which I had never seen, even with my alcoholic father. I partook in the party, using it as an excuse for everything in life that I had missed thus far. I didn’t quite understand to what extent my abuser’s use of substances was actually an addiction, until it became a problem.

I noticed that when he used, he was “loose” and claimed to have forgotten all the various things that he’d done while under the influence. I would find phone numbers from various females in his pockets. After several years of struggling with the displeasure of his behavior while drinking, the event that broke the camel’s back came to pass.

My abuser went to a golf tournament that his father was attending with all of his Rotary friends. He was at the dinner that followed when he called me to tell me he was leaving San Francisco and would be back to the East Bay shortly. Nearly six hours passed and yet, not a word, not a sighting of him. I was a wreck, my mind was going in a multitude of directions. Suddenly his truck pulled up and stopped in the middle of our front lawn. He entered our side gate and was vomiting throughout the back yard. I was furious. I immediately locked all of the doors, refusing to allow him to be in the presence of me and our children in that condition. Lucky for him, my adult daughter, who happened to be visiting that night, told me that we couldn’t leave him outside because if he had alcohol poisoning he could die.

The next morning I told him that I was done with the alcohol. He watched me dump every bottle, every beer down the drain and then he asked me for help.

I made an appointment for him with a rehab center and intake doctor and told him I was really proud of him for taking this step. I supported his recovery in every single way I could, including not allowing a drop of alcohol to pass my own lips, or even be in our home, for the next twelve years. He dove in head first to his sobriety, which led him back to the church. He sponsored other men, whom by the Grace of God, are still sober to this day. I supported everything he did in his sobriety. I stood by his side, unequivocally.

In a future post I will elaborate on how it came to pass that I eventually became the one with the drinking problem, and how, when I chose recovery, he literally chose to start drinking again. He not only abandonded me emotionally, but used my shame around having turned to alcohol to soothe my nervous system to devalue me, threaten his commitment our relationship, cause fear of abandonment and continually suggested that another woman would love him the way he deserved to be loved. It was a very lonely time.