I’m trying to support someone going through living hell at the moment. Without going into any specifics (because it literally could risk my friend’s life if I were doxxed), their tormentor claims ownership of them, body and soul, and claims that only they know my friend: no-one else could understand them, no-one else would want them… I think of my friend, who is a person of deep integrity and intelligence, and wonder if Alice used the exact same words as weapons against IG. In my own personal experience of NPD/Dark Triad afflicted individuals, I’ve been subject to the selfsame lines - ‘I know you better than you know yourself’; ‘you’re lucky I’m keeping you around - no-one else would want you’; ‘you made me hit you’. Narcs follow a predictable playbook (and this is one reason why I am suspicious of these sites Alice gloms on to, with their memes and pat phrases and infinite victimhood commensurate with the complete innocence of the women who are, apparently, the saintliest mothers in Christendom). When did the abuse start? Did he think he could help her, fix her, before the absolute final straw of the Day of Violence concluding with her unconscious carcass snoring on the kitchen floor?
I don’t know what point I’m making precisely - maybe there is none, or one that’s been hashed over endlessly in this forum - but I still see some people blaming IG for staying, and it both infuriates and grieves me. No-one goes into a relationship thinking ‘I want to be hurt and abused’ unless they’ve got some pretty niche weirdness going on. No-one expects that their internal worldview - the frame by which we mediate the world and our experiences in it; our logical underpinnings, our fount of rationality and sense - to be in direct conflict with what another, who claims to love us, is telling and showing us. No-one wants to feel the shame of being so grievously wrong in whom we choose as a life partner, or the victim of mental torture. And (and this is something narcissists abuse and exploit) no-one wants to think their life partner irredeemable. They want to help the one they love. They think their love can heal the wounds in the sob story the narcissist tells, make the narc feel ‘better’, that the more they are loved the more healed they will be. Walking away from such psychological enmeshment, the mind fractured into a million pieces because of the narcissist’s lies, games, manipulation, power plays and distorted reality and utter isolation from normative thinking is incredibly hard. Profoundly, almost impossibly hard. And by the time you’re ready to go, you’re running on fumes, broken, dissonant and discordant, feeling utterly worthless, reduced to bare evolutionary prompts for survival. So when I see people say ‘he should have taken the kids’ (realistically, without being arrested and sent to prison??), or ‘why didn’t he leave sooner’ or ‘why didn’t he push back against her horrible behaviour’ or a million and one variations on that theme, it makes me want to bang my head against a wall: if you haven’t escaped a narcissist, you cannot imagine the torment. I’m just thrilled that he’s still alive, was able to smile again and has found someone who seems to be Alice’s antithesis.
View attachment 3323035 qView attachment 3323036 q
