The Sob by David Alfar Siqueiros, 1931
I believed my relationship with my spouse was ‘special’. That what we had between us was so far evolved from the ox-yoked marriages of our parents that we were pushing the millennial change forward, ushering in a spiritually progressive union between a man and a woman as peers, not unequals. A marriage a’ la Riane Eisler uniting the blessed chalice with the honorable blade. Me being the silver chalice of course, because I had a receptive womb bringing life into the world; and he being the blade because he could cut things in half. Like hearts.
We used to have deeply earnest conversations about spiritual beings having a physical experience and I lofted into reveries of the meaning of things which appeared for all intents and purposes to be shared by my partner. I loved sharing deep thoughts, probing the essence of being alive and questioning God’s purposes for his rebellious children, our fears, our insufferable pains and irremediable uncertainties. Talks like this were uncommon in my home as a child where the most pressing issue of the day was who was gonna make dinner and whose week it was to feed the horses. Pragmatic is how I’d describe my formation years, so when I met someone who introduced me to Herman Hesse and taught me all about Siddhartha and meditation, I felt as if God had brought the two of us together for a special purpose: to overcome the insults of our pasts and remedy gender injustice.
As I said, and you psych-savvy readers have already figured out most likely, this is what “I” was thinking during our conversations and what my partner was thinking was assumed to be the same. Only time would tell the vast difference between our ability to walk the talk instead of talking and talking and talking and then skipping over the walking part.
An anonymous reader commented on my blog entry titled Narcissists Lack Emotional Depth . She asked me why it was so hard for partners of narcissists to heal. Why we struggled with the grieving process and letting the narcissist go so we could move forward with our lives without being constantly reminded of our losses. I wanted to write a more thorough response than a comment; but before I continue, I'd like to say that my experience may be similar to some of yours---and it might be very different. One of the biggest differences to point out is that I was married for several decades and had two children and overtime, my spouse and I changed a lot. Perhaps it’s fair to say that we became MORE like the person we were when we met. Especially once the illusion of perfect love faded into pragmatic realities.
Infatuation diminishes, sometimes faster than ink can dry on the marriage contract. In a normal relationship, if all goes well and both partners do not develop psychological blocks to emotional maturation, infatuation grows into love. The relationship becomes ever bit as much about the ‘other’ and the ‘children’ as it is about the Self. Instead of feeling entitled to have our needs met by our partner, needs that might not have been met in childhood, we look for ways to meet our partner’s unmet needs, even if they’re unaware of how much they needed us to do this-or-that. I think we call it Growing Up as a couple. Moving beyond the immature selfish self into equalizing our needs on a par with our partners and then, very importantly, believing ourselves to be capable of meeting their needs without resentment, ambivalence or resignation.
When a relationship ends suddenly, when something we never expected to happen to us, DOES, we might have an arduous time processing the unexpected. Especially when other people are incapable of empathizing with and validating our experience.
It’s like the time my daughter was in a car accident on her way back to her apartment after doing laundry at my house. A drunk was speeding around a curve close to midnight and smashed into the driver’s side of her car. There she sat, trapped like a sardine, watching the little birdies spin around her head while her brain lagged making sense of the chaos. She was out of it for awhile.
Her adrenalin soared and she managed to kick her smashed door open, even after a man had stopped and said she’d have to sit there until a rescue team could cut her door open. The oncoming freeway traffic was swerving around her car, terrifying her of being hit again and she doesn’t even remember this part fully, but she escaped her car and then started acting like a crazy person dodging in and out of traffic picking up her laundry strewn all across the highway. The back of her car had been ripped off, like opening a box of Twinkies when you’re in a hurry.
In retrospect, picking up laundry was a stupid thing to do, even self-destructive and dangerous, but that’s about how crazy human beings can be when the unexpected happens. You say to yourself, “I cannot BELIEVE someone hit my car at 100 mph! I cannot BELIEVE what just happened!" and while you can’t BELIEVE what just happened, you’re acting like you’re Fruit Loops or even worse, Cocoa Puffs. You are not grounded in reality, you’re suspended above planet earth with one foot in LaLaLand and the other hopefully NOT on the accelerator.
The next day, after she had been released from the hospital with a broken collarbone and had to sleep in our family room easy chair for six weeks, she said to me with eyes full of horror, “What person in their right mind kicks their door open and races through traffic to save their panties?”
But that’s what she did and there’s no denying it. Lucky for her, she didn’t get hit by freeway traffic. Paramedics arrived in five minutes to save her from herself which they gladly did since she’d been serving them Starbuck’s coffee for years. They saw her pink punked-out hair and shouted, "It's the coffee shop girl! The one who calls us angels!"
My daughter believes they gave her extra-special care because she always called them angels when they came in her store. I tend to believe it's because they occasionally got a free coffee out of her. A good cup of hot joe goes a long way towards building a relationship.
The paramedics reciprocated her kindness and made sure she didn't have to lie next to the drunk while they took care of him. Thank God they were trained in emergency procedures and recognized a woman in shock, temporarily traumatized by what she could not see coming from behind because she didn't have eyes in the back of her head. Lucky girl. She'd never get asked out if she had four eyes. Not that she gets asked out a lot now but a mother can always hope, right? At least her hair isn't pink anymore.
Until our brains can put order to the chaos, we act unconsciously, outside ourselves. We do things we’d never do under ordinary circumstances. Other people who do not understand the shock of being hit from behind by someone we trusted, might look at us and assume we’re fools or that we are and always were one grain short of a full box of cereal.
Within short order, if we’re lucky, the little birdies circling our brains will stop going tweet and we’ll get ourselves off the highway and out of harm’s way. If we’re really lucky, an emergency vehicle will show up and well-schooled paramedics will check us for injuries and sooth us back to reality by taking charge because obviously, we can’t. At least not for a little while. We’re confused. We need help. But most of all, we need support that respects our temporary frailty and respects our weakness by promising under the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
One of the first questions resolved by the police, and bless them for setting my daughter’s mind at ease, was the assignation of fault and blame. “It wasn’t your fault,” the cops reassured her. “He was speeding and driving drunk and now he’s in jail where he belongs for breaking the law and putting your life in danger.”
That settled her mental obsession wondering whose fault it was and how she might avoid a similar accident. What she had done wrong and how could she fix her driving if she’d been negligent in seeing warning signs and posted speed limits. Well, she didn’t do anything wrong. She was obeying the law like a good citizen when someone determined themselves superior to the rules society sets to protect us from each other and like an intoxicated fool, smashed into the side of her car without even realizing what he was doing. He said in his defense that he had lost control. As if that's an excuse for almost killing someone. But the thing is, he let himself get out of control in the first place. He could have applied the brakes at the bar, in the parking lot, or stopped himself at numerous points along the way and he didn’t.
As they say, “Shit happens” and no matter how obedient, good, conscientious or courteous you may be, not everyone else is. People break the rules. They hurt others. They blame everyone else by putting up a good fight to avoid responsibility for their choices. In the end, the law decides who is at fault and who isn’t and who pays the price and who doesn’t. In a law-abiding and CIVIL SOCIETY, the guilty are penalized; thus releasing the innocent from their natural instincts to question themselves as to what they did wrong and how they can protect everyone in the future, including themselves.
The conscientious are driven to take responsibility, not avoid it.
The narcissist is a highway menace. A Good-Time-Charlie without brakes who endangers others because he-or-she doesn’t LIKE being controlled. Since they lack moral discipline, any restriction on their behavior is resented as control and nobody is gonna tell them what to do, especially not some road sign or social contract. It’s all about the narcissist’s freedom to do as they please and any taboo or rule regulating (and protecting the N’s freedoms, too) is rebelled against. The narcissist is a law unto himself. One who mocks social traditions and rules as being only for the minions, the followers, the muddle-headed sheep who obey street rules because they’re weak and inferior. The only way to negotiate some kind of reasonable safety in a society replete with narcissistic individuals, is to seek justice. That means assigning fault and blame where fault and blame are due and not expecting someone like my daughter to say, “Okay. I’m half responsible for my accident because I share the road with drunks.” That would be a legal injustice making a mockery of what we know to be true. It only takes one drunk to cause an accident and the only person responsible for that accident, is the drunk without a foot on the brakes.
What legal justice did to restore my daughter’s sense of safety again was educative. I was able to watch her start healing once she had been absolved of fault for only doing what millions of people do every day---driving on the same road as everybody else. She did not spiral into guilt and self-blame that cannot be resolved because it was based on a lie. She did nothing wrong. She cannot suffer remorse for guilt that was not hers to suffer. The law saved her from illegitimate suffering wondering how she could prevent this from happening again. She can’t. Not if she bore no responsibility for causing the accident in the first place. She’d go half-crazy if she started checking her rear-view mirror for fast drivers or refusing to drive in the dark because she couldn’t see dangerous drunks or never doing her laundry again because maybe that is why he hit her. She did nothing wrong and even with legal support telling her this, I had to remind her of the fact over and over and over again.
Sensible, good-hearted people are prone towards internal examination of the self as cause to the consequences in their lives.
I have said this before and it’s not always received with welcome arms but in my way of viewing the narcissistic relationship, it’s another accident on life’s freeway. Perhaps there were red flags and stop lights and street signs alerting me to danger ahead but then again, maybe there weren’t. Maybe anybody could have met and partnered with a narcissist, someone who for all intents and purposes, did not intend to cause an accident but refused to step on the brakes if he or she was having FUN.
As long as our society pretends there is NO FAULT and NO BLAME to be assigned to a broken marriage; as long as we purport the silly cliché that it takes ‘two to make a marriage’ without realizing it only takes one to break it; as long as people insist we had something to do with the DEMISE of our relationship, or that we didn’t work hard enough or try hard enough or care enough to work out the problems inherent in any relationship, we are prone to self-doubt and self-blame trapping us in an endless spiral of prolonged and complicated grief.
When we see judgment or indifference in other people’s eyes, we tend to isolate ourselves, withdraw into silence that may lead to depression and prolonged grief. It’s the betrayal or ignorance of the bystander that makes it hard for us to let go of self-blame and move forward. Here are four key steps to consider if you are grieving the shock and trauma of the narcissistic relationship:
1-Don’t isolate. You know you want too; but don’t!
2-Ask for support but make sure your support is experienced in trauma. You would not go to the bread store for a quart of milk. Don’t go to your neighbors for something thay cannot give.
3-Establish a daily regime. Getting back to normal will reground us in reality and occupy our minds when we might start obsessing. Sometimes keeping busy helps us feel better.
4-Take care of your health even though most of us don’t. Especially since a long grieving process might trigger depression and we won’t care enough about ourselves to get out of bed. Avoiding escapist substances like alcohol, drugs and especially anxiety-producing situations (like a new love interest too soon) graces us with adequate time to cope with our lives.
I believe with every fiber of my being that anyone with a generous heart, a moral conscience and the intention to create a safe relationship with a partner, is capable of being sideswiped by a narcissist.
I also believe that there is one person at fault for the stagnated or even abusive relationship, and that is the narcissist.
I will also be so bold as to say that there is no one who works harder to save the marriage and support their partner than the non-N spouse. When we have our reality validated by someone who shares the same experience and we know that that person is a GOOD person of integrity and conscience, then our healing process gets a kick-start.
Our truth must be heard in order to release us from illegitimate blame and guilt. Until our experience is validated and supported by experienced people like ourselves, it's far to easy to believe the lie that we are trapped in a wrecked self without any hope of escape.
Hugs,
CZ
Resources:
Definition of Trauma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma
Healing Emotional and Psychological Trauma, http://www.helpguide.org/mental/emotional_psychological_trauma.htm
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