Now Imagine...

Once you discover you are the victim of someone with a Cluster B disorder, like Destructive Narcissistic Pattern, it changes you. Forever.

- You realize you meant nothing to that person.
- You realize they used you for sex, fun & games, money.
- You realize if they used you for sex (saying they 'loved' or 'cared' about you) they were just masturbating using your body & emotions.
- You realize you can't trust them or yourself.
- You realize if they were a friend, they probably used you to meet other victims or to springboard a personal agenda.
- You realize everything you were told was a calculated lie.

Now imagine if you have had at least 15 of these people as friends or lovers in your life.

Now imagine if someone like this was one of your parents. So you were raised by one. (Usually takes a child of a narcissist until their 40s to see it, if at all)

Now imagine if a bunch of them were in charge of the government of the country you lived in.

What to expect once you have discovered narcissism

Narcissism is hugely offensive because it reduces the victim to absolutely nothing.

After years and perhaps a lifetime of being made to feel like nothing, you finally realise why - to the narcissist this is exactly what you are. Nothing. Your pain means nothing. Your efforts mean nothing. Your love means nothing. In fact, if these mean anything at all, it is that they are offensive to the narcissist, because anything that makes you a lesser source of supply simply angers them and reduces your value even more in their eyes. Kind of like we would feel if our car suddenly started giving trouble.

Let's look at another analogy.

Imagine a commercial dairy farmer with a herd of cows. He does not care how pretty the cows are. He is not interested in whether they like him or not. He cares about how much milk they produce and how much cream is in that milk. That's it.

He gives them a place to sleep, feeds them and has them tended, all for one sole reason - the milk that they will give him in return. His entire farming operation revolves around his attempts to get maximum milk for the least cost and with the least hassle. If he has a cow that bucks and kicks, he will try to tame her by coaxing or beating - whichever works.

If he has a cow that is not producing to standard anymore, he may try one or two tricks to get her back up to standard, but if he can't, or if she did not give such great milk to begin with, he will dispose of her in whatever way will bring the greatest benefit to himself. It does not matter if her production has dropped because she is ill or because he has beaten her so much that she no longer can, or because she is old. All that matters is that she is inconvenient & no longer up to scratch to meet his needs.

Now imagine that this particular farmer is a particularly cruel and nasty person who does not even have basic respect for his animals, let alone any sort of affinity or compassion. Got the picture? You are looking at a full-blown Narcissist.
How it feels to deal with a narcissist

See if you recognise any of the following:

• You are often left feeling as if you are going a little crazy with him or after you've had time with him.
• You feel that you are being constantly spoken at instead of spoken with.
• You wonder at times if you actually are going crazy and feel that there must be something wrong with you - or fear that there is.
• You feel guilty, even when you have done nothing wrong.
• You constantly feel that something you did or said is going to be misinterpreted to be something bad, and not what you meant in the first place.
• You feel that no matter what you do, you can never be good enough.
• You often feel (if not constantly) that you are not sure what exactly he wants in the first place.
• You long for his approval, yet you merely get crumbs.
• You long for his closeness, yet you merely get crumbs.
• You feel a sense of relief and gratitude when he is in a good mood, is nice to you, says "I love you" or does any of the other things that you once believed were in fact a normal part of relationships.
• You fear him and even when things are good between you, you feel you can never really relax and be yourself.
• You feel he never listens.
• You feel he doesn't know you and, when you think about it, he has never really asked you many questions about yourself. Perhaps in the early days he seemed to live inside your head, extracting all sorts of information from you, but since then, his interest has waned. These days when he does ask about you, he doesn't actually seem to listen to your replies.
• You find it really hard to disagree with him about anything - even your own feelings and thoughts.
• You are constantly scared of upsetting him.
• It seems that no matter how hard you try to keep the peace, you can never keep it up. He will blow at some stage, no matter what you do.
• You feel as if you spend your life with him jumping through hoops and walking on eggshells.
• Most importantly - These things are not true of you in general - just with this person or this type of person. You do things with or for them you would NEVER normally do.
  

  You yourself become a completely different person around them.

When you finally realise that to the narcissist you are no more than a cow - a source of supply and that even the good and nice things were no more than means to an end, there is a good chance that you are going to experience numerous things.

* Emotions such as you may never have experienced before: rage, pain, perhaps even hatred.
These will probably run deeper than you could have imagined possible and seem to have no end. They will be tripping over each other for first place and continually swop position as first one, then the other, comes to the surface - over and over again. You will experience moments or periods of deep sorrow and sadness - a mourning - and this mourning will be for many different things and reasons.

What is important is that you realise that a lot of your sadness is a mourning for the loss of a dream. An illusion, not a reality. You can choose to turn a blind eye and continue as before, but realise that what you are returning to is a puff of smoke: a make believe world and nothing more.

* Liberation.
The more abuse you have suffered and the more of your life you have spent trying to get your head around what was going on, the greater this sense of liberation will be. It is as if you can finally accept - TRULY accept - that it is NOT YOU. Finally you see that not only are there others who will believe the bizarre stories that you have to tell, but that others have lived through almost the exact same abuses that you have. The mind games, the dual personalities, the undermining, the character annihilation, the lack of protection, the fear and uncertainty and the immense pain.

Even in the middle of the new pain that you will feel, you will experience a sense of a weight being lifted off you. You finally know what you are dealing with and it IS real. You will know that you are not alone and you are not the only one. After years of you trying to hold onto reality in the face of utter madness, you are finally validated.

* Memories come flooding back.
Some you did not even know that you had. As each one comes forward, you begin to see the incidents clearly for the first time and you finally can start to understand. Each memory will bring its own emotions and further insights and some will hit really hard, but this is finally the path of healing and not the senseless pain of abuse. There is a hope and an encouragement in that - and even further liberation.

* Self-doubts.
Not the same type of self-doubts that you have had through the years with a narcissist, but more of a self-questioning that has you examining yourself, checking frantically, "am I a narcissist?". Questioning your thoughts, your motives, your behaviours - past and present - with real fear. This is normal and IF you are questioning, there is an excellent chance that you are not a narcissist at all.

When a narcissist looks inward, he sees no fault, no imperfection, only the image he desires to see. If he does experience a flicker of reality, he will blink it away and return to the illusion.

* Life-dissection.
You find yourself going back over your life and reliving all sorts of things. Your general life dynamics, specific incidents, particular moments - the good and the bad. You look at them upside down and inside out, trying to see all the things that you could not see at the time. Questioning and testing everything, then refiling it in your mind, sometimes with a bit more insight and sometimes with a completely fresh perspective. One that finally makes sense.

* Obsession to learn, to discover, to deal with and even to expose.
At times you may feel that you are about to crack because you cannot stop. You have a need to understand it all. Now that you finally have a thread to hang onto, you want to see exactly where it goes and examine absolutely everything about it. This is also normal. I think it is possibly a critical issue as a victim of this type of abuse because thinking and asking and understanding are the very things that you have been deprived of - sometimes brutally - as part of the strategy of the abuser. The pendulum is swinging and you are like someone who has been trapped in a cage and finally let free.

* Understanding.
So much is going to begin making sense, even while you are wading through a host of new questions. This is the main source of the sense of liberation that you will feel, because one of the most damaging aspects of being a narcissist's victim is the constant lack of understanding. The constant feeling of nothing making sense and the awful confusion that this all brings. - It is this lack of understanding that eventually leads us to conclude that it must, after all, be we who are the problem. When we begin to gain understanding and see clearly, we finally see that it is not us after all.

SOURCE

(I was interviewed for this book that gives fuller descriptions of the victim's processes...)

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO JBLOG ME