Piecing Together Narcissistic Abuse

There’s a truly sickening paradox in healing from narcissistic abuse.

I wanted peace. I wanted the hundreds of questions to stop.

But somehow, the road to peace took me deeper into the darkness of the very person I was trying to free myself from. I needed to understand how his mind worked because somehow, I thought that would help me make sense of the toxicity, trauma and chaos he had created all around me.

And if I knew how it happened, I could make sure it never happened again.

Eventually I got there, but it cost me a lot. My mental and physical health suffered and, truthfully, some days they still do.

There is no way to quantify the hours I’ve spent having conversations about manipulation, reading books about narcissism and listening to podcasts about emotional abuse.

And then there’s the time I've spent thinking. Literally just thinking.

What’s that saying? If I had a penny for every thought, I’d be rich?

Let me tell you, I would be so, so rich.

There were many times I remember asking myself, How long am I going to allow this to consume my mind? How much more of my life am I going to waste trying to understand the psychology of someone capable of being so callous?

The moments when I actually saw very clearly who he was were difficult.

Sometimes my mind would get quiet long enough for me to recognize this fact: there is something seriously wrong with someone who can be so devoid of emotions.

He could go out into the rest of the world and get it right. He was charismatic, fun, giving, a good listener, a good friend. But behind the scenes, where nobody else could see, lived this manipulative, controlling and entitled person.

There were fleeting moments where I could see it, but those realizations moved in and back out of my mind pretty quickly.

Maybe I pushed those revelations away because I wasn’t ready for what they meant. I’m the kind of person who wants to believe that deep down, people are good-natured and have good intentions. Truly seeing him meant confronting the possibility that this wasn’t always true. And those raw moments where those insights challenged what I wanted to be true about human beings blew my view of humanity to shreds. That was devastating.

But there is another possibility for why those glimpses of who he really was were so hard to hold on to.

Maybe they were snatched away by the haunting voices he had already placed in my head. The ones reminding me that I wasn’t rational, that I was too sensitive or that I misunderstood things. That repeated voice saying he was a good person meant I must have been the problem.

Good people do bad things. It’s true. But at some point, I had to stop using “he's a good person” to explain away a sick pattern of behavior that was tearing the people closest to him apart.

I KNEW this.

But even when I could see it, I couldn’t always hold onto it. The clarity would fade away, and I would end up at square one again.

I would go searching again. I would study more.

It was an exhausting, vicious cycle that always seemed to end with another set of questions.

Did he know what he was doing? Did he really believe his own version of history that was so drastically different from ours? Did he ever really see me? Was any of it real?

I kept trying to understand his mind because I was desperately trying to make sense of what had happened to my mind.

But somewhere along the way, I came to accept something incredibly simple:

I may never understand how someone can treat their own family this way because I would never do it.

No amount of research was ever going to make his behavior make sense. I had some theories but, in the end, every single one of them were simply excuses.

After all of that crazy searching, I can finally say I’ve loosened my grip on having to know. I know enough.

The question had to change from:

Why did he do this?

to:

What did living through this do to me?

That question takes me somewhere completely different. It takes me to things I can control.

I still have questions. A shit ton of them, actually. They’re just different questions now.

What has all of this done to my body, my nervous system and my health? How do I learn to trust myself again? How has this changed the way I show up in my relationships?

And right now, some of the biggest questions are about my children. I’m questioning what I want my future to look like. How to use my anger instead of letting it consume me. How to turn it into protection, boundaries and something that actually serves me and my family.

The questions aren’t keeping me trapped in his mind anymore. They’re bringing me back to my own life.

I’m finally looking forward. And yes, sometimes that means looking back but only when I need to understand where I’ve been so I don’t ever fucking end up there again.

But I made it through one of the hardest parts of the journey.

I stopped needing to piece together narcissistic abuse.

And started working on Piecing Together Peace.