My name is Michele, I was born & raised on a proper Midwest working farm in rural Illinois. I grew up with a loving extended family around me every day. We had our own cup of family chaos and we never doubted we were loved. Integrity, commitment, do your best attitude, be honest, and loving one another were our values. I have incredibly supportive parents. I have siblings and love my nieces and nephews to the point of complete bias and loving obsession. I played sports, was a class officer, played in the band, and worked to put myself through college. I graduated from the University of Illinois and pursued a career in apparel merchandising and design. I traveled the world for work, yoga, and solo for fun. I opened 3 small businesses, and I shouldered the entrepreneur stress of 2020, finding ways to keep the doors open. I purchased a 12,000 sq. ft building in 2016 and remodeled every surface of it. I am most proud to be self-built. I come off as strong, independent, and a go-getter. I am loyal to my friends and most experiences, to a fault. I am an empath. I carry grief. I carry shame. I am a people-pleaser. My gift of loyalty can also be a curse. I stayed too long in relationships that drained me. I overworked, performed, and served for love. I am a "fixer" and the flip side of that coin is "control" or "leader". I believed I just got things done. I am a strong nurturing female with weak boundaries. The narc experts say I am a covert narcissist's best form of supply. I detail my life because narcissistic abuse can happen to anyone. It doesn't leave visible scars. The scars are inside. The more I speak out, the more I find, many of us are Healing Inside.
EMPTY PROMISES
We were riding in his truck, we were about 20 miles away from home and he and I were future talking. His mirroring around my dream was that he always had a dream to have 5 kids. He asked, would I want 3 instead of 1? He wanted a big family. His kids would love to have younger siblings. He wanted this adventure with me. I willingly dismantled my life chasing after his promises. Just before Christmas, he gifted me this letter.
Five days after this letter, promising me a chance and commitment to have a baby, he wrote 4-pages spewing his devaluing accusations and jealousy. The emotional whiplash was so intense, I wasn't sure what just hit me. His narcissist mask had fallen off under the pressure of living up to his words. Little did I know, it wasn't just his unresolved trust issues coming to the surface, it was abusive relationship patterns. No matter my effort to try to listen, understand, and compromise, his darkness was going to dim my light.
I had done so much in my 20s and 30s, I wanted a family life in my 40s and was willing to sacrifice everything to get it.
I shared this openly with the narcissist. It wasn’t going to be easy with the possibility of a blended family with 2 teenagers. I saw through their chaos and I loved them both, so I committed to finding stability in their Dad’s house. And the narcissist assured me, it was a shared dream. Standing in his garage after an emotional moment with his son, he produced crocodile tears in his eyes and asked me to make his house a home. Without me knowing, he told me he asked his youngest brother if he would ever donate sperm. He went to great lengths to convince me he was in this for life and he was committed.
I am piecing together my life post-narcissist. I am 4 months outside of his controlling tactics. Tangible evidence of his destruction can still be seen in my building. The absence of life, energy, and inventory in the building was initially very devastating. I had worked so hard for 6 years to build it and willingly walked for the promise of a family. I left my 8-year-old business in the hands of a businessman. He promised to love me, build with me and protect me. He mirrored my dreams when I talked about how I wanted to grow them. He assured me he would make the businesses better, and bigger and it would serve more communities. He said the businesses had to be scalable to be successful. They were all empty promises. I learned I am not alone. There are many people that have been dupped by his big empty promises. I learned this was not my fault. I showed up willing to work and I believed his words. I've learned narcissists lack integrity.
Intangible evidence of his destruction came in the form of my grief, shame, and guilt. These were not emotions I readily knew how to navigate. In my “freeze” stage of trauma response, I heard the loving advice of “run for your life & never look back”. However, I had these big emotions in my backpack weighing me down. I had been committed to my dreams of building awareness of health and wellness in a rural community. I poured my heart and soul into these businesses and clients. Through life circumstances and weak boundaries, I tried pouring from an empty cup. Drained from entrepreneur imposter syndrome. Stricken with grief and working through Covid mental exhaustion, the covert narc knew he had found an easy supply. Rather than support, he destroyed. He worked so hard to convince me we were meant to be together in the love-bombing stage. This was to test my weak boundaries. Could he control what I thought? Once he saw he could, he then convinced me the problem was me. This was the devaluing stage. He convinced me I only needed the patience to let him get to everything we talked about. The emotional roller coaster was intense.
The challenge in my journey is to take post-traumatic stress disorder into post-traumatic growth. I am not grateful for having lived through his abuse. These were his choices. I had challenges, I didn't need his destruction on top of it. No one deserves to be kicked while they are down. It did not kill me. It did not make me stronger. I am learning how it can make me wise. It showed me the evil of the world and how important it is to continue to show love, compassion, and empathy. It was a scary chapter in my otherwise beautiful story. I am grateful I had a strong sense of self pre-narcissist. Living outside of his daily chaos and abusive tactics, I am regaining my resilience, I am regaining my confidence in my ability to make decisions, I am regaining my sense of worth and I am regaining my sense of loving myself. I will turn my pain into purpose.
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