Actual advice I’ve received while living with and after leaving the Covert Narcissist
1. Join Alanon
FACT: Not all addicts are narcissists, but all narcissists have addictions. I did join because, it was clear to me, he did have addictions. I needed this self-reflection and community to cope with that and keep my sanity. It did not address his emotional abuse.
2. Run. Run for your life and never look back
TRANSLATION: You can't change him, you won't get an apology, run. A narcissist relationship never ends on good terms or consciously uncoupling terms. They are incapable and the psychological and emotional abuse will continue with contact. While this is survival advice, it lacks the acknowledgment of the trauma experienced while in the abuse.
3. Better not to say anything & take the high road
TRANSLATION: Stuff your emotions and be the bigger person. It is hard to legally pin them in the broken court system. Silencing the victim is often what happens and is easiest because of public opinion and lack of recognition of emotional abuse from the legal system.
4. Talk to a therapist
FACT: Trauma lives in the amygdala, not the pre-frontal cortex. CBT addresses emotional regulation and behaviors caused by those emotions in the pre-frontal cortex. The somatic (body) reaction to abuse and trauma can not be talked out.
5."If you say anything, you will be labeled the crazy one"
TRANSLATION: People won't believe you, they can't see your scars. Bravely, I speak.
Trauma Introduction
Culturally, we are not trauma-informed. Before this relationship, I was trauma ignorant. My belief was if you are being abused, simply leave. While I was in the marriage, I would have told you I wasn’t being abused. I would defend him, I stood loyal to him even as I pulled him out of the hotel room with the cleaning lady. I believed he was sick and a victim, his behaviors could be excused because he had trauma and I believed the promises he made to me. He will get to them, I just need patience and to be strong for him. Also, I didn’t have physical cuts, bruises, or trips to the ER. Five months after I left, I found out I did have 3 torn ligaments, however, while in the relationship that still didn't count as abuse to me.
Generally speaking in today’s world, if we can’t see it, we don’t believe it. I would normalize his abuse because as he always said “‘l’ll never lay a hand on you” and love bomb me to soothe any concerns. I learned to minimize my voice because clearly, I was “too much” anything for him to process. I knew he couldn’t hold space for my dreams, my wants, or my needs. Once I realized he didn’t take anything I said for truth, I went quiet until he badgered me into an emotional reaction, which served as his supply.
Emotional & psychological abusive tactics are a choice. A covert narcissist uses them in order to control others to get what they want. They are masterful to cover their paths of destruction and begin a false narrative about their supply. There are no visible scars, so to them, if you can’t see it, it didn’t happen. They don’t want to remember anything they did. In fact, in one of the last conversations I had with him, he offered “I am going to only take the good from this marriage and nothing bad”. At the time, I thought “wow, finally I think he is willing to talk this through and will also forgive me for my emotional outbursts”. Not the case. He simply wanted to gaslight me, deny anything he did to me was real, and walk about like he had narc amnesia. I know now, he was discarding me.
There is a glossary of terms, specific to narcissist abuse. The only terms I was familiar with pre-narc are Narcissist and Gaslighting.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
DEVALUING STAGE
DISCARD
DOG WHISTLING
FLYING MONKEYS
GASLIGHTING HOOVERING
LOVE BOMBING
NARC
NO CONTACT
PARENTIFICATION
PROJECTION
SCAPEGOAT
SMEAR CAMPAIGNS
SUPPLY
TRAUMA BOND
THE GRAND FINALE
TRIANGULATION
Why doesn’t anyone warn us? Psychology is an elective in most curriculums. Yet, understanding and relating to people are what we need to succeed personally and professionally. I wish someone would have taught me this list instead of drilling the Periodic Table. I wish someone would have told us the monsters of the world do not live under our beds, they don’t just drive around in vans without windows or live behind prison bars. In fact, they walk among us. Narcissists are the devil in human skin.
How to relate to others isn’t taught in school. A divorce comes with a dysfunctional stigma. The divorce rate numbers are considered shameful. The US ranks 16th in the world on the happiness index. "They" act as if we are all educated on how to survive and be happy in this often cruel and traumatized world. Insurance covers talk therapy, which only scrapes the iceberg of emotionally abusive trauma. Anything insurance can't medically prove as worthy is too witchy to be considered healing. Mental health does not equal emotional health. We are not just mind/body being, we are mind, body, spirit, and soul.
Trauma in the Body
When I taught yoga, I taught from the perspective of We Are 5 Bodies.
Physical
Mental
Emotional
Energetic
Spiritual
We have nearly mastered our physical bodies. Detailed images, repairs, and the world of science revolve around how to gain longevity from a physical perspective. We can see our physical body, we believe it. If we feel pain in our physical body, we believe it is something we need to see to prove the pain is actually there. It is beyond us to know that some of that pain and disease is actually pent-up emotion and trauma. After I left in February, he passed kidney stones and again in September. He sent this picture for empathy.
Of course, I offered it. Now, there are other biochemical reasons for kidney stones, however, it did not fall to coincidence that both times, he passed stones. I went to my resources to check which emotion lived in the kidneys, it is fear and insecurity. Both emotions of a narcissist. That made sense. Also, when I talked to Jen (his ex-girlfriend), she also knew he passed stones after she left. Narcissists are in a perpetual state of fear they will be exposed and have deep unresolved insecurities.
As I spoke to his ex-wife, she noted he also sent her this same picture. Hoovering her back in, soliciting empathy while making her life chaotic and stressful with a custody battle. Somehow in the middle of that, he needed supply. He tried both for both of us.
Mentally, we are just getting to the table of the conversation. Schools and professional settings are at the beginning of recognizing mental health days. Generally speaking, the public is just now learning about different segments of the brain and how they affect the physical body. It is a separate entity AND it is fully connected to the body. Logic, reasoning, speech, intelligence, and creative thinking are reflections of mental health. How can we access the different areas of the brain in order to heal? We are connecting those dots.
Emotionally, there are trailblazers forging a path. This is our Soul. Feelings are not facts. No matter what the brain says, we are not our thoughts. For many, our thoughts and feelings dictate our actions. Our subconscious belief system blocks us from reprogramming childhood beliefs. Many adults are running around with an outdated belief system that dictates their emotions and actions. We are not comfortable with emotional expression. The physical body feels an uncomfortable emotion and we are all looking for a way to numb out of it. Alcohol, drugs, sex, porn, social media, gaming, fantasy, physical harm, eating disorders and so much more are ways we create distance from ourselves. Generally speaking, emotional expression and processing are not areas we are guided on from an early age.
Energetically, we recognize when we feel a calming presence, or see grace and coordination and can feel good or negative energy. But what makes it so? Intuition? A sixth sense? The chills running up our spine? A hunch? If we say our energy is off, we look back at the physical body. Could it also be our thoughts? Is it a lack of boundaries around people who drain our energy? Energy healers are generally viewed as witchcraft. When we tap into healing our body and mind, our energy or vibration is higher.
Spiritual Body, this is the house of our Spirit. We often confuse it with religion. Organized religion can be the gateway to a spiritual atonement, so can time in nature, and so can prayer or meditation. We have work to do. It is my firm belief God is within each of us. The Divine Spirit, Guides, or whomever you refer to as the Power Greater Than Yourself lives inside each of us. It is up to us to quiet our mental body, quiet our emotional body and get energetically aligned to listen in to that guidance. The lies we tell ourselves pull us out of alignment. The lies and manipulation from others lead us to believe we are not enough and so we seek. We seek outside of ourselves for answers that have always lived within.
That’s where I met the narcissist. I allowed his voice to be louder than anything I heard within myself. I was in a vulnerable space of self-doubt, grief, and emotional distress when I met him. I loved myself so much. He mirrored that love and loyalty right back at me, I thought I met my One. He held that as long as he could and then, as all narcissists do, he still felt empty inside of himself. Nothing would ever fulfill him. He once told me "There's not enough weed to dull my pain". He doesn’t love himself and using the love for myself was him trying to fit a triangle into a round hole. It didn't work. The narcissist then gets disappointed and even angry that this fantasy of a perfect person didn’t fill their void and they use tactics to control them. That feeling of control then fills their void, however brief it might be. The never-ending cycle goes on until the supply is physically ill, mentally exhausted, emotionally drained, energetically voided, and spiritually misaligned. Or discarded.
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