Woe is Me
In the trenches of covert narc abuse, when he played the recording of Nikki & the kids saying they all wanted to move outside of St. Louis, it seamlessly went along his victim narrative. He would say “see, I was coerced to move”. Until I began putting together how narcs work, I never questioned WHY he had the recording (and yes, in this particular recording there were actual voices). Why did he begin recording a family conversation about a move if they were all moving? It’s infuriating to me now to know he was setting the stage to use it against Nikki and to alienate his kids from her in the future. He was setting the narrative for him to be a victim when and if he needed to be. In the conversation, he was keeping them guessing, he stated he didn't know if he was going to move. I know now he did that to create chaos and to be the “hesitant” one. He staged that conversation. He was already “browsing” houses. His son was sending him house options. He says he bought the house he is in, for his son. So why would you record that exact conversation and no others? In true Narc form, he recorded it so it could be used as a weapon in the near future.
Then, he moved. Knowing she wasn’t going to move. Instead of staying put and stabilizing the family, he made a covert decision for his personal gain to move. He once explained to me that he moved to get away from Jen who was "crazy" and would just show up at his house. He would tell his employees and his salespeople that he moved so he could better run his company at the corner of 64 & 70: same situation, 3 different stories. Sure, there could be a multitude of reasons for moving. He owned them when he needed superiority and grandiosity. He didn't own them when he needed to play the victim and gain empathy. And he weaponized the story when he needed to alienate his kids from Nikki. Covertly, it may just have been him that broke up the family, again. A narcissist will tell on themselves by projecting their story onto others.
Two examples of using his narrative for empathy.
Through LinkedIn, he found a graduate of Harvard to consult for his company. He made calls to his top employees and family “A guy from Harvard is going to help us grow”. Through this guy, he was introduced to an ex-VP at 20th Century Fox. Here she stood at our house, not even hired, yet, the Narc went into a sob story of how his son was abandoned, how his ex-wife left him, and why his son was behind in his “development”. I was instantly embarrassed. None of this was a reflection of me. But here he was on night one of getting to know this woman, and it all came out as if she was a counselor. He was manipulating her. Oddly enough, that night, something that sticks with me, she mentioned her former boss in LA was a narcissist and she had gone to a therapist to learn how to work with him. She accepted the position with the Narc's company. I can only assume she knew what she was getting into with his immediate victim story. In my narc ignorance, I reasoned and knew he was socially off and I felt sorry for him. I know now, that a common and bizarre emotion from narc abuse survivors, they feel sorry for their abuser. I give her assumed credit, she saw the red flag, and yes, she accepted the marketing position.
In the second example, a food distributor salesperson courted him for a year working to get his company's account. Finally, after making this sales guy spend time, effort, resources, and money to get the account, the Narc negotiated and signed the contract. This sales guy was so excited, that he came over to take us to dinner and genuinely wanted to connect to build a relationship with him. The day after, the Narc called the sales guy and said he was on his way to get his daughter because he was fighting for custody and gave details. Followed by "Hey, if you are going to work with me, you’re going to know all the details". Then after he used that contract to secure a better one, within days he nullified the new agreement. He had taken it to his current distributor and they met the terms. It’s not personal, it's business. I get that. However, his lack of professionalism and integrity is cringe-worthy. He will use people, places, and things for personal gain. Here he was using his custody battle to gain empathy and using the sales guy for a better contract with his existing distributor. While the latter could be justified by "it's just business", ethically, leave your family drama out of it.
Losing Control
Nikki threw a wrench in his ability to control her. She told him in September she was moving out in November from the house he owned. She was moving in with her boyfriend as things were getting to the next level in their relationship. This meant the Narc no longer had control over how much she made or where she lived. It took him a bit of time to find his next move to maintain control and make Nikki’s life miserable. It all makes sense now. He couldn’t keep her guessing on monthly payments, he couldn’t control where she lived, and against his narrative, she was finding a way to move on and hold her own. So in true narc form, he devised a plan to use his daughter as a pawn. At the end of October, he filed a lawsuit to get custody of his daughter. It was and still is emotionally torturous to everyone involved.
His family would validate the "Nikki is crazy" narrative. They witnessed her reactive abuse. They had no idea he was a covert narcissist. When I was with him, they had no idea he would spend 20 minutes devaluing me on the way to their house, plaster a smile on his face when we walked through the door, act caring and concerned, and then continue the abuse as soon as we got back in the car. I would go along with it in utter confusion about who he was going to be and when. His family confirmed they saw him do everything for those kids, again, from a keyhole perspective. None of them lived within 5 hours of him to see he is a covert narc. I know now, what they know of him, is all a keyhole perspective. What they see in a moment in time and matches his narratives. He knew how to act when he knew he was being watched, he mega-phoned out the one-sided narratives. He did nothing wrong.
I'm not painting Nikki as perfect, she's not. She's human. She's surviving ongoing narcissistic abuse. After getting a narcissist education, getting to know her, and personally living in his narc prison cell, it's all in his playbook. Only after sharing experiences with Nikki, did we realize it was a pattern.
The “Family” Man
He made the appointment with the family attorney. He wanted me to go with him, he produced tears in her office. He played the victim. He filed a motion to get custody of his daughter. His plan? He wanted to go to a basketball game that week. This was incredibly odd, he had made zero effort to attend any other school events. In reality, how could he? He was so busy surveilling, tracking, and following, he had no time. And he had time. At the beginning of our relationship, he dropped everything to come 90 miles to see me, during business hours. He rearranged his entire day to stand guard outside of my studio. However, he couldn’t make it to her evening school events, he was "busy". So was my Dad and my Dad never missed a single extracurricular event, ever. As we walked into the school gym, he verbally devalued the Principal. He devalued other parents. We sat by ourselves. His eyes were on a swivel. He was a fish out of water.
The Custody Battle
He filed a motion and wanted to uproot his daughter immediately. She was in mid-Fall-semester in her 8th-grade year, on the basketball team, and suddenly he was entitled to this because of the way he wrote the divorce decree. He dictated in the divorce that he had the final say in where the kids go to school and the decree was “non-modifiable”. In his ongoing smear campaign, he tells the story of how Nikki said she was suicidal when he was leaving her, this is a keyhole perspective. What he fails to say is how behind closed doors for years, he devalued her, manipulated, gaslit, cheated on her multiple times, installed cameras and microphones, nailed the` attic door shut to keep her pulling out the wires, and by the end of the marriage, she was drained. From personal experience, in the last 8 weeks of our marriage, I was so emotionally distraught from his narcissistic abuse, I said to him, I could see why anyone who has lived with him concludes that death is the better option. I don’t know how Nikki did and still does it.
The following week, he enrolled his daughter in the local school. When she came that weekend, he told her he wasn't taking her home, she was going to live there. He took her home. I explained it was emotionally exhausting for everyone, whatever he was going to do, do it. Do not say one thing and do the other. He did just that, over and over again. On Thanksgiving break, he told his daughter he wasn't taking her home. He did. On Christmas he said he wasn't taking her home, he did. In January, he tried again and even went to the school to tour it. Each time her emotional reaction intensified. The psychological and emotional abuse of this back and forth is incomprehensible for a 14-yr old. Remember, this is the man who moved cities because he wanted to prove he is a man of his word. It came down to an emergency hearing at the beginning of February. His answers to the questions made zero sense. It was surreal to hear him interrupt the Judge. It was jaw-dropping to hear him dodge questions from either attorney that he may have had to admit lack of judgment. To his dismay, he lost the emergency hearing. Instead of speaking to his daughter or spending time with her before taking her home, he told me to take care of her. On that particular day, he was onboarding my friend (see post Devalued). If he couldn't control Nikki, he went back to work to gain control over me.
In the coming months, he threw me under the bus to Nikki. The entire custody battle was my fault. It was me who was the one pushing it. He explained to her he was coerced. Nikki tried to tell me about it at a pick-up for his daughter that he couldn't get to. I simply didn't have the capacity to listen. I was surviving. The most I had as input was I told him, I will support him with whichever way he decided to go, but please, pick a direction and stick with it.
The narc tried to buy his daughter that summer after her 8th-grade year. He would remind her he wasn't going to buy her a car unless she moved in with him. He purchased $3,000 worth of clothes and spent another $5,000 on her 15th birthday trip all to say on the last clothing store, "So, when are you moving in". He would share he wasn't going to give her a dime of his company's money until Nikki is dead because he didn't want her supporting her mother. This is not love. I called him out then. I will call it out louder for the ones who don't understand or know better. This. Is. Not. Love. This is control.
In the August 23 custody hearing to determine where she was going to high school, he asked me to attend the hearing with him. The night before he needed supply so he devalued me. That night, I was a whore who had cheated on him. While he never said "whore", his allegations would suggest the definition and his narrative would illustrate it. I defended myself. And then, as most narcissistic abuse survivors would do, I went to court to show support as I had told him I would. Once in court, Nikki's attorney let the Judge know, he didn't have the paperwork submitted to his attorney in the court-ordered timeframe. He had 2 options, let the hearing continue, but he could not speak, or he could go outside the courtroom and make a deal to allow his daughter to stay with Nikki for the school year and reassess after the year. He chose the latter. The judge also ordered family counseling and for him to pay for it. To this day, he hasn't attended or paid for it.
On the ride home from that hearing, he was punching the steering wheel and screaming. He was the victim. His attorney, the opposing attorney, and the Judge were clearly against him and Nikki was the narcissist. From the night before and that morning, I had enough. We were leaving Columbia and I told him if he hadn't been so distracted with the cleaning lady, surveillance, tracking, and following me everywhere I went since May, maybe that would open up some time to file the paperwork in a timely manner and put his daughter & family first. It wasn't the attorneys and Judge against him, he was his own worst enemy. I've since learned narcissists hate to be called out. The verbal, psychological, and emotional abuse he spewed for the next 20 minutes was unbearable and still echoes in my brain to this day. I remained quiet for the next 24 hours. I know now, he had used me to make him look better in court. 12 days later, I left.
Two months after I left, his attorney voluntarily withdrew from the custody case. It was every chance for him to withdraw his motion and fold on this losing legal battle. He didn't. He doubled down with a new attorney. He still needed control. Even with me out of the picture, he's fighting for control over Nikki and using his daughter as a pawn. It wasn't me, it never was. He's made zero effort to get to his daughter's school events. He continues to try to buy her love. Most recently, he told her not to come on one of his weekend visits with him because her brother wasn't going to be around. The message is clear. His narcissistic reason to remain in the custody battle is to keep control over Nikki's emotional state and to keep her guessing so he can gain his supply. And to narrate to his new supply, through his keyhole perspective, he is a "family" man because he's "fighting" for his daughter.
Commentaires