Teresa, Victim, & Jackie,
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and emotions. I feel like I am going crazy from “the looping” … I dream of him constantly. In fact, I’ve been dreaming of him more and more recently. I think I need to confront him; write him a letter; something. He is not the man I thought he was.
It’s all so standard and obvious, when I look at it on paper. The statement “He isn’t who I thought he was” – it’s what we’re all feeling. But it’s heartbreaking to me, because I’d known him since we were teenagers. He was such a beautiful young boy, charming and funny even back then. Some of those youthful days spent with him were the happiest in my life, when were just friends and joking around. Those are precious days to me. True … he also made me sad back then; he seemed to enjoy flaunting his girlfriend in my face. And he made HER so crazy with jealousy that she attacked me verbally several times in school. She didn’t hate me; she was just never sure of her footing with him. Why should she be, when he invited me out to the movies with him, behind her back, which I did not know. Fortunately, I wasn’t ready for romance back then, and everything he was doing was waaaay over my innocent head.
I’m told that his teenage girlfriend’s parents forced her to break up with him; he told me it was because “…I didn’t make enough money, and they wanted her to marry a doctor.” He also told me, a couple of years ago, that he wished he could contact her, “so she can see how much I’ve changed.” So now, in retrospect, I suspect her parents forced the breakup because he was driving her insane, and his behavior towards her was unhealthy. There’s a key in that statement of his – why should he want to show her he’d changed?
That’s one glaring thing I can see about him now; as much I believe he is a high functioning Narcissist, I can spot the holes in his stories. He has a penchant for blurting out the truth , and then changing the story later, so that he comes out in a better light.
It’s quite the revelation for me to think I saw the Narcissist at work when I was a teenager, but never recognized it. Asking another girl to the movies without informing his current girlfriend …he started cheating on his women when he was 16 years old. He is in his 40s now, and has been married twice … and cheated on both of his wives. Yet I thought that he had evolved.
I want to just puke.
Jackie, you’re right, it’s more revealing to analyze our own past, pre-Narcissist. I feel I am sorely in need of therapy. I have done a lot of self-reflection and am aware of many of the weaknesses that drew me to him – and, on the heels of him, another one I was terribly fond of, but who exhibited similar cold/controlling behavior. And I just wanted to love him and save him and help him and OY VEY, Hellooooo Doormat.
So. I want therapy, but I can’t afford it – there really aren’t any affordable options for me right now, not with my current situation of less hours on the job, and lots of bills to pay. But – less work hours is sort of therapeutic in its way. Not only would therapy be a good way for me to talk all this stuff out, and gain insight on why I feel so oversensitive and bruised about all this, but I have this belief/hope that anti-depressants are what I need. God, if I could just take a magic pill, and be the happy, fun loving person I used to be. To feel motivated to go out and do the things I used to love to do, that I now only feel “meh” about. I’m always saying: Forget HIM! What happened to ME? Where did I go? I miss… ME!
I am aware of the co-dependency tendencies that exist within me, due to the double-whammy of losing my father at a young age, and then being controlled & manipulated by an older “friend” with Borderline Personality Disorder. I’m amazed I have any self-esteem left. As for my mother, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Actually, I used to think the woman was a female Satan, but she isn’t really harmful at all. She just had a lot of growing up to do, and so did I. We get along wonderfully now, although she can still get cranky if she’s forced to socialize with me for too long. But she’s older, so she’s entitled, lol. It’s amazing how much I adore her now, and accept her as the flawed (and frankly hilarious) human being she is.
I, too, believe that the punishment for the Narcissist is that they are their own worst punishment. Anyone who gets “close” to them will see through the facade, and question the broken promises … and any time that facade is questioned, the famous rage is triggered. I actually cornered him once and pressed him for explanations, thinking I might uncover the true him. Boy was I right, with a capital “F”, which stands for the stream of profanity he spewed out at me! I was torn between pity, horror, and amusement. Honest to god … Mister Screaming-Your-Head-Off-Jerk … get some meds. Wowzers.
And think about it – every Narcissist is actually a FAILED Narcissist. Not only do they have an incredibly uncool and undeveloped “true” self to shield from the world, but as I mentioned before, they think they’re “special” and “unique” … and they’re all cut from the same mentally disordered cookie cutter template. “Special”? “Unique”? “Extraordinary”? #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL
I want justice, I want revenge, I want to see him in person so I can wring his fat neck, grrr!!!
I am still deciding what to do. I am torn between waiting for him to write to me again (because he said he would, right? And I can take all the checks he ever wrote to me to the bank, RIGHT?), and writing a big fat long letter that calmly and rationally explains to him that I do not wish for him to ever write back to me, as I could never accept someone so untrustworthy as he proved to be his entire life. It would need to be a carefully worded letter, using as few words as possible, and as little emotion as possible. That’d hurt him. Or perhaps it would feed into his delusion of self-grandeur (well … it’s not really delusional … he IS important to me, I DO obsess about him) … but most of all… I feel it would give me a sense of closure, and I really really REALLY believe I need that.
Or, I could take a page out of a Seinfeld stand-up routine, and order a dozen pizzas to be sent to his house every now and then, for years and years and years. ~~Tee hee!~~ (Wow, that’s as evil as a Dr. Evil plot, lol.)
Until I can figure out what to do to start to heal, I think that bonding with others who have been through this experience is a very good start. I really could use a good virtual btch session, where we take these jerks we gave our love, souls and trust to, and give 'em the verbal bashing they deserve… btchy drag queen style.
This was an awfully long venting session. Thank you for letting me have it; I hope I didn’t bore anyone by going on for so long!
Hoping we can all find the path to ourselves again,
J’Nean
So do I feel bad about using his tactics against him ? NO What goes around , comes around.