Stop Blaming Narcissists
Or you’ll never heal from their abuse.
It was two years after I divorced my husband that I began to read about narcissistic abuse. I’d had my suspicions for years that there was something amiss with him, but I always knew there was something wrong with me. How could there not be with my tragic childhood?
When I was six, my mom tucked me into bed one night with hugs and kisses, and the next day she was gone. An aneurysm in her brain took her life as quickly as the light went out when she switched off my bedroom lamp. My dad thought the best way to manage his wife’s sudden death was to talk about her as little as possible to her five children and remarry quickly to a deeply insecure woman who was jealous of my mother and could never be pleased no matter how hard I tried.
I didn’t recognize my dysfunction as a people-pleasing co-dependent until the very end of my marriage, with the help of a therapist who advised me to go to an abuse shelter “to hear their stories and see how you too have allowed yourself to be used and abused.” At the same time that I realized that to be the crux of my problem, I saw how my husband used my co-dependence to his advantage. I didn’t fully see the abuse, I didn’t see the lack of empathy — the narcissism — as a problem, but I began to understand his cowardly nature and believed we had simply grown apart. It was enough to power me through the divorce.
And then three months later the woman he’d been having an affair with the last five years of my marriage came to tell me all about it when he dumped her for a thinner, wealthier woman.
And then a man I was on a date with recognized my ex-husband in my drunken revelation of my married life. He said, “You have to ask more questions. I always knew that guy to be a major womanizer.”
Thus began the horrifying demise of my self-confidence.
For two years I vacillated between attempts to slide right past the truth of rampant infidelities with the declaration of “who cares, I divorced the fucker!” and a paralyzing depression as I realized “I’m unlovable and don’t deserve love.”
We all know that our emotions cause stress and that stress causes physical ailments. Some of us get sicker than others because we are not given the proper support early on to address our emotions and express them before they are buried and behave like a slow-acting poison to our bodies. For me, that played out in an auto-immune disease with flare after flare throughout my marriage. I didn’t understand the emotions I’d had buried, I didn’t connect their effect to my physical pain so I didn’t know that just “divorcing the fucker,” wasn’t enough. I had to feel and express decades of emotions and face the fact that I’d been lying to myself my whole life. I’d withheld loving myself in favor of the belief that love only came from others and that I had to please and be pleasing in order to get love.
I believed that lie until it almost killed me.
After four blood transfusions brought me back to life and I had surgery to remove my colon, I began the very intense journey into who I was and why I told myself so many lies.
This journey included understanding the narcissistic personality disorder that I’d identified as my ex-husband’s issue, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. As I’d read book after book and blog after blog on narcissists, how evil they are and how much pain they are to be blamed for, I couldn’t help but shake the nagging concern that blaming narcissism wasn’t helping any damn thing.
Yet it was all I found in the literature. I sensed a resounding “Death to the narc!” mentality with article after article detailing the horrors they’ve inflicted and how to destroy them. Of course, the horrors are real and many cases are far worse than what I’ve suffered, but after the validation of what I was dealing with in my ex-husband was absorbed, I found it unsettling that validation wasn’t enough to heal.
Because blame is a very low energy. It is a victim energy that gives one very little leverage from which to heal.
Letting go of blame and taking responsibility, I realized, was the only way for me to take back the power I’d given away to my ex-husband, and — as it turns out — other people in my life, and truly begin to heal.
Responsibility is a challenging term for victims of narcissists. I’d been taking the blame and being the responsible one in my marriage all day long, every damn day, and my ex-husband used that against me to get everything single thing he ever got from me. So how do I let him off the hook and blame myself instead — — WAIT!!! Taking responsibility is NOT taking blame. Taking responsibility is taking control. Let the one afflicted with the narcissistic personality disorder deal with their own shit. Don’t tell them you no longer blame them and are taking responsibility — they will have a field day with that. Walk away from them. Seriously, “no contact” is imperative to your healing.
Take responsibility by understanding what it is in you, in your past that allowed the narcissist to take such advantage of you. Utilize the gift that you have of empathy and self-reflection — the very things that the narcissist in your life used to control you — to your advantage. It is the blessing you have in you that allowed you to even survive the abuse, now take it and run with it to understand yourself, love yourself, and never, ever again allow another person to use and abuse the very best part of you.
Make your gift of empathy and self-reflection your superpower, not your kryptonite.
