Narcissistic Injury

My therapist gave me a simple way to think about all this pressure from my father to "love" his wife: 

NARCISSISTIC INJURY

Apparently, by not taking his "possession" into my heart, I have injured him greatly. And he won't let go of this "injury"...he will stalk me until his dying day to "repair" it. That might be a bit dramatic, as he turned the tables around and proclaimed that he never abused me at all, that I'm making it up, and he won't have anything to do with me or my daughter. So, I don't think he'll be communicating anytime soon, if ever. However, this blog stalking surprised me, and I am sure that will continue. Fine, dad, C., anyone else,  YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH! (as one Navy JAG once said....)

Anyway, I had tried to repair our relationship a few months ago, believing that my daughter should have a maternal grandfather. The first phone call was fine. He sounded older, much more like his father than I'd ever heard before, still depressed, still having the same problems, still wanting to know all about my life, but I could manage that. It was good to hear his voice after so long. What I couldn't handle was the second phone call, when, at the end, he asked when I was going to talk to his wife again.

I was enraged--did he learn nothing in this decade of silence??? Did he never hear a single word I said, ever??? He never had heard me before, when I explained why this "acceptance" issue was so difficult for me (understandably, I think, because my parents had just gotten divorced!!!) and continued to shove this "need" down my throat for years. You know the story now.



I was simply shocked. I had told him I wanted to work on our relationship first, and then I would see if I could have a relationship with his wife. I told him I needed to take it slowly. He seemed like he understood, but he actually didn't HEAR me in the first place. And it felt as though he was patiently asking all the questions about me and feigning interest in my responses, to butter me up, for the REAL issue...when would I talk to his wife. His "relationship" building with me was all about getting me to accept her. To repair his narcissistic injury.

So, in a normal (read "non-dysfunctional" family), this issue wouldn't have been a big deal. But in mine, it was all about control. My father wanted to control an intimate part of me:  my relationships. MY relationships. Dictate who I can love and who I cannot. And punish when I don't have relations with who HE wants. I am a free human; I was born to love, but not to be dictated to about who or how to love. Loving and relationships, compassion and sensitivity are WHO I AM. I needed the space to grow into myself, and my father could never get that. I needed AUTONOMY to decide how to structure my life and who should be in it. It is MY choice who to include in my life and how, not my father's. All this time, I believed my father had the RIGHT to control these things. Now, I am experiencing FREEDOM of CHOICE for the first time.

I chose to not want to engage with this woman yet. Who knows, given time, I might have been able to develop some sort of relationship. But he refused to allow me the opportunity and time to formulate a relationship for myself, and so desperately needs me to repair this "injury" that I pushed him right back out of my life again. And then he decided to make it sound like he was the one who chose to disown me. Wow.

Narcissists suck.

I LOVE this blog post on defining narcissistic injury.  Quite brutal and vivid.

Narcissistic injuries have nothing to do with sadness.  They are always and only about rage.

The narcissist says, "I exist."  A narcissistic injury is you showing him that he does not exist in your life.  Kicking him in the teeth and telling him he is a jerk is not a narcisstic injury-- because he must therefore exist.
Let's say I'm a narcissist, and you send me a 10 page letter explaining why I suck, I'm a jerk, I'm an idiot; you attack my credibility, my intelligence; and you even provide evidence for all of this, college transcripts, records from the Peters Institute, you criticize my penis size, using affidavits from past and future girlfriends-- all of this hurts me, but it is not a narcissistic injury.
A narcissistic injury would be this: I expect you to write such a letter, and you don't bother. 

The reason it's important is because the reaction of the narcissist to either "insult" is different.  In the first example, he will be sad and hurt, but he will yell back, insult you, or cry and beg forgiveness or mercy--he will respond-- maintain the relationship.   He'll say and do outrageous things that he knows will cause you to respond again, to prolong your connections, even if they cause him misery.  He doesn't care that it makes you and him miserable-- he cares only that there is a you and him.

But in the latter case where you ignore him, humiliate him-- an actual narcissisitic injury-- he will want to kill you.

One Girl as a Projection

A sad fact of this world is that oftentimes people see you how they WANT to see you, not as you really are. I suspect my family of origin was unconsciously looking for one member to place all their guilt, anger, and shame on--the scapegoat as it were. They wanted to see this member as a sick individual, the one who gives away the family secrets, the one who shuts the rest out, who doesn't listen, is unreasonable and one-sided in her thinking, and shuns the others for no apparent reason. So, here is the sensitive daughter, the frightened, timid member, and they projected all of this onto her and ensured it played out exactly as they had imagined. She has lived up to their "expectations." A fulfilled prophesy. Funny how that works, huh?

 

I became the ogre who shunned the others. The bad girl who hurt them all. The guilty one.

I have become this nightmare of a horrible person to them; I am a mix of all the negative traits these family members individually possessed, rolled into one unpalatable package.

A lifetime of being pushed and shoved and having others' thoughts, feelings, opinions stuffed down my throat, well, yes, I did FINALLY stand up for myself--after forty fucking years! How dare I stand up for myself in this family? Feel my own emotions, speak my own views, have my own opinions? How dare I defy the status quo? Change and not be the pushover I always have been? BETRAYAL! BITCH! SICK!

Only no one, except five people, view me this way. Everyone else knows a loving, sweet, sensitive, funny, yet hurting, aching human being. A thoroughly vulnerable, mistake-making, imperfect human.  If I were such an ogre, wouldn't I have been abandoned by friends and husband long ago? Would my mate have stayed with me despite everything for twenty years and counting? Would wonderful recovery siblings have continually encouraged me during my struggles? Would many of my relationships still have shifted and evolved yet remained strong and comforting? Would my work colleagues still have donated amazingly generous amounts of time when I ran out of sick days during my maternity leave? Would a few cousins still determinedly keep an eye on me to make sure I am okay? If I were so nasty, so horrid, such a sick individual, wouldn't be I completely alone by now?

Blogging is "sick"?

 My husband sweetly offered to take the baby and sent me out to the Starbucks cafe, bless his soul. I wanted to write a bit and he understood that.

DH was trying to protect me from the nastiness the family's discovery of my previous blog-and he did a good job. I asked him point blank what was said to him, though, (my husband was dealing with them all so I could focus on my newborn and the ppd), and apparently my brother-in-law said my blog was "sick." Sick? Do you think it was sick? Writing my feelings and impressions in my own web journal is sick? My sister said it was one-sided, without giving my father a chance to defend himself. Well, this is the man who denies any abuse whatsoever. And since when is anyone allowed to comment on and judge someone else's feelings and experiences? My feelings are my own, not to be tossed at anyone's feet to be judged and shamed. Now my mother is telling me that I shouldn't be writing personal things on the web and indirectly implying that this whole business was my fault. And that what happened when I was young was the responsibility of "all of us." Since when was a child responsible for her abuse? I watched my own child as I thought this; I looked in her innocent eyes and the absurdity of that remark made me want to cry.

We had a wonderful visit with my in laws this weekend; everyone was happy and excited about our child. She has wonderful grandparents and great aunts. However, the beauty of this visit brought home the fact that this isn't the case in my own family. I wanted peace with them so much. I tried so hard. And then found out they were spying and tracking me on the web and used what I wrote to "prove" what a sick and demented person I am. My father then said he feels sorry for my daughter because she won't know him. What an ego! How dare he bring my daughter into this. She is innocent. I love her. She is mine, and what she gets to experience is up to me and her, not this man.

I will  never again censor myself just so family secrets can be kept under wraps or because I am shamed into it. This is my medium and I thrive here. I KNOW I am not the only person to keep a personal blog, for crying out loud, and I hope to make friends with people like myself in this forum.

It does feel good to be sitting here, typing my feelings out again. I've missed blogging.