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.

Ah! Validation!

As I searched the web for informative blogs on the topics of the narcissistic parent, covert incest, and toxic families, I stumbled on this gem: One Angry Daughter

"One Angry Daughter's" situation similar to mine; and as I am accused of being "sick" for having a personal yet anonymous blog, well, I think this blogger and others like us are on the sane side of the aisle. Just look at what happened to her:

Unfortunately, I underestimated their internet search skills and left a path (albeit a convoluted one) right to this blog. As such - I know they have read everything. To anyone who thinks if you can just tell your family members that you think NPD, alcoholism, BPD, etc... are in play and maybe they will get the help they need - let my experience be an example that it may not.

Same here. And our intentions are the same as well:

I hope by sharing my experience I can help others going through a similar situation. I want other DoNMs, ACoNs, ACoAs and other victims of emotional abuse to know it is not their fault and they have the power to walk away from the source of the abuse. Even more importantly - you have the power not to fall down that slippery slope and pass on the abuse to your children.  Having the strength to face your past to become a healthier person can stop the cycle.  

Survivors of emotional abuse thrive in community with each other, especially as we walk away from the source of the abuse, as One Angry Daughter states. It is too easy for us--being already vulnerable to pain inflicted on us-- to feel guilted and shamed into believing that we are the crazy, manipulative, dysfunctional person in the family, that we are making these issues up in our heads. That alone is enough to push us under deep water--the lack of empathy ans validation that comes with this type of treatment by our families of origin.

I welcome connections with other bloggers in this type of situation--please don't hesitate to leave a comment if anything you read here helps or hurts, or you'd like to join together as a  blogging community.

Family secrets

 Identifying that one has been covertly (or emotionally) incested is difficult because direct sexual contact does not occur in these situations--and I believe, in our (American) culture, that anything other than the "real deed" is considered to be a figment of an overly sensitive person's over-active imagination. This is why I doubted myself for so long. I still do.    Sometimes I think that I am making a big deal out of nothing....but I realize that is the voice of the guilt I still feel and what members of my family of origin want me to believe. When I recall my experiences of psychosomatic illness; chronic, severe depression; constant anxiety and vigilance; suicidal thoughts, and past sexual dysfunction in my relationships, I now understand that these are not "normal" behaviors.  Nor is secretly running off in the dead of night to a foreign country and staying for two years until guilt overwhelmed me. Nor is having difficulty making friends and having no hobbies or career interests until I cut off all contact with my father, over ten years ago. Once I did that, I magically became interested in the world outside of "him and me" and started discovering what made me content and invigorated. Ten years, and I was able to repair my sexual relationship and finally bear a child.

The sexual "side effects" of covert incest, that is a whole other story I will get into later. Let me just say that at least my father had enough boundary sense not to violate explicit sexual limits, thank God.  I have recently learned, however, that overt incest is present on his side of the family, it happened to my dearest relative, and my personal theory is that covert incest occurs in families in which overt incest has previously occurred in some form; the atmosphere is charged with a sexual, enmeshed, boundariless energy that seems "normal." 

In fact, I did have an unfortunate sexual experience with a cousin on that side--molestation, I might call it. What do you call performing a sexual act that your heart says is wrong because you want to please the person? A first cousin, who I trusted and thought cared about me. This memory did not surface until recently, as well, but I have always experienced a highly charged erotic feeling around this cousin and could not understand it. This feeling caused me such shame over the years--what a sick person I was for having sexually charged thoughts about this first cousin. And why was I so shy around him, why did I feel so "violated" and "ashamed" when I was alone with him in later years, even for a few minutes. I was so uncomfortable in his presence, well, it was hard to tolerate. And the sadder and sicker part is that this cousin was my father's FAVORITE nephew. His FAVORITE person, like a son to him. Why was I surprised that this person would have been the one who violated me sexually? They were both, as I have come to learn, narcissists in the extreme and ended up estranged because, in my opinion, they couldn't cope with how alike they were! It makes me sick to my stomach, the whole thing.

I think this is enough for today. Trying to dredge up and clear out the past while struggling day-to-day to be a normal, healthy parent for my young daughter is turning out to be the challenge of a lifetime. I am determined to give her the life I wished I had, though, at whatever cost.