From Danie Winchester: Hello, I think I need to vent about how confused I am at something. I started a relationship with someone that didn’t last more than a few months. However, it still caused me to fall into depression because it also brought back a lot of things that I buried in the past and things that I thought I had dealt with. The good part is that I am seeing a therapist about that. However, I can’t see her as much as I’d like too due to how expensive it is. My therapist said that person was a narcissistic pervert and that I was his target. The friends that I have and knew him, confirmed it as well. I don’t know how to grasp that nor how to wrap my head around what I went through. Is it actual emotional, verbal, and psychological abuse? Was I the actual “victim” of said abuse? It was only three months after all…Do I “qualify”? I know the answer is yes, because whatever abuse you go through, even if it’s for on day or one hour, it still is abuse. I just have a hard time seeing myself as that in this particular situation…Which is silly because verbal and emotional abuse is something I suffered at the hands of my family… I don’t know how to cope with all this, and I don’t think I understand what narcissism really is…I read things about it, and watched specialists talk about it. And all I can think is, okay sure, but narcissists also have the capacity of love and care right? And if so, the person that I loved, sure did too. So, I feel bad for hurting his feelings by exposing him to our friends. I didn’t do that in bad intent…I just needed to talk to someone who knew him to understand what was going on and to see if I was imagining things. I wish I could talk to him and confront him about all that, as well as all the things that made people uncomfortable about him. I just feel lost and confused in all this and two therapy sessions a months are not enough…
I am so very proud of you for coming to the place where you are getting therapy, where you recognise that even though it’s hard to reconcile, there was still abuse there, and for being brave enough to talk to people!
I think when people are so used to being around people who mistreat them, whether it be from childhood or from long term relationships, it can be hard to understand and know what healthy relationships look like.
When they constantly “apologise” and tell you they love you, it feels like you are getting what you need from the relationship. Something in the mind clicks to say “this is love”.
It’s not about whether you hurt his feelings. He will keep. People with those tendencies have easily bruised who’s and go on to find someone else they can manipulate. Maybe he was a product of his own environmental upbringing. You certainly don’t have to hate someone to know they cannot and do not respect you. Maybe your emotions and feelings feel conflicted and all over the place.
I would like to encourage you to maybe start with affirming yourself. Maybe writing a little note like
- Remember that everyone — including you — deserves a healthy relationship where they feel loved, respected, and valued
Post it somewhere you can read it every day. The more we feed ourselves those positive feedbacks, it does get easier to start believing them.
And YOU deserve to hear them. You deserve to be respected and shown real love. You deserve to be valued
From Danie Winchester: Thank you so much for this. I do realise that I picked the one person who mirror my family’s behaviour. And so, in his case he didn’t ever apologise and minimised my feelings. He once told me “you’re not a victim, you’re just hurt”. And it’s funny because I never used the word victim or even hinted to it. And a lot of hurtful things he told me on this day were things he seemed guilty of. I realised now that I probably was an object that represented that part of himself that he despises deep down. And instead of trying to fix his own low self-esteem and self-hatred, it was easier for him to pick someone else and try to “fix” them. I only was with that person for three months so it’s difficult to understand the way NPD functions. However, my family has been like this for quite some time. I knew of NPD before, but never realised it occurred in my family that…So, I think working on understanding that with my therapist should help. Because if the only person I felt for in a decade was like my family, it definitely means I need to work on the trauma they caused in order to avoid looking for similar people.
Thank you again for your respond, I love the idea of notes. I think I definitely need life-notes like those where I remind myself what respect is and implies.