There are a lot of sad things about being in a relationship with a narcissist.
The person you thought you loved is nothing but a figment of your imagination and there is nothing you can do or say to fix the relationship, fix the person, or help them to become the person you thought you saw when you first looked at them.
You will break your heart again and again with all the ‘what ifs’ and ‘coulda beens,’ wondering if you were the bad one, wondering if there’s something wrong with you that made you choose them, etc. That state of doubt and confusion will last long after the relationship is over.
The person you were when you first got involved with the narcissist is also dead and gone by the time you get to the discard. You are no longer the confident, strong, skilled and talented person you were. You minimized yourself to try and keep them from raging, pouting, or being jealous. You discarded friends and family after the narc’s many ‘them or me’ ultimatums. You may have let career opportunities or educational offers pass by because the narc either caused you to doubt your ability to achieve, or their conflict-prone and needy nature would not have given you the time and space you needed to succeed.
You are not the perfect person on a pedestal that the narc said you were at the beginning. That dazzling vision of yourself has become tarnished and destroyed by weeks, months, or years of belittling and nitpicking. You went from being their perfect person to an incompetent dolt who can’t even pick out the right cereal at the grocery store.
Friends and family who did not know or understand the way a narcissist works will more than likely blame you for everything. The narc abused you behind closed doors, but goaded you until you ‘acted out’ in public. You may have tried to tell someone what was happening, but the narc got there first so all of your outcries ended up playing into the narc’s story of how you are ‘jealous’ and ‘crazy’. If the narc is also a family member, or an in-law, the situation ends up looking like you are the one who started the conflict, and you are the one stirring trouble and gossiping. Between the narc smear campaign and all of the loyalty tests/shit tests the narc puts you through, ties with friends and family are strained or broken completely. It’s hard to rebuild relationships after the narc is done and you are left so damaged and lacking in self esteem that you question whether it’s even worth trying or why anyone would bother to try and like or trust you again after all of that.
You have doubts and denial, fears and neuroses. You second guess yourself, you can’t make decisions, you break down for no reason, you find yourself mentally rigid, emotionally brittle, and unable to connect authentically with anyone because you no longer trust yourself and you no longer trust others to be who they appear to be. Anyone who seems kind, beautiful, comfortable to be with, easy to talk to….immediately sets off your alarms and you get away from them as fast as you can. You may have a heightened “BS” detector that keeps you from being swindled again, but you also have so many walls and fences around your heart that you can’t get close to anyone at all, even people who are kind and good. You don’t trust others, but mostly you don’t trust yourself anymore.
The loss of someone who was never the person they appeared to be is certainly sad, but the fundamental loss of self respect and confidence in your own competence and sound judgement is the worst. The profound feelings of shame and self-loathing that are left when the Narc is finally out of your life is unbearable. As I once said to an ex: “Eff you for treating me that way, but more than that, EFF ME for LETTING you.,”
Forgiving yourself and learning to like and trust yourself again is the last and hardest wound to heal after a narc has destroyed you from top to bottom, and from the inside out.
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