A Letter to the Narcissist – No. 102
“Dear Narcissist
I wish you’d acknowledged the various loans I’d made you and given me a plan I could work with. I would have protected you then.
It seems so ludicrous to have risked it all when I told you I would expose you and seek legal recourse if you didn’t reply with some sort of arrangement. You had more than fair warning beforehand. Instead, you chose to respond with brutality and aggression. Why? Did you really never have any intention of paying me back? Was this always the outcome I should have expected? All rhetorical questions by the way. I don’t need or want a response.
I’ll give you your due in that you really did put on a great act if your intention all along was to steal from me and use me for what you could manipulate out of me. You’re a lot of things, but I didn’t expect you to be a thief. Though perhaps I should have. The evidence really was staring me in the face all along. Anyone who can cheat and lie the way you did can’t lay claim to integrity in any area of life. I acknowledge now that I should have seen it coming.
I wish I’d never loaned you a cent. Clearly, I enabled you to my own detriment in more ways than trying to love you through all the shit you rained down on me. You’re an adult man for Christ’s sake. It’s your job and responsibility to provide for yourself at least. You sat on your arse and did nothing about your circumstances, literally living off me while you fucked me and shamefully lied so much my head is still spinning even today.
There’s such a thing as cognitive dissonance where two or more polar opposite emotions exist in the same moment. That describes our relationship and particularly where I find myself now. I don’t love easily, so when I do, it’s for life. I will always love you. I don’t hate easily either. I’m thoroughly traumatised by everything you put me through, I’m ashamed of the person you’ve shown yourself to be, and I hate you. I will always hate you. Those two emotions exist in parallel and I struggle every day trying to reconcile them.
You’re a bitter, miserable, lazy and entirely self-centred human being. You lash out at anyone who gets too close. You have no deep friendships because it’s impossible for people to sustain their relationship with you when they meet who you really are. They have to put you at arms length to stay in your life on the occasions where the wind blows and you think to call on them. You put on a great front initially, I’ll give you that. As soon as someone sees behind the mask though, you’re all shards of glass ready to rip and tear through anyone who dares get too close.
I feel so sorry for your family. Your parents love and support you no matter what. They enable you too. You hurt them so deeply and so consistently that it must be hell on them. Your sister knows what you are I think, and manages to keep you at a distance because she lives in another city and you can’t take from her anymore. Your kids are destined to be either seriously fucked up themselves, attract people like you in their own lives as they get older, or they’ll eventually find they too need to shut you out as your eldest son has already done, or keep you at arms length as your sister does. What a sad indictment on you as a son, a brother and a father.
Obviously, I speak from experience as to what you’re like as a friend and a partner. Your wife once wrote to me after you cheated on me with her that your marriage was a very few intermittent highs, mostly in the beginning, followed by a series of extremely low lows. I wholeheartedly agree. In a relationship, your selfishness knows no bounds. You take and you use for your own ends, and you only give rare breadcrumbs in return. You project and you deflect, you blame everyone else for your problems, and take no accountability yourself – it’s always someone else’s fault. You criticise, denigrate and judge by some ridiculous ideal that doesn’t exist except in your own mind (and not one you ever live up to yourself). Your self-loathing is turned around on your lover, expressed through unbelievable verbal and emotional abuse, silent treatments and sulking, and a pure unadulterated victim mentality.
You ARE a classic narcissist, and the worst part about that, is that it’s highly unlikely you will ever change. There’s almost no hope at all. It’s a personality disorder that is so resistant to change that it’s widely considered to be incurable. There’s no drug you can take, no mind or mood altering substance. There is psychoanalytic psychotherapy and cognitive psychotherapy that has seen limited results through psychiatrists who specialise in Cluster B Personality Disorders, but generally only when the bottom of the barrel has already been reached, and there’s nowhere to go but up (save death) by a committed patient willing to lay all of their cards on the table who desperately wants to change.
If you want further evidence, I can steer you in the right direction. In the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th Edition), known as DSM-5, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is diagnosed based on a set of 9 criteria. In my experience of you, you score off the charts in all 9 of the criteria. I’ve told you this before, and I’ve also said that I believe you are co-morbid (meaning you have a dual issue) because you also meet the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s not just me that believes this, Carole (our former Counsellor & Psychologist) and Emma (your own former Psychotherapist) believe it too as you already know. I no longer have a single doubt in my mind that you are a highly disordered, dysfunctional person. I don’t know what it would take for you to see and understand that and find the help you need to get on top of it, or whether that’s even possible for you. For everyone in your life’s sake, I hope one day you do get to the bottom of the barrel and seek real help so you don’t continue to ruin your own life, and the lives of people who love you. Maybe you’ll do it for your kids – probably not, but one can hope.
HG Tudor writes a blog called “Knowing the Narcissist” which I’ve told you about many times. He is a self-confessed narcissist and his blog is part of his therapeutic journey. If you don’t care enough to read the DSM-5, then maybe read a post (or 20) of HG’s. I think you’ll find it impossible not to relate. On his scale, you are a Lesser/Mid-Range Narcissist. You’re also known in other circles as a Covert- or Victim-Narcissist.
Whatever way you look at it, you have a personality disorder that mentally and emotionally controls you, just as much as you need to try to control everybody else in your life. I feel pity for you because, regardless of where it stems from, I know that the emptiness, inability to love other people, lack of real empathy, self-hatred and blackness within you won’t go away, and you’ll continue to inflict it on other people as long as they’re around to tolerate it.
I told you that I know you my Narcissist, better than I think you know yourself. I studied you and your behaviour as I would anything else previously unknown to me, that I needed to learn everything about as if my life depended on it. Unfortunately for me, it didn’t stop me from loving you or being shredded by you as a result of knowing what I know now. That’s my own cross to bear, and I have to learn how to trust not only men, but also myself again because I didn’t heed any of the red flags I saw waving right in my face almost from day one. Hindsight is useless after five years of crap, unless it serves to stop me from letting another disordered person close to me again.
The tough thing is that it’s not over for me yet. The addiction I had to you (and now at least understand why) is still alive and kicking. I know I’m still susceptible to you which is exactly why I wanted to cut off contact altogether. You prolonging this issue about the money you owe me is preventing me from being able to do that properly. I think you were angry at me for telling you I didn’t want to see you or have personal contact any longer. You felt as though you had lost your control over me, and so you lashed out and threw a mind-bending tantrum to inflict maximum pain so you felt better about your own conduct. It’s not working in the way you think though. I’m more determined than ever to hold you accountable and have every dollar I loaned you repaid. You don’t have my loyalty or respect any longer, and I have no regrets involving your wife and divulging the extent, timeline and nature of our relationship to her. If only I’d had that same benefit accorded to me. Maybe I’d not have believed it, but I’d have at least been forewarned and better able to watch for the signs I now know were there all along.
This legal action by me was a very deliberate, conscious last nail in the coffin on you and I, a demonstration that you no longer have any control over me at all, and my way of causing you to feel some consequences for refusing to acknowledge the loans and make a plan to repay them. If it costs you your marriage, that’s on you as I warned you it would be. If it makes access to your kids difficult or even impossible – again, that’s on your choices and behaviour. If she forgives you and all is fine, then more fool her – you’ve done a magnificent job of manipulating the hell out of her, and she’ll no doubt rue the day at some point in the future.
How’s Chelsea, by the way? Celeste? Andrea? At least I was able to warn Alice who you were when you couldn’t avoid telling me the truth about her any longer. Remember the lie you tried to sell? You insisted she was your cousin for Christ’s sakes! She saved herself and her son, ditching you before she had to go through any of the shit I did. She was very thankful I sent her screenshots of your horrific messages about setting her up to fuck her, as well as fuck your wife (as if you weren’t already). Another fine example of you lashing out at me because I refused to come to you after you lost your August 2018 child access hearing against her and stormed out of court, abusing me by text as I tried to work. According to you, that was somehow my fault too. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen you for two weeks at that time. Apparently I was in control of the global #metoo campaign that caused you to lose your mind in Family Court. That’s some awesome power I wish I’d known I had there!
I’m sure there are others now too, I wonder what your wife suspects or knows of them? I wonder if she knows you told me regularly you would always cheat on her if I didn’t stay in your life? Who you follow on Facebook and who follows you should be more than enough to alert her, but I’m guessing she’s tried to connect with you on that platform and you haven’t accepted her invitation. Feel free to block me, I’ve enjoyed having that little perspective into your addiction to porn and your life, but it serves no purpose now. Regardless, it’s none of my business any longer, and I don’t want it touching my life.
I will say that the smear campaign on your wife you kept up had me fooled for a long time. I definitely bought what you were selling right up until around the time she had your baby in February – that she was a scornful, manipulative, lying bitch. I believed you when you told me over and over that you would never go back to her after the pain she’d inflicted on you. I felt hate towards her for all that you’d told me she’d done to you. So many times you said you hated her and wished her dead, that you wished I was the mother of your children, that she used sexual coercion and control over you so you could spend time with your kids. You lied so convincingly that I was the love of your life, your soulmate, the person who knew you best, the woman you wanted to marry and spend the rest of your life with, and I bought it all.
For the record, I don’t feel that way about her anymore. I have perspective now and I’m certain you are doing the same thing to her about me. I think she’s an ordinary woman who tried or is trying hard to keep her relationship together for your sake because you were in the background manipulating and lying to her as well. She has your children so she is bound to you, and for that I’m sorry for her too. If only she knew a tenth of what you told me about her, she’d run and hide as far away from you as she could get. I can guess how it’s playing out when you’re forced to talk about me with her because I named her as a co-Defendant, hence I’m running as far from you as I can get, and thank God I don’t have the misfortune of sharing children with you.
I’ll do what needs to be done and take it to whatever extent is open to me from a legal standpoint to make sure I am repaid every dollar you owe me, regardless of how long that takes. In time, I’ll find a way to forgive you in my own mind. Rest assured, I’ll do that for me because that’s who I am, not for you. As much as I admit that I still and always will love you, and that I’m conflicted over how I feel, you are never welcome in my life again.
IGB
PS – Note to your wife: if you get to read this as I’ve addressed it to you also, and you want to get to the bottom of the pile of shit I’m sure you feel isn’t quite what it seems with him, you are welcome to contact me to talk. If not, then it might at least pay you to visit HG’s blog I mentioned in the letter or read more about Narcissistic Personality Disorder yourself. I used to think it was you who was the problem because he’s clever enough to have built a formidable case against you, but I know better now and, despite how you’ve also insulted me previously, I understand it to an extent and do feel for the position you’re in. You know how to reach me.”
