A Letter to the Narcissist – No. 109

I read some of your emails the other day. I do that occasionally, I do it to remind myself of your vile characteristics. I do it to remind myself to stay away and the good decision I made to walk away. I do it to fight against the emotional thinking, to apply logic to your devaluation, to remind me that the golden period was an illusion or to ensure i stamp down any seeds of growth of rose tinted glasses on our time together.

My email responses remind me of the bright, happy and witty woman I used to be. I had forgotten about her.  So they come in handy those email essays of yours. You would never discuss anything face to face that required a decision to be made between two people – you are incapable of having a two way balanced discussion to find a resolution that suits anyone other than yourself. Especially if I wanted a voice.

My opinion was pure challenge fuel to you. So you would use electronic means to control. And you also liked to punish in the same way with your vicious and spiteful words, creating anxiety and compounding your withdrawals by threats sent by technical no through roads where response was impossible. You liked to create confusion and hold me to task with them. It was very effective,  until I saw it for what it was, and stopped blaming myself. Knowledge is power as they say. But at the beginning I was drawn down that electronic whirlpool of correspondence to its dark depths of hurt and control.

Willing to conform in whatever way you wanted, seeking your validation and approval, I was conditioned to respond and communicate in the manner you demanded – so i would acquiesce. And the unacceptable became the normal. Metaphorically, this took the form of you standing your unarmed victim in the corner and shooting them down with words whilst they maintained their silence (something you did physically as well but this tale is of emails and texts).

A white rage of words to which no one is allowed to respond. I had to collude with your method of communication or have no voice at all, conform or lose you, swallow the words without responding – but colluding meant losing integrity. Any response by my own email was met with mockery and derision. Unable to respond by discussion or conversing it was a fait accomplait of gaslighting, a confusion of twisted reality, leaving no room to explain or reason and no room for negotiating or bargaining. A slow death of the soul by one thousand emotional cuts.

Your first emails I saw were the ones you showed me before you sent them to your ex wife. I used to ask you to change some of the terminology, take out the spite and vitriol in them.  You used to laugh and say she needed to be given ‘both barrels’. Whore!  Slapper! I was worried that the person I liked so much, this upstanding, moralistic, ethical, intelligent middle class man was capable of actually penning these vitriolic essays, that they would be turned on me at some point. And of course they were. How naive of me to think I would be different. But then that’s how your type get away with it isn’t it, our naivety, our belief that we can produce a different result through our endeavours and efforts.

We put great faith in the smearing stories and pity plays about the ex, trusting your words and your sorrow for past events . We believe the charming, affectionate persona displayed in front of us is the true person that lies inside.  Not the jealous, angry, embittered and frightened troll you in actual fact are (I  was going to say child, but that seems wrong to attribute those traits to a child but I do see the little frightened boy inside of you, but he’s not getting my pity or care anymore).

The first big red flag displayed to me was an email, and I let it pass me by (though I can see from my responding email i did in fact see it as a big red flag – stupid girl). It was an email  you sent to me a mere few weeks after our first date. Such a short golden period. But that’s another story to be told. And that is what is lucky, if such a word exists for those on the end of your type of human being. Here I am left with a trail of emails and texts that tell our story.

They have helped in the aftermath of ‘us’. And oh what an aftermath. I always prided myself on my strength of mind, my independent ability, my career accomplishments, there was just one thing i wanted – a family life. And what a lovely family we could have had, three budding teenagers between us and what seemed to be two very compatible adults, such a potential for a happy family as we drifted into our fifties when our other life goals could then be brought to fruition as our little blended family made their way into the world. Oh the dreams we carved – oh yes that’s right, my dreams, your future fakery.

Forever moved in front of me never to be realised unless I met the unquantified higher ground you set for me to achieve. Looking back, we never got off first base, there we were still 60 miles apart after eight years. It seems so ridiculous, you put the satisfaction of gaining ‘fuel’ above the contentment of a happy family life.

Yet if you had moved toward the happy family life then you would have had permanent and consistent positive fuel. A bizarre misnomer of the narcissist and of course positive fuel is never enough. But I digress, we need to come back to the aftermath. Looking back at your emails I can see that I pulled you up on your future faking within 18 months, but of course you did what i know now to be a hoover to keep me bound tightly to you.

For eight years I believed you, trusted you for your words and after two final grand hoovers I finally prised myself away from your grip and label of ‘useless and never good enough’ and pushed myself away from you, using your emails and texts as ‘proof’ of my sanity, that the events that had unfolded were my reality, and using them for clarity of thought I escaped. But as a direct result of trusting you for those eight years I have escaped into financial precariousness, a wasteland of  time, CPTSD, anxiety, lost friendships, shame and guilt.

Worst of all is the loss of what could have been good times, times with my family and yours, times with our children. Due to my childhood I prided myself on my mental strength – and that has got well and truly cracked. I never even knew that someone as everyday as me could be facing PTSD symptoms. I feel weak, my determination for success is at its lowest ebb, that knot inside of me that was my success driver is now anxiety. I lost eight years at a crucial time of life. But I have re-educated myself. I have always been a survivor.

I have someone in my team now who is far cleverer than you, someone who is successful at his game, with many many supporters. I have been gathering all their thoughts and experience to put everything together. I resent the additional 6 years i spent with you when i should have left at 2.

I resent your affair(s) that you blamed on me, I resent trusting and believing you. But with those emails I have compartmentalised your behaviour, each piece by each piece. The future faking is now so obvious, the word salad is there in print for all to see.  The gifts to bind me – given to confuse, taken away to punish until i conformed are there.  I see now when the savage devaluation started, I saw myself fall apart by the end of year 4 only for you to once more lay the golden carrot in front of me. I saw my determination in year 5 to leave you only to now see the grand hoover you sent in to save the day. I see me go super nova empath to protect myself and challenge you.

I see how my swearing and anger was a defence of your onslaughts of hurt. You started to smear me to the few friends you have and your children before I had even left, you spent the last year of us together in other relationships – i can tell by your terminology which matches the terminology when i caught you out the first time.

A few weeks ago I found out that your new girlfriend overlapped me. Of course she did. When i found out the anxiety started to rise and then immediately dissipated – it was the last box to be ticked on everything I now knew. My heart went out to my tutor, I didn´t fall apart, and you were just as predictable as anyone would have expected you to be with the condition you carry as your personality. And thats you in a nutshell. Companionable, but boring and predictable. Amongst all the drama I missed the fact that you are boring.

You see, eight years with no moving forward in life’s journey is boring. You are boring.  I have found you out. So I embrace my future, I will chase those life goals we set – happily on my own. I have new ones too. I know myself now more than I ever knew i could. The resentment has gone, the anger is no longer necessary as I no longer need a defence. I will beat the PTSD. I have rewritten my landscape of my childhood, I now realise my father was the first narcissist in my life.

I will not end up like my mother or your mother – spending the last 20 years of their lives as mere husks waiting for death after spending the first 30 with narcissists, never regaining their potential, their souls replaced by their narcissists’ ever-presence. I know what to do. I have the knowledge. But there are 3 reasons i will not forgive and forget. 3 other people where your behaviour has scarred the beginning of their lives. I will not forgive myself for the part i played by letting your behaviour shape their life experience so young, for the moments i let slip by whilst conforming to your demands, for wrongs you played out and i did not challenge.

Nor for the moments my ‘conditioning’ by you left you in charge to carry out your emotional abuse, and for not ensuring the development of the opportunities of proper relationships between all of us instead of the isolation and compartmentalisation you applied. I will do my utmost to repay that debt. All 3 of them have been misshapen by your behaviour to bear low, low self esteem.

It is another naivety of empaths. Whilst I have the experience of life to pull on to save myself from drowning and had the potential to escape – they had neither of those resources. And you broke one of them entirely.  Your own child and you broke him. You made him feel worthless. Useless. That he didn´t count. Irrelevant was his own word he used. That he meant nothing, that he had no place in life. Unseen and unworthy.  You gave him the shroud you wear for yourself. You found someone to pass it to. He lived on his own in that house with you for what must have been three long insufferable years, alone to be at the end of your total degradation, devaluation and abuse. He had no world experience to pull on.

He started by self medicating with drugs and you stood by and watched. You did nothing. Ignored advice from experienced professionals. I did at least try to pull you together and get you to act on that but your inclination to not do anything that anyone asks of you would always take priority over anything else. Never accountable, you firmly put the blame for the events that unfolded at the feet of your ex wife’s abandonment of you years before.

You celebrated the fact it opened up communications with her and you successfully hoovered her after 10 years, twisting the garrotte of losing the custody of her children that lay round her neck a little tighter. She still doesn´t quite understand the enormity of what you are and always will be,  the coldness inside of you and the lack of a heart, nor recognise the everlasting effects of your behaviours that lay inside of her and her children. She is still tricked by the magnificence of your word salads, thinks she can appeal to a better nature that would surely be inside of you for the love of your son, that the opening of communication for the benefit of the children could only possibly be a good thing. Everything and every idea I offered to you to improve your child’s self worth you rebutted.

You used counselling to extoll yourself of any responsibility and support your facade. But you even limited that to ensure your position wasn´t made vulnerable or that you were ‘discovered’. You liked him feeling bad. It fed you. I see that now, I know that now.  I wish I had lived in that house with you, I wish I had so I could have protected him somehow. I wish I had done more to make you do things to help him. It all happened towards the end of our relationship whilst I was making my escape so i wasn´t there to even rescue some part of him.

I stood over you and made you go and be with him when he was at his worst and in the middle of a nightmare whilst you were making your holiday your first choice. Your priority still wasn’t him, it was to use the situation as a grand hoover of me. I told you twice that he was a suicide risk. I berated you to support him but you still labelled me the neglectful and absent one.

I still wasn’t doing good enough and he wore that label too.  After one more huge devaluation carried out despite knowing how vulnerable he was, you sent him down the road of attempted suicide. That lies firmly and surely at your door, as does not accompanying him to hospital to be with him.

You couldn´t even give him validation at that time. I once told you that you didn´t know what real love was. It was a strike from the gut and you looked very upset (I had seen through the facade). But my gut was right. I know now that you don´t know love, ever, not at all, and in that moment you proved it. He continues to suffer, but I can see that he recognises that narcissism is involved, but as most kids do, he looks inwardly – your words say its not you thats at fault, so what else can a young person think when theres only two people in the room – he blames himself. My hands are tied and limited on how to help him as your skewed rules are ingrained in him. What the outside sees as ‘normal’, he has had rewritten as ‘weird’.

What the outside sees as strange, is his normality. Because you command it, with the end of our relationship must go all the other relationships with everyone else. Despite 9 years in his life i have been deleted by your rules. So in his world view the adults have abandoned him. And now you have two new young teenagers under your care with that poor woman currently under your spell that you are rushing to bind to you – you who resents any attention given to anyone other than yourself. So they too will be at the end of your machinations and that’s now five young lives affected by your degradations.

Well, I cant stand back and let you continue unheeded, not when it comes to these young lives, cheating them of a fair start in life. I remember what that feels like, what its like to live that, the effects carried for years until you find out how to heal yourself. I once was that child. How can I possibly let further events unfold, knowing full well that they will most certainly unfold, destroying more young people when i know what you are and what you do when I have power in my hands to hinder you.

I know what you fear the most – you showed that to me four years ago when i foolishly gave you the gift of secrecy along with my integrity. I know your fear, your Achilles heel – Exposure.  So now that trail of emails and texts are going to come back to haunt you and become your worst nightmare, because I have someone clever who is going to tell our story with them. Text by text, email by email. Hundreds of them. The story of the vile and cruel human being you are.

You can run abroad like you are doing, but this story can follow you wherever you go in this world thanks to the very technology you like to use to abuse. It might not be straight away, but it wont be a long while either. So go ahead and build that new facade of yours – it won’t last long. Keep looking over your shoulder. It is the cold knife of the revenge of the children that is hanging over you, and like the Sword of Damocles, you will never know when it is going to fall.