Lessons I’ve Learned Part 1

I went to the Smokey Mountains last weekend. I needed to get away from here and have some space and time to think and spend time with God. I have struggled so much with the realization that I had been the target of a narcissist, two of them. I finally took some time to go back through texts and emails of the most recent relationship and it was so eye-opening. I could see all the manipulation, lies, and gas-lighting. It was all right there, but until I reread it all I didn’t even remember it happening! It was like my marriage all over again.

I wrote about the science of remaining in abuse and the memory loss that accompanies it a couple years ago in the posts Abuse Amnesia, Cognitive Dissonance, and Trauma Bonding. In my marriage, I had started keeping a journal that I would go back and read occasionally. I would be completely shocked at things I had gone through and forgotten about. I didn’t keep a journal in this most recent relationship because he was the opposite of my ex-husband. He was kind, caring, and vulnerable. At least in the beginning he was, and then all that openness was intermingled with passive aggressive insults and control attempts. I had eventually began to feel like I felt with my ex-husband and that’s why I finally ended things with him. He did love bomb me right back in soon after for a short time, until I told him I was stepping back. I had enough of his hot and cold behavior.

It was after this that I began trying to figure out what I had gone through. It felt so much like abuse and control, but seemed so passive. So much of what I remembered seemed like my fault. I spent a lot of time during this relationship self-reflecting and figuring out my responsibility in our issues and arguments. It’s when I figured out my tendency to be avoidant and to choose flight over fight, and when I learned how deep my trust issues went and the walls I had built to protect myself. With the relationship over, I began to research the behaviors I witnessed in him that concerned me. They mainly concerned me because I had put up with them for way too long and I couldn’t figure out why I felt like I was to blame for his actions. It was in this search that I discovered the term covert narcissist and realized that I had been used and abused by narcissist who uses vulnerability to gain control.

Now for the lesson part of this post. As I’ve said before, I struggle with perfectionism issues and can be very hard on myself. I worked on that in Celebrate Recovery, but this realization that I had been manipulated again, brought back a lot of that anger at myself. I was so disappointed in myself. I decided to go back through old texts and emails and see if I could find patterns of abuse I had forgotten, like I did in my marriage. And they were there, written by me and him. Many things that I had forgotten due to my brain already being susceptible to the trauma bond and memory loss. I had called him out on the abuse, but by the next day with some love bombing, it was all forgotten. I was shocked at how easily I had let dealbreakers go and stay with a man who was treating me so badly. There was nothing overtly physical, it was mainly emotional and verbal, but it was clearly abusive in nature.

I have cried so much for lost years, lost connections and relationships, opportunities, and the life I never got to have. The husband I never got, the father my boys never got, the fifty year anniversary I’ll never have, all gone. I had mourned all this before, but this recent realization that my trauma was following me and made me an easy target was heart-breaking for me and brought a lot of those tears back.

So, this past weekend I needed peace. I needed time with God in the quiet to find me. To find the me that was not so disappointed in myself. God led me to Ecclesiastes 3 and then He told me that grace is learned through hardship. It’s in the hard times that we can see God work and truly give us what we don’t deserve. His unconditional love for us is so apparent when our hearts our hurting. I had learned to extend grace to others, but not to myself. What I went through with my ex-husband taught me to be gentle with others and not to judge them because we are all hurting in some way. What I went through recently has taught me to be gentle with myself, to give myself the same grace I try to give others.

I am still healing from the years of emotional abuse and control and the trauma it caused me. I was broken completely and God is slowly putting me back together how He wants me, not how I want me. My hardships have taught me how much God loves me and how intentional that love is for me. He is fighting for me to become the woman He created me to be. So, I am going to show that woman some grace and work to forgive her for all she has gone through.

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

²     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

~Ecclesiastes 3:1-8