Out of the well
Narcissistic abuse can convince you that you can never escape the darkness. You can.
Living with a narcissist, whether it is a partner or a parent, does a number on you. There’s no way around that.
The constant invalidation. The constant devaluation. The constant walking on eggshells because you don’t want to upset them. The constant reading of signals to make sure you are doing the right thing. The constant tension. The constant feeling that you are all wrong. The constant having to stifle your own impulses because they will not be acceptable to the narcissist. The constant stuffing of your feelings. The constant fear and dread. The constant deadness in the atmosphere. The constant erasure of yourself. Constant constant constant.
It’s massively traumatic. And it’s the sort of trauma that is not easy to work with. If it were just a single incident that took place you could go to a therapist and say, “This thing happened and I want to work through it,” and you could do that.
But relational trauma that is ongoing every single day is much more complicated. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts.
Also, it is an energy. It is the things I listed above, but also an unseen “something” in the air around you, that you breathe in, day in and day out. That energy infiltrates you at a cellular level. It’s a corrosive energy, an anti-energy, a destructive force, and it feels like it is right inside of you—like you are it, and it is you.
At the time I felt like I was possessed by a demonic force; now I know it’s something called the “negative interject”, as if someone has injected something into you that constantly works to sabotage your chances of being alive, of being free, of experiencing love and intimacy and fulfilment and all the other things we long for in life.
The negative interject is a result of the narcissist’s projection onto you. It comes as a result of them not being able to face up to their own inner darkness—the self-hatred and shame and self-sabotage that resides inside of them. The difference between someone who is a narcissist and someone who is not, is that narcissists cannot own those feelings. They are incapable of honest self-reflection. Consequently they have to transfer those qualities they are incapable of facing inside of themselves onto someone else, seeing them not in themselves, but in that other person. The “carrier” of the darkness thus becomes the scapegoat for all the narcissist’s inadequacies, failings, and self-hate. So instead of hating themselves, they hate the scapegoat. Instead of punishing themselves, they punish the scapegoat. Only that way can they continue to function in the world.
Narcissists are of course known to draw adult partners into relationships to play out some bizarre mindf*ck of their own, as I described in the last post. However, by far the easiest target for their projection is a child. A child is malleable and will take the projection on, no questions asked, because they have no choice. Without being conscious of it, the child internalizes the parent’s darkness. And because they are a child and because they have no capacity for such strong emotions, the negative interject feels huge and overwhelming, like a demonic force bent on destroying them.
In my memoir I described it thus:
It was as though a force, an entity, had taken up residence in me, its sole purpose being to destroy anything that made me feel alive. The more I pulled towards the light, the greater the hold exerted by this force, like a hand at the bottom of a well that pulled me down as I frantically tried to free myself. The greater my desperation, the stronger its power over me. This force was inside me … yet it was not of me. I felt possessed by it, owned by it, but it was not the real me. “It” was my jailer.
It is very, very hard to explain the depth of the damage that a narcissistic parent can do to a child to someone who has not experienced it. And because the majority of people don’t get it, and because the narcissist is so adept at deflecting blame, children enmeshed in this kind of web can feel bottomless despair and hopelessness, as though they will never escape—even when, as adults, they have managed to remove themselves from the narcissist’s forcefield. The negative interject has become entrenched. It goes where the child goes, even when the child grows into an adult.
And it must be dismantled, if the adult is to break the spell. In my case, it meant confronting my mother.
I had to prove to myself that I could withstand her projections, and the self-erasure I felt in her presence. I had to prove that I could stand before her and speak my truth. “She’s not that powerful,” Dr. Diamond had said when I talked to him about my fear that the sheer force of her presence might obliterate this tiny budding self that was pushing up out of the rubble. But I knew he was wrong: she was that powerful. She had created me in her own image and so, I felt, she had the power to annihilate me.
I’m not sure it was the correct thing to do. Had this been today, with the knowledge we now have about narcissism and narcissistic patterns, I expect my therapist would have dissuaded me from doing that. The reason: when a narcissist is confronted with the truth, they can react with such violent rage that it can be downright dangerous. The whole undertaking can blow up and leave the victim even more damaged than before.
Narcissistic rage is indeed what I got, and it was shattering.
Today, therapists recommend other methods for dealing with a narcissist, such as greyrocking or going no contact.
If you are feeling like there is something inside of you constantly sabotaging your efforts to live a happy, fulfilling life, know that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are many paths to healing, and sometimes one path works for a while, and then it is better to move to another. In my case, I moved from psychoanalysis, to body release work, to counselling, to 12-Step groups, to EMDR therapy. And sometimes I switched back and forth between those. I also regularly do yoga and meditation today. Giving up alcohol was also a profoundly life-changing experience for me.
When my mental and spiritual ravaging was at its worst, I could not imagine that I would have the life I have today. I was convinced that this kind of life was for other people, never for me. But I have it. It is like a rebirth. And I know from the depths of my being that, no matter how much isolation and self-sabotage you feel, you can have it too.
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Hi, this post is thought provoking for me. I’ve commented on a previous post that I recently ended a long term friendship that I had from early childhood. As close as a sister, I am now slowly realizing that this friend was a toxic narcissist. My every action, comment, or opinion was criticized and found to be lacking. For me, the hook to remain friends was the lure of “saving” this desperately inadequate person. I got hooked at age ten, I’m a grandmother now and I still can’t believe I couldn’t see what was happening. Thanks Alda for creating a safe atmosphere for this important discussion.