Tag: narcissistic abuse

The Difference Between Abuse And Care

Bones
Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

I had a very interesting discovery the other day.

I had a friend make a joke on one of my posts that suggested I might have a diagnosis other than fibromyalgia. She’s suggested this particular diagnosis ad nauseam in the past. I didn’t take it well. I was upset and antsy and, after some prompting from another friend, I politely set a boundary of can we please not with this topic, and how it makes me feel.

And she apologised. She apologised, explained she had been trying to make a joke about how she could empathise with my experiences because she has the other diagnosis, and the injury I had experienced is one she could imagine herself doing. Then she apologised for missing the mark with the joke. And none of it was ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ or anything like that, it was a true and genuine apology, taking responsibility for what she said and how that made me feel.

It was freeing in a way I cannot put into words. Suddenly I wasn’t offended by the joke, and I could feel her care and consideration for me. It increased my love and respect for her a thousandfold.

This is totally different to the friend I lost. During my diagnosis process for both fibromyalgia and trigeminal neuralgia, when the doctor and I were both pretty sure what I had but were doing the formalities, she would send me messages with all sorts of different things I could have. Constantly. I rarely mentioned any of my symptoms past ‘ow’. She never once asked about them. And she was saying ‘oh what about this? and this? you could have this!’ I repeatedly told her we were pretty confident it was fibromyalgia (or trigeminal neuralgia) and it felt like she was dismissing my knowledge and my doctor’s knowledge of the situation.

She never apologised. She would only say ‘I just don’t want you to have x because it’s chronic and it’s awful’. That is not a place of care. That is a place of control. Which pretty much summed up our whole relationship.

Because of my long history of being abused (right from infancy through to this latest ‘friend’), I have difficulty with identifying when people come from a place of care and love. It’s often only once I begin to establish a boundary, and they accept it and apologise for stepping on it that I can tell the difference.

It has started healing a little part of me that was very raw.

Money Matters

Bones

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I just received news that the long awaited inheritance is now not far off – and that it is likely to be more than originally anticipated.

I freaked out.  Total meltdown.  Still am.  My brain is frazzled, I’m bouncing all over the show, and not all of it is delight.  A lot of it is anxiety.

While hand combing out knotted fur and rambling (surprisingly therapeutic) I realised that my anxiety with money and the lack thereof didn’t actually begin, as I thought, with Him, my narcissistic ex, but rather in my childhood.

I grew up lower middle class in a family of five – two siblings.  We were fed, we were clothed, we had school books and that adhesive sparkly wrap to make them more interesting than just exercise books.  We had healthy lunches.

We would walk to school, rain or shine, typically a 30 minute walk at a good clip.  Mum would walk to the green grocer to pick up veggies for our lunches, and to the butcher to get meats for our sandwiches.  She tried her hand at growing vegetables, but with her severe depression when I was growing up, it was difficult.  She would trawl op shops for clothing for us.  Once in a while I would get a new top or a new pair of pants, which were always from the cheaper shops.

I hated growing because it would mean new shoes, so I would wear the same shoes until my toes were curled in and it was too painful to wear the shoes.  We would drive for 30 minutes to the cheaper shoe shop and Mum would always be fussing over the price of things.  I would always pick the cheapest pair I could walk in.

It took me years before I finally asked to get a bra, and then it was only one.  Once I grew out of that, I would only ever have two bras, and I would wear them until they broke, because I hated shopping with Mum.  We would only ever go to the cheap stores when they were having really good sales.

I understand these are all sensible things to do, but to my growing brain, it was ‘you can’t get money spent on you, we don’t have enough’.  This has been emphasised over and over again in my life by people of great import.  If it weren’t for one of my oldest friends, I wouldn’t have a healthy relationship with money or spending at all.

Compound that with the last 13 years of being in debt with no savings to speak of and barely solvent, as well as, at some stages, barely having enough money to feed myself let alone my animals (they always came first), I have no fucking clue how to be a person with financial security and it scares the shit out of me.

I was gifted with a relatively significant sum when I was with Him from a family member passing.  I paid off my debt, and he insisted on going on holiday overseas and all these expensive things that of course he couldn’t pay for and I had the money so I should pay for them.  It was gone within two months.

I know it’s not going to happen this time, for one thing, I’m not with Him, and for another thing, it’s considerably more, but the fear is still there all the same.  Any sum of money I receive disappears.  POOF!  All gone, with nought but memories and a sour taste in my mouth.  And while intellectually I know it’s not going to happen this time, there is still the overwhelming terror of it all just disappearing.

And of the unknown, this mythical financial security thing that, at 33, I have never felt like I have had.  Even the idea of it is scary.  What do I do with myself?  How to I live without the looming fear of debt, the worry over whether or not I can afford to buy cat food this week?  How do I live if not paycheck to paycheck?

This is entirely new and terrifying territory.  Because I know I am overwhelmed and can’t process this information myself, I will book an appointment with my counsellor for the extra help.  There’s a lot going on here, and this should be an amazing and exciting thing, but it’s not.

Nightmares – A Small Setback

Bones

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I’ve been having dreams, nightmares, whatever you want to call it, I’ve been having it.  It invariably involves one or the other of my past abusers.

My usual nightmare involves It, the narcissist I was with for the longest, the one who caused the most damage, and my PTSD.  It typically involves him returning, and just assuming that the relationship is back on, and I fake it.  I fake it to hide my relationship with my amazing human being – which is basically what I’m doing now, minus the being in a relationship with him part, and more with him being on the other side of the world (THANK FUCK).

My first abuser was in my dream last night.  Then, later on in the dream, I did what I have always dreaded doing.  I said Its name instead of my amazing human being’s name.

Sometimes, in the awake world, It’s name will be on the tip of my tongue instead of my amazing human’s name.  I don’t speak when that happens.  I have almost been away from him for the same length of time as I was with him, but some scars take longer to heal than others.

All of this has … done something to me.  I feel flat and anxious at the same time.  I don’t want to do anything.  I want to bundle up in a blanket and drink tea and watch Forensic Files.

And unfortunately I can’t today.  Or at least not all day.  I have adulting I must do before I can be an amorphous blob.

The Unseen Scars of Sexual Abuse

Bones

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I was sitting down to write about the anxiety of needing to do things all the time when my flatmate began cleaning the oven.  This is a completely normal and expected thing, we have a flat inspection coming up, and we’ve just spent the last few days making sure everything is cleaned and put away.  There’s just one problem: due to a defect in his septum, my flatmate has difficulty breathing and breathes very noisily and often with an open mouth.

That’s fine… for anyone else.  For me, it’s a trigger.

I was sexually abused by my ex’s best friend.  There, I said it.  It’s a hard thing to admit.  There is a lot of shame around it, shame that I did not realise what was happening at the time, that I allowed myself to get into those situations, that I was such a doormat.  I’ve told two friends.  I haven’t told my partner.  It’s not something I am brave enough to be open about yet.

Intellectually I know I am not at fault.  I had been in an intimate relationship with a narcissist for at least a year by that point.  My semblance of self, already weak after the previous narcissist relationship on the back of growing up with a clinically depressed mother and a loving but not really on hand father, was virtually non existent by this point.  I was an undiagnosed aspergers woman, and incredibly vulnerable.  It was not my fault.  It is not my fault.  A predator saw the vulnerability and took advantage.

It’s still hard to talk about.  So I’ll throw the story out to the internet, hiding behind my perceived anonymity (I know full well ‘anonymous’ only goes so far unless you take internet anonymity very seriously).

Our house was the ‘party house’.  We would have parties almost every other week at our house, no matter what house it was we lived in, and that was fine.  We used to do various illicit substances, as one does when one is young – nothing hard, nothing technically addictive, and not often enough to get addicted.  It was the usual fun shit from the raver scene.

And it was, it was super fun.  Until he started taking advantage.

I don’t remember when it first happened, but I do remember which house we were in at the time.  He began to pester me to give me a massage.  And pester, and pester, and pester, until me, being the naive, happily high, aspergers person I am, said okay.  So we went up to the bedroom I shared with my partner, I’d lie face down on the bed, and he’d massage my back.  It was just a massage.

He breathed heavily while he gave it.

This continued at subsequent parties.  He convinced me to take my t-shirt off so he could give me a “better massage” and “you can take your bra off if you like but I understand if you’d rather keep it on”.  I always kept my bra on.  My ex would, every single time, walk into the bedroom to “get something” and stop and pause and say in a high pitched voice (that I only now realise as fake) “I’m totally okay with my best friend massaging my topless girlfriend in my bed”.

Looking back at it I have to believe they were both in on it, because he never left a party to “get something” from our bedroom unless his best friend was giving me a massage.

This continued.  For years.  His best friend would pester me until I gave in and would give me a back massage with creepy heavy breathing.  It wasn’t until the later massages that he would push his erect penis (in his pants) against my arse while giving me a massage and lean down like he wanted to kiss the back of my neck.  Thank fuck he never did.  I stopped letting him give me massages after that one.  It made me sick.

A number of parties later, while completely off his face on booze (he had, and probably still has, an alcohol problem), he grabbed me around the waist and dragged me onto his lap where he immediately started grinding his erect penis (in his pants) against my arse crack with some amount of force.  I got his arms off me and stood up and went off without looking at him and blocked the incident from my memory.

I think he might have stopped after that.  I can’t quite recall.

So now heavy male breathing is a trigger for me to lock up and want to vomit.  Unfortunately for me, my lovely flatmate sometimes triggers this.

At least I have noise cancelling headphones.  I should also look into some really good therapy for this.

The Power of Music

Bones

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I’ve been having a bit of a crappy weekend.  Things went, but things never quite went well.  I was tired, technology wasn’t working, there’s too much clutter in the house that I just don’t have the energy or motivation to sort out, and I’m feeling a bit sulky because I feel like I’m the only one who does the dishes.  Which is partly true, and something I’m slowly working on.

I’m supporting a friend through a particularly rough period involving a narcissistic friend, and it’s bringing a lot to the surface because of how we’ve both been abused.

I mistakenly watched “Abducted in Plain Sight” and watched a narcissistic psychopath paedophile seduce the mother, sexually abuse the father, and then horrifically sexually abuse the daughter, all the while abusing and manipulating everyone.

I think my amazing human is a wee bit depressed – he’s holing up a bit.

Then It messaged me.  I just about backflipped.  I was not in a headspace to interact with It at all.  I could feel myself beginning to escalate into an anxiety attack.

I decided I didn’t have time for that and went straight to Youtube where, bless their algorithms, they had We’re All We Need by Above and Beyond on my front page.  After the first 20 seconds of letting the music flow over me, I was in a wonderful state of relaxation (okay, there is probably also a lot of emotional repression going on) and able to manage the less than pleasant interaction.

I’m still a bit antsy, it’s one of those days, but I’m a lot more relaxed than I was.