Sometimes we know what we don’t want to admit

When I talk about calling a partner a narcissist, I am not referring to giving them a diagnosis.

We can’t diagnose people in our lives with anything. To get a diagnosis, someone has to see a diagnosing clinician on their own and then they will do the tests and gather the information necessary to make an informed decision.

But if it walks and talks like a duck…it’s a narcissist.

We may not be able to go around supplying titles to the people surrounding us, but we can take inventory of their actions and decide for ourselves what we think is happening.

I like to think of it as the difference between judgment and discernment.

I’m not placing that label on them, but I can decide to choose my actions based off of what I believe is happening.

It all comes back around to us eventually and we will have to ask ourselves, “What will I do with this information?”

Before you get to that point there is always the Aha moment.

You know what I mean. This is the moment when the gears shift into perfect alignment, the wheels move smoothly, and you have a new realization about something that was always in front of you.

It’s the moment you *GET IT*.

The Aha Moment Is A Mixed Bag Of Goods

Not all Aha moments are positive. As good as it feels to finally see more clearly, it can also feel terrible if that thing is something as bleak as narcissism can be.

What is nice is the relief of pressure, finally seeing it was not all your fault.

This is one of the top emotions that a person feels when they have been in a narcissistically abusive relationship. This feeling of oppression, of how you are not good enough. Worthy enough. Haven’t tried hard enough in the relationship.

It’s a core wound that was based off a lie. A lie that was drip fed to you over the course of weeks, months, years. A lie that was designed to keep you in the same place perpetually.

That place is beneath. Beneath the narcissist.

It erodes boundaries, warps thoughts and feelings and creates trauma bonds.

You didn’t plop in there over a day. So it makes sense that traveling away from that place will take time as well.

Why Is It So Hard To Imagine?

When you are first starting your path away from being a victim of narcissist abuse, the feelings in your body will not match the thoughts in your head.

Your gut will be fighting with you and screaming that there is danger in this direction.

You may be able to list off the things they do that are narcissistic, but you have the lingering feeling that says I’m wrong.

It’s doing this because it has figured out a way to keep you alive in your environment. It has done that through cognitive dissonance.

Our brains are not built to make us happy. The brain’s only concern is to keep us alive another minute. If we are living in a world where the biggest threat to us is our partner (or parent when we’re little,) then it needs to find a way to make that a livable situation.

It will tell us to lie to ourselves and confabulate reasons why we aren’t in as much danger as we truly are. It keeps us stuck in the fantasy land that is the narcissistic world.

Why would the brain want us to travel outside of that altered reality? Our brain moved things around and found a way to survive there.

Survive > Living.

The real world becomes the new threat. The real world is the unknown space we haven’t been in for so long that we forgot how to live there. Some were raised in chaos and have never been a citizen of reality. They were born into the funhouse mirror version of the planet and don’t know anything else.

This is one of the reasons we fight the thought that our partner is a narcissist. If we face the truth, then we can’t live in fantasyland anymore. We have to move. We have to do something different.

That is an overwhelming task to begin. So we fight it.

I Can Do Anything I Put My Mind To

This is another reason why the thought my partner is a narcissist is so hard to come to terms with.

Most of the people that could be described as Codependent are very resilient and know how to get shit done.

Have you ever said I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ll figure it out.

People who think that are also typically empathic and want to be helpful. They want to be able to love their partner enough to heal them.

That’s not possible.

If only it were, this world would be such a better place for it. Love can cure many things, but narcissism isn’t one of them.

Willpower may be able to. But it would have to be the narcissist’s willpower, not the partner’s.

A label like narcissist is like a doom button. All of the hope for a better future dies with it. How do you let hope die when it’s all you have to hold on to?

You’re not a quitter. This option doesn’t exist.

How Could I Have Missed It?

Resisting the term narcissist makes sense when you think about everything it brings up in ourselves.

If we could miss this, what else did we miss!?

How did I not see this? How could I have gotten it so wrong?

I recall telling counselors they were dead wrong. They could not be right. I was too smart to be so off.

They were right. I was wrong. It doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence. Me being able to rationalize was the thing that got in my way. I was smart enough to think of a thousand bs reasons why things weren’t the way they actually were. I talked myself into fantasy.

I just wasn’t ready… yet. I got there one day. It became the day I started to regain my freedom — my liberation day.

It DID NOT feel like it on that day. That day it felt like I was defeated. Later it felt better, but right then it was too disturbing to feel anything other than pain.

When the dust settles and your nervous system resets you will feel the relief. It will come, even though it doesn’t seem like it. It will.

To get to the other side the process has to start with acceptance. Accepting what you’re really dealing with. Accepting that you are dealing with someone who is highly antagonistic, high conflict, is selfish at a core level, and is not going to change.

Someone who is narcissistic.