Member-only story
The Last Things We Let Go Of
Narcissistic Abuse Recovery is a Long Process with 5 Final Challenges to Get Stuck In
You’ve done the work. Fought the fight. Held on to hope. Walked the walk. And you are almost there. It damn near killed you, but you survived. You see it. There on the horizon. A resplendent sunrise of promise and rebirth and new beginnings.
Freedom. Wholeness. Health. Sanity. Peace.
But forget Ninja Warrior. This is more like Narcissist Warrior. We’re navigating a similar set of hazards, and there are often one or two last obstacles that hold us back. And those last pieces must be dealt with and released to make the space for something good to come in.
“Life is a process of ‘becoming’ via insight. Having insight into yourself allows you to have insight into others, and this is called theory of mind. Knowing is not enough. Empathy is the bridge and crossing into others and these others are your reality testing.”~ Dr. Sam Vaknin
When I turned my gaze to the man sitting beside me, the covert somatic narcissist that masqueraded as my husband for 15 long years, I saw all of him — the man he ‘appeared’ to be, the injured boy he was, and the fully actualized man I believed he could be. I loved all those parts of him blindly and without borders. I just didn’t understand the extent of his mental sickness or the depth of my own issues with layers of complex trauma.
It cost me everything.
“The meeting of a narcissist and their victim is a meeting of two hungers. The victim is hungry for love, and the narcissist is hungry for existence. The narcissist tries to “become” through the victim, but the sad irony is that the only way for this to happen is to abscond with her existence and deny her becoming. The only way for the victim to obtain love from the narcissist is to stop being and become as much an absence as he is.” ~ Dr. Sam Vaknin
In many ways, that is exactly what happened. I was discarded and summarily erased which caused me to become hollow and empty, gutted and absent. The four plus years that have passed since the discard have been comprised of persistent effort to birth myself and create a new life without my husband who defined me in the shared fantasy that…
