And Survived to Tell How I Surrendered My Soul to a NarcissistLiel AnIf You Ever Loved One, You Will Recognize Yourself in This Story

Before I met him, I was chronically lonely. I had no boundaries, attachment issues, and abandonment fears. I was a child of abuse and had complex generational trauma and archaic wounding. I searched outside myself for validation and believed worth came primarily from overachieving and sacrifice, productivity and blurred lines. I never felt like enough, so I perpetually reached higher.

Before I met him, I was also trying to achieve moral substance and attempted to cultivate integrity and virtue. I was empathetic to others pain and wanted to help them. I carried guilt like a cross for never being enough — for my parents, my partners, myself. I worked hard and made reasonable and responsible choices in my daily life. I accepted blame for my failures and tried to do better. I wanted to be a better parent than what I had experienced but had no roadmap on how to do it so there was enmeshment masquerading as commitment and devotion. I made a noble effort to be a good person and better parent but fell short in many ways on both accounts. I carried an inner sadness that permeated everything I touched no matter how subtle. . . i twas that shadow in the corner.

The stage was set.

Enter the disordered pathological sociopathic narcissist.

Ironically, the first time I ever saw him, it was at the annual performance of The Nutcracker ballet.

Our 16 year long dance began that moment, and I didn’t even know it.

ACT ONE

There was nothing normal or healthy about it. He was scandalously younger and incredibly creepy. A healthy neurotypical would have run for the exit. But me? I stepped closer, drawn by a compelling familiarity. The magnetic pull, the vibration literally shook us when we touched. It was supernatural, not of this world. It was some powerful magic. Even before the transformational physical consummation, there was a trembling, shaking, energetic frequency that bound us. Typical humans cannot perform such feats of metaphysical power. It was like levitation, electricity, demonic possession coupled with pure bliss.

ACT TWO

Married life was everything I had ever dreamed of with an uncomfortable undercurrent of unease as if there were caverns beneath our feet that flowed with torrents of tempestuous waters, the kind that sweep you away and drown you. I could almost hear them running in the background, rushing in waves beneath us. I could smell the damp murky depths like an ocean waiting to open its mouth and swallow us whole. I held onto tighter, as if he were my life raft, and buried my face in his essence. The energy was still palpable, out of this world, vibrating at an unsustainable frequency, the kind that blow the wheels off the car and send it airborne over a cliff. Danger lurked nearby in the shadows and lived on the edges of our lives together, but it only compelled me to escape into his fantasy-world where the dark thing could not reach us.

ACT THREE

While I was gone, when I wasn’t looking, as I lay sleeping like the cursed; everything and everyone around me fell away. Thorns and sinister vines crept like snakes around our castle in the clouds. And then, when I had lost it all except him, he began to close the magic shop. The smirks and snipes were endless — death by a thousand tiny cuts. Criticisms, mockery, contempt, and coldness. Everything felt frozen in a chilly sheet of ice as be shape shifted into someone I did not recognize — someone incompatible with our shared fantasy. The holes and tears in it began to appear as I frantically raced about attempting to patch them all. I felt anger and resentment for all his betrayals and micro-agressions yet loyal and a true acolyte, a true believer until the last breath, the last choking gasp.

CODA

Why did I do it? Give away every single thing that mattered so I could hold onto someone so sick, so broken that they were incapable of humanity or decency or mercy?

A fellow Quora writer Shirley said it best in her space called Relationship With a Narcissist (https://narcismdisorde.quora.com/):

“We grow up with at least one parent fully incapable of love: a narcissist, an antisocial, or worse, a narcissist antisocial. 

BUT A HUMAN BEING NEEDS LOVE TO SURVIVE. 

IT IS FUNDAMENTAL TO HEALTHY DEVELOPMENT.

So we grow up denying this truth: our parent doesn’t love us.

A borderline, like me, will internalize this as their fault.

A narcissist, will project this as others’ fault.

A histrionic will deny it entirely.

One thing every cluster b personality in my family has in common is ADDICTION.

Because at the root, every addict has one thing in common: DESPAIR.

A GAPING BLACK HOLE OF DESPAIR.

We seek desperately to fill it, to make ourselves feel good.

NOTHING WORKS.

 We are addicted to all kinds of things.

We are addicted to drugs, cigarettes, weed, prescription pills, alcohol, caffeine, dieting, cutting, binging and purging, sex, porn…

We are addicted to abuse, to being abused…

We are addicted to exercise, work, school, meditation…

WE ARE ADDICTED TO LOVE.

But we can’t find it. WHERE IS IT?!

Everything that makes us feel good eventually hurts us or nearly kills us…

…just like our parents did.

In the world of cluster b’s, life is continually trying to climb out of quicksand.

We only differ in what type of addictions we manifest and how well we mask them.”

We make a deal with the devil when we jump into the rabbit hole with our irresistible, undeniable, intoxicating narcissist. They transport us to another reality where everything shines brighter, tastes better, smells sweeter, and feels oh so much more blissful. The intensity of a relationship with a Cluster B disordered person is more intense than anything you have ever experienced and completely unfathomable. Everything else fades to pale obscurity as it fails to compete with the power of the psychopathic narcissist’s over the top other-worldly wizardry that keeps you spellbound and bedazzled while they eat you alive.

If there is an actual region or space where hell manifests all of it’s depravity and torture, I imagine that the trip there is a lot like falling prey to a covert malignant narcissist. Evil is deceptive, seductive, and empowering. There will be carnal revelry replete with orgiastic abandon and feverish ecstasy. It lures you and hooks you and binds you and reels you in, punch-drunk and fuzzy headed about what is actually happening, anesthetized by the power s of the narcopath/demon to sedate you into submission. When you awaken from the surrealistic dreamscape, you discover that you are in hell — fire and brimstone and screams of anguish echo from the cavernous pit to the high cliffs that tower above, every inch strewn with the carcasses and wretched remains of the victims who surrendered their souls to evil.

This is how it happens.

In the bottomless depths of the narcissist’s eyes, we see ourselves, our mothers, our fathers, our abused child-selves, and all those who could not love us. In their touch, their hands and mouth and body give us life as we swap souls and let our spirit flow like blood into the empty narcissist that can never be filled. In their words, we are made whole and believe in magic and give in to an unholy union, a perverse alliance. In their charm, we see the innocent and harmless little child they were before abusive caregivers and a life gone wrong crushed them, and we want to help them, heal them, restore them.

I believe he was simply destroyed by a toxic family and survived the best he could by silencing his suffering with a false self who must feed on others in a false reality. I joined him there for a while and tried to convince myself it was heaven and real and forever. But hell was still there —inside us. We managed to spackle over it and paint it with breathtaking celestial panoramas, but it still churned and seethed under the surface. I believed his ability to create such a magical imaginary place was confirmation that he dreamed of becoming a “real boy” and a testament to his tender, gentle soul. I was wrong. I think he died a long, long time ago and something dark crawled into the vacant spaces in his heart. And if there is a remanent, a shred of that little injured and sweet boy, he is bound and captive and defeated should he ever try to break free.

I’m not sure what hell is. I don’t know if it is geographical destination or a state of mind.

I believe that evil is an absence of God.

And the narcissist and anti-social and psychopath and maybe even the borderline?

They are an absence of being.

Pesqueda 2022

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