Is preoccupied with thoughts and fantasies of great success, enormous attractiveness, power, intelligence
Lacks the ability to empathize with the feelings or desires of others
Is arrogant in attitudes and behavior
Has expectations of special treatment that are unrealistic
As it turns out, I know a couple of people that fit this description and then some, so the book’s many suggestions for relating to, being in a relationship with, or remaining family with someone with NPD were helpful to me.
From the book: “Your unfounded guilt can be your worst enemy, causing you to try one more time to make him happy.”“On the codependent side of the coin, many individuals in England and America were similarly blinded by their righteous attachment to their “pacifist” ideologies- to such a point that they could not recognize the inevitable danger to their own free society. Like the entrenched codependent with the NPD individual, these groups regularly called for soul searching and an ever-increasing intention to reason with Hitler, to prevent conflict.” Get your copy here. Get your copy here.
You probably haven’t missed me, but if you have, you probably already know where I’ve been. If you don’t, here goes: I just got through a disgustingly expensive and time-consuming court ‘battle’ (that word came up repeatedly) over my son. This isn’t a blog where I talk about him, usually, but I figure I have to make some sort of excuse for disappearing. So that’s it. That’s my reason. I’ve had full custody since 2009, when I divorced his father; last year, I started homeschooling because my child was doing abysmally in school, and I rented a second home in his father’s neighborhood so he and the family could help me with the kiddo’s needs. That not only didn’t pan out, they ended up suing for full custody – and they lost, even though I ultimately went to court Pro se (meaning I represented myself). He still has no custody, and he’s got a visitation arrangement that is actually less visitation than he had last year, but it cost both of us scads of money and it gave me several new gray hairs, and at one point the ex actually intended to use my blog about Loose Girl against me somehow (how?!). His family spammed my fundraising page and my friend’s blogs. His attorney made a huge issue in court about my anti-abuse pages I ‘liked’ on Facebook. And so on and so forth. There are lessons to be learned from this if you have the time or inclination (Marriage is generally a high-risk, low-reward thing, distance from exes is ALWAYS good, and if you have full custody, you have it for a reason so for Pete’s sake steer clear of asking the other parent to ‘help’ if you aren’t sure that their help will actually be helpful, etc.) – but the biggest lesson is that if you have something to say, someone or several someones out there in the world will try to stop you from saying it. And when that happens, you have to make a choice. Your expression is your light; it is yourself. And you have to choose whether or not to let yourself be silenced, or whether to keep speaking out.
I choose to keep writing. I’m not ashamed of speaking out against abuse, writing about sexuality, or loving literature. The only thing in this entire blog I’m ashamed of is that I have to confess to having married the sort of person I married in the first place – but life is a process, and I’ve moved on. Now that the mess is over for now, there’s a bit of PTSD, but everything is sweeter, everything is more open, and resuming real life is pretty awesome. So I can get back to the business of blogging, because I’m not ashamed of anything I have to say.
To quote Brian in Vanilla Sky, “It’s the sour and the sweet. And I know sour, which allows me to appreciate the sweet.”
The thing that buoyed me up during court is my personal philosophy: Pronoia. What is Pronoia, you ask? John Perry Barlow (yes, the guy that wrote for the Grateful Dead) defined it as “the suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.” Ages ago, I ran across a Rob Brezsny book in a Barnes & Noble while looking for a new Wayne Dyer tome. The unique cover attracted me ,and when I turned the book over, I noticed an endorsement by Tom Robbins (the best writer under the moon). The book was:
How? That’s the stuff of my next blog. Instead of delving into details, I’ll leave you with a remarkable quote from the book:
“Fairy tales tell of a magic cauldron that cracks apart when a lie is told by the people standing near it. There is one way to restore the pot to wholeness: Speak three great truths in its vicinity.” In my next entries, I will speak my truths.
Here’s the backstory: Today is the anniversary of the day I married my son’s father. I’d had the baby a couple of months previously, but marrying him was everyone’s idea of the “right thing to do” – so, on our lunch break (I’d just started working in his family’s company) we went to the courthouse and tied the knot, with the baby drooling on my grey work shirt. I’ve never regretted – and never will regret – my son, but I’ll always regret the marriage. Silver lining? Every second of your life, you’re making a choice. You’re choosing how to spend your time, and who you spend it with. I love Happily Ever Afters as much as the next girl- but staying in a bad situation doesn’t make it better. Celebrate your every moment!
In celebration of making BETTER choices, I’d like to give you a gift: Love’s Enduring Bond (NOTE: This does NOT mean that I will be your soulmate for life. This is a book, people.) You can enter the giveaway here!
The blurb: A bloody conflict put them on opposite sides, but could not break their bonds of passion.
Elizabeth Warner fell in love with Justin Holt at their first meeting when Elizabeth’s father moved to the Shenandoah Valley to take up a small medical practice there. Justin taught her the joy and passion of love on their wedding night, but war intruded on their bond. When he rode away to war as a colonel of Confederate cavalry, she took their young son and moved back with her father, to nurse Union wounded at her surgeon-father’s hospital in Washington. She tried to put the war and her love of a rebel officer out of her mind until his battered body was carried into her surgical ward.
It’s historic fiction written by Jean C. Keating,a deceased Williamsburg, Virginia author that had diverse interests. She had degrees in mathematics, physics, and information systems; she was Virginia’s Outstanding Young Woman of 1970; she was an aerospace engineer for NASA; she was the head of research for Virginia’s Higher Education Council; she was an animal lover (she especially loved Papillons) – and she was a writer. A writer that was passionate about many things, and wrote this historic romance set during the War of Northern Aggression (For you Yankees, that’d be The Civil War). I never met Ms. Keating, but I wish I had. She lived a full life and maintained hope in Love’s Enduring Bond. Here’s to that.
This is something I never talk about. I gloss over it and pretend that my boyfriend isn’t really violent, because it happens so rarely. He’s shoved me topless and shoeless down flights of stairs, left bruises from grabbing my arm when he’s been angry, but those things— I can write those off. I am shaking as I write this. Last night we were at a wedding reception in Charlottesville (his family) and the slit in my dress ripped up my bum. A girl gave me a shawl to cover it, and I entertained myself while he wandered around. I started dancing with one of his female cousins, and he became irate that the shawl (apparently) didn’t cover everything. We left. As we drove down the road, he started telling me that he didn’t want to take me home, that I deserved to walk the streets of this strange town at night. He asked me to get out of the car. I didn’t want to. He threw my cell phone out the window, and then physically tried to throw me out. The next thing I know, the police are here, he’s run off down some alley or side road, and then I was at the police office having photos taken of my bruises, bitemarks and scabs…
It’s really over, I’ve got to find a new place to live, I’ve get to get my stuff out of the home we made together and all of his buildings downtown, I’ve got to decide whether or not to drop the charges that the officers decided to file for me because I was so inebriated. My life is over.
I always promised myself that this would never happen to me; I was too smart for it, because I’d seen it happening to my mother. The really sick thing is how much I love him and how badly I want it all just to be over. I wish I could be with him again. It will never happen, and we’d both be stupid if it did.
It did. I wrote that in 2005, while we had a temporary restraining order in place, between packing and moving my things into storage so that I could drive the 14 hours “home” to my family. The very hour the restraining order was up, we met. We talked about how much we loved each other and how tragic it was that our love was so cursed.
That night, he sent me a series of depressed and drugged suicidal texts, and I called his father to ask him to please, please check on his son.
He came by the hotel I was staying in as I rested to drive into the hazy homeward sunrise the next morning- to tell me one last time how much he loved me- while his dad waited to drive him to an inpatient rehab facility (which he never completed the program in).
I’d told a friend that was helping me move, “What do you bet I get home and find out I’m pregnant?” That is exactly what happened. “That idiot doesn’t even have to know about the baby,” my grandmother said.
I turned around, drove back, moved back in with him, and married the guy.
That is the definition of codependency.
And this is the definition of oversharing on the internet. Or is it? I broke up with and took him back more times than I can count. We divorced, he signed over full custody- and now we’re embroiled in a costly legal battle in which he’s accusing me of being a terrible mother, and asking for full custody.
There are so many women out there going through this exact same thing, and there are ways out. There are so many things I wish I could tell my 22 year old self. And my 25 year old self. And my 30 year old self. Breaking the cycle is hard. Unhealthy love is as intense as Twilight, and we’re all more interesting than Bella. But choosing to stay in the cycle is choosing something worse than dying: it’s choosing a life without living.
Today, a dear friend and I went out meet her ex so that he could -not spend time with their son- pick up a kitten from a recent litter belonging to her cat. 90 minutes of driving resulted in the cat howling in their truck with no carrier for four hours while he ignored his son for as many. It all seemed familiar. It’s all about him, I thought. On the way back, this song came on the radio, and we sang along together while our sons in the backseat asked if the band was the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
Apropos.
I saw the sign
No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong…
But where do you belong?
I saw the sign and it opened up my mind!
And I am happy now living without you
I’ve left you, oh-oh-OH!
Last year, a good friend of mine talked me into buying a copy of The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists. Oz isn’t a hard sell, but the idea of Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is. The question I asked myself was, is being a jerk really a disorder? The answer, apparently, is yes.
The Literate Libran 