How To Wipe a Narcissist Out of Your Memory

CTRL-ALT-DEL

I cried so hard at the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I could so deeply relate to the desire to erase my exes from my memory so that I could sidestep the grief and go back to the innocence that I was before abuses and betrayals visited me.

The tragedy for the characters in that movie is that when they erase each other, they meet and FALL IN LOVE AGAIN, restarting the whole toxic cycle.

And that’s what happens if you try to sidestep grief.

If you try to mask it with drugs or sex or a new partner, expect it to eventually return, whether it is in the form of your physical health deteriorating or your mental health.

I’VE NEVER FORGOTTEN ANY OF THE NARCISSISTS I LOVED.

And that includes some family and friends as well as lovers.

(Ah Taylor, your classic Histrionic).

I was raised by two NPD/ASPDs as the scapegoat. My sister has NPD and I have BPD.

I attracted exclusively to narcissists and antisocials, especially covert malignants, until I went celibate from trauma at 34. This year, my 6 year celibacy was broken when I casually befriended one as my maitenance man — who drugged me and raped me for three weeks.

No matter what I do, my family dynamics make me a magnet to these people.

I’ve felt as if my life was growing up in shark infested waters, attacked young before I could swim to any shore, bleeding out all my life and consistently having sharks swipe off whole limbs while I turn to chum for the next shark.

It’s truly like they can smell…here’s a scapegoat to hold all my shames.

BUT I SMELL THEM TOO.

Mom. Sister. Dad….

I have dozens of narcissists in my history and several sociopaths. The ones that traumatized me the worst I THINK ABOUT EVERY DAY.

I think of them when I wake up, shocked to still be alive, glad no one broke in in the night again.

I think of them when I check my locks before bed.

I think of them when I check the backseat of my car every day.

I think of them when I see parents hugging their kids after school, wondering what a loving parent is like, or if it’s even real, if that parent is doing what mine did behind closed doors…

I think of them when I write every day.

I think of them when I pray.

I often have memories of something one of them did or accused me of and realize their projections, their confessions, their covert abuses and devaluations — decades after the fact.

I discover new truths I wish I didn’t know and pray to stop thinking of them.

And then think of them more.

Narcissists’ inner children are dead.

They survive by siphoning off yours.

What you experience with narcissist abuse is a haunting from the ghost of their inner child’s trauma.

One day while teaching my humanities class, we were studying the ancient Greeks.

I held up a polished garnet, and said, “What’s this?”

“A rock. A stone. A crystal. A marble. Nothing,” they said. They all held it and passed it around.

I said, “If you’re a Christian, this garnet is the only light God provided on Noah’s ark. So this garnet is hope. A promise that light and warmth and love from your Heavenly Father will return even after He showers you with the darkest, deadliest of His storms.

Christian crusaders carried them into battle or wore them on armor for protection.

But rewind to the Greeks, pre-Christianity: this garnet is a pomegranate pulp from hell.”

I told them the story of Persephone, kidnapped by Hades, taken into the underworld and raped while her mother, Demeter, goddess of the weather, grieved, and the earth was blanketed in snow.

Persephone could have gone home, but she made the grave mistake of eating the garnet, hell’s pomegranate, and now she was bound to the underworld for half the year: half her life she’s raped by Hades and it’s winter on earth as her mother grieves. The other half, she’s returned to source…

…and rebirth and regeneration begins again.

I thought to myself, “This lesson is a veiled confession.”

This is my truth: half my life I’m in my mind, being raped, married to the Minotaur monster who raped me, half man, half predator.

I’ve spent so much time with him in there that he’s not even scary. I know the devil well.

But the other half of my life…I’m being REBORN.

Reaching to live up to my highest potential.

Basking in the warmth of my light and God’s light. WHICH ARE ONE IN THE SAME.

It was Persephone’s light that attracted Hades anyway. She made him jealous.

And that garnet God gave Noah provided no real light: he had to believe in the light in himself, believe it was worthy enough to survive.

Famous trauma bonder Sylvia Plath wrote this in her poem “Lady Lazarus” shortly before killing herself by putting her head in an oven after her narcissist husband left her for another woman (who also went on to kill herself, as did his son),

“Dying is an art.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like Hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.”

Narcissist abuse is the fate I was born for, assigned scapegoat at birth, so I’ve died many times and returned.

Even my mom’s pregnancy is recounted as horrific, as almost killing her, and I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. I was named after a woman who was beheaded.

It’s as if even the womb was a struggle for me.

How can I ever stop thinking of the ones who wounded me when I’m covered in scars?

How can I stop thinking about a wound based in love, one that is blood bound?

My mother, father, and sister are rotten people who’ve abused and repulsed many. But I am made of them.

If they were not emotionally disabled, what they experience as hate would be love.

Instead of being jealous of me, they’d admire me.

Instead of sabotaging me, they’d support me.

Instead of devaluing me, they’d appreciate me.

Instead of harming me, they’d protect me.

Because they’d understand I’m human, they’d feel my love, and they’d empathize with my pain AS IF WE ARE ONE.

Because we are one. WE ARE BLOOD.

And we’re ONE SPECIES.

We’re humans. And if they were not all wounded through golden child narcissist abuse as babies, they would have their humanity.

But they don’t. And that’s utterly tragic.

I grieve that every day.

Not only have they never been able to feel, attach to, or process my love for them, they’ve never felt anyone’s love at all.

They are in survival mode, operating on a false self love upheld only by the fantasy of the mask.

Their truth is their self love survives only by offloading a massive amount of self hate onto victims.

And many of their supplies loved them deeply. Unconditionally, even.

I loved ASPDs whose crimes I knew of. I didn’t define them by their worst experiences and empathized with their trauma, being so traumatized as a child myself.

They felt like my siblings. That maintenance man who raped me — I knew he had NPD before he attacked me, and he told me he’d been to prison (though he made himself sound more innocent than he was: I looked up the case) — and still, I couldn’t shake that he felt like a brother to me from day one.

It’s tragic for everyone involved.

I have a lot of rage and animosity towards my abusers as well as the grief, however.

At least once a day I fantasize about outing one, collapsing one, hurting them back, especially about my stalker/rapist and family members — the ones who nearly killed me.

Then I realize I’m feeling the feelings of hate they projected into me again.

That’s what abuse is: a projection of their self hate to survive. They hate you to avoid hating themselves. And then they abuse you to avoid having to harm themselves.

They offload their shame.

Abuse is an energy exchange.

The psychological effects you experience are simply you feeling their feelings.

You feel obsessive. Because they were obsessed with you. You were their supply, their scapegoat.

You feel worthless. Because they are worthless abusers without a stable identity threatened that you may be better than them.

You feel suicidal. Because if they confronted their shames that their brains cannot process, they’d be suicidal (in a collapse).

You feel you can’t live or love yourself without them. Because they can’t live without supply to siphon their identities and self love.

You worry that you are ugly, unlovable. Because they are insecure and incapable of love, therefore unlovable.

You hate them. You want to hurt them. You want revenge. It’s they’re fault. They should suffer as penance. Because that is exactly how they felt towards you when they raged on you.

Everything you feel is simply absorbing their projections.

You carry the shame that their brains cannot bear. And they feel relief and move on like you’re a turd they just ejected.

So, while I’ve never stopped thinking of them, MY EYES GOT USED TO THE DARKNESS THEY PUT INSIDE ME AND I STARTED LOOKING AT THEM CLEARLY.

I studied them closely.

A good predator knows its prey, and they mined me bare, so a good prey must be smart and crafty.

NPDs and ASPDs are wildly dangerous, uglier than people even realize, and a tragically sad and common human experience.

This removes a lot of fear.

It also removes any self blame to see them clearly.

It helps me see myself more clearly as I study myself next to their darkness and retrace my memories.

And I move differently in the world.

Aside from moments of rage towards them, I mostly feel what’s appropriate: pity.

I have strong boundaries.

I have lots of protection.

I’m keenly aware of how to spot an NPD fast, even a covert.

And when they mistreat me, instead of feeling bad about myself, I FEEL GOOD (ish).

I know then that I threaten their grandiosity somehow. This makes me feel proud of myself. Because I know if they were healthy, they’d love me, not hate me.

This means I’ve worked very hard on healing my inner child and developing an independent self love that can’t be threatened by abuse.

Instead of letting them project themselves onto me, I now use it to see myself more clearly, and recognize my worth.

If a narcissist really, really hates you, IT’S BECAUSE THEY FEEL THEY CAN’T BE BETTER THAN YOU OR CONTROL YOU.

I let narcissists be a mirror to remind me of what I should be proud of in my life by recognizing what they try to break in me to restore their own fantasy of grandiosity.

Then I grey rock and/or get out of dodge.

For most of my past NPD lovers or favorite people, I feel mostly neutral. But there are a handful of them who went off in my life like an atomic bomb, and I don’t know that I’ll ever stop pulling the shrapnel from my flesh.

But, when you die enough times and regenerate, eventually you fly above the fire.

YOUR LIGHT WAS THE FIRE THAT BURNED THEM ALL ALONG.

Demons scamper at light that exposes them.

I think of many other things as I heal, even though I still think of them every day.

I seek to sit in joy and peace wherever I can.

I’m about to go read a book that is really juicy and watch the sun go down and the sky turn colors. ⛅️

I hope you find yours too. 🙏🏼

For individual coaching or group healing sessions, visit https://am-champion.com, and navigate to the coaching page.

A.M. Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.