Lessons Learned Being the Other Woman of a Narcissist
Address your wounds, face your shadows, have coffee with your demons.
Being the other woman of a narcissist was an interesting experience, to say the least. When I say interesting, I mean heartbreaking, abusive and downright scary.
We met when I was 20 years old. Young, naïve, and filled with unhealed emotional trauma. Fun times indeed.
I immediately didn’t like him. He was full of himself, yet funny. I like funny. So we started seeing each other. This was a rollercoaster from hell and suddenly, four years had passed by. How did this happen?
Anyone that has been in a relationship with a narcissist knows what that is like. Being the other woman, I presume, is a little different. Another type of saga.
The mind games were the worst. The manipulation and feeling crazy. At the time, I had no clue what gaslighting was, yet it was exactly what I was experiencing. See, when being a child I was different, an outcast many times. My biggest unconscious wish was to belong. I didn’t understand at the time how much core shame I dealt with. For me, not being able to be his girlfriend was the biggest problem. Until I slowly opened my eyes.
The universe was persistent with me knowing the truth. The narcissist was persistent with gaslighting me with lies like her being the ex-girlfriend, classic. And I fell for it every time. Not because I believed his stupid excuses, but because I wanted it so badly to be true.
When I finally found out, he confessed. I think that he finally broke because I never scolded him or attacked him. Again, not because I didn’t want to. I was furious, heartbroken, and confused, but all I wanted was to understand. How could this man have been with me for 4 years?
This was one of the biggest gaslights. He never loved me. And thinking back, we were like two children finding solace in each other because we carried the same wound. I got to know him and myself from such a depth I couldn’t run from my inner demons anymore.
I felt such intense shame. The fire I felt in my solar plexus made me feel like I was being swallowed by the earth itself. Like I was falling into a bottomless pit. I was ashamed of myself…
So what did I learn?
That love is not a feeling of constant terror and anxiety. That love is to consider someone in every decision you make in life. Not out of obligation, but out of sheer will and care. I didn’t know that kind of love. This was also how I treated myself. I knew I was miserable since being a child. Now I finally had a hum of why I was miserable.
I learned that co-dependents are not all narcissists, yet all narcissists are co-dependent. I watched this man talk about his broken childhood, and it was so obvious that every step he took in life was from two different perspectives. One to please himself and himself only. The other was to be accepted by his abusive father. I felt compassion. Or was it Stockholm syndrome? I still have a hard time figuring this one out.
Anyone that grew up with a narcissistic parent knows this struggle. We love the parent so much and they have sides to them that are so beautiful. But when their pain rears its ugly head, the confusion sets in. How can you love someone so much, yet they hurt you so badly? And we spend every moment in the rest of our lives trying to make sense of it. Until we accept it had nothing to do with us.
Loneliness and unmet needs will be the driving force of our lives if we don’t address them head-on. When having blind spots in our emotional body and psyche with the wrong people, we become vulnerable negatively. We become prey. If we are unlucky enough to attract people with the same wounds, yet that decided they don’t care if they have used others to get those needs met. We can get into a lot of trouble.
Address your wounds, face your shadows, have coffee with your demons. If you won’t do it, trust me, someone else will. And it will be a coffee break from hell.
The shadows seem scary until we work with them consciously. There are no other ways out of horrible relationships.
With this experience, I learned so much about my inner shadows. This man was mirroring every one of them. It deepened my spiritual understanding of how our subconscious sets up these situations to mirror its own experience. Ti gets a resolution for something it never could before. I wanted to be chosen, to feel significant to someone. And I was terrified of being seen for who I was. These two combined attracts an “other woman scenario”
But like I wrote in a previous story, the things we do to cover up deep hurt end up being those things that cause further pain.
Being the other woman was the end of my self-hate. It was the beginning of the rest of my life. Because of this being a huge catalyst for my inner growth. It was exactly as it should have been, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.