Reluctant Awareness
Waking up to the reality that you have been living in a covert narcissistic relationship.
If you’ve had the misfortune to end up in a relationship with a covert narcisstist, then perhaps that’s why it has taken so long for you to see reality for what it is.
We want to believe the lie, we want to stay in the delusion, and the high expectations because maybe if we keep ourselves there, hiding from the truth, the truth won’t find us. It won’t hurt us more than it already has.
And maybe, just maybe it won’t be a lie, maybe there is still hope.
The truth hurts when you have unwittingly been living a lie.
No one likes to admit they have been a fool, nor do they like to admit they have been fooled
But of course that is all just bullshit and if we could be honest with ourselves we could see it couldn’t we?
So instead the awareness of it is not something that happens suddenly, unless of course you walk in on it unsuspecting to find it frolicking gleefully in your apparent naivety.
Instead it is more likely to creep up on you, until one day whilst minding your own business, the thought manages to slip past and you see it.
You really, really see it and suddenly it stops you in your tracks. You can no longer deny having witnessed and seen the truth of the thought that managed to sneak past those carefully built barriers.
As if by magic, its as though you have been pulled out of a fog, out of a surrealist nightmare and smack into reality.
Everything is brighter, darker, quieter and louder all at once. The beauty that surrounds you beckons. and yet the toxicity overwhelms you burning all your senses.
That first realization startles you so incredibly wide awake.
And yet it’s not earth shattering, it is simply obvious.
Suddenly, the source of the constant, nagging sense of malcontent that has been eating away at you is there for you to see plain as day, all day, every day.
It’s chilling, and yet freeing all at once.
The odd thing is, nothing else changes. Not at first anyway.
Its almost as thought you are taking the time to simply sit back and take stock of the situation. To watch as the behaviours that you have previously dismissed or rationalised playout before you.
The subtle manipulations in your interactions, the way that your choices, actions and very thoughts have all been slowly coerced and moulded to carefully orchestrate you, leading you where THEY want you to go, not where you had intended.
Can you even remember where you had intended to go?
Your opinion and feelings, once welcomed are now scoffed at and mocked if they dare to differ from what is expected of you.
You have likely become entangled in mental gymnastics without realizing it, in an attempt to figure out the correct response or decision.
TO EVERYTHING!!
But it’s not your response is it?
And it is utterly exhausting.
Did you notice you were doing this the whole time? Had you seen how your choices and actions were slowly guided until they were no longer your own?
That slow manipulation, surgically applied with the cunning tact of the covert narcissist is a favourite weapon – passive-aggressiveness and gaslighting.
You didn’t see it did you? It snuck up slowly on you.
You took the kind words and compliments for what they were on the surface but did not see the resentment, devaluing and sarcastic animosity that accompanied them.
Your subconscious noticed, the deeper part of you saw it plainly.
You have been left desparately trying to keep your head above water amidst the silent undercurrent of hostility and tension that you were simply unconscious to.
A gentle tease by another is venom dipped when it comes from the mouth of the narcissist.
The backhanded compliment proffered with an Oscar worthy air of innocence leaves you numb to the poison accompanying it.
The toxicity builds slowly over time.
But you see it now, all of it, and that awareness is the first dose of antidote.
As the cure slowly works its way through your system it sheds light upon everything that was previously hiding in the shadows. Giving you almost supernatural vision to see all that you had been blind to before.
This new clarity it has brought you is both terrifying and liberating.
This awareness, this unmasking of the truth, is your antidote to the poison of the past.
It’s a bittersweet awakening, one that brings the pain of realization but also the promise of healing.