The Narcissistic Love Story 2
Is it possible to “live happily ever after” with a narcissist??? Continue reading Elisa’s story after her dream wedding.
Welcome back to the story of Elisa, who found her “soulmate” at the age of 18. (click here to read part 1 if you haven’t yet). Her story started like a movie, with a bit of drama, a grandiose proposal, ups and downs, and finally a dream wedding. Most movies end right at this point and we think that the couple will now live happily ever after. But, do they?
Living happily ever after is exactly what Elisa expected from her wedding. She thought that her struggles would now be over. Her fight for the love that she deserves and going against all odds will now be paid off as she is heading toward the beautiful life of her dreams, with her soulmate.
Little she know what life had in store ahead of her. She still had to discover what narcissism and gaslighting are.
Let’s continue reading what Elisa narrated further.
Trigger warning — Readers are advised to be aware that some of the incidents in the story can be triggering as these are very common in narcissistic relationships.
In this article, I have marked (in bold) the red flags, narcissistic traits, and other signs that one must look for when suspecting to be in a relationship with a narc. I have also added my comments at the end of the article on each incident worth your attention.
Happily ever after???
After the wedding, we lived together in the apartment. During that time Tom had been working for a very small (graphic design) company with less than 10 owners and employees together. He invited them all to our wedding so I assumed they must be close to him — but I was wrong.
Tom didn’t like the way they were working. He would complain about the way some employees were not talented or skilled but were hired anyway to do things that he did, which he was very talented and skilled at.
One winter, Tom was crafting an email to his boss in response to the company needing to withhold pay from their employees for a certain amount of time while they continued to work (he was upset about this). He was meticulous about writing this email (and everything else).
I pointed out to him that his grandfather was outside in a foot of snow cleaning the driveway and he should go out and help him. He refused as he was not done with the email.
I was mortified that we were sitting in the warm apartment while his old grandfather was out there cleaning. I was nagging and soon enough we started yelling at each other.
To avoid it I went outside and started helping his grandfather. I was so mad but after a few minutes I began to calm down and cleaned off my car and Tom’s car even though I told myself I wasn’t going to do it.
I remember I came back into the apartment and was in the middle of a sentence saying “I’m sorry…” — when I looked around and the curtains were ripped from the windows and a board game was broken and thrown all over the floor.
That same winter though, he brought me outside the house in the middle of the night while it was snowing and we danced our choreographed wedding dance in the middle of the street as the snowflakes fell around us.
These types of highs and lows became common and more frequent in our married life.
I graduated in June 2010 with my master’s degree and got a job as a therapist. I loved it, however, it was only contract work and was part-time so I picked up whatever other jobs I could on the side.
Tom’s company was taken over by another bigger company and he was promoted. We felt we were finally in a good place with work. We bought a house in June 2011.
I’m not sure how he expressed himself at work or whether the people he worked with sensed an air of superiority about him (which some of my family members had told me they sensed over the years). He wasn’t completely happy with the people he worked with. He also wasn’t very happy with the actual work he was doing — he was working on video games that were violent and had to watch and edit the scenes repeatedly.
Just weeks before Christmas 2011 he went to work and his computer would not let him log in. He was called into a meeting where his boss told him he was letting him and a few other people go. It was a severe shock. The original owners of the small company did not speak to him, he suspected that they may have had a part in choosing him as one of the people to lay off.
When he was laid off we needed insurance. One day, while looking for a job for him, I came across a job that fit me — I applied for it and got it.
I had to leave the part-time therapist’s job (which I loved) for this full-time job to feel secure. Tom took a contract job that sounded promising at least because it was using his creative talents but it was a long travel and he never felt secure with contract work.
Tom thought he knew how to do the same work this company was doing in a shorter amount of time than they were doing and he told them that. They asked him to prove it and he did. After that, they didn’t contact him back — whether they didn’t like that he came in there telling them he knew better, or his attitude was the reason. I don’t know.
During this time we lived in our house, and if we fought, he wouldn’t talk to me for up to three days sometimes. He would give me silent treatments often. I couldn’t stand him ignoring me and walking away. I would follow him from room to room when we argued. This angered him even more, of course.
Sometimes the argument was so confusing and frustrating, I felt I was being driven to insanity. I would become so angry, I would scream and cry, and slam cabinet doors. He would stay calm, almost like he was sitting back and saying, “look at you going crazy”.
The beginning of gaslighting
I remember a time during this when we got into a fight and I got so mad I slammed my pocketbook down on the dining room table. It was a round table that was my grandmother’s, made of heavy wood.
I left the house and when I came back, the table was in pieces on the street to be picked up with the garbage. I went inside shocked — and he tried to convince me that I saw him break the table before I left, and he said that he had warned me if I slammed my pocketbook down that he was going to do that to the table.
This was not all, he also smashed a painting of my grandmother against the wall and there were holes in three walls of the living room and dining room.
He never wanted to talk about our fights and expected me to just move on from them. After a few days, I would offer to make him his favorite meal and he would accept and then we would go back to normal without ever discussing what happened.
The holes in the walls stayed for a while until he attempted to patch them up, but not very well. My parents expressed concern about them but didn’t want to get too involved and make things worse. His parents had been to the house while the patched-up holes were obvious but never said a word (at least not to me).
He normally didn’t help with household chores except for only taking care of whatever was his own, like his laundry. I would shop for groceries, make the meals, and clean up after the meals. He would take his plate after he was done and leave the kitchen. He admonished me when I felt stressed out — I had no children like other people we knew and he told me I shouldn’t complain because my life wasn’t stressful like theirs.
Moving on?
While I worked full time, Tom collected unemployment. He then decided he was going to go back to school for a masters in a completely unrelated field to what his bachelor’s was in. I supported him in that. That schooling (to become an English teacher) would take two years and he continued receiving unemployment because he had become a student.
He put all he had into the work, he enjoyed it and he aced everything. I was so proud of him. I always knew he was such an intelligent and creative person, and that was why I fell in love with him. Meanwhile, I hated my job, I wasn’t using my talents, I was the lowest on the totem pole and my boss did nothing to help me get any further.
I always believed in Tom that he would be a successful teacher and we would be able to move on (and have a family) soon.
One semester he was interning at a local school. He was placed with a teacher who wasn’t very nice. He would tell me that she seemed to be threatened by him, a young male student, and she wouldn’t be helpful or share anything with him that would help him to learn.
He ended up having to have one of his professors come with him to the school to speak with this teacher and the principal about it. I know this was embarrassing for him and I felt very badly about it — there were so many obstacles.
I knew he was down on himself during this time (not having a job and starting a whole new path when at this age most people are set in their careers) but he never really showed signs of depression, possibly because being depressed was beneath him. He once told me he didn’t believe in postpartum depression (!).
When Tom graduated with his master’s in teaching he was still miserable because he said it didn’t matter until he had a job. He didn’t even want to go to his graduation. We fought on the car ride there because he didn’t even care that his graduation gown was ridiculously wrinkled.
I had a panic attack in the bathroom at the graduation with my mother and his mother there. I told them he just could not be happy — but they just said it’s alright and probably thought to themselves I was crazy and overreacting.
The downfall
Once I can recall he told me he had looked into divorce. This scared me. I always wanted to save our marriage and was willing to do whatever it would take.
I thought of going for couples counseling but he refused to go. He once told me I was the one who needed therapy.
Since he wouldn’t go, I did go myself.
One therapist talked about herself a lot of the time and then moved across the country. The next therapist went on vacation and never called me to resume when she came back. I went to a third therapist.
All the therapy went nowhere because my issue was in my marriage and without him present, there was nothing that could be done to change the situation.
During that time, however, I was still a part of a group at my church that provided me with much peace when I needed it the most.
He got a few substitute teaching jobs and worked very hard at them. He applied for full-time teaching jobs but wasn’t getting hired. This was during a time when teaching was in high demand and there were very few positions where we lived.
In the summer of 2015, just two days after our 6th wedding anniversary we went to Home Depot to pick something that he needed. For a few weeks, I had been telling him it would be nice to paint the ceiling of our screened-in porch, blue, like the sky.
Often, if I wanted something he would disagree, we would argue about it, and then I would just drop it because he made me not care anymore about what it was that I even wanted in the first place. Or worse, he would say things that sounded like he was interested, but then when it came time to do it he would get angry at me for assuming he’d agreed. He would be very vague and would never really say one way or the other.
So while we were at Home Depot, I said let’s go get that blue paint because I thought he was OK with it, but he replied that he never agreed to that. I started getting upset and he got very angry saying I was making a scene. He left immediately and we fought in the car on the way home.
In the house, we were fighting. He went into the bathroom, locked the door, and called his mother like he was fearful of me and had to protect himself.
A few minutes later two policemen were at the door. I don’t know who called the police. They told him to leave the house and he took some things and went to his mother’s house. I was curled up on a chair choking and hyperventilating in the middle of a complete panic attack. The others left, and I had never felt more alone, ever.
He stayed at his mother’s house for the rest of the summer. He didn’t work because the schools were closed for vacation. He didn’t call me. I would call his house and sometimes talk to his mother hoping she could get him to talk to me but she never helped the situation.
It didn’t seem like she ever told him that he should be taking care of this with me, that he should talk to me, that he is a grown man and shouldn’t be handling things like this. It was so frustrating also because he always told me I involved my family so much but the last thing I wanted was to go to my parents, I wanted to talk to him, and he was the one who was involving his family by living there away from me.
Something I found very strange and frustrating and which started early on, was, he would (right in front of me) tell his mom things that I told him, that I wouldn’t want his mom to necessarily know that I said, in a joking way, as if I never said it.
He thought it was funny and just playing around with me but I would feel so uncomfortable and wouldn’t know what to say. After doing this so many times, I was sure that she knew I had said those things. He did this throughout the years and I think it contributed to me having a difficult time having a normal, good relationship with his mom as she never told him to stop, she almost played along with it.
I resented her and got a sense (whether it was true or not) that she knew she had a special relationship with Tom, that she would always be in his favor, but I would always have to work for it.
Looking back now, it might have had something to do with why she never really helped me with his bad behavior — almost like she wanted me to look bad in his eyes, she wouldn’t stop it but she also wouldn’t completely take his side either.
I told his mother my life was at a standstill, I didn’t know what he wanted to do and weeks were just passing. I was 32 years old and we still couldn’t get it together. For a long time, we were waiting for our life to be right so we could start a family and now I felt we were just back at square one.
I scrambled to find a therapist. I had gone to a talk that a well-known couples counselor was giving at a church. He was great and I asked if he had any openings but he hadn’t. He gave me the name of someone he knew but that person was also not available.
I found a therapist who lived in the same neighborhood as my husband’s parents where he was staying to make it convenient for him. Meanwhile, for me, it was 30 minutes away and I had to go back to work after the session while Tom went back to his mom’s and enjoyed his summer vacation.
Tom agreed to meet with the therapist but all we did was argue in the session; the therapist gave us homework once and didn’t even follow up with it. After the sessions, Tom would get in his car and drive away and I would be a wreck waiting for the next session when I will get to see him again a whole seven days later.
In between sessions, he would come back to the house while I was working and get the mail and do whatever he wanted. I would sometimes race home during my lunch as I worked five minutes away, just to see if I could catch him there but I never did. I remember I would place a pen down on a counter and note its position so that when I came home and it was moved, maybe I could tell if he was there.
Narcissism! What’s that?
During this time I lived alone in our home, and I started doing some research on psychological abuse. I didn’t know the term narcissism. What I found was a list that described what was happening well. I called a local organization for domestic violence and asked to speak with a counselor. They took my information along with Tom’s name and told me there was an 8-week waiting list.
Towards the end of the summer, I saw an ad in my church’s bulletin for “Retrouvaille”, an organization that holds a retreat and meetings to help people come back together who are on the brink of divorce. (Retrouvaille translation: The joy of reuniting with someone after a long separation) I was so excited and told Tom about it and he agreed to go. When I told the therapist, he reacted as if it was a ridiculous thing to do. We stopped going to him.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Comments
Here, I would like to point out some of the incidences where there were some red flags which Elisa noticed but didn’t quite understand how serious they were.
These comments will help you understand narcissistic traits and how some people will display them in a relationship.
“Tom didn’t like the way they were working. He would complain about the way some employees were not talented or skilled but were hired anyway to do things that he did and he was very talented and skilled at”
Out here Elisa explains that Tom didn’t like the way his new company was working and he felt that he knew much better than them and they have hired people who are less talented, deserving, and smarter than him. He assessed himself to be smarter and better than everyone, and although he claimed to prove himself to be better, still he didn’t get the job or heard back from them.
The narcissistic trait that can be seen here is the sense of superiority and thinking that you are the only smart one and everyone else is dumb and of course, doesn’t deserve what they have.
A narcissist would always advocate how smart they are and it is their loss to not see their talent and smartness.
“I’m sorry…” — when I looked around and the curtains were ripped from the windows and a board game was broken and thrown all over the floor”
Another narcissistic trait is anger, which comes from an inability to handle emotions. Narcissists are incapable of dealing with their emotions; they resort to getting angry and aggressive when it comes to something they cannot handle—narcissistic wrath is one example of this.
They tend to do things in a fit of anger and then act as if nothing happened without ever talking, resolving, or genuinely apologizing for it.
Sometimes the argument was so confusing and frustrating that I felt I was being driven to insanity. I would become so angry, scream and cry, and slam cabinet doors. He would stay calm, almost like he was sitting back and saying, “look at you going crazy”
Narcissists are known to push people, especially their victims, to their mental limits of frustration, where they find themselves becoming aggressive, angry, paranoid, and crazy. It happens almost slowly because of the lack of effective communication, resolution to the problems and issues, and, of course, the constant mental and psychological abuse that the victim endures.
In the end, the victim is blamed for losing their mind and pushing the narcissist to do things that they are doing to them, like verbal, physical, or mental abuse.
“I left the house and when I came back, the table was in pieces on the street to be picked up with the garbage. I went inside shocked — and he tried to convince me that I saw him break the table before I left, and he said that he had warned me if I slammed my pocketbook down he was going to do that to the table”
This is the perfect example of gaslighting, where Tom, out of anger, breaks the table, which had emotional value to Elisa and tells her that he did it in front of her and that it is a result of her not listening to his warning.
In a way, he conveyed that Elisa is responsible for the breaking of the table as she slammed her pocketbook and pushed Tom to break it. In short, she asked for it.
“He never wanted to talk about our fights and expected me to just move on from them. After a few days, I would offer to make him his favorite meal and he would accept and then we would go back to normal without ever discussing what happened”
This is a classic example of “we fight, we break up; we kiss, we make up”. In a relationship with a narcissist, there is no discussion addressing the issues and often people find themselves fighting over the same issue again and again without getting anywhere. The issues are always ignored and never talked about. While in a healthy relationship, it is very important element to discuss and resolve issues to not let them affect the relationship.
“He would tell me that she seemed to be threatened by him, a young male student, and she wouldn’t be helpful or share anything with him that would help him to learn.”
This is the extension of the very first comment, where I mentioned that narcissists see themselves as superior and smarter than others. They do not perceive disliking them as a problem related to their personality and attitude, as this requires insight. Instead, they label it as people being intimidated, insecure, and jealous of their smartness and intelligence. It is one of their self-fulfilling prophecies to feel confident and better than others without facing reality.
“In the house, we were fighting. He went into the bathroom and locked the door and called his mother like he was fearful of me and he had to protect himself”
Many times you will see narcissists acting like children, being adamant, fuzzy, disrespectful, and angry while throwing tantrums. This is because of their inability to handle emotions. Another important thing to remember here is that narcissism is in most cases a product of toxic parenting and family dynamics.
In this example, you can clearly see how Tom turned into a child and called his mother to seek validation and comfort. This also shows how his mother has always been supportive of his actions and behavior, making her an enabler.
I know this part has been a bit longer and I am sure by now you want to know what happens next and what Elisa did in the end.
Well, there is much more to her story and her journey.
I hope her story will help you get some valuable insights and will educate you about narcissism and narcissistic traits. It will keep you safer and help you heal if you have been with a narcissist, ever.
Do share your thoughts about what Elisa went through if you have faced a similar situation and how you handled it.
With my best wishes, see you in part 3.
If you or anyone you know is in a relationship with a narcissist, then click here to book an introductory session.
