I’ve long wondered if there was something in my background that made me vulnerable to making such a poor marriage choice. I couldn’t see any connection for years. One of the reasons I was so drawn to DH was that I wanted a family like his — energetic, loyal, proud of one another, sociable . . . It took a lot of years to realize that Different is not the same as Better.
The breakthrough came several years ago as I was watching a series of videos on Youtube from Doctor Romani, a psychologist who focuses on narcissism and recognizing and surviving narcissistic abuse. In the particular video, she began describing what it looks and feels like to grow up in a narcissistic household, and as she described the family dynamic, I realized: I grew up in a narcissist family. My mother was the narcissist, my father the enabler, my sister was the Golden Child . . . and I was the family scapegoat. Everything my sister did was cute and adorable; anything I did was wrong, clumsy, stupid. I would win some privilege or award in school: “Why’d they pick you?” I’d make a simple mistake, like not mind-reading what was expected of me: “Laura, you’ll never amount to anything.” I wanted to learn how to do something new, like cooking: “If I have to show you, then you don’t have enough sense to figure it out.” I was easily sacrificed in the family dynamic: mother was impossible to please and to get along with, but “you just have to try harder,” my dad told me.
That video was a revelation, and all at once a lot of things finally made sense — how my dad never believed me, how he accepted my mother’s narrative as true (even when her drug abuse and dishonesty were well established), never responded to my begging for time and conversation while I was going through the divorce, the strongly preferential treatment given my sister, the blame assigned to me for things not my fault when Mother, strung out on drugs, blamed me for things I hadn’t done, the endless string of criticisms and insults that had really worn out my spirit over the years. When I needed my family the most, they sided with DH, blaming me for the divorce without ever discussing the situation with me — until DH’s effusive references to his then-boyfriend caused them to realize that maybe there’d been more to the story than they’d assume. They never apologized for doubting me or for not being supportive when I needed them.
Imagine: all your life you’re told that family loyalty matters more than anything else . . . but when it comes down to it, there is no loyalty for one member of the family, no matter how badly wronged that member is by an outsider. The family member is expected to make the sacrifices, to demonstrate the limitless loyalty . . . but there is no loyalty available for that family member, the scapegoat.
Which plays into my decision to marry DH. He defended me against my mother. He told me, in the early days, that she was crazy and that I wasn’t the awful person she said I was. His own family was supportive and did things together and were loyal to one another — I wanted that. I wanted to establish a family and a home of my own as different as possible from what I’d known, and DH seemed an ideal spouse — because he was showing me the loyalty I’d not received from my parents (despite the years of lip service), and because of our shared evangelical Christian faith and church commitments, our shared recreational activities, which I thought would provide an unassailable foundation to our marriage.
I didn’t know it then, but this is a form of love-bombing. Now, love-bombing at 18, 19 looks very different from love-bombing at 28, 42, 60. . . but it’s still a form of trying to win quick allegiance and dependency from the target. It can be blindingly wonderful to someone starved for love. But it’s insincere and unsubstantial; it can’t support a long-term relationship in all its complexity, and it can act like a drug: so long as you have the feelings of euphoria somehow all the other stuff ceases to matter for a while.
Later, with the divorce and the slanders and calumnies that flew about from DH’s mother, I realized that his family, too, has its narcissistic components: his mother never made her children accept responsibility for any of their faults or failings; whether with a teacher or a peer, or an estranged wife, the problem, whatever it was, had to be the other person’s fault. She trained DH well in that regard.
I’m still not certain this pattern of repeat narcissism is common, but I’m curious to know if it is. It certainly would seem to fit the common wisdom that we tend to be attracted to what we already know, that we will marry someone like one of our parents. If any readers have anything to add, I’d be grateful for the input.
Surviving The Rainbow 