Recognizing the pattern of narcissistic abuse

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.

The Life I Want

Years of being told who I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to settle for . . . none of it honest, none of it good, not knowing how to fight back to claim my own identity and to defy the people I love .. . They mean well, but they don’t know me, so they have no authority to dictate my life to me.  Still, from childhood I’d been taught I was supposed to yield to their judgments in all matters.

In the fall, I made the decision:  I would move.  I would cut the safety rope linking me to a life I mostly hated, but which was quite secure, and go in pursuit of something more. Once I reached this decision, I must say, I have not had a moment of fear or uncertainty. I have paused frequently to ask myself whether I really was willing to take this risk, and each time the answer was a joyful Yes!

The Hand of God in this has been unmistakable.  I am in awe of how He has guided my steps along the way, even feeling Him laughing at me and saying, “Sweetheart, what took you so long?”

I never had to place my property on the market. When I began doing my research, my neighbor offered to buy the place and offered me the high end of current market value for our area (I knew this because I’d already looked, before I talked with them of my intentions). We closed the sale on a Wednesday. That evening, I got in the car and headed to my chosen new locale for what I believed would be the first of several “recon” missions.

I arrived late Thursday evening.  Friday, I met with a dear Christian realtor I’d connected with online. She showed me one house. I fell in love with that house, beginning with the front porch. It abundantly met my needs and left me “room to grow” — physically and aesthetically,  The rental was well within my budget.  I filled out the application.

“Laura, you must contact the pastor over at such-and-such church. My good friend tells me they have just lost their organist of more than 50 years, and they need someone.” I thought, okay, maybe next week. . .   The pastor contacted me. On Monday I went and played for him and for the one Board member who was able to come over on very short notice.  I was provisionally offered the position, pending completion of a formal audition.

I cut my recon mission short, headed back to my home and began my move (I had a contractual provision to remain in my old home until the end of the school year). Friends offered to help — a massive savings over the professional movers I’d thought I’d have to hire.

There were decisions to make.  I felt that — not just because of spatial and economic moving considerations — I needed to take only those things I dearly love and actually need.  Only the items that would fit in the life I want. So far as furniture went, that meant my antique bed, two chairs, and my desk; everything else, I sold or donated to my church charity.  Of the smaller items, if it could not be immediately put to use to help me realize the life I want, it would not go.  A saddle I’d held on to for sentimental reasons, for more than 30 years (I have not had a horse since I was 18, nor ridden but a couple of times since I was 14) would not make the move with me. I gave away more than half my books in order to save on moving space. I gave an avid gardener friend all my yard tools.  The trailer itself — the neighbors did not want to deal with it — I was able to re-home with a couple who would move it and refurbish it for their own daughter, recently escaped from an abusive marriage.  They also helped me with the cleanup as I moved out.

Several friends came and helped me pack, easing the physical stress on my body.

In a scant 10 days, I was back on the road, this time to stay.

I admit I hurt some people with my decisions — not just to move, but more, to keep my own counsel regarding the move until the last possible moment.  I did this primarily to spare myself the stress of having to explain myself to the extended family.  And I feel justified in that decision, still, because they all have made major life decisions without reference to me, and I think informing would have been too much akin to permission-seeking.

I have moved in order to create for myself the life I want. It’s not about betraying my family (although I confess to a bit of the good ol’ British Workers’ Salute in the direction of a couple of people who had betrayed and abandoned me at a crucial hour.) There was no room for expansion, in my old home.  The area I lived in seemed to sap the joy and energy from me even as its sandy soil saps nutrients from the soil itself. A cousin had pointed out that everything is stunted in that region — even the deer are significantly smaller than just a county or so west, where the terrain takes on a different character.  I was stunted, I realized, and I want to grow.

 

“We are still married”

Email from a young woman:  “Do you ever write about women still married to men struggling with SSA?” (Same-Sex Attraction)

There are a couple of reasons I haven’t, to date.  The obvious one is that I don’t know many women who are knowingly married to men with SSA. And of those whom I do know, roughly 1/2 have ended up divorced.  One of the still-married ones is going to talk with me soon (after some family member’s surgery is completed and life slows down a bit for her) — and I expect to learn a lot from her.  Yes, the conversation will be made available here when we’ve had it.

The other reason is that I’m pretty sure my attitude isn’t one people want to hear. Why?

Well, in order to be successfully married, both parties have to be fully committed to the marriage:  the creation of a new family unit, the intimacy and the bonding and interdependency with this other person. Both have to take the responsibilities of their role in the marital union deadly seriously.

Now, my experience is that men with SSA have a hard time with responsibility and self-denial.  And self-denial is 100% of the nature of marriage, for both the spouses:  we serve the good of our spouse, not our own. We embrace a wholly new identity as the “one flesh” creation with our spouse. SSA men, in particular, have a hard time with this.  The SSA spouse has to be willing to suspend his own biases and prejudices in favor of this mystical reality of the nature of marriage. He has to reject the onslaught of messages that he’s “entitled” to gratification, or having his needs met, or that he’s somehow a privileged class because of his SSA.

Moreover, the SSA spouse has to be determined to renounce his “right” to have sex whenever and with whomever he wishes; he has to be fully engaged in  his volitional decision to be faithful to his marriage vows.  It’s been the experience of my friends and acquaintance whose husbands were ambivalent, who even flirted with ambivalence — they end up separating/divorcing as the husbands yield to the same-sex attraction. And the unhappiness and difficulties that precede that separation are just heart-breaking.  I believe a divorce from a SSA spouse is a lot more complicated than a regular divorce between OSA couples, especially when children are involved.

And when we live in a society that glorifies homosexuality and insists that sexual gratification is the most important part of life, it’s hard to defy those “norms” and to stand for traditional moral values and the sanctity of marriage.

And the straight spouse has to be even stronger, and wiser, and more mature than him. She has to accept the uncertainty that this man she’s giving herself to is going to be serious in his declarations and that he’s sincere in his desire to get well, to grow into a full union with her, spirit and intellect, not just the perfunctory sexual obligations.  She lives daily with the risk that he’s going to break over and fall. She lives with risks to her physical health if that happens.  She lives with enormous risk to her mind and heart, even if he doesn’t break over — because what if he never reaches a point of being able to really, truly, love her with a mature man’s love?

SSA men are deeply wounded. We might well call it a catastrophic wound, it goes so deep.  His sense of himself as a man, emotionally and spiritually and psychologically, far more than physically, is poor. He’s probably been belittled, he’s almost certainly been exploited by older men exploiting his need for affirmation in his maleness in order to gratify their lusts.  Emotionally, psychologically, his development is compromised, even more than an alcoholic’s (an alcoholic’s emotional maturation is arrested at the age he begins drinking). The behaviors  and the persona that help him get along within the distortions of the gay community are not authentically masculine but a false mix of the masculine and feminine.

He is probably very fragile, psychologically and emotionally. I keep hearing of anxiety disorder, depression, and narcissism being rampant in the gay community, and common among SSA men married to women.  Now, as women, it is our nature to care for others, to help, to serve. . . but often our care is exactly what our SSA husbands would resent.  They are afraid of failure, of their inadequacy . . .  but when we try to make things easier for them, when we try to “help” them, they hear only the amplification of their own self-doubts:  I am not good enough, I have to have a woman do all this for me.  I am weak and worthless. 

The hardest thing for a woman to do in the face of such hurt and fear is to stand back and to say, with firm conviction, “You can handle this. You’ve got this.”  Because, frankly, when we see him so anxious and uncertain, we don’t know whether he can or not. A straight man? No doubt! but the SSA man is somehow a more tender and fragile plant and our instincts move us to want to cushion this boy-man from the cold hard world and treat him more like an orchid when he needs to be exercising and developing some hardier stuff.

And when those instincts kick in and dictate the wife’s behavior, she’s met with his resentment and an even deeper threat that he’ll break over and go (back) to the gay lifestyle. Because he resents the echoes he hears in her of all the insults and belittlements of his lifetime. She’s supposed to be his #1 ally? but instead she’s as convinced of his helplessness as all the others in his life . . . and he will despise her as much as, or more even than himself.

So the straight wife has to be a diplomat and a therapist and have wisdom and flexibility and clarity of understanding . . . and I think it’s a helluva lot to expect of anyone. Especially when children enter the picture.  Which is fodder for another post.

God bless y’all.

 

 

 

A friendly reminder:

Being the “beard” does not define who we really are.
This experience does not negate our value.
The abuses we lived with do not determine our future.
We are NOT condemned to mediocrity or failure or a life of loneliness.
This does not limit what we can achieve or who we can become.

God can, and will! bring enormous good from your sufferings.

St. Paul on Marriage — Radical Conversion

When I was going through the whole business of suspecting DH was gay, I was in a conservative evangelical church that probably would have been very supportive had I not been under the very mistaken idea that I was obligated to stay in the marriage and to protect him, no matter what. That idea of protecting DH was what kept me from seeking help at the time.

But as I’ve read comments from other women, it’s become clear that many of them have been in churches that are not supportive of women married to gay men, or men with SSA (same-sex attraction). The whole idea of submission from Ephesians 5 gets tossed around and used to bully women into staying in insupportable marriages.

But — and this is extremely important! — I don’t think St. Paul ever intended to beat anyone over the head with his Epistle. But I also think he couldn’t foresee a time in which we live, when women have unprecedented rights and privileges and his words would seem oppressive.

Paul was writing to a people who had lived their whole lives in the self-indulgent, even depraved culture of the Roman Empire. Shaped and informed by Greek paganism, although Roman women had some rights, they were still very much under the rule of fathers, then husbands, and the rights they did possess were so connected with their father’s family that I’m really not sure what the point of their being able to inherit or make a will actually might have been. And if she were a slave, she had no rights whatsoever.

Marriage was monogamous, but not a matter of love; most often it was an arrangement between families. Men married in order to establish legitimacy of offspring, to secure a legitimate heir, or for some personal (economic or political) advantage.

Paul, on the other hand, was an elite Jew, highly educated and quite privileged. In Judaism, marriage could occur for love, as demonstrated by many of the biblical narratives (Isaac and Rebekkah, Jacob and Rachel, et al.). The Song of Songs is a highly romantic celebration of erotic love as an analogy of spiritual love (which does not diminish its importance as a marriage celebration).  This was the culture Paul was teaching his Gentile converts to Christianity:  Christianity was Jewish in its moral and social values, its ethos. It was a massive paradigm shift for the formerly-pagan converts.

So when Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands as to Christ, he’s not subjugating them to men.  Society had already done that. What he was telling them was to view their dependence and their legal subjugation in a new and nobler perspective. By serving their husbands as they would Christ, these Ephesian women were given an opportunity to elevate their homes and their relationships with their husbands to a new dignity and importance. And, in the process, to elevate their own status in the home as analogous to the Church itself. Paul goes into this comparison in some detail in ch. 5, vv. 23-24.

But it’s the men who faced the greater challenge. They were instructed to completely change the way they regard their wives:  no longer as property, nor as a status bearer, nor as an object for sex and procreation, but as part of themselves, part of their own bodies!

To love them.

And, even more radically, to love with the same kind of total self-sacrificing self-donation that Our Lord demonstrated when He gave Himself for the Church.

The Greco-Roman culture was depraved. Sexual license and depravity were normal behaviors. From Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, we get a glimpse “Neither . . . sodomists . . . will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And such were some of you!” (I Cor. 6:9-11) [Yeah, ex-gays.  I totally get that!] That’s how complete  and radical the paradigm shift for these converts was.

So Paul is telling men to love their wives, rather than objectifying them. To honor them as part of themselves. To be willing to die for them.

We ex-wives of gay men have been objectified. We have been exploited, and in many ways abused. This abuse is not a Christian experience of marriage, but more of a reversion to a pagan model.

It really is better than we’ve known.

Important Event – Atlanta, GA – This Saturday

I so greatly admire the folks who participate in Courage.  I’m honored to have been invited to speak to the Atlanta Open House, this Saturday, February 3.

Book Review: The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon

I’m only on Ch. 19, but I have to get in this review now.

I’m blessed to call Moira Greyland one of my friends.  We met on Facebook through mutual friends; she is the daughter of gays, I am the ex-wife of one. We have exchanged numerous comments and messages; a number of months ago, she became my voice coach, and we have talked numerous times.  She is a joyous woman, enormously talented, expert in several fields, energetic, cheerful, and beautiful.

She is also a walking miracle.

And a very fine writer.

Moira’s parents were famous writers; I’d come across Marion Zimmer Bradley through her Mists of Avalon (which I bought but never could get into, and eventually threw away), but I wasn’t acquainted with the name of Walter Breen until I met Moira.  Both Marion and Walter were brilliant and famous in their respective fields; I was surprised to learn that she was one of the cofounders of the Society of Creative Anachronisms, and other Faires.

Walter, it turns out, was paranoid schizophrenic. Marion didn’t have a formal diagnosis, having never been institutionalized, but my hunch is that it would have been very bad, had there been one.  Nevertheless, both of them were brutal child molesters and abusers.  Moira was raped by both her parents, she watched her father bring into their home and seduce dozens of young boys, her mother go through bouts of insane and irrational rages.  How she has emerged from that hellhole to be the vibrant and powerful — if sometimes shell-shocked — woman that she is leaves me in utter awe.

There are moments in this book of wry humor (Walter would have sex with “anything with a pulse” — in my head, I can see and hear Moira speaking those words). There are recountings that are so carefully navigated to avoid the salacious but still leave one wanting to scream with fury, to reach through the pages and to rescue that little girl she was.  Moira had told me she has panic attacks in the shower, and now I fully understand why.

But the book is more than just her story; it is also the story of the fomentation of the gay rights and pederasty movement (I’m sorry, the two really are inescapably linked — and Breen wrote about “Greek love”) out of Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s. Walter’s schizophrenia thankfully left him incapable of playing the system by self-editing his thoughts and words, any more than his impulses, he was very vocal in his advocacy of sex with children, and wrote about it, and his words and attitudes have been recounted by more than just Moira, which allows us to see the train of thought of an active pederast. His testimony in the criminal trial that put him in prison for the rest of his life was appallingly candid; he actually seems to have believed he could persuade the judge that he was in the right in seducing young boys, that he was doing them an enormous favor. Moira weaves others’ writings, remembrances, and testimony through her own story to demonstrate that these events she recounts were not the creation of her own mind but a well-documented, publicly-known “secret” in the various communities where the family were connected.

There are hard paragraphs to read, yes, but overall The Last Closet is a story of survival and of triumph of love.  Moira shows us the brokenness that each of her parents brought into their marriage, and the tragic and twisted love they shared (they were so in tune with one another on many levels, that they would regularly buy one another the same gift). She shows us her carefully-forged escapes and survival techniques.

As I said in opening, I’m on Ch. 19.  But I know how the story will end, because I know Moira:  in triumph.

Right now, The Last Closet is only available in Kindle format. It will be available in hard copy soon.  And — I don’t know where she’s going to find the strength to do it all — in audiobook.  Yes, Moira’s going to record it herself.

It’s All Okay

Much better the day after that last post.  Most of the time I do very well.  This one took me unprepared.

There are days I know will be difficult:  my daughters’ birthdays. Our anniversary.  Christmas.  As those approach I give myself a bit extra pampering, allow myself a bit of grieving, buy myself a good chocolate bar and maybe some other delicacy.  I take extra naps.  In advance, I might take extra vitamins and immune boosters, since being low in spirits often coincides with a lowering of resistance to sickness.

I’m not a cry-er; it would probably be better for me if I were.

But what the mind doesn’t consciously identify, the body often will know and react to.  This can be brutally hard at times. Suddenly finding oneself low and not knowing why is almost more distressing than being low in itself.  When I’m low on certain expected dates, I know it’s because it’s that date and will pass by the time I wake up, tomorrow morning; but when I’m leveled and don’t know why, it leers at me and threatens to become my permanent state.  This is unrealistic, of course, but sometimes the feeling dominates all.

The good news is that I got through a couple of anniversaries, this past year, with barely a wobble.  There is a lot to be grateful for:  if time doesn’t heal all wounds, it does generally make them less acute.

Thirty Years

Thirty Years.  It’s been thirty years since the morning he came in and announced he was leaving. “I can’t take it any more,” he said.

Of course, he dropped this bombshell on me as I was changing clothes to go to my first final exam of the semester — timing I can’t help but feel was not an accident. He had sabotaged me before. This time the sabotage was only a bump in the road; I still completed my work.

But how those years have flown by! Thirty years! In some ways it seems like just a couple weeks.  There are hours and days when I still feel fragile and raw, uncertain where to step, when my wounds still feel raw and I feel timid and weak.

There are times when I grieve deeply for lost family, dreams, and possibilities. I look back on the thirty years when, under other circumstances, I might have remarried, had another family, known love. . . but for the wounds and scars left by the very disordered relationship of marriage with a gay man.

“You need to find yourself a straight man and get married again,” he counseled me, when my first social outing was a large school event, and my way was paid by two gay colleagues. But he himself never acknowledged to me that he is gay, and he denied to others that his homosexuality had anything to do with our divorce,

So how could he admit that the dysfunctional relationship between the two of us had done any damage to my mind and soul, at all?  He couldn’t, and all these years later, still can’t. Or won’t.

I get by.  Right now, anniversaries being low points, that’s the best I can do.  Forty-eight hours ago I was happy and hopeful; perhaps in forty-eight more I shall be there again. But right now I am low.

It passes, so I hang on.

Protecting your children: Media

You know we have enough difficulty protecting our children without big family media pushing a homosexual presence and agenda and trying to normalize the very dangerous and heartbreaking behaviors we want to shelter our kids from.

Disney has been pushing homosexuality for more than twenty-five years, now. They began with “Gay Day” back in 1991, and have gently, incrementally, been pushing the boundaries of propriety ever since.  It’s also an “open secret” that Disney has a big ol’ thick Gay “glass ceiling” in the company’s management, any more.

Disney used to be a wonderful, wholesome, educational family entertainment provider — now the “educational” component is NOT what most of us want for our children.