I thought I would share more of Ursula’s wisdom from her blog An Upturned Soul.. Her own experience with her Mum gave her a lot of insight as well as the journey she took to understand how her upbringing affected her…. these quote resonated for me… I have not shared sources but they are all from her blog..
Unfortunately the emotions, the pain, the anger, the fear which comes with that(narcissistic abuse – denial of true self/feelings) gets passed onto everyone who reminds those who’ve been abused of their abuser. It’s a very human thing to do, and partly springs from a primal instinct to avoid ever having that kind of experience again. We’re hard-wired to identify our foes, enemies, those who might harm us, and we often use generalised labels to do that. So someone who has been abused by a narcissist will label all narcissists as being as abusive as their particular narcissist, and if their particular narcissist happened to be one who was on the extreme end of the NPD spectrum, they may have behaved like a ‘monster’ and therefore for their victim that would make them view all narcissists as monsters, as being like their abuser.
Don’t take the label of ‘monster’ or the opinion that ‘all narcissists are monsters’ personally. View it as an expression of people trying to make sense of an issue which confuses them, frightens them, and has deeply wounded them. It is not a reflection of you, of your NPD, it is an expression of their own story, their personal experience of their particular narcissist or narcissists who abused them and left them feeling fractured and fragmented.
One of the aspects of being human is being narcissistic – we can all be narcissistic, narcissism is a natural and normal phase of human development and it can be healthy as much as it can be unhealthy.
Narcissists are afraid of everything, everyone, of losing the control they never really had but thought they had because sometimes it seems as though we have the ability to control the chaos of being alive and all that ensues from that… we can arrange the dominoes and dictate how they collapse once we decide to push that first one over… they don’t always fall the way we wanted them to which can cause a jarring within, the pressure we’ve placed on ourselves and therefore on others can grind like gears whose teeth have gone astray…
I’m used to being lost, I know how to find myself within the loss.
sometimes we’re uncomfortable with others because they make us confront what makes us uncomfortable about ourselves,
One of the sources of anger for me with my parents was the conflicting realities. Narcissists are hypocritical to the extreme, the double-standards really tangle the wires in the mind causing all sorts of shorts. Your logic is constantly frustrated by their ‘logic’, and sometimes it includes the ‘logic’ of society, especially where relationships with parents are concerned. Such as – you must love your parents, your parents love you – but you know this isn’t the case and why on earth should you love someone who doesn’t love you, or whose ‘love’ for you consists of hurting you.
For those of us who have either grown up with or have had an intimate relationship (or both) with a narcissist, thinking we’re the narcissist is a regular feature of our inner landscape. I think it’s healthy to wonder that in some ways as it makes us more self-reflective and perhaps adds depth to our experience of ourselves and others. The unhealthy side of it is trying to eradicate any narcissism which we find in ourselves, being overly critical of ourselves any time we stand up for ourselves or do something ‘selfish’ or being ashamed of those times when we express it, which includes those times when the narcissism is actually good for us.
Knowing who we are for ourselves, getting to know ourselves, exploring ourselves, figuring our selves out for ourselves is far more valuable than being told by others who they think we are and are not.
Accept that you’re human and figure out what that means – it often means that your heart will get you into trouble, you will make more mistakes than you’d like to because you care, and you will be wrong more often than you are right, but that’s okay as long as you’re willing to learn from the experience and cut yourself slack – everyone needs that, if you do it for others, do it for yourself too.
People like narcissists are idealistic perfectionists who punish others for being human because they can’t accept being human – they were deeply hurt for being human a long time ago, they got stuck there, and they decided that they never wanted to be hurt again, so… they don’t want to be human and they hurt others for being that way. They don’t really know what they’re doing even when they do.
I went through a long period of seeing myself as a ‘monster’, no one could have changed my mind about that at the time, it was up to me to figure things out for myself. Some of that view of myself was based on the views of others which I’d taken too personally, but I needed to see that for myself and not have someone else point it out to me. If I’d taken someone else’s word for who I was, even if it was a positive view, I would have become too reliant on others to keep confirming that for me. My identity, good or bad, would have always been the property of others, and that just leads around in a vicious circle of never really knowing who we are for ourselves. Sometimes we just have to decide who we are and then find out for ourselves if it really is who we are.
Consider this – You grew up feeling that your parents never loved you, and you constantly tried to find a way to win their love in spite of all the evidence you have gathered in many different ways that both of them suffered from an inability to love. You also have loved them, and kept trying to maintain a love for them, no matter how they treated you. You believe in love and feel it strongly in a variety of ways – love has never died for you, it is a vibrant essence in your life. – this is strength, stamina, learning and so much more.
And yes, definitely, living in fear, anguish, being scared of people, is part of PTSD… of the ptsd incurred from growing up with narcissists who made life unsafe, unstable, a constant source of intense anxiety – we were always being watched by prying unfriendly eyes… but it’s also a common experience of being human, connected to the primal instinct.
Narcissists are far more tuned into and concerned about who others want them to be because they need others to tell them who they are, they don’t self-reflect they need others to do that for them, to mirror to them who they are. So when they become a popular ‘hero’ for others it piles on the pressure for them to maintain that hero status. They do go out of their way to be a hero, to appear to be ideal, perfect, etc, because they’re driven by a need to be more than who they are, they can’t accept being human and definitely don’t want to be an ordinary human – so when others see them as being special it is a dream come true that eventually turns into a nightmare as they try to hold onto the dream.
The hardest part of a relationship with a narcissist is dealing with the destruction of the illusion we had of who they were. We’re often attracted to them because they represent an ideal to us, they embody an archetype – the hero, prince charming, a goddess – for us. Then we get to know them a bit better and see that the hero is sometimes a villain, prince charming is not charming at all, the goddess seems to be more of a demon, they aren’t who they were supposed to be, we feel deceived by them and hate how foolish that makes us feel. We once saw them as being so wonderful but now all we see is them being the opposite… we want them to know that we’ve seen through their facade but they refuse to. And we see others being fooled by them as we were… that stings, we want everyone to know what we now know.
Emerging From The Dark Night 