I’m holding my nose…

Posted on January 28, 2015 by luckyotter

I did the unthinkable.

I started linking my blog posts with my Facebook account.

I did something even more heinous than that.

I started talking to people on Facebook, and there’s a vast community of narcissistic abuse survivors. The beauty of that is I can talk to these survivors in real time. There’s a whole different and wonderful dynamic to communicating in real time that can enrich your entire blogging experience.

I had all but given up on Facebook because it’s just too connected to my IRL life. My family all want to “friend” me so they can check up on me (my account is set to private except for those I’ve friended). My MN ex is there, and that makes me nervous even though he can’t see the details of my account. People I used to work with and go to school with are all there. The whole freaking world is there. It was scary and still is.

But I changed my mind for two reasons:

1. I no longer care who sees my blog. I still use my fake name on this blog and LinkedIn, but I’m known by my real name on Facebook. It doesn’t matter, since my family already found this blog over a month ago and the world hasn’t come to an end.

It kind of makes me giggle when I think about what they must be thinking if they’re actually reading what I’m saying about them (if they’re even interested enough to read my posts, which they might not be). Even though no one’s real name has ever been used in any of my posts, they will recognize themselves. Maybe that’s what they need though. To see themselves through my eyes, and read all about how they are perceived BY me, instead of them always telling me how they perceive me. Karma is a bitch.

2. It increases this blog’s visibility and reach to a part of the narcissistic abuse community that spends most of its time on Facebook. Like it or not, that’s where most people online can be found. Since doing this, my reach has increased quite a bit. OM would be proud. 🙂

But the third reason is one I never expected or intended. I’m making friends with some amazing people I never would have met had I not made the decision to give Facebook one more shot.

I don’t think I sold out. Do you?

Attracted to danger.

Posted on January 24, 2015 by luckyotter

I think many survivors of narcissistic abuse find themselves drawn to narcissists–and find their danger appealing. We have to be very careful not to be drawn back into darkness, because that darkness can be very seductive, like a fist wrapped in soft black velvet.

I am an idealist and a romantic by nature. I’m an emotional person, even though I don’t always show it. Though I lack trust, I still want to think the best about all people. While I don’t hate narcs, I have to be careful not to feel too much compassion for them and allow that to make me make unwise and possibly dangerous decisions that could hamper my own healing and cause me to lose focus on what’s important.

Earlier today I woke with this crazy idea. I was going to start a second blog, a blog FOR NARCISSISTS. My argument was that they were human too and because I have learned to have some empathy for their plight, that they deserved a place to share their experiences.

Sometimes I really live with my head in the clouds.

I was brought back down to earth pretty quickly, when a good friend I respect like a sister told me this could be extremely dangerous and that I’d be flirting with darkness should I do such a thing. At best, it would take the focus off my own recovery and the recovery of victims of abuse. This woman is Christian, and much more biblically-oriented than I am, but she was right. If the devil does exist, this could be him trying to draw me back into the same dark place I just escaped. I already know, I need to keep my distance from them, even online, so why would I want to COURT such a thing?

I don’t think all narcissists are evil, except for the malignants and psychopaths, who are too far gone to ever change or want to change. I think their illness is as much a spiritual one as a mental one. Perhaps more so. But it’s not my job or my calling to provide a place for even benign narcissists to have their say. If they want to say something, they are more than welcome to do it right here on this blog, as long as they are pleasant and civil. And they have done so.

But starting a new blog for them would just be stupid. The more I think this over, the more I’m glad my friend stopped me before I actually did this. I’m not always the most practical person and I don’t always have a lot of common sense. I’m an idealist and sometimes act on my unrealistic, romantic fantasies more than I should.

More than likely, the narcissists who need help the most (the malignant psychopaths, who are least likely to seek help) would not even post on the site, or may even try to destroy the site in some way.

I think many women, especially those who have always been attracted to or been in relationships with Ns, find something seductive and appealing in narcissists and have to be very careful not to be drawn in by their charms. I know I’m a sucker for it, and they can present a very mysterious, seductive, bad-but-hurting-boy charm, like the main character in the movie “Rebel Without a Cause.”

We may find ourselves wanting to mother and nurture them and protect them from further hurt. And yes, they do hurt, and maybe nurturing and remothering is exactly what they need, but it must come FROM A PROFESSIONAL who knows what they are doing. It’s not our job to give them that kind of therapeutic support. We don’t know how to do it. We can’t make them feel better.

I love this song by Sarah McLachlan. I’ve posted it before, but I think it describes the attraction many women have to narcissists and psychopaths and why they can be so seductive.

Narcissists are indeed building a mystery, seducing us to becoming their supply. They can never give back what we give to them; all they can do is demand more and more until there is nothing left of us or we become one of them.

Our maternal instincts would be better put to use helping each other, and helping the people we love who can return that love.

So I will not be doing another blog right now. Thank you to everyone who suggested this was a bad idea.

I will say though, my journey since I started this blog has been the greatest, most humbling, and most exciting adventure I’ve ever been on.

My own little kingdom.

Posted on January 24, 2015 by luckyotter

Creating and running your own blog is just like having your own little kingdom.

I’m sorry if that makes me sound like a narc, but it’s the truth.

I bet most bloggers feel the same way. If you’ve lived a life without much control over anything, as many of us ACONs have, it’s so nice to know that with your blog, you have a whole place that’s yours alone, where you can write about whatever you want, post whatever pictures you want, have an unpopular opinion and not be afraid to say so, and you don’t have to put up with mean people and bullies like we have to in the physical world. The bullies and trolls can be silenced with a just a click of a button and their hateful spewage sent to the Trash.

It’s also great finding a community of like-minded people who share their thoughts with you. I don’t see myself as the King or Queen holding court though. I’m just another person, trying to find my way in a world that hasn’t been very kind to me.

In my Kingdom, I am free to be myself. Totally and completely in a way I never could out there in the physical world.

2 new award nominations!

Posted on January 22, 2015 by luckyotter

I am way too tired and ill tonight to answer the questionnaires and pick blogs to pass these awards along to right now, but I do want to take a moment to thank Not a Member of a Club Sandwich for the Versatile Blogger Award and Back to Whatever for the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award.

Thank you so much, guys! I owe you one. I’ve linked to your blogs at least for now.
Everyone, please follow these two fantastic bloggers.

The rest is just gravy.

Posted on January 20, 2015 by luckyotter

If you are a sufferer of a mental illness or a survivor of malignant narcissists or other mentally ill people and decide to blog about your experience, you have to be very brave.
You have to be 110% honest at all times.
You can’t hold anything back. Ever. No matter what.

The only thing it might be okay to lie about is your real name. Using a pseudonym can make it much easier to be honest about your life, your true feelings, your own opinions.

Self consciousness and reservedness would never work on a blog like mine. It’s my diary and my therapy. Everything I would tell a therapist is here for the public. This is how I’ve chosen to conduct my healing.

To do so requires courage. You must not be afraid to admit when you’re afraid or lonely or vulnerable. Don’t think about the thousands of strangers who will read your words. Don’t let anything intimidate you or make you hesitate to be completely honest at all times.

Speak only your truth.
Speak only from your heart.
The rest is just gravy.

Around the world in 4 1/2 months

Posted on January 19, 2015 by luckyotter

I think this is always the most interesting part of my stats. There’s a thrill in knowing once you press that “Publish” button, your feelings and thoughts that were yours alone just a few minutes ago as you were putting the finishing touches on your article, are being read by people al over the world, in a matter of minutes or even seconds.

Here is my is the list of numbers of views per country since I started this blog on 10 September 2014. Sorry about the stretched out look on a few of the panels but you can blame “Paint” for that, when I was trying to crop. I didn’t know how to fix it. I also wasn’t able to fit all of them in one table, so I had to do them in sections. Sorry!

Click on the tables to make larger.

I’m frustrated.

Posted on January 18, 2015 by luckyotter

For old times’ sake–

This article was my first big “win” after I started this blog. I only had this blog for 8 days at the time I wrote this post. I’m not the world’s most patient person, and was frustrated and discouraged because my blog had no visibility and I only had 12 followers, and no likes or comments to speak of. It was so disheartening to work on a post all night, and in the morning I’d find nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds under the post. So I wrote this whiny little rant.

OM (Opinionated Man, for those of you who might not know him by his famous initials) , decided to help me out and reblog it. Because OM is hugely popular with an enormous following (51,000 followers last I saw) , I was overloaded with views, comments, likes and new followers that day. It kept me so busy all weekend I practically got nothing else done!
After this happened, there was no stopping me. I was hooked.

I have also worked very, very hard to get this blog to where it is now. At first I had to force myself to write and sometimes it was a chore. But I kept at it, and soon it wasn’t work anymore it was play. November’s Nano Poblano challenge helped a lot. But even by then I was writing 2-3 posts a day. Now I average 4-5!

Other people do the work of getting it out there for me by sharing it on social media, even if you don’t like social media yourself. Making sure to have all available social media buttons under each post is essential for that. People probably won’t bother “sharing” your post it those buttons aren’t there.

Then there is the matter of connecting with the right people, or having the right people discover your blog and promote it. Sam Vaknin has a lot to do with this blog’s growing success, but I didn’t recruit him for that task. I just lucked out by writing one well timed article about him he happened to like (if you can call a mutually beneficial arrangement with a malignant narcissist/borderline psychopath a lucky thing). Now he’s here all the time and reads everything, even if he doesn’t comment (I can tell by how many views per day are from Macedonia).

Connecting with other bloggers, especially popular ones, helps a lot too. Fivehundredpoundpeep at Blogspot has me on her blogroll now that we’ve become friends and her blog is pretty popular so I get a lot “referrees” from there. This blog also appears on Narcwriters at Blogspot and people come here from there too. The stats give so much information it’s mindboggling.

Everything else just has to do with hard work and writing as much as you can. If I don’t feel like writing (because sometimes I don’t) I still will post something short or cute, a video or a photo. I also make every effort to answer all my comments. Even if a blog has the best written articles outside of Pulitzer Prize winners, if an admin ignores comments (or doesn’t allow comments, which is something I will never understand), that makes visitors feel ignored and eventually they will get bored and go away. No one wants to be ignored.
Lively discussions are the key to any successful blog.

If you told me in September this blog would have grown as much as it has in this amount of time (I even qualify to run ads on the site now due to a sufficient amount of traffic) I would have laughed in your face and called you deluded.

Now the sky’s the limit.

Lucky Otters Haven

I started my blog a week ago as a form of self therapy and didn’t care if anyone read my stuff. Or didn’t think I cared. But I admit it: I do.

I read a lot of other blogs here at WordPress and some of them have thousands of followers and hundreds of comments for each post. Of course I realize most of these people have been at WordPress for a long time, and naturally those people will have more followers and comments than a newbie. Some of them may be professional bloggers who have paid for SEO and know all sorts of tricks I don’t to increase the numbers of hits they get.

But all that said, I still find it frustrating and disheartening when I spend hours writing a post and then another hour or so editing and trying to make it look great, only to come back…

View original post 425 more words

Beware of N’s who use mental illness as an excuse to abuse

Posted on January 17, 2015 by luckyotter

I think those of us ACONs and survivors of narcissistic abuse who post on public blogs that are accessible to anyone need to be very vigilant and careful. I will never make my blog private or require you to sign in first, but due to that decision, I realize I am going to attract MNs and psychopaths whose only desire is to bully, make incendiary and false remarks, and play “divide and conquer” games within the community. I am willing to take that chance because I want this blog to remain as accessible as it is. I want people to feel welcome without having to be “approved” first or having to sign in, because I hate having to sign into any website myself and will usually bypass any site that requires me to do that.

If you’ve been following my posts, I wrote two articles about some drama that was going on between me and another blogger who allegedly suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID). I provided links to the nasty, character-assassinating articles that were written about me and my commenters and followers on their blog. I was quoted extensively in their rant (as well as several of the people who commented on those two articles) and was practically accused of being MN myself. The things they said were hurtful, but I also knew they were lies and intended to upset me. If this person is a narc, they were projecting their own disorder onto me. And that’s just so wrong, but it’s what they do.

I am letting that go and do not wish to further antagonize this blogger and will just delete or not approve any further abusive comments from them. But in thinking it over, I realized that there are going to be people on the Internet who use their own mental illness as an excuse to be able to abuse and be nasty to other people. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a mental illness, but it’s possible to be mentally ill and also a malignant narcissist who wants to hurt those who speak the truth. I also think there are some N’s (I’m not saying it’s this blogger) who feign mental illness because that gives them an excuse to abuse. We need to be very careful of anyone who says they have a mental illness but then make abusive remarks based on no real information. N’s are out there, lurking our sites and reading.

Not all N’s are going to be abusive to us. Some actually are honest and want to seek help or educate us about their NPD. Those are the ones with insight into their disorder.

But there are others, who may feign another mental disorder (or sometimes actually have it but use it as an excuse to be nasty and mean), who can become trollish and try to destroy our communities with their vitriol or make us fear their wrath. I refuse to let people like that make me afraid to post what I want and keep journaling about myself honestly and openly. I refuse to let them squelch or discourage me in my desire to heal and help others. I am made of tougher stuff than that now, and I know God is behind me, protecting me from the bullies and trolls who may want to attack me and this blog and keep me from speaking my truth.

Shame on you, WordPress.

Posted on January 16, 2015 by luckyotter

I am getting so tired of the automatic default to the “new” stats page, which I hate. I don’t think it’s better than the old one, and is in fact much worse. The graphs are unattractive and don’t show visitor/view comparisons. The layout is unattractive and makes you have to keep scrolling to see all the stats, especially if you’re trying to do it from a Smartphone, the way I sometimes do during the day when I’m not at the computer. The old stats page was easy to read, seemed to give more detailed information, and didn’t require constant scrolling to see the stat you want.

I always click on “see the old stats page” but sometimes before it lets me do so, I have to answer a survey asking why I prefer the old stats page. I find that very annoying. I can’t believe anyone would like the new stats page better. Aren’t enough people complaining about the new stats page that WordPress will scrap it and go back to the old stats page, which is so much better?

Does anyone actually like the new stats page, and if so, why?

WordPress, PLEASE get rid of the new stats page. “New Coke” didn’t go over well either.

Thank you, OM!

Posted on January 14, 2015 by luckyotter

Thank you, Opinionated Man, for the INCREDIBLE activity on this blog last night due to your reposting my rant about political correctness. I got about 20 new followers because of that. I was so busy replying to comments I couldn’t post anything else last night! Thank you so much. You’re amazing.