In my last post, Jocelyn made a comment about quitting therapy, and this reminded me of something important that’s kept me going: mindfulness.
People in therapy, especially people who have cluster B disorders and have problems either regulating or accessing emotion, often quit when the going gets rough. Narcissists are notorious for quitting therapy (if they ever enter it at all) because of all the Cluster B disorders, NPDs have the most problems allowing themselves to become vulnerable (well, maybe ASPD is even worse that way), but for therapy to work, this cannot be avoided. This is why people with NPD so rarely get better. For most, as soon as they start to feel too much, they’re outta there.
For borderlines, it’s a little easier. We’re not running away from emotions all the time the way narcissists do (although I do to some degree and probably have narcissistic tendencies–I also have comorbid Avoidant PD which also explains my reticence). For BPDs, our main problem is the regulation of emotions that are too intense. But the core issues–abandonment trauma–is the same. When you finally reach the stage of diving into the maelstrom of pain and emptiness, it’s incredibly painful. You feel like you’re dying or going insane. You think about quitting because who wants to live with all that pain?
That’s where mindfulness comes in. Without mindfulness, I probably would have quit therapy after today. But with mindfulness, I can actually let myself fall into the pit of pain and trauma and allow myself to feel those unpleasant emotions. At the same time the mindful part of me is observing myself feeling them as they arise, and thinking logically and trying to make connections and give them meaning. This kind of distance–while at the same time being fully submerged in the feelings–makes the experience more bearable and also makes it more likely you’ll learn something valuable from it. Mindfulness also means you acknowledge that the emotions are not YOU; you have emotions but you aren’t your emotions. You are you, and the emotions are just trapped energy moving out of you.
Without mindfulness, you just feel like you’ve somehow fallen into the 9th circle of hell and will never escape. You can’t separate yourself from the overwhelming feelings and feel consumed by them. No wonder so many people quit when they get to this point. I’m so glad I took DBT classes (even though I blew them off back in he ’90s when I took them) and had the presence of mind to keep the DBT book I was given. It’s been so helpful to me throughout this whole process.
I think mindfulness training should actually be a prerequisite for intensive psychodynamic therapy, especially for trauma survivors (whether they are personality disordered or not), because there is nothing to prepare you for the intensity of the ride you’ll be taking (which seems so gentle and tame at first).
This is what’s going on with me now.
This has great meaning to me right now.
I love to take pictures of clouds. These two are from tonight, just before sunset.
My daughter and I had a nice time girl-bonding tonight. I’m not the type that gets into female bonding in general ( most of my platonic friends have always been male), but every once in a blue moon, I can get down with it.
So we shared a bottle of chardonnay and got just a little goofy. She decided she wanted to give me a makeover and do my hair. I rarely have my hair done professionally; usually I do it myself, which means either a blunt, easy cut (if I’m ambitious) or a ho-hum parted down the center boring 1970s look.
I did have my hair done by a real hairdresser back in March (you might remember that post), but it’s expensive, and my hair was getting boring and lifeless again (and worse, frizzes in the high humidity, so I told her to be my guest and have at it.
She used a color called Soft Black Violet in the deepest layer of hair(near the scalp) and and after letting that sit about 20 minutes (rather than 40 like the box said–I didn’t want it BLACK because I remember about 20 years ago when I dyed my hair jet black and I looked exactly like Morticia from The Addams Family, with my pale, almost redhead type of skin crashing into the blue-black of my hair like a cargo of black and white linoleum floor tiles after a truck explosion.
I asked her how much gray hair she could see (I have no gray where I can see it in the mirror). She told me just a little in the deep layer near my neckline in the back.
“That’s it?” I marveled. One thing my family did right with me was give me good genes. I hate sounding narcissistic, but I always thought I looked pretty good. Most other people did too. Hardly anyone on either my mother’s or my father’s side looked anywhere near their real age (until age finally caught up with them, usually around 70 or 80).
“Yup,” my girl confirmed. Then, “Mom, you’re done. Wow, you look great!”
The result is a color a little deeper than strawberry blonde, but not really red either, sort of a dark mauve (the mauve must be from the “violet” in the haircolors’ name). My medium blonde hair on the top layer remained intact, and the effect makes my hair look thicker and with more 3-D depth.
The choice of color might seem a little eccentric for a woman my age, but I never pretended to be anything but a bit off the beaten path. Besides, my daughter picked it for me. It’s true, I’m not much of a risk taker in much of anything, but when it comes to doing weird stuff to my hair, well…
It will always grow out if you hate it.
Here are the final results, after the blow dry and the hair straightening my daughter did. I think I just saved about $80.00.
One last thing that made everything perfect. Here’s the song we cranked up and sang at full volume so it reverberated against the white ceramic tiles that cover most of the bathroom walls. It’s one of her favorite songs ever and it’s grown on me too.
B-Cat’s (her “homegirl” name) is adjusting well and Cleo and Sheldon even remember her, and there don’t seem to be any problems so far. Here she is lounging around like a slugabed today.
“Time is always melting, but why should I give a damn about your human obsession with time and clocks even though there’s one of your infernal stress-tickers melting right over my head. I will not be micro-managed. Now give me my Fancy Feast, please.”
Coming right up, your Royal Majesty.
*****
Just need to vent here too about the terrible time I just had getting these photos to upload. I never had trouble doing that before. They just refused to load into my picture file, no matter what I did . I finally got so aggravated I gave up and went over to Paint where I just copied and pasted them there, and made copies which I filed with my documents. Pain in the butt, and time consuming, but it worked!
Once again, my MN/ASPD sociopath ex has proven what a conscienceless shell of a person he has become. Maybe he’s always been this way but it seems to become worse the older he gets. Maybe he just masked his true nature better in the past, and pretended to be a decent person, or maybe he’s really gotten a lot worse. He used to have some emotions; now he appears to have none at all. He doesn’t even bother pretending to be a decent person anymore. He’s a man who is so cut off from all feeling and whose heart has turned so black that he can’t even squeeze out any empathy or drum up any human decency to his own children. To him, they are just objects to use for his convenience and maybe, for a few lulz at their expense.
Unlike some lower spectrum narcissists, this man is so malignant he’s beyond redemption. He has zero self awareness and never will have it. He’s way far too gone. If the Dark Triad had a poster boy, he would be it. A long time ago, he sold his soul and it’s never coming back. One of his favorite forms of abuse is financial abuse. He used to abuse me financially all the time, mostly by freeloading and refusing to work, although he used to steal from me too.
As most of you know, my daughter has been staying with me while she tries to save enough money to move into a place of her own. She’s been working hard–faithfully going to her job every day where she works long, grueling hours, and she’s saving money diligently, adding something to her apartment fund every time she gets paid. Since she doesn’t make a lot, I don’t charge her rent so she is able to save more easily. Her saving money and not spending it all is an improvement for her. It’s a good sign that she’s becoming more mature and less impulsive–and she told me the other day how proud she is of herself for being able to resist impulse buys and save money instead.
But she made a mistake. She didn’t put the money in a bank account. She keeps it in a box next to where she sleeps. She trusts me and knows neither I nor my housemate would ever dream of stealing money or anything else from her.
My daughter is a very codependent sort of person, and still thinks of her dad as her sun, moon and stars. She loves him dearly, although he doesn’t deserve her love. She knows how sociopathic and narcissistic he is, but loves him because he’s her father and the concept of family actually means something to her.
Today, while I was at work, she let him come over to the house for ten minutes, because they had been somewhere this morning and she wanted to change her clothes. She was going to make him some coffee before he left.
I don’t allow this man into my house and she knows how I feel about him. But at least she was honest. She texted me and said he was only staying for ten minutes and then leaving. I told her I wasn’t pleased, but that fine, make sure he leaves in ten minutes and watch him. Don’t take your eyes off him for a second. He’s a thief and a snoop.
Right then she got a phone call from someone she’s dating and went into the bathroom to take the call, not thinking her father would have time to do anything. When she returned, he told her had to leave. She said fine, but before he left, she told me she had the urge to go look in the box where she’d been keeping her apartment savings fund. Unfortunately the box had been right next to her father the whole time. She opened the box, and it was empty. All the money was gone.
She burst into tears of hurt and betrayal. She told him she’d been saving money in that box so she could get a place of her own. She didn’t want to accuse him of anything, but she knew he’d taken it. She told him how hard she’d worked for that money, and how hard it was to save. It wasn’t that much (only about $225) but it had taken about three months to save, being that she can only save about $20 a week. Her tears didn’t move him. She told me later she saw a flicker of something that might have been remorse or guilt, but that look quickly disappeared and was taken over by his usual expressionless, cold, flat stare.
“I didn’t take your money,” he said. “You must have misplaced it,” he continued, gaslighting her. “Or maybe your mother took it.” Of course, there he went blaming me, even though I wasn’t even there. She kept crying, but he showed no empathy, didn’t offer any words of comfort or a hug or anything. He just started talking about the election instead, and then said he had to leave. This is a man who doesn’t need financial help. He gets over $2,000 a month in SSDI and gets food stamps and Medicare. He has very few expenses and sits at home all day long trolling political websites and painting miniature lead soldiers. He took her money because he could. Because he’s a conscienceless POS.
I told her she needed to go No Contact with him. She knows it’s worked for me. But she’s too softhearted and can’t do it. “He’s still my dad,” she said. She loves him even after this. I know she won’t let him in the house again. She learned her lesson. She knows how dangerous he is. Maybe one day she will cut ties from him completely. I can only pray for this. She’s going to keep saving her money, starting from scratch, and put it in a bank this time.
DISCLAIMER:
I don’t recommend trying to out-narc a narc unless you feel up to playing such wretched games, or if there’s no other choice. If you can’t go No Contact right away, a technique known as grey rocking is better and won’t violate your conscience or morals . But grey rocking works best with people you aren’t that intimate with. In a very intimate relationship, such as a marriage, out-narcing the narc could prove more effective. Always keep in mind you are not as skilled a player as the narcissist in your life. You’ll know if it isn’t working. Then STOP.
After years of codependency to my MN sociopath ex, always skulking around like a frightened church mouse and not daring to defy him (but inwardly seething the whole while)– and about a year before I finally got a restraining order and finally made him leave–I started to get mean. In other words, I had learned his games (hey, I had the best teacher!) and decided to use them against him.
I think when our rage rises to a certain level, or has been building up over a long time, there’s a pressure cooker effect, and you either explode–or if you can keep a measure of control, you can mirror the narcissist in the most negative way possible — by reflecting back to them the nasty and evil things they have been doing to you. In other words, you can “out-narc” the narc.
It can be hard for abuse victims to out-narc the narc, because we don’t have as many allies (they’ve all been turned against us), and anyway, we don’t recruit flying monkeys to make sure our commands are carried out. We also have a stronger conscience and some empathy, maybe a lot of empathy. If we’re really empathic, we might be much more prone to try to “rescue” the narcissist from themselves rather than give them “tough love”–forcing them to taste their own nasty medicine. poison. If we have compassion and especially if we still love the narcissist, we don’t want to see them suffer at our hands. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this or it goes against your morals then you shouldn’t. Grey rocking is a nicer alternative.
But if you get mad enough, the anger might override your compassion temporarily. It did for me, for about a year, until he as served the restraining order. Mostly I gaslighted him (told him coldly he was imagining things when he accused me of something I didn’t do, etc.), verbally abused (insulted him), using what I knew were his buttons (things he was sensitive about) against him, and most of all, I gave him the silent treatment. (If you’re not all that skilled in narc tactics, the silent treatment is one of the easiest to use). I don’t recommend using insults–they’re not very effective (they will be turned against you) and likely will enrage the narc. So try not to use them, unless they’re very subtle or you have the ability to be sweetly sarcastic. Then, if he picks up on it, you can tell him, “oh, you must have been imagining things!”
I hated to be this way to anyone–it just isn’t me–but my survival at the end depended on it. The narc had zero sense of boundaries, and my seething rage and fear with no way to vent it was destroying me. Out-narcing him for a short time made me feel stronger and readied me to do the (at he time) unthinkable: kick him the hell out. While rage shouldn’t become a permanent place to live (in fact, it’s downright dangerous to you if you can never move past it), righteous anger when you’re going no contact is perfectly justified.
My narc-mirroring definitely turned my ex a lot colder toward me, but it also made him stop trying to suck the lifeblood out of me and stomp all over my boundaries 24/7. He learned, and rather quickly, that I wasn’t having it anymore, and I also think he recognized himself in the way I treated him. It didn’t make him remorseful or ashamed and it didn’t bring self-awareness either, but it made him STFU and leave me alone until I had the courage to file a restraining order on his sorry ass.
Finally...
If you do decide to a out-narc your narc, don’t do it for an extended length of time because after too long, it will take a toll on your spiritual and emotional integrity. It should only be used for the short term, when you simply can no longer tolerate the N’s behavior, but going No Contact isn’t possible yet (but will be–start saving money now if you have no place to go).
Further reading:
Grey Rocking: If You Can’t Go No Contact
HG Tudor has a really good blog. Don’t let the frightening appearance on the main page intimidate you. I’ve been following this blog for a while and it’s been immensely helpful to me, as it has been to many others. Please give HG’s blog a chance. You will learn so much about the mind of the narcissist, straight from the horse’s mouth. Sometimes it’s helpful to have that perspective too. Here’s a very interesting theory he has about why codependent types and narcissists are so drawn to each other.
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