It’s been a while…living or dealing with a narcissist can be draining. I’ve been very busy lately, but more than that I’ve been trying to cope with the periodic and unpredictable outbursts from my Ex, and I had gone through a doozy of an assault just a while ago. It’s taken me this long to even be able to write about him again.
We had had a pleasant conversation in the morning about pick up time, and how I was going to tutor her for the afternoon. I came walking out of the center seven…count that, that’s seven minutes late, and asked if he’d go in while she finished up a task, so I could leave for work (which I was going to be a little late for).
He flew into a rage – his face, his voice, that look, that used to make my breath grow shallow and fast – and started ranting about how I said 4:00 and he expected to be here and leave at 4:00, and now he has to go in, and I’m always late, always late.
And he’s saying all this stuff as he’s angrily getting out of the car with his rage face on, and I’m stunned and disorientated and I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to do and like a fool, I start to reason with him, as if he’s a sane person who’s just misunderstanding something or having a bad day, and once he realizes what a mistake he’s making, he’ll suddenly change his tone because facts actually matter to him.
Which of course, is pure fantasy, and the kind of stuff that keeps you glued to a narcissist for years and decades – that assumption that they’re normal and just don’t understand and if they only did then they’d change, because the truth really matters to them.
But it doesn’t. So of course, he just hurled one unreasonable accusation after another at me, and none of it made sense, because none of it had to. Because it had nothing to do with me being seven minutes late. Because it’s so much easier to hurl false accusations against someone or take one innocuous incident and blow it up into a major outrage, than to admit you feel entitled to lounge around all day with your child rather than meet your responsibilities as a home schooling parent, and feel put upon that your ex would be so selfish as to sacrifice her hours off in the day to drive way out of her way to tutor your child in your stead.
That would make you look like a jerk, which you are, and you can’t have that. So…let’s throw all the rage you feel at this affront to your entitlement at the target over her egregious offense and make her offender.
I know, I know…I know I have to deal with these things with him, but what really, really took me aback and sent me back a few notches in my healing is that it was so sudden, so out of the blue. Sometimes I can see it coming, and even though I know he can change on a dime, it hadn’t happened in a while, and the viciousness and intensity of his hostility was so great and such a contrast to his earlier friendly demeanor, just a few hours earlier, that this whole sudden appearance and experience with Mr. Hyde over something I couldn’t have even imagined would have been a trigger, just floored me.
I screamed in the car on the way to work and tried to call someone, almost anyone to vent to.
I was mad at him, but I was mostly mad at me. I had lost my center. I wasted precious time arguing with him. I set myself up trying to reason with him, which just gave him opportunity to take more cheap shots. Read more…