I found this statement in
I couldn't have said it better.
Hooked
By: Ann Molinaro
I have read almost every piece of information on the internet about abusive men and narcissists. I have read many stories about the strong courage of women and men that have fallen in love with them. I have been trying to understand how so many of us get hooked into these relationships. I only found out last year the name for my pain, narcissists, not your ordinary abuser, if there is such a thing.
They all lack empathy or they would not be that way. Some of us came from abusive homes, some of us came from semi normal homes. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a normal home life. Your profession, your income, your nationality, no matter your background, it can happen to anyone, even psychiatrist can be taken in.
How do they invade our minds and change our thinking about everything? We end up questioning our sanity and wondering who we were or are, from our encounter with one. That is why recovery is so difficult. These people slowly and methodically destroy our hearts and minds. They take pieces of us, bit by bit, over time, you don’t even know you are being robbed, till you are depleted of everything. You then mix in the confusion, of good times, appears to be loving and human, and the bad, incapable of love, not human at all.
You think you will be able to get the good guy, if only you can turn yourself inside out for him. You know there is that good side of him, so he has you hooked and thinking you can get that good guy. You just need to love him more and put a little work into it.
You love that good guy, you know he exists, he is connected with love, pleasure and good times. Your focus and goal is all about getting that guy. You no longer think about yourself and what you want in the relationship, you will have it all when you get that good guy all the time. It will just be perfect and you live happily ever after.
What we don’t know, is narcissists and abusers are at war in their heads, they take prisoners, not partners. You became a prisoner in is private hidden war. He brainwashed and tortured you every day in your relationship. He knew exactly what to do, to break your spirit so he could gain control of you.
You became a prisoner in his private hidden war. He told you what to feel and think, and when he felt like it, he rewarded you with some crumbs of kindness. We are so starved of real human love, we eat up those crumbs of kindness and crave our next meal from them. We are starving for a human being to return our love and appreciate us. They gain power over us by mixing pain and pleasure, thinking we will end up with the human one but, THEY DO NOT EXIST.
When it is over, whether you have been dumped or trying to get away from them, you have survived and emotional holocaust, brain washed and tortured, and you wonder why you are having such a hard time getting over it. You are left to sift through the destruction and rubble to find pieces of yourself.
You have to try to remember who you were to even begin to put yourself back together. You try to think, what you did do wrong, where and when did it go wrong, what did you miss, what more could you have done, how could you be so stupid, why would you put with it, why did I stay, why didn’t I leave, why can’t I just move on?
Never ending questions trying to make some sense of it all, but it will never make sense. It had nothing to do with you. Then we think we are codependent, we enabled our abuser, we loved too much, we had no self esteem to have to have left this happen to us.
We now feel ashamed of ourselves, for letting this happen. We end up feeling and being responsible for it all. They go on, taking in more prisoners and totally unaffected by it all. He blamed everything on you, made you responsible for everything that happened and then you are basically told you brought it on your self.
Maybe there are some people who are codependent, but it does not apply to everyone. It does not apply to prisoners taken in by narcissists and abusers and tortured in their camps, your lovely, picture perfect home. They are from another planet, they come for the hearts and minds of the loving, caring people on our planet. They look like us, and they can act like us. You have no way of knowing who they are till you are in their camp. It can happen to anyone. They need a never ending supply to live every day of their lives.
A normal divorce or break up is hard, but this is so much more. They rearranged your mind, depleted and deleted every thing that was you, sucked you dry and you wonder why you are having a hard time of it? You were a kind, loving, caring human being with an out standing capacity to love, they have none of that. You just did not know people like this existed, now you know.
You can still be fooled, keep the warning signs in your head. Set up boundaries how you wish to be treated from now on and don’t ever settle for anything else. I always treated people the way I would like to be treated, now I know, not every one feels that way. Some things in life do not or ever will make sense at all, narcissists and abusers are two of those things. So as long as we question ourselves and try to make sense of it, we keep them in our heads. The feelings you are feeling are all normal when you have been a prisoner of war.
Sadly for us who have survived this, understanding and support is hard to find. You have to live it to know what it is like. The road to recovery is facing it all, releasing the memories, they will never make sense. You can now make sense of the insane behavior, you had nothing to do with it, it was not you.
Focus on yourself and what you want to do. You can’t rush it, you must have the same amount of patience and love you gave your partner, but his time for you, you deserve it. I have learned not to say, “This is the worst thing that could have happened to me,” worse things can and do happen every day. Now I say, no one died, I am healthy, I will be OK… I have the blessing of tomorrow, another day, I will do better tomorrow.
Don’t beat yourself anymore, you came in contact with a non human from another planet. You are more aware than rest of the world, warn everyone you know, in case they encounter one.
~~~
I began to lose myself in my first marriage where even his Mom recognized that I was being "Gas-lighted". A form of psychological abuse in which the victim begins to doubt their own memory by false information being fed to them. The term comes from the play Gaslight and the movie starring Ingrid Bergman. The man in these works uses tricks to convince his wife that she is crazy. I was beginning to feel that way during our 18 year relationship.
My next marriage was made up of every form of abuse and during this time I no longer believed in myself. I didn't know who I was and felt I didn't deserve any better than what I had. I did as I was told but never could please him.
When I finally was able to get away I went to a man who preyed on vulnerable women, and continued to do so for years to come. By then I was resigning myself to the life I was dealt.
It took his illness and hospitalization and the ensuing responsibilities I had to take over to make me remember the person I should have been and thus began my process to become ME.
I like me. I like the person I have become and no man will ever take "me" away again. I have been blessed to have found a man who admits to his previous flaws. He knows that I no longer give second chances when my mind or health are threatened. This man has proven to me time and time again that he wants me to never feel the pain I felt for so many years. He wants me to always know that I am loved.
I deserve no less.
