While turning to self-medicating solutions like alcohol and drugs may seem like a way to ease the pain, the outcome is that your mind is further muddied by the altered state of being. In fact, being high has a propensity to escalate discussions into outright battles.

When I was dealing with my Narcissistic-Ex, my head was always clear. The only background noise that confounded my ability to respond appropriately was the drug called Love. Our minds do not choose to love, our hearts do. To that end, Love is irrational.

Perhaps like you, there were many times that I flogged myself for staying in a no-win relationship. I’ve written about this before the first essential step forward to recovery that has to be taken is to FORGIVE YOURSELF so you can weed through the rest of the experience and learn the lessons therein.

You mention that your friends and family cannot help because you don’t believe they can relate. The latter is probably true. They cannot relate but that doesn’t mean that they will not be able to provide the emotional support you now need to rediscover your self-love and inner peace.

Once you’ve found a way to forgive yourself for staying, I am fairly certain that the criticisms this man hurled at you will have less emotional charge for you. You’ll be able to see him for who he really is, a frightened bully who can only feel good about himself by diminishing those who love him.

I wish you peace in the New Year.

He was always right. He convinced me I had major finicial issues and used it to his advantage and held everything over my head telling me I would never have it better than I had it with him. He is very successful and drained me as a resource because he could never make decisions on his own. Every “friend” in his life he used as a resource to help him excel in business and personally. His contractor, his archetecht, his brother in law who owns a business, his personal trainer, me, his friends who owned businesses. He only wanted to be around other successful people.

He constantly was negative…spoke ill of almost everyone he met including my friends and family and then would use it against me in some bizzare way. His mother emotionally abused him as a child and put him down constantly and he still struggles with feeling accepted. He constantly would critisize everything I would do. Never compliment me. No support or compassion. No empathy from him.

I started to feel incredibly alone and experimented with drugs. I was so confused and my family intervened because of my weight loss. He convinced them and me that it was my own doing but my family saw through it and helped me recognize it wasn’t me – it was him. He was financially successful, generous, and charming. But that was a disguise to the truth that he only cared about himself and what other people thought of him. I was always on the backburner…him draining me for answers for everything in life and I was getting sucked dry.

I wanted to sleep all day and I cut off many relationships with my friends. I was so afraid to say something wrong or make a wrong decision and get critisized for it. Its amazing that, through therapy, I have discovered all of this but emotionally I am still heavily effected.

I have anger at myself for staying. I feel complelty inadequate. I have severe anxiety. I am on depression medications and xanax occassionally. I feel that sharing my story with friends or family doesn’t help because no one will be able to relate to me and think I am just being dramatic. He used to always tell me I was playing victim, I was inconsiderate, I couldn’t hold adult conversations. He never really showed interest ion my life or got to know me as a person.

Thank you for sharing your personal story with us in such a heartfelt way. I want to stress that you are not alone regarding the shame you’ve alluded to. For years I stayed in a relationship that was demeaning and I denied the reality that all of my friends repeatedly pointed out to me. I couldn’t see the nature of the man whom my heart had chosen to love until the day of my mother’s funeral when his cruelty could no longer be ignored. Following the travesty of that event, it took me years to find a stable center of balance again and my progress toward complete recovery is still underway. Of all the emotional and spiritual work that I undertook, recovering my sense of self was the most challenging leg of my journey.

Your narcissistic partner certainly does sound oppressive and controlling. Although I do understand your reasons for not wanting to go to your circle of friends for help, it has been said that having the ability to ask for help is a sign of strength. Humans are inherently social beings and we have the capacity to recognize when our ability to handle something is overwhelming. Your friends who truly love and care for you will respect your privacy and perhaps even lend a fresh way of approaching the darkness you’ve described.

May I suggest that you are not weak but rather that you are choosing what you know as a pattern? If domestic violence is part of your primary family experience, it could be that you are “used to that” as a style and have not yet found a way to rise above the misery that you were introduced to at a young age.

Your story makes me feel as if you are in danger. In fact, emotional and verbal violence leading to physical violence informs me that you actually ARE in danger. I’m not sure what country you are living in now but most Western countries have legal systems that protect women in your situation. You should NOT have to pay him to vacate your house and there probably is something similar to the USA’s Restraining Order that can prohibit him from interfering with your life or coming within a specified perimeter of you and your personal property. If this man is not a citizen of the country you live in, his breaking the law might even force his eviction from the country where the two of you now dwell.

Money, or the lack of it, can sometimes influence our willingness to seek legal support but most places do have some form of legal aid with sliding fee scales related to your level of income. I’m not sure what you were alluding to when you referenced the fate of your sister but I do not want this man to take your life! Please do something … anything that you can to keep this from happening. Even if you don’t believe this about yourself today, you are precious and your presence on the planet brings value.

Beating me up I always thought would be the last straw but then somehow he made me feel sorry for him. Now 5 years in and too many slaps to count I can’t even received texts without him wanting to know who it is, what they want, and why are they talking to me. I always thought if a man hit me I’d rip him in two having watched my mum go threw domestic violence that would never happen to me. Well it did and I was weak because I was living in another country with no family or real friends to run to…. besides those around me ran to me for strength, support and advice. How on earth could I let anyone down by letting them see what was happening to me?

3 years over seas and I decided to come home and be with my friends again BUT the man who couldn’t wouldn’t and to this day won’t live without me followed me home. Stupidity, weakness, or…. no now I realise fear made me try again. God I’m weak. This man learned all he could about me and my home life, family and friends when he loved me (or so I thought). As couples do, we spoke, so he knows all about my past, my relationships with my friends – both the good and the bad points and worst of all he has seen the skeletons in my family closet. All of which he found out when two people high on love and looking towards a future together share in conversation and sharing.

To say my family have skeletons in the closet is a huge understatement, its more like an over crowded cemetery. The times lately I have found the strength to leave my own home resolving never to go back (oh I should say he doesn’t work or pay for his keep here either) he calls anyone of my close circle and rants and raves about me and lets out little bits of our earlier conversations to them and sometimes even elaborates on stories to make them turn on me. I have once again returned to the house to this hell hole of a life to save my family and friends from this sad person but resolve to leave AND NEVER RETURN regardless of what he will say or do next time.

He has said he’ll leave if I pay for his flight home (uk to NZ) and give him £1500 in cash but the last time I left I arranged this and he didn’t go…. he simply changed tactics. To keep the peace in my house and assure my parents that I won’t meet the same fate my sister did 6 years ago, I smile and tread water. I don’t want this man near me anymore, I’ve given him so many chances in a nice way to go find someone else even to the point of being compassionate to how he must be feeling … saying things like “we can’t keep doing this to each other, I’m hurting you when we argue, I’ll always be your friend blah blah fear hatred hidden blah.

I no longer have the desire to be intimate with him but if I don’t a fight, the nastiness, the moody child happens to a point not only has he destroyed my self esteem he has violated me and made me feel like his property to do what he wants with. I am the last of 5 children for my parents, they depend on me for various things, my daughter depends on me, my friends depend on me so I have to smile and carry on.

I have faith and hope in the knowledge that one day it will end…..One day one of us will die – either I’ll be free in death or happy in mourning. Like I said I have a daughter so he couldn’t push me far enough to cause his demise. Well lets face it, I couldn’t protect my child (not his) from a jail cell.

The only other way out for me is if he falls head over heels with someone else but that’s the fairy tale ending. For him to choose to leave me would be way too much to hope for but without hope what do I have.

I don’t believe in God (sorry if that offends) so no one will save me from my own stupidity but plenty will say they told me so.

I hope you all find in life the you truly deserve and cherish those around you but don’t be like me, don’t hide behind the person you were, show who you are now and repair yourselves until you are the person you WANT to be. I want to say love yourselves but I’m not a hypocrite – how can I now after spilling all this – tell you do do something for yourselves that I find impossible.

It has been nearly 3 years since I’ve seen the Narcissist who affected me and 2.5 years since we last spoke. Recovering from the effects of emotional abuse, to the degree it occurred, takes time.

The good news is, I haven’t shed a tear about him in years and I have pretty much resolved the matters that once seemed unresolvable. As a result of this relationship I had, I have an uncanny skill of identifying and distancing myself from people who are Narcissistic, however benign they seem to others.

When I am ready to venture back into the game of romance, I pray that I will not allow seduction to rule my good sense again.