The Legendary Narcissist | Recovering from a Narcissistic Relationship

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This is a movie that Julia Roberts starred in.  Although she excels in roles like this and I truly admire her skills as a performer, I didn’t rush to the movies to see it.  I guess I’ve become weary of the formulaic predictability of most romantic comedies.  As some of us know, real life is not all that predictable.

Thanksgiving is a holiday of note in the history along the path into my relationship with a Narcissist.  The first time he invited me to a family holiday meal was Thanksgiving.  I wept with joy at his invitation and played the voice mail message again and again to make sure that there was no mistake.  I may even have the recording of that voice mail message somewhere on my hard drive but I don’t listen to it anymore.   He knew that my previous lovers had not included me in their family gatherings.  That is why his invitation meant so much to me.  I really felt that I had arrived in his life.

You are quietly coasting back an forth in the gentle summer breeze on your porch swing, deeply engaged in conversation with your partner.  The warmth in the air mirrors the glow in you are feeling inside, until they casually use a confidence you’ve shared with them in jest.  Your partner studies your reaction.  You feel the clutch in your stomach, for their remark seemed more cruel than funny, but you don’t know how to respond.

It’s a turning point you will only recognize as a Narcissistic attack after the relationship has ended.  At the time, you whisked away your intuition and wrote it off to a joke at your partner’s suggestion.  How many more times did you do that during the duration of your narcissistic encounter?  How many turning points did you choose ignore?

Years ago, when something easier was troubling me, I asked a mentor how I should handle my desire to renew that habit.  Their response was brief and profound.  The advice they offered was simply, “Follow it through.”  I asked what that meant.  My friend explained that I should use my memories to follow through the act of renewing that habit all the way to the point where I had decided to change the habit.

So, when you find yourself pining for your Narcissistic Ex, follow that feeling through.  Examine all of the experiences, good or bad, and follow that train of thought right up to the point where the only choice was to leave the relationship.  During that stroll down memory lane, you’ll be refreshing memories that both attract and repel you.  If you are completely honest with yourself after replaying your mental tapes, you will once again conclude that you’ve made the right decision to leave.

I sure don’t describe this as some of my best work but, while I was working today, this poem flitted into my head so I thought I would share it here:

There once was a woman I knew
Who thought that she knew what she knew
Then she met him and went for a spin
And turned into somebody new

She’s not necessarily changed
For much of her viewpoint’s the same
She’s managed to smile in spite of her trials
And won’t have to learn that again

It put a smile on my face. I hope it does the same for my readers!

All the holiday commercials on TV this time of year sometimes serve as a rancid reminder about emotions that I once felt.  The illusion of love propagated by our culture is designed to make us want it but, what is it?

When my former beau reached for me, the anticipation of his touch was like an electrical arc charging the air.  Every smile, kiss and impassioned embrace that I shared with him was, to me, an expression of my love for him.  For him, a Narcissist and serial dater, it apparently was some game that he played to prove to himself that he had the ability to amuse, seduce and sexually satisfy a woman.

That’s the title of a movie that I watched again last night.  Although it is moderately amusing and the acting is very well done, there are similarities between the player’s justifications to his peer-aged lover and experiences that I had with my Narcissistic Partner are stunning. 

There were some major differences, however.  The female character, played by Diane Keaton, learned within a few weeks of falling in love that her new sweetheart was nothing more than a shameless womanizer.  The second major difference is that Jack Nicholson’s character actually experienced curiosity about the effect he had on his former lovers and sought them out in order to better understand himself. 

Of course, he had suffered an event which gave him cause to recognize his mortality… 

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