How to Find Closure

You should understand that if you should pretend, suppressed or dismiss your abuse, you will develop unconscious psycho-social problem. You inadvertently allow your erstwhile partner control of your life. If you become misandric or misanthropic then you have become an extension of your abuser,: which is far more detrimental than understanding your feelings, accepting them and then seek healing and restored balance in your life.

Before I knew anything about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, I would relish the day when my emotional torturer would concede that he was wrong and re-enter my life with an apology. I waited, mused and wish. When he started giving me a little attention, I jumped on the bait and I was severely punished.

It may seem that the narcissist called me in to towards him to torment me over and over again, when I got nearer, he stretch his hands out and slapped me across the face and send me right back into the tight corner that I was in back then.  It appeared his torture would never end and I was going to live with this harrowing circuitry of thoughts for the rest of my life.

His verbal abuse was scathing, severe and unrelenting. It seemed that the more I tried to reconnect with him, the more it emboldened him to challenge, dominate and destroy me. His mind games were done for sheer pleasure and I felt exhausted, addled and in a narcoleptic, catatonic state after being subjected to his counter plots.

I had to find closure. I dissected our relationship, needing desperately to find a connection. A conceptual reason why I am being treated this way and why I was discarded like a used paper napkin.  I knew I was not to be blamed but I found it very difficult to allocate blame on the part of the narcissist because he appeared flawless, perfect and I kept seeing the image of the perfect man. The perfect man does not make mistakes, I am imperfect, fallible and discernibly undervalued for the narcissist.

I felt guilty, the guilt that he should have been feeling for impregnating and abandoning me. The narcissist with little effort had managed to make me feel guilty and responsible for everything that had happen and he went off unaccountable for his actions or responsibility to my child.  I wanted to purge my system of this accumulating execration I had for him before it destroyed me.

I wanted to give him a taste of what it felt like to hurt me. I decided to become the predator. He played the role of the victim and quite frankly disarmed me. But I was callow to think I could beat the narcissist at his very own games. This was not my nature. This definitely was not my disposition. I could not do this effective and he used every card I dealt him to win my hand. He won when he was the perpetrator and he won when he was the victim.

He played the victim role nicely. He enlisted the aid of his friends and cohorts to show them the damage that I was doing to his good name and misrepresenting his character. He threatened to sue my family and I for defamation of character and slander. I understood his malignancy. It was permissible for him to abuse, calumniate, disrespect and misrepresent me to society but if someone should return the favor, he feels transgressed and entitled to restorative justice.

I had taken on the facet of vengeance that was a component of his character. I was becoming him and the retributive closure was not working for me. Retribution did not generate the closure and recuperation I had envisaged it would instead I felt ashamed of my behavior and hated myself. I realized that I was becoming my abuser. The cycle of abuse had been achieved, abuse breeds abuse, prey becoming predator and the wheels keep turning until the victim becomes worse than the culprit.

It is quite intriguing how the narcissist can make one feel responsible and deserving for the maltreatment that a victim was subjected to. In some spectrum, a victim is responsible, if she chooses to go back to him and get burned over and over again after she was scorched the first time and discovered that he was not just a glowing light and but a dangerous ember.

I decided that I needed to find myself, to detach my being from this malicious character. I had to stop seeing my body through his eyes. I needed to cease feeding off the self image that he projected. I had to accept him for who he was. A drink with a lovely shell and sullied contents. A poisonous apple that looks edible on the outside but is deadly on the inside.

It is not advisable to repress and shoved your painful memories away. Dissociative closure is not the grandest way to deal with a relationship as torturous and harrowing as with a narcissist. It is best to deal with your feelings and talk about them. Writing was my greatest valve for dealing with my feelings and it helped me and I pray it may help you.

You should understand that if you should pretend, suppressed or dismiss your abuse, you will develop unconscious psycho-social problem. You inadvertently allow your erstwhile partner control of your life. If you become misandric or misanthropic then you have become an extension of your abuser,: which is far more detrimental than understanding your feelings, accepting them and then seek healing and restored balance in your life.


SOURCE

Blood Ties That Blind

Nearly all of us have something in our lives that doesn't work, large or small, irritating or overwhelming. Most of us have been carefully taught to avoid ever seeing that 'something' clearly.

This is a theme I tend to bring up a lot: the way we are trained from birth by abusers, to serve as their prey, if we have them in our families of origin.

One of the most destructive forces I have seen in human interactions is the way people are pressured to mindlessly worship 'blood ties'.

The idolatry of 'family', when the family in question is nothing but a toxic trap... and the way that anyone who is in that situation, and wises up, may be ganged up on by people who are completely ignorant of their situation, totally ignorant of psychology and group psychodynamics.

Healthy, good families don't demand worship. They don't 'demand' anything. They just love each other, and wonder what on earth all the fuss and bluster and oracular pronouncements are about.

Merely having similar DNA doesn't mean that you will be similar people in terms of character or tastes.

Merely being related to someone doesn't guarantee affinity.

Heck, it doesn't even guarantee that they won't kill you - or try to.

Post-Infidelity Stress Disorder

Post-Infidelity Stress Disorder

Understanding Domestic Violence

Many are often shocked to find an otherwise healthy and strong woman in an abusive situation and wonder why and how this happens.
This women is a nurturer. She has nurtured her own soul, conquered herself to find joy in the world.
She meets a man who seems to be so close to winning. He's almost conquered himself. She finds great pleasure and joy in watching and taking part in the nurturing of other's souls. She sees how beautiful he is. She wants him to win his inner battles. She wants to be a part of this great battle.
She sees his behavior change from kind and loving, to mean and cruel, and believes she is watching an inner battle of self being waged. She wants him to win the good fight. She sees the worth of his soul, and feels the battle is worth the wages.
This loving, nurturing woman joins the man in his own personal battle as a loving friend and wife.
But she doesn't understand his swift mood changes from kind to cruel, are not representative of an internal battle over self, but merely manipulative behaviors, designed to gain power over others.
FOR THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE CLICK HERE

An Important Reminder...

...that you are NOT "Just a Bitter Woman"

"You’re just bitter”

This is a phrase commonly used to silence women.

Another variation says, “You are so unforgiving”.

The bitterness accusation is used to bully a woman and tell her how she “should” feel instead of asking her how she does feel. Someone who uses this label expects her to pretend there has been no harm, no foul.

She is expected to pretend the one who hurt her is a great person, even if she knows he is a terrible person. If she does not pretend, it is because she is “bitter and unforgiving”.

Abusers nearly always sling this accusation at their victims. She may have accepted him back with open arms after a dozen violent episodes, but the first time she hesitates to “forgive and forget” he will tell her she is a bitter and unforgiving person.

If only it stopped there. The world does not want to hear the voice of the abused, either. Let her speak of abuse in the divorce hearing, and the judge may roll his eyes. When he makes his ruling concerning child support and visitation, he will keep in mind that the woman is “bitter”.

The fact is no one wants to hear it.

The message to abused women:

Shut up about it. Go back to being ashamed, as if that hand across your face had left a nasty stain that made you evil rather than him.

It is not dignified or proper to speak of the ugliness of abuse. It offends our sensibilities. By making us hear about your experience, you are violating our sheltered little world. We can forgive the man for hitting you, but we cannot forgive you for having the bad manners to actually talk about it.

Speaking the truth is not a sign of bitterness. It is a sign of wholeness and stark, unblinking courage.

It takes guts to go beyond “He abused me” and say “He held a pillow over my face until I thought I was dying”, or even “He did things so unspeakable, I cannot make myself say them”.

Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”.

A woman may know the truth without speaking it, and she may in silence escape her own situation. But a lone woman with sealed lips will not change the world. It is not only the woman who must be set free; society itself needs to be set free from a culture of violence against women.

We must speak the truth to our society, so that we can all be set free.

(SOURCE)

Bullies (Part 2)

Projection

Your face is a mirror of the image the narcissist projects onto, so he represses his REAL SELF and project all his failures, hurt, pain, anger onto you so he can tell you "It's you that has the problem" and not him. His mask of sanity is a fake self, it isn't the real him.... he represses the real him and projects that side of him onto you.

Has your abuser ever accused you of the most vile, cruel lies? Accused you of being crazy? Twisted everything you say into something grotesque? Most of us have experienced that with the NP in our lives. We are left emotionally reeling. The hurt can be nearly unbearable. You were likely experiencing 'projection'. To make things simple, he is accusing you of what he is THINKING, DOING OR PLANNING. It is very hurtful to us when they project their thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and impulses and pathololgise the people they target.

Projection is not an easy concept to learn. We need to twist our way of thinking. An important part of realizing projection is to remember Psychopaths have the emotional maturity of a 5-year old!! They are like the little boy caught breaking a toy who says "Jimmy made me do it". "Look what you made me do!" Now the Psychopath 'projects' on us as they accuse us... "You're the one whose cheating, destroying the marriage, lying etc.

Those terribly cruel words hurt us so very much. We are devastated trying to understand where they came up with the idea. What could we have done that they reacted so vehemently about? We are stunned by their words. They hurt us to the core.

So, you ask yourself "Is he doing this just to be intentionally and horribly cruel? He must know it's ridiculous. Maybe he's using it as a way to end the relationship, but what a terrible way to do it". That is your rational and very logical reasoning trying to make sense of what's happening. The truth can be even uglier. He is indeed saying what he is doing, thinking or planning. Coming to this realization can give you a glimpse into the hell of their mind. It is a defence mechanism of their disordered psyche. 

Professionals are trained to recognize it. Doctors use it as a barometer in diagnosing a psychiatric problem vs. a physiological one. Even the most trained and hardened psychotherapy professionals who often get the brunt of this have a hard time dealing with it. Our own normal egos get damaged.

Expect endless blame and criticism often for trivial nitpicking things. Expect them to 'split' you into a good or bad person instantaneously as their defence mechanisms kick in to protect their psyche.

The personality disordered will always be able to find a scapegoat.

(SOURCE)

Bullies project their inadequacies, shortcomings, behaviours etc on to other people to avoid facing up to their inadequacy and doing something about it (learning about oneself can be painful), and to distract and divert attention away from themselves and their inadequacies. 

Projection is achieved through blame, criticism and allegation; once you realise this, every criticism, allegation etc that the bully makes about their target is actually an admission or revelation about themselves. 

When the bully makes allegations of, say, "cowardice" or "negative attitude" it is the bully who is a coward or has a negative attitude.

When the symptoms of psychiatric injury become apparent to others, most bullies will play the Mental Health Trap, claiming their target is "mentally ill" or "mentally unstable" or has a "mental health problem". It is more likely that this allegation is a projection of the bully's own mental health problems. 

It is a key identifying feature of a person with a personality disorder or psychopathic personality that, when called to account, they will accuse the person who is unmasking them of being the one with the personality disorder or psychopathic personality from which the bully suffers.

(SOURCE)

Bullies (Part 1)

The Serial Bully

The violence committed by a serial bully is almost entirely psychological, for psychological violence leaves no scars and no physical evidence. Most commonly the violence takes the form of verbal abuse and emotional abuse including trivial nit-picking criticism, constant fault-finding combined with a simultaneous refusal to recognise, value, acknowledge and praise. Manipulation, isolation and exclusion are other favourite tactics, as is feigning victim-hood or persecution, especially when held accountable.

The objectives of serial bullies are Power, Control, Domination and Subjugation. These are achieved by a number of means including disempowerment, the stimulation of excessive levels of fear, shame, embarrassment and guilt, manipulation (especially of emotions and perceptions), ritual humiliation and constant denial. When you live with someone who is constantly denying what they said or did a day ago, or an hour ago, or even a minute ago, it drives you crazy. When the symptoms of injury to health start to become apparent, the bully will tell others you have a "mental health problem". You may be mad, but this is not mad insane, this is mad angry.

Control is a common indicator of the serial bully at home - control of finances, control of movements, control over choice of friends, control of the right to work, control over what to think, and so on. All are designed to disempower the victim.

A favourite tactic of the bully in the family is to set people against each other. The benefits to the bully are that:
a) the bully gains a great deal of gratification (a perverse form of satisfaction) from encouraging and provoking argument, quarrelling and hostility, and then from watching others engage in adversarial interaction and destructive conflict, and
b) the ensuing conflict ensures that people's attention is distracted and diverted away from the cause of the conflict

Bullies within the family, especially female bullies, are masters (mistresses?) of manipulation and are fond of manipulating people through their emotions (e.g. guilt) and through their beliefs, attitudes and perceptions. Bullies see any form of vulnerability as an opportunity for manipulation, and are especially prone to exploiting those who are most emotionally needy. Elderly relatives, those with infirmity, illness, those with the greatest vulnerability, or those who are emotionally needy or behaviourally immature family members are likely to be favourite targets for exploitation.

The family bully encourages and manipulates family members etc to lie, act dishonourably and dishonestly, withhold information, spread misinformation, and to punish the target for alleged infractions, i.e. the family members become the bully's unwitting (and sometimes witting) instruments of harassment.

Bullies are adept at distorting peoples' perceptions with intent to engender a negative view of their target in the minds of family members, neighbours, friends and people in positions of officialdom and authority; this is achieved through undermining, the creation of doubts and suspicions, and the sharing of false concerns, etc. This poisoning of people's minds is difficult to counter, however explaining the game in a calm articulate manner helps people to see through the mask of deceit and to understand how and why they are being used as pawns.

The bully may try to establish an exclusive relationship (based on apparent trust and confidence) with one family member such that they (the bully) are seen as the sole reliable source of information; this may be achieved by portraying the target (and certain other family members) as irresponsible, unstable, undependable, uncaring, unreliable and untrustworthy, perhaps by the constant highlighting - using distortion and fabrication - of alleged failures, breaches of trust, lack of reliability, etc.

The process is reinforced by inclusion of the occasional piece of juicy gossip about the target's alleged misdemeanours or untrustworthiness in respect of relationships and communication with people. Mostly this is projection. The objective is to manipulate the family member's perceptions and create a dependency so that the family member comes to rely exclusively on the bully and see the bully as the sole source of reliable information whilst distrusting everyone else. Any person who is capable of exposing and breaking the dependency is targeted with venom and will find their name blackened at every opportunity.

When close to being outwitted and exposed, the bully feigns victim-hood and turns the focus on themselves - this is another example of manipulating people through their emotion of guilt, e.g. sympathy, feeling sorry, etc. Female serial bullies are especially partial to making themselves the centre of attention by claiming to be the injured party whilst portraying their target as the villain of the piece. When the target tries to explain the game, they are immediately labelled "paranoid". Attention-seeking behaviour is common with emotionally immature people.

The serial bully is easy to spot once you know what you are looking at: Jekyll and Hyde nature, compulsive lying, manipulation (or emotions, perceptions, beliefs, etc), unpredictability, deception, denial, arrogance, narcissism, attention-seeking, etc - whilst always charming and plausible, especially when impressionable witnesses are present. For the full profile of the serial bully, see below. Everybody knows someone in their life with this profile - who is it in your life?

Profile of the Serial Bully

• is a convincing, practised liar and when called to account, will make up anything spontaneously to fit their needs at that moment
• has a Jekyll and Hyde nature - is vile, vicious and vindictive in private, but innocent and charming in front of witnesses; no-one can (or wants to) believe this individual has a vindictive nature - only the current target of the serial bully's aggression sees both sides; whilst the Jekyll side is described as "charming" and convincing enough to deceive personnel, management and a tribunal, the Hyde side is frequently described as "evil"; Hyde is the real person, Jekyll is an act
• excels at deception and should never be underestimated in their capacity to deceive
• uses excessive charm and is always plausible and convincing when peers, superiors or others are present (charm can be used to deceive as well as to cover for lack of empathy)
• is glib, shallow and superficial with plenty of fine words and lots of form - but there's no substance
• is possessed of an exceptional verbal facility and will outmanoeuvre most people in verbal interaction, especially at times of conflict
• is often described as smooth, slippery, slimy, ingratiating, fawning, toadying, obsequious, sycophantic
• relies on mimicry, repetition and regurgitation to convince others that he or she is both a "normal" human being and a tough dynamic manager, as in extolling the virtues of the latest management fads and pouring forth the accompanying jargon
• is unusually skilled in being able to anticipate what people want to hear and then saying it plausibly
• cannot be trusted or relied upon
• fails to fulfil commitments
• is emotionally retarded with an arrested level of emotional development; whilst language and intellect may appear to be that of an adult, the bully displays the emotional age of a five-year-old
• is emotionally immature and emotionally untrustworthy
• exhibits unusual and inappropriate attitudes to sexual matters, sexual behaviour and bodily functions; underneath the charming exterior there are often suspicions or hints of sex discrimination and sexual harassment, perhaps also sexual dysfunction, sexual inadequacy, sexual perversion, sexual violence or sexual abuse
• in a relationship, is incapable of initiating or sustaining intimacy
• holds deep prejudices (e.g. against the opposite gender, people of a different sexual orientation, other cultures and religious beliefs, foreigners, etc - prejudiced people are unvaryingly unimaginative) but goes to great lengths to keep this prejudicial aspect of their personality secret
• is self-opinionated and displays arrogance, audacity, a superior sense of entitlement and sense of invulnerability and un-touch ability
• has a deep-seated contempt of clients in contrast to his or her professed compassion
• is a control freak and has a compulsive need to control everyone and everything you say, do, think and believe; for example, will launch an immediate personal attack attempting to restrict what you are permitted to say if you start talking knowledgeably about psychopathic personality or antisocial personality disorder in their presence - but aggressively maintains the right to talk (usually un-knowledgeably) about anything they choose; serial bullies despise anyone who enables others to see through their deception and their mask of sanity
• displays a compulsive need to criticise whilst simultaneously refusing to value, praise and acknowledge others, their achievements, or their existence
• shows a lack of joined-up thinking with conversation that doesn't flow and arguments that don't hold water
• flits from topic to topic so that you come away feeling you've never had a proper conversation
• refuses to be specific and never gives a straight answer
• is evasive and has a Houdini-like ability to escape accountability
• undermines and destroys anyone who the bully perceives to be an adversary, a potential threat, or who can see through the bully's mask
• is adept at creating conflict between those who would otherwise collate incriminating information about them
• is quick to discredit and neutralise anyone who can talk knowledgeably about antisocial or sociopathic behaviour
• may pursue a vindictive vendetta against anyone who dares to held them accountable, perhaps using others' resources and contemptuous of the damage caused to other people and organisations in pursuance of the vendetta
• is also quick to belittle, undermine, denigrate and discredit anyone who calls, attempts to call, or might call the bully to account
• gains gratification from denying people what they are entitled to
• is highly manipulative, especially of people's perceptions and emotions (e.g. guilt)
• poisons peoples' minds by manipulating their perceptions
• when called upon to share or address the needs and concerns of others, responds with impatience, irritability and aggression
• is arrogant, haughty, high-handed, and a know-all
• often has an overwhelming, unhealthy and narcissistic attention-seeking need to portray themselves as a wonderful, kind, caring and compassionate person, in contrast to their behaviour and treatment of others; the bully sees nothing wrong with their behaviour and chooses to remain oblivious to the discrepancy between how they like to be seen and how they are seen by others
• is spiritually dead although may loudly profess some religious belief or affiliation
• is mean-spirited, officious, and often unbelievably petty
• is mean, stingy, and financially untrustworthy
• is greedy, selfish, a parasite and an emotional vampire
• is always a taker and never a giver
• is convinced of their superiority and has an overbearing belief in their qualities of leadership but cannot distinguish between leadership (maturity, decisiveness, assertiveness, co-operation, trust, integrity) and bullying (immaturity, impulsiveness, aggression, manipulation, distrust, deceitfulness)
• often fraudulently claims qualifications, experience, titles, entitlements or affiliations which are ambiguous, misleading, or bogus
• often misses the semantic meaning of language, misinterprets what is said, sometimes wrongly thinking that comments of a satirical, ironic or general negative nature apply to him or herself
• knows the words but not the song
• is constantly imposing on others a false reality made up of distortion and fabrication
• sometimes displays a seemingly limitless demonic energy especially when engaged in attention-seeking activities or evasion of accountability and is often a committee-aholic or apparent workaholic

Responsibility

The serial bully appears to lack insight into his or her behaviour and seems to be oblivious to the crassness and inappropriateness thereof; however, it is more likely that the bully knows what they are doing but elects to switch off the moral and ethical considerations by which normal people are bound. If the bully knows what they are doing, they are responsible for their behaviour and thus liable for its consequences to other people.

SOURCE