Tag: narcissisticabuse

  • Woe is me…or is it?

    Woe is me…or is it?

    The need to be pacified about the struggles of our life is an indication of how much or how little we believe in ourselves to rise above it.

    When we lose sight of our contribution towards our current state, we surrender to destiny or fate, and wait to be saved or celebrated for how strong we are for persevering.

    Meanwhile, our inaction at changing, or breaking the cycles in which we’re caught, reflects our self-worth more than it reflects our bravery or resilience.

    When the oppressed or the abused remain submissive, they choose to live with shame rather than fight with dignity.

    That fight doesn’t have to be confrontational. Especially when we are physically incapable of subduing the other.

    However, understanding what we’re doing to feed the cycle that is harming us is the beginning of changing what we contribute to such cycles.

    This is not victim blaming. This is victim empowering.

    The difference being that we don’t blame the victim for the oppressor’s actions, but we encourage the victim to reclaim their voice and their dignity, which in turn reduces the validation that the oppressor or abuser gains from their abuse.

    Understanding the cycle is therefore paramount to effective action.

    Action without understanding is like gambling with your life.

    Seek to understand before you surrender to your reality.

    Otherwise you’ll go through life believing you’re trapped, while not realising that there was always an exit strategy available to you.

    It always starts with you.

  • Destroying peace to find peace

    Destroying peace to find peace

    Rage is a destructive demand for significance when we believe that who we are is not enough to be important to those we love.

    The anger that spurs on the rage is a defence mechanism to protect ourselves from becoming invisible.

    We try, in our own little futile ways, to be enough without being able to express ourselves the way others may expect, which leaves us feeling unappreciated when they don’t realise how difficult even that little expression was for us.

    That’s when we feel the rage build up, because we’re reduced to love languages, and token gestures that define how we must express ourselves, when all we want is to just be appreciated for who we are.

    But, that feeling of frustration at not being able to express our emotions in a healthier way was instilled in us long before our adult years.

    Therefore, the rage at our partners or children is simply years of bottled up anger at never being enough, or never feeling heard or seen, by those we relied on most to make us feel safe, and whole.

    It is our invisibility in childhood that creates our demands from the world as adults.

    It is our feelings of inadequacy as children, that fans the rage of abuse and marital rape in our adult years.

    It is our obliviousness to the value of who we are, despite the failings of our parent/s, that keeps us raging at innocent ones who had nothing to do with the nurturing of our insecurities in childhood.

    That’s how we end up repeating the very cycles that destroyed our sense of self.

    When you judge your parents harshly for what they didn’t give you, you fail to see their humanness.

    The very same humanness that you fail to see in yourself, that causes you to rage at the world, instead of appreciating the beauty and peace that it offers.

    You cannot give what you don’t have.

    And you cannot grow if you’re waiting for others to treat you right before you let go of the rage.

    It always starts with you.

  • Escaping addiction

    Escaping addiction

    It’s not drugs that steal our children from us. Like us, they also need to feel significant.

    Taking drugs is not just a bad habit. It’s a means to escape what we don’t want to deal with in the world around us.

    Is it a bad decision? Absolutely. Because escaping something never resolves it, it only defers it to a later time.

    But we all indulge in escapism of some kind, that’s why we have little to no communication in homes that centre around technology or social media, leaving the young ones struggling to find a space in which they belong, physically and emotionally.

    The emotional connection that they then forge with fellow escapees is what makes drugs the escape of choice.

    If we treat them as addicts, they will behave like addicts. If we deny what is lacking in their emotional make up, we’ll deny ourselves the opportunity to address it.

    Addressing it doesn’t only benefit them, it also benefits us because the only reason that they would feel emotionally isolated is because we’re not emotionally accessible.

    That means that we’re also denying ourselves the sweetness of life because if we’re emotionally unavailable, then we’re convinced that what is important to us is not important to anyone else.

    That’s why we lose ourselves to duty and dismiss any demands to be emotionally available for those around us.

    That’s how we create the environment that makes substance abuse or gambling, or other escapes attractive as a coping mechanism.

    Break the cycle.

    It always starts with you.

  • Don’t trade your best for their worst

    Don’t trade your best for their worst

    There is rarely a day that passes without me reading or hearing about someone who invested years, if not decades of their life, to people who were not invested in the relationship.

    When the reality of that betrayal finally hits home, it destroys our spirit and convinces us that we’ve sacrificed the best years of our life while having nothing more to look forward to.

    Nothing could be further from the truth.

    The same way we were able to create beauty in such a desolate landscape, we must recognise that the best of us that we gave was simply the truth of who we were. And are.

    The moment we discard that because it was discarded by an ingrate who was looking for servitude of their ego when they could have had love for their essence, we become ingrates just like them.

    Don’t trade who you are for who they were. It’s never a fair trade. You owe yourself more than that.

    And self-pity will only ever prevent you from being true to yourself.

    Embrace the beauty of who you are despite the ugly of who they were.

    That’s how we take back the gift that they discarded so that we may be able find a more fitting recipient.

    As long as you’re breathing, there’s always hope.

  • Don’t pay it forward

    Don’t pay it forward

    Vengeance is easier than understanding.

    Bitterness is easier than forgiveness.

    Mirroring the behaviour of those who treated us badly is easier than rising up to be better than them.

    Each time we choose the easier path, we become the very monsters and degenerates that created the hurt and pain in our lives.

    Too often, we raise our children with harshness because we are afraid of spoiling them.

    Recognise that such fear never inspires moderation or a wholesome approach to life.

    If you treat your children the same way that you were treated, understand that you will lose them to the world because they will despise what you stand for and discard any good you tried to teach them.

    Your children have more options to choose a different path than you ever did. Give them reason to connect with the value of choosing the path that you believe will be good for them rather than simply demanding compliance with your rules or boundaries.

    Parents with unresolved childhood trauma at the hands of their own emotionally inaccessible parents raise emotionally stinted children who need to escape the reality of life rather than embrace its beauty or opportunity.

    If you want to break the cycle of abuse, the cycle of generational trauma, the cycle of harshness and detachment, or the cycle of dysfunction, you must first recognise its roots within yourself.

    It always starts with you.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • Self-imposed prisons of our mind

    Self-imposed prisons of our mind

    We imprison ourselves each time we restrain our natural expression because we’re afraid that it won’t be appreciated, or celebrated.

    Our need for approval or validation soon becomes our greatest crutch in life, until eventually it becomes our prison.

    We decorate its walls with images and scraps that honour the past, sometimes recalling moments of joy, but often also anchoring us in moments of pain.

    We hold those mementoes up as trophies and garlands that need to be revered by others before we’re willing to set them back down, believing that unless someone else knows our pain, we cannot let it go.

    Our need to be comforted about the aches and losses of the past is not because we need to be comforted, but because we need to feel as if someone cares for us…for what we’re hurting about.

    It’s not always the hurt that’s important. Often, knowing that someone cares that we’re hurting, and that they care enough to want us to stop hurting, is what shackles us to our past, because letting it go also means that we have no way to test if we’re significant to those around us.

    The prisons that protect us from experiencing a beautiful life are often just a single moment away.

    Sadly, we most often wait for someone else to create that moment of release for us before we’re willing to love ourselves enough to create it for ourselves.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • The hypocrisy of self-loathing

    The hypocrisy of self-loathing

    The most toxic plague in the human condition is that of demanding kindness while withholding it.

    I watch with morbid curiosity the volumes of memes and quotes shared by many in which we are reminded to treat everyone with kindness because we never know what struggles they are enduring. Yet, those same people are waiting for such kindness to be shown to them before they are willing to share the same with those around them.

    It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Everyone wants to claim victim-hood, but no one wants to accept that they’re oppressors. We all believe that we’re justified in our harsh treatment of others, or in withholding our gentleness from fear of being taken for granted. It’s that same sense of justification that leads us to experience cruelty or callousness at the hands of those we wish would treat us with significance.

    But we don’t want to see in ourselves what we despise in others, because we can’t be held responsible for the vile behaviour that we display, because you know, we’re too angelic for that. So it must be because someone else made us that way.

    This life is replete with people demanding justice but denying the rights of those around them. People crying for compassion while treating with contempt those who hold them to a higher standard. People who remind others of what kindness looks like, while treating harshly anyone who disagrees with them or calls them out for their double standards.

    Life takes on burdensome tones and vapid outcomes when we try to live by a code that is not shared by those we hold dear. My idealism dictates that we must remain true to ourselves or else we risk becoming the very contaminant that leaves us feeling used and discarded. But idealism has exhausted my soul more than any other investment of myself in the lives of others.

    Idealism is what courts with madness when my ideals are seen as naive or foolish in the face of the disappearing humanness around me. My madness, however, has never been a cause for the concern of another. When it rears its head, I am quickly discarded. When it is tamed, I am superficially celebrated.

    It’s that superficiality that grates away at my reserves. The very fragile reserves that I have to pull me through another tiresome day lacking in warmth, understanding, or even a mildly sincere embrace.

    Window shopping rarely reveals the reality of the purchase. We dress ourselves up to appear as wholesome or as nonchalant as we’d have others believe we are, until they reach in to touch the essence that lies beneath that window dressing, not realising that what they caress beneath that facade is in fact the rawness of our self-loathing.

    It’s that self-loathing that is revealed in our harsh treatment of others. Our cold, callous ways towards those who would draw us closer out of love, not realising the we don’t know how to return such love. Rather than appear incompetent or lacking, we strike at them with feigned confidence and a dispassionate smile, subtly telling them to get lost while smiling sweetly as if to promise them a beautiful trip when they decide to undertake that journey. That journey of leaving us alone.

    What self-loathing doesn’t do is it doesn’t allow us the space to realise that when we despise in ourselves what others admire, we don’t only reject ourselves, we invalidate their love for us as well. And that invalidation leaves them questioning their worth, spawning within them the same self-loathing that we hold within. Thus, paying forward a harshness while reminding the world to treat us with kindness.

    The hypocrisy of self-loathing is a source of destruction that will forever be ignored, because our pity for our pathetic condition will forever convince us that the courage it took for another to see in us what no one saw in them is merely their misplaced investment in something that doesn’t exist. Perhaps it’s just their need to convince someone to see in them what they need to have seen.

    It’s a circle-jerk of epic proportions. And those who break that circle are ridiculed in moments of ease, but desperately sought out in moments of pain. And as soon as the pain passes, that misplaced confidence once more convinces us that they’re just reading too much into everything, or that they just don’t know how to have fun. Or they’re among those who take life too seriously.

    At least that’s what the delusional tell themselves in their efforts to justify their abdication of the responsibility that they have in destroying the self-esteem of those who once loved them. The world is lacking in compassion and understanding because of our self-loathing, not because of the cruelty of a few.

    As I’ve said before, the less human we feel, the more inhumane we behave. Those who view themselves with contempt have caused more pain than any other I’ve ever observed.

  • Contaminating the self

    Contaminating the self

    Self-worth is contaminated when we try to define it by the way we think others perceive us.

    Whether their perception is correct or not is irrelevant.

    The fact that their perception has more sway over our self-worth than our perception of ourselves is what determines the difference between a healthy self esteem, and an unhealthy one.

    Many struggle to connect with who they are in the absence of an external voice validating them.

    That external voice is not always aware of the validation that they provide because the one in need of such validation invests themselves in inspiring others to feel accomplished and amazing. [This is important!]

    When that investment is not well received, or is credited to someone other than the one making the investment, the self esteem of the investor is destroyed.

    That’s how we lose ourselves to servitude. We lose sight of our ability to serve, and become defined by how our service is appreciated, or rejected.

    Thus, are arrogant ones created. Arrogance being nothing more than a proclamation of the good in us that we need others to acknowledge.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock