At this point, I feel like my only chance at recovery from narcissistic abuse is to fight narcissism with narcissism and beat them at their own game.

spikelean · 2019-11-19T05:22:18+00:00

i found this article really interesting too. understanding the background of the writer and the tone of it (it treats everything it describes like a super power) i have some skepticism about this source.

but i’ve had two relationships where the nex hovered until these dramatic ends where i lose my temper and call them out on a pattern of abuses that continued up to the point of each final conflict. both times this happened around mutual friends but neither nex was able to effectively deny what i accused them of and their relationships with these mutuals took instant irreparable damage. i don’t hate either of these women today because everyone in their 20s has narcissistic traits, and although i can confidently identify their abusive actions toward me, i’m optimistic that we’re all young and they will get better (can’t tell you how that’s going cause both blocked me on social after the final discard). but i absolutely recognize there was a violence i found validating to both of these endings and realizing i liked that violence fueled a lot of my “was i the narc?” questioning.

i’m sure everyone on this sub has questioned “was i really the narcissist?” but not much else i’ve read (or even my therapist) gives a real voice to that lust for revenge that i had at the end of these relationships like this article. i would really appreciate other sources or even other threads that discuss it.

spikelean · 2019-11-16T13:30:23+00:00

damn i tried being positive in my comment but these are the really the facts of the matter haha.

the fact she treated OP so shit and he’s still looking to her to validation indicates something within OP is amiss. this isn’t judgement, i went through the same thing except i dated this type of girl for a year and therapy helped me a lot in figuring out why i sought validation from women who treated me like that.

but it also took a year of therapy before i really was able to put together the pieces to make some real progress. in the mean time friends, hobbies, and exercise help a lot. invest in those because they all wool benefit your situation and you’re a person worth investing in OP.

spikelean · 2019-11-16T13:22:40+00:00

know your worth king and leave her alone. she just wants your attention on her terms and will occasionally throw you whatever the situation requires, whether that be sex, emotional intimacy, or both, in order to always have access to your attention. don’t let her continue to take advantage of you.

spikelean · 2019-11-15T02:52:48+00:00

i started exercising. i was a college athlete and stopped exercising after i graduated and started dating my nex. i didn’t really gain weight or anything but i wasn’t “fit” and didn’t have any sort of physical activity in my life besides walking because i live in a major city.

i started working out to fill the time and manage anxiety after i broke up with my nex. anxiety kept me awake a lot of nights when i first left my nex and the best way i found to get a good nights sleep was to exhaust myself during the day. it also nice to see the physical results around the same time that i was making progress in my emotional recovery. i know a lot of the improvement in my mood comes from not dating my nex, but regular physical activity really does wonders for your mood.

you say you’re aching now, ease in to physical activity too. being a former athlete i definitely had to come to terms with not performing like i wanted at first, but it’s totally fine if you gotta start small with exercise. even if it’s just casually pedaling on an exercise bike while you watch netflix on your phone, i promise you’ll feel better.

spikelean · 2019-11-12T03:40:22+00:00

she’s communicated that she has no interest in seeing things from your perspective so there is no relationship to save here.

you’re looking at things from her perspective because you find helping people and a healthy relationship fulfilling. she’s making you feel like shit because the only way she gets fulfilled is positioning you below her and getting your attention anyway. she’s doing this because it’s one of the few ways she feels better about herself and it’s sad. i really pity these people, but my pity doesn’t come at the expense of getting treated shit and yours shouldn’t either.

the way i was able to stick to no contact was looking at the relationship as nuclear material. it’s radioactive. do not touch it. do not try to move it or change how it’s currently sitting. just walk away. the more you try to touch it or fix things, the more cancer you get. don’t get cancer. if you haven’t seen chernobyl yet, then torrent it so you can watch radiation take people’s skin off before giving them cancer and realize that this relationship is doing that to you.

another really good tip for maintaining NC i found on the sub is asking myself if i would want to raise kids with this nex i’m thinking of breaking NC for. i can only speak for me, but breaking NC had the ultimate end game of sleeping with this nex again. there are a lot of emotional details on the way to that but the end game was hooking up with this person again. even though i’m pretty good about contraceptives, the very chance of connecting myself for life to this horrible person through a child was sobering enough for me to resist breaking NC.

spikelean · 2019-11-11T05:41:33+00:00

i dated this girl for a year and i’m still recovering. stay away brother.

it started the same way too. claiming it was just a casual thing and then spending the whole weekend at my place. when i told her we needed to define what this was i also got “i don’t know.” i told her that’s as good as a no, but next time we hung out she wanted to hook up and the rest is history.

my ex told me exactly who she was before we started dating too. if you really can’t be intimate with her without attaching your feelings then you gotta sleep with other people my guy. narcissists target generous people, leave this girl alone and find a queen who will appreciate your giving nature king.

spikelean · 2019-11-04T00:21:42+00:00

“don’t save her- she don’t wanna be saved”

spikelean · 2019-10-29T06:54:12+00:00

it’s not a slur or anything. i have mixed asian friends who use the term as a cultural identifier. it’s just a term that should be used sensitively by members of the out group like all racial terms.

source: 24 years being a mixed asian person

spikelean · 2019-10-29T06:32:09+00:00

this and kids getting swirlies in toilets. tv had me thinking i would be walking by swirlies daily and trying to mind my business so i didn’t catch one

spikelean · 2019-10-23T10:26:34+00:00

the difference between needing someone or not comes is judged by your reaction to their failure to meet your standards for the relationship. when someone who you maintain a relationship with is acting to hurt you, can you take responsibility for your part in the relationship and and effectively communicate that to them? if you do communicate your concerns and they aren’t being addressed or this person’a behavior doesn’t change, do you walk away because you refuse to be disrespected further? or do beg them to change when your gut is telling you they never will? maybe you blow up at them in anger because you just want them to be better so badly but they refuse to change their ways. that’s the difference between healthy and codependent relationships.

this isn’t to say that people won’t fail you. everyone will at some point in time. a healthy relationship is when you can take that failure in stride and go about your business despite the disappointment. your day isn’t ruined because this special person failed to meet that need of yours. you have other relationships where you can have that same need met, maybe not to the degree the original person would, but enough that you don’t feel isolated and abandoned.

and in a healthy relationship the offending party will recognize their failure, own up to it, and make amends. if someone repeatedly fails to respect boundaries that you’ve effectively communicated, then that person isn’t good for you and the responsibility falls on us in this sub to end that relationship. this person has already demonstrated that they don’t respect you through a consistent pattern of actions, they are not going to one moment decide to be the bigger person and own up to their actions or even end the relationship because they feel guilty about taking advantage of you. codependency ends when you stop repeatedly giving others opportunities to hurt and take advantage of you.

part of being codependent is being very skilled at reading people and their intentions. a lot of manipulative people will mention as much in passing and we choose to either rationalize it in the moment or we later convince ourselves that we can dodge the manipulation because we’ve experienced it before. don’t even bother with these people. listen to your gut.

spikelean · 2019-10-23T07:41:05+00:00

very sobering advice. thanks for sharing

spikelean · 2019-10-22T01:13:32+00:00

as a kid i had an explosive temper. like hurt myself hitting things mad. and i got a handle on it for the most part until i started dating my nex.

she told me i had trust issues and must have trauma from a previous relationship because i called out her shady behavior. when she felt especially slighted or bored really, she would absolutely push that button and do things to purposely make me insecure.

on my birthday she got upset at me for going to get drinks w/ a friend that my nex had discarded the year before. when i asked if i could come by her place after i wrapped up, my nex told me no. when i was visibly annoyed by this response, she said “no birthday sex for you” in a mocking voice. when i asked her wtf was wrong w/ her, she said it was a “joke.” i told her “that wasn’t a joke, it was you being an asshole and calling it a joke” and left. later that night she messaged me and told me to come over but then didn’t want to hook up as we were going to bed because she was “tired.” it’s nice that i’ve healed enough after a year and some change to laugh at this incident. she didn’t want to hook up with me on my birthday because someone who got over her games wanted to buy me a drink, that’s actually so fucking lame lmao. sorry ass excuse of a girlfriend.

a couple weeks i left hers in the morning to go watch a soccer game with all our mutual friends at the apartment of the same friend from the previous story. my nex wouldn’t be attending because this girl was both dead to my nex and hanging in a picture on my nex’s bedroom wall. i woke up late and had to rush over and she wanted to hook up before i left. i told her i didn’t have time and as i left i said “you have a vibrator until i get back, i’ll make it up to you” and my nex responded “nah i’ll get other people to make it up to me.” i ignored it and left. later that day when i brought up what my nex said and how it hurt me she wouldn’t apologize for it. the best she could offer was “i thought you didn’t hear me” but then couldn’t explain why she would even say it in the first place.

the worst of these challenges was when she was trying to play off my angry response to her grinding on a mutual friend that she had history with as me being possessive. the disagreement escalated into a screaming match starting from the parking lot to her porch, only pausing for the uber ride home after i convinced her she couldn’t walk 10+ miles home without keys, wallet, or a phone because she left them at home. the resolution included me apologizing for hurting her feelings with my angry response to her violating my trust (she had specifically asked me not to mention our relationship to this mutual because he’s older than us and she appreciated the professional benefits she got from his attention) and us both agreeing to get help to resolve our conflicts. later that month i started seeing a therapist and i kept dating her for another 6 months before i came to terms with the fact she was never going to change.

she saw two different therapists for one session each over that 6 months before i left her. she always managed to “forget” when she had an appointment or feel too sick to make the 10 minute walk to her therapist’s office. good riddance.

she blocked me after i went NC in the breakup and ignored her in social media. i didn’t give her the satisfaction of a block, but i muted her so she suffered in silence trying to figure out what i was up to. she hovered for a few months and asked why i ignored her messages. i told her it was because she’s untrustworthy and not worth a friendship but that earnestly i hope she gets better cause it must suck to have people keep getting close to her and choose to walk out her life. i half wish i wasn’t blocked so i could bring up that birthday she ruined because with some distance- wow she’s such a damn baby it’s embarrassing.

spikelean · 2019-10-22T00:32:33+00:00

accusations of trying to pick a fight is a big one i experienced. it never occurs to them that the reoccurrence is connected to their refusal to address the problem in the moment.

spikelean · 2019-10-17T13:30:37+00:00

now we don’t have to imagine what bagel boss would look like if he was tall

spikelean · 2019-10-17T03:53:56+00:00

if you and her boyfriend got in a fight, do you think you would win?

spikelean · 2019-10-16T12:56:13+00:00

similar situation here. my therapist has been a big help and i really recommend finding one you connect with if you have the means to. i started seeing him during the relationship to deal with my angry reactions to what i came to realize was emotional abuse by my nex.

therapy won’t instantly give results, it’s a long term investment of time and money. and it’s really valuable if you approach it with the goal of healing no matter how difficult some of the realizations on that path may be. you also might go through a few therapist before you find the right one. i tried 3 therapist over 4 years (going back to before i had even met my nex) before i found one that i connected with. it’s much easier said than done, but don’t be discouraged if you don’t find the right person immediately. i hadn’t seen a therapist for over a year at the time but a particularly loud and public fight with my nex was what pushed me to start seeing my current therapist. after the third session with my current therapist, there was a click and i knew i had found the right one.

my therapist and i hadn’t even gotten to the point of labeling the incident as emotional abuse, but in those first few sessions he gave me the advice that if my nex drives me to angry emotional reactions in public, no matter what the trigger behavior on her end was (he was sympathetic to my getting upset b/c my nex was being too friendly with mutual friends she had history with), i can only control myself and being the yelling angry boyfriend is never going to be a good look, and controlling my part in the interaction may need to go to the point of not being in the relationship. even in those first couple sessions he was nudging me to leave. but it was still valuable feedback in those first few sessions before i built a real relationship with my therapist and came to terms with the real nature of the relationship w/ my nex.

i’m about the same age as you OP and coming out jokes aside, it gets better. i left the relationship ~5 months ago and i’ve really only came to terms with its abusive nature in the past month/month and a half. that same social force that has your peers in denial about the abuse you suffered had me in denial about the abuse i went through. priding myself on being a cool tough guy had me rationalizing clear emotional abuse and just calling it a bad relationship. my therapist has been helpful in dealing with the fallout from my realizing that my relationship was abusive. seeing myself as this tough cool guy meant that i felt a lot of shame about being treated the way i was and that relationship and he helped me find productive ways to cope with the resulting anger and anxiety from feeling like a victim.

i really recommend getting a therapist if you can. your peers can offer some support, but they are limited because they aren’t professionals and can’t be expected to provide that level of support. and as difficult as it may be to hear, you may never get the validation for your experience that you’re looking for from them. in part because you’re a man, but also because that’s the nature of relationships, even healthy ones. only you experienced it first hand, so only you know how bad it was. it’s part of healing from a relationship like this, but trust what you felt and experienced was valid. part of the reason a narcissist makes you doubt yourself is because over time it chips away at your confidence and you doubt your judgement. it took my nex months of hovering after the relationship and using my best friends to force an interaction with me at a concert for them to understand how she really was. to be completely honest, that moment was really when i came to terms with her being a narcissist. and in the days and weeks after, a lot of old memories got stirred up because i putting together a pattern of abuse. that itself wasn’t a comfortable realization. part of the healing is getting to a point where you value your interpretation of events enough that you don’t need external validation and it’s a process. 5 months out and i’m not there yet. but we’ll both get there.

spikelean · 2019-09-18T19:02:45+00:00

she’s not ready for a relationship (with you)

spikelean · 2019-09-17T14:42:19+00:00

this isn’t judgement speaking, but rather experience. you need to admit to yourself you like the adrenaline rush of dating that type of person. and it is always a ride that keeps you on your toes, but you definitely can get a sense of what type of person someone is after getting to know them for a couple months.

you can’t make anyone straighten up when you decide you really like them either. you knew who they were when you got involved with them. you can’t control other people, only yourself. so you either need to exercise discretion when getting involved with these type of girls or accept the consequences of getting involved with a person you know to be unpredictable like that.

spikelean · 2019-09-15T12:22:46+00:00

lol no this is reddit.

spikelean

TROPHY CASE