I want to be honest with you guys, I still have feelings of hatred towards the narcissists that have made my life miserable. It’s not always there but sometimes a sudden flashback, a situation, a realization comes and I can feel it – this visceral “I hope you die the most miserable death” hatred.
I have been trying to figure out why it’s still happening. This hatred is obviously strongest towards my mother. But a thought of any of the narcs (and their enablers) that I had to deal with can bring this hatred up.
I have been trying to figure out why I still cannot be complete zen about them. Why I still feel they can emotionally affect me, after all the self-work that I have done.
Humiliated love
Hatred certainly, in my case, is broken, humiliated, trashed and betrayed love. I can’t even describe how it makes me feel to think about what these people did to me. It’s still breaking my heart to realize that it was the fact that I cared for them and loved them and wanted to make things right with them that made me keep accepting the abuse, keep looking for excuses, and absorbing the blame and shame onto myself.
I did suffer a lot for people who didn’t care about me in the slightest. The understanding of this still hurts me.
This hatred is also fuelled by the understanding that they, no doubt, continue their abuse from the distance by continuing their smear campaign against me. That’s how it is – try to hold a narcissist accountable, try to speak the truth about their behaviour and they will annihilate you. Keep speaking the truth and they will keep annihilating you. The only way to stop them would be to accept the blame and commit to their narrative. But that’s not healing.
And the projection lives on
That means that if you have ever been unfortunate and have had a narcissist in your life, especially as a close family member or a partner, you are, in one way or the other, scarred for life. Somewhere out there is an idea of you, a story of you, that has nothing to do with you the human being but is simply the narcissist projecting their shadow onto you. But this character exists out there, is talked about, and those under the narcissist’s influence relate to this character as if it were you.
It’s terrifying. Recently someone commented on one of my YouTube videos saying that it is unfair that people trust the narcissist’s smears but once that person tries to set the record straight, and speak the truth about the narcissist, she is not believed. People prefer the lies of the narcissist over the truth of the scapegoat. That, likely, is because they have accepted the narcissist’s story and through projective identification now see the scapegoat in the way he or she has been portrayed by the narcissist. Add to it the fact that victims of narcissistic abuse are easily triggered and have a tonne emotions in them resulting from the endured abuse. Whenever they allow these emotions to come out, they confirm the narcissist’s story and therefore the projective identification of the enablers.
I am still struggling to come to terms with it. In the past, this stuff would kill people. Good innocent people. They would be ostracized from their communities for sins committed by the manipulative narcissists. All the women burning at stakes for witchcraft – they all just carried the narcissistic projections of the dominant class.
The loneliness and helplessness of a scapegoat
It’s not true what some narc recovery gurus claim that narcissists are harmless. They are dangerous. They do change your life forever. And once you stand there, awakened to the reality of the evil that these disorders present, you are terribly lonely. People in the know about the reality of narcissistic control and manipulation are still a minority. Most of the so-called normal reasonable people only continue the abuse by either accepting the narcissist’s story or promoting the “there are two sides to every story” theory. The victim, by trying to make those people see the truth again comes across as crazy and unreasonable, as someone refusing to own THEIR part in the problem, and therefore confirming the story of the narcissist.
The life of a scapegoat is lonely. And all that just because of a simple misfortune of having had a narcissist amongst your dearest. The price we pay for developing our inner resilience is very high.
What does it really mean to not let them affect you?
I would like to stop specifying the individual narcissists from my life experience because I feel it only gives them more importance. I really don’t know how to go about it – say it was your mother, your sister, your ex – and you only inflame them further and force them to continue their smear campaign. Say it was an unnamed narcissist in your family and you are, in fact, protecting them.
But I am going to say it the way it is. I do feel hatred towards my mother because of her shapeshifting, the passive-aggressive and subtly invalidating jibes she uses, the difference between the persona she puts on publicly and who she really is and has always been to me.
It’s impossible to pin her down and make her accept responsibility for anything. She has several sub-personalities. One is the eternal victim, then there is the domineering cold and hard bully. Try to be harsh talking to the bully and she immediately morphs into this weak vulnerable victim claiming that you are in fact the bully. Try to give that victim compassion and empathy and she rebuffs you, she doesn’t need anything from you, she’s done with you. The mindfuckery of this person is such that with all I know about psychology, I still struggle to understand it. The story always changes. She ends a conversation with me because she doesn’t want to hear the truth but it’s me who is not talking to her, she claims publically. The lies, the never-ending lies and reality distortions. The absolute absence of a personality core. The absolute absence of the ability to self-reflect, the absolute inability to own her actions and the constant urge to blame all that on you. The absolute lack of interest in making things better – you are the problem, you make things better, or fuck off. That’s her message.
I haven’t seen my mother in a year. I feel defeated by the fact that through her insanity, she is still able to affect me emotionally. To see how easy it was for her to discard me when I refused to toe the line anymore, to see how disposable I was for her, to see she has never had the slightest care about how her behaviour affected me and has never had the slightest intention to do anything better for me. It’s just plain heartbreaking.
And so I feel hatred. I feel hatred because of the power this quite frankly uneducated primitive alcoholic woman has. I feel hatred because of how powerless I am. Despite all my education, knowledge, self-work and therapy I still let her eat away at my soul. I feel powerless because people prefer to listen to her and trust her over me.
I feel powerless because, despite all that she has done to me, a part of me still feels sorry for her and has compassion for her. And that part then feels guilty for the hatred that I feel.
I wish there was a vaccination that I could just have and be totally immune against all of them narcs of the world.
I wish there was a vaccination that could be given to all the enablers to make them see the truth. There is none. And so here we are. The scapegoats of the world, trying to spread awareness through our little efforts. But will this ever make any difference?
As far as I feel, evil seems to be winning and levels of ignorance are nowhere near reduced.
If there is a god, he doesn’t seem to have too much sympathy for us, scapegoats, and that’s hard to swallow.
Being you as if the narcissist never existed
I have been trying to figure out what really is the right approach to dealing with narcissists. Speak openly about how they affected you and you are feeding them narcissistic supply. But then again, if we really don’t care about what they think, we should speak freely about our feelings, the wounds they caused us and our struggles. We shouldn’t be thinking – oh, I need to be putting up a brave face and claim how great everything is just to make sure I don’t give the narc energy. If we choose our actions thinking about them, they are winning. They are stripping us off our authenticity. This way, they lead us into isolation and pretense. And that’s not right.
Anyway, I hope that by speaking openly about everything and owning proudly every little scar, I will be able to heal those feelings of hatred. I do not want to give any narcissist the privilege of being able to stifle my truth, even if that means that I will temporarily feed them supply.
These disorders are geared towards shutting out all signs of vulnerability since those are seen as a weakness by the narcissist. But vulnerability is humanity. Our weaknesses are what makes us whole and real, our pain is what gives us strength and character. We should not allow them to affect our thinking about our vulnerabilities. We don’t need to be ashamed of our vulnerabilities, we should be proud of them. If we accept the narcissistic game and publicaly refuse to be vulnerable, we are spreading the narcissistic poison.
Let’s stop doing that! It appears to me that by fully embracing our vulnerabilities and weaknesses and being open about our true feelings is the only way to truly defeat them, defeat the way of thinking they instilled into us.
Anyway. Enough of my ranting for today…
Hi, yes, I identified with a lot that you say. I’m guessing you’ve heard of the Karpman Drama Triangle? It’s helpful for getting off the roundabout!
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Thank you for your comment, I will have a look into that. The crazy thing is, because I have been conditioned by my mother, I have to relearn how human interactions should look like and it’s very easy for these people, my mother especially, to draw me back in… the hooks are still in there somewhere…
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I identify with a lot of what you said too.. Instead of a mother narcissist, for mine it was my father. It sucks that the people who were supposed to be taking care of us, loving and protecting us, were the ones who broke us and abused us.. We are not toys.. Thank you for sharing your experiences.. We are all in this together!
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Thank you for you comment! Yes, it certainly sucks đŸ˜¦ It feels like a certain part of your personality can overcome that but there are other bits that will struggle with this experience forever… Life is not the same for scapegoats as it is for others…
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A wise person once said something along this line: “Hatred/bitterness is a poison that we swallow and hope another person dies.” The best thing you can do with a narc is forget that person ever lived. I know it is very difficult, but it really is something you do for YOURSELF. Each day you spend hating and thinking about a narcissist is another day you have allowed that person to rob you of. It is incredibly hard because each day you live, you are reminded of how hard you have to work to replace what they took from you. But look at as building the new life that you’ve always wanted, not trying to get something back that never was. You are free, the narc will never be free. I continue to pray for you, my friend.
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I do believe that we have to honour all our feelings. There is a difference between honouring all our feelings, even these difficult ones, and indulging them. You can’t let go of a feeling. It will go when it’s ready to go. When you learned from it all you had to learn from it. Otherwise, it’s just suppressing. That’s what I believe in any way. I believe that what I am learning is to speak my truth no matter how unpleasant without shame. I think that’s what my inner being wants. When it comes to narcs that are your primary family, it’s extremely difficult to forget they ever existed, because you are trying to rebuild a foundation of your life that never was. The enmeshment with the narc mother is extreme, the child is helpless against her, she molds and shapes the child’s psyche with her craziness, the child never knew anything else. And she hooks you in into that circle through making you absorb guilt.
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Hello T,
Excellent. I really do like reading your thoughts, experiences and intuitions on our scapegoat phenomena.
Rant? I think not. You come across as passionate and genuine. Hardly a rant. At least I don’t see it that way.
Anyway
Have a great day.
Stew
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Thank you for your lovely comment… I really appreciate that :-)Have a great day too!
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Thank you for your comments. A lot of wisdom in your words. Yes, you are right and I have quite recently myself came to this realisation. It’s heartbreaking to realise that the foundations of your life were build on hatred, disinterest and total lack of care. Not just my mother but the entire family. I do wonder how I survived all that. The worse I think, is the realisation that your life has no value for those who should have been the closest to you. If your life has no value for your family, for whom does it have value?
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You have a soul sister in your quest for peace and equilibrium. I sit here contemplating ending things, and I find you. That’s how God works. I am so terribly sorry for your pain. I’m so terribly sorry.
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Hi Sara and thank you for your message… Is there anything I can do right now to make you feel better? I know those suicidal urges… I think that’s the hated child thing… I have to say I have been much better lately.. Trying to always remember, when I get my depressive bout to stay with my heartbroken inner child until it feels better, and it always does, eventually…
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