Rewind
Mr. Charm and I went for at least three weeks before he contacted me after our last argument. During our last connection, he had been triggered by a comment I made in regards to a movie we had watched together. He was triggered by one of the female characters. He literally flew into a rage and verbalized that women were basically good for nothing. When I responded to him that it sounded like he hated women, he basically heard my comment as “You hate women.” I was only telling him what I heard from the standpoint of repeating it back to him, but he flew into a rage and assassinated me with a verbal tongue lashing.
Although I believed there were other underlying issues he was dealing with at the time, I was not going to waste my time trying to help him address them. I knew he was not ready to hear anything I had to say, and I knew he would never admit he even had a problem. It was easier just to accept the fact that he was angry because of me. He had already shifted the blame of his behavior to me anyway. He had projected his issues onto me so that he could avoid dealing with whatever he had going on in his mind and heart at the time.
Narcissistic Cycle Of Abuse
Back then, I did not realize that Mr. Charm’s increasing meltdowns were actually his preparations for my discards. The ongoing cycle of narcissistic abuse was moving in a circular motion at rapid speed. Mr. Charm was love bombing me less but still did so in quick succession of his devaluations and discards of me. I never knew when his temper would blow. I never had a moment’s notice either. I considered that maybe his stroke was affecting him dramatically, but then I also believed he used his stroke as an excuse to be mean too. Then again, maybe there was something wrong. I could only pinpoint one thing.
Taking Time To Analyze
During the three-week hiatus away from Mr. Charm, I journaled profusely. I analyzed his behavior. I studied his behavior under both a spiritual and psychological context. Although there was a lot of textbook information on narcissistic personality disorder, there was not enough information that I had come across in textbooks regarding narcissistic abuse. I was in graduate school, and nothing that I came across even touched on the topic of narcissistic abuse.
At the time, I had yet to realize that most of the wealth of knowledge about narcissistic abuse would be found in the experiences of others who had lived through or were living through narcissistic abuse. So I journaled, and I reflected on situations I had experienced with other narcissists. I compared the common theme of behaviors that all of the narcissists I knew had shared, and I came to some rather startling but interesting conclusions.
As I tried to make sense of things with Mr. Charm, I came to the conclusion that although he had experienced a stroke [two actually], and the stroke had changed his mindset, he had also experienced the greatest rejection of his life. He had not only experienced this rejection once, he had experienced this rejection twice by the same person. He was resentful that the one person who he may have believed should have loved him had actually not loved him. That person was his biological mother.
I reasoned that he had searched for his mother because he was seeking for the love that only she could give him. His adoptive family had left him wanting because they had given him abuse and dysfunction [as he would tell the story which I actually believe to be true]. I reasoned that he may have thought that his biological mother may have had some tragic reason as to why she could not keep him and had no choice but to give him up. I do not believe he would have ever imagined that she gave him up because she really did not want him.
As with his birth, his biological mother reacted with coldness towards him when he finally found her and reached out to her. She did not even want talk to him. She was a narcissist and did not have the ability to love him as it is common for a mother to love her child. So, it made sense to me that Mr. Charm would hate his mother because she rejected him much like the woman from the movie had rejected the main character.
It made sense to me that he would project his hate of his mother onto a movie character and then speak what he felt in his heart about it. It made sense for him to do that because it was safer than voicing the truth. The truth hurt. I had discerned this truth that he wanted to keep hidden, but I spoke it without considering his reaction to it. I had not considered all of the components of his situation at the time. I felt bad about my words afterwards. It was not my intention to hurt him further.
Even still, though, that situation shows that I had spoken correctly in terms of what he may have felt. I gathered from his comment about the movie scene that it seemed to me that he hated women, but if he did not hate all women, he quite possibly hated one woman – his biological mother. At the same time, however, I also sensed that he hated me too. I did not always know why, but after analyzing the situation, I gave it great thought. I had not rejected him, but he maybe he expected rejection from me.
The bottom line – Mr. Charm was [and still is] a narcissist. Just like his biological mother, he did not have the ability to love either. Although he pandered to women and surrounded himself with women, women appeared to be objects to him. His own mother had treated him as an object. She seemingly easily and willingly gave him away without a thought as to how he would have been affected by it all, but I am only basing my thoughts on what I read in the case files.
Because of Mr. Charm’s biological mother, he might have needed to possess women to siphon the feelings that he lacked within himself or the feelings that he never received from his mother. He could have also had the need to possess women so that he could return the treatment he felt he had received from his own mother. I do not really know. As much as he held women up on a pedestal, he degraded them as well. He idolized women, but he seemed to hate how much he did idolize them. The same women he complimented, he also tore down. I was a prime example of a woman he appeared to hate.
In fact, I would often look at Mr. Charm and see fragments of my own mother’s eyes peering out with hate towards me. I was familiar with the look of those eyes. At the same time, I could see the pain and the agony within Mr. Charm’s eyes too. Yet, I chose to override heeding to the hatred he extended towards me. Instead, I chose to empathize with the trauma he experienced of which I had a connection.
This man was hurting terribly, and I wanted to help him. I just did not know how. Short of prayers on his behalf, I was powerless to do anything for him. He was not even receptive to my desire and willingness to help. In my research, there was nothing I found about people suffering from narcississtic personality disorder that gave me any guidance on what I could do to help him. From what I had studied, getting the help was all on him.
In the next post, I continue on with the series of meltdowns Mr. Charm had that eventually led to the end of our so-called friendship.
My Voice Unchained 