What I Learned About Myself From Narcissistic Relationships

What I Learned About Myself From Narcissistic Relationships

After years of being in narcissistic and toxic relationships, I learned a whole lot about myself. Some of the things I learned have been encouraging, while other things have not been so encouraging. I’ve had to make a lot of changes. I’ve had to take a really good look at myself. The reflection I’ve seen hasn’t always been so pleasant.

Overall, I’ve learned that I’m a warrior. I’ve been knocked down countless times, but I always get back up. I might stay down past the knockout count of 10, but I still get back up. I usually get back up much stronger and wiser, but I’m still so very hurt. I have a lot of broken pieces to pick up, and I often feel broken beyond repair. Those times where I’ve had a whole lot to learn, it seems I just continue to encounter the same narcissistic types but in different humans.

In many cases, much of what I’ve learned is that I gave up in situations with narcissistic types far too easily. I can recall so many conversations and circumstances where I wish I could and would have said or done so many things differently. I wish I had the gall to stand much firmer and stronger than I did in certain circumstances – saying what I wanted to say instead of stifling myself and absorbing every single situation, including the emotions with those situations.

I wish I would have spoken my mind more freely without caring about how I affected a narcissist. There would not have been anything I would have said that would have kept them from gaslighting me, maligning me, shaming me, embarrassing me, hurting me, using me, or killing me spiritually (if not physically). I wish I would not have wasted so much time caring and loving harder than these types pretended to care and love me.

I can’t go back no, and I can’t say I have many regrets. I lived. I loved. I laughed. I conquered. I failed. I lost. I hurt. I survived.

I Learned And I Improved

I had many chances to improve myself with narcissistic types, and even though I’ve grown and matured quite a bit, I came to some painful realizations about myself along the way. These realizations took me a long time to accept and change. For one, I realized that I can never be nice to narcissistic types. Neither my kindness or love mean anything to narcissistic types. These kinds of people only view this aspect of my personality as weakness.

I had to develop a detached way of thinking when it came to dealing with narcissists. I had to behave as if I didn’t care. I had to literally turn off my desire to care about them prior to them driving this aspect of who I am out of me. I had to learn the ways of narcissistic types, and I had to adapt and fall in line with learning to ignore them whenever I could do so. Sometimes I was successful, and other times I was not.

After taking so much stuff from narcissists, I finally had enough. There was an urge inside of me so overwhelming to break free of them that I snapped myself into breaking away from the narcississtic bullies from my job by resigning and then again from three narcissistic relationships with the fury of hell. I literally went into spiritual warfare to break away from two narcissists because it was apparent that some force of darkness didn’t want my release from them. But I determined to break free into the freshest non-narcissistic air I’ve ever breathed before.

Then, I retreated into healing and resting. I took a hiatus from work. I didn’t mingle myself with anyone. I cut nearly everyone out of my life who were narcissistic in nature, and this included those who were tied to narcissists in some way too. I also blocked contact from narcissistic types via phone and social media. I even went as far as to deactivate a number of my social media accounts. Overall, I took myself off the map and attempted to stay away from any paths that might take me into the zone of any narcissist of my past.

A few times, a narcissist tried to come back into my life as if there might have been some indication for them that I’d changed my mind, but my energy was so spent from having dealt with them, and the new air I was able to breathe free of toxins, had me do a double take. There was no way I wanted to re-enter a zone of hell I’d just left. I didn’t really need to think twice about it. I wanted my freedom. I needed peace.

For the most part, I’ve had peace, but I can only avoid narcissistic people so much. I still have to keep on living, and I do need to keep the established nature of balanced and healthy interactions with people. If I could just settle on living my life in solitude away from people in general, then I can avoid any more encounters with narcissists. It wouldn’t bother me too much to live like a hermit, except I think this could have the potential to create within me a faulty persona that lacks any other connections.

As a matter of fact, I know this is not a realistic or healthy thought process. I reason with myself that having had narcissistic types around me throughout my life must have some purpose, but I can’t say I always know the answer to this reasoning of mine or the purpose. I just continue to walk out all that I’ve learned, and I continue to practice setting and enforcing boundaries with anyone who’s in my life. I don’t back down, and I stand my ground.

I’ve maintained no-contact with my narcissist mother, and that has taken a lot of tenacity and creativity on my part to keep her out of my life. I’ve also maintained no-contact with narcissistically enabling siblings and other relatives connected to my mother. I also maintain a safe distance with my father even though he has made significant progress in changing his ways. Frankly, I feel that I lack people in my life.

Although I have a few good friends I still speak with, I don’t belabor them or bore them with this aspect of my life because I feel that it would be such a huge burden. Admittedly, it is a lonely place to be without family and without friends, but I have become more of a friend to myself. I always have been my own friend. So it’s nothing for me to spend inordinate amounts of time alone with myself, both living and thinking inside of my head.

It’s as if my life is only me and God and an occasional friend. Sometimes, I don’t feel like God’s presence is with me either though. Sometimes I feel there’s a huge engulfing void of nothingness, and I just feel this great numbness within me. Yet, other times I feel overwhelmed with great internal sadness and loneliness which I cannot often describe with words. I have struggled enough with depression and anxiety that I can now discern the difference among the different feelings. When I am numb, I’m most likely depressed but when I am sad and lonely, I am in need of connection.

I often wonder if other survivors of narcissistic abuse go through these experiences or anything similar. It’s like having many dark nights of the soul. I often question if I am really healing. It’s like I go back and forth. Some days are good, but some days are horrible. I gain enough ground that I know I’m moving forward, but then I feel as if I lose so much ground that I know I’m going backwards. It’s never-ending.

I do know it was all worth it for me to walk away from all the toxicity of narcissistic drama. There’s nothing about the toxicity that I miss. I don’t even miss the narcissistic people either. I think sometimes that I miss the “idea” that I was so wrong about what I thought about them, and that I believe in their potential instead of accepting them for the truth of who they were as people. I hoped for the best in all of those situations but only reaped their worst.

I sometimes reflect, and it often seems like an unfair imbalance that I am the one who continues to struggle to connect and put my life back together while narcissistic types just live on and exist to maintain what appears like freedom, happiness and good things after having brought their destruction into my life for me to clean up.

I know I bear some of the burden for what I allowed to occur in those situations, but at the same time, I didn’t always know I was around a diabolical, manipulative and hateful schemer. Having a narcissist in one’s life isn’t always an easy detection. It often takes years before a narcissist can even be pinpointed as an actual narcissist. It’s a constant battle of spiritual warfare and keen discernment, and once I’ve received all the clarification I need to determine that I’m dealing with a narcissist, I’m dead exhausted from it all. It’s a tiring feat from which I have to disentangle myself, and that takes a lot of time.

Now that I am free, I feel that my life is spent and I don’t even know how to live the rest. For a time, Twitter provided me a type of outlet for expression until narcissistic types began hounding me with their hatred and foolishness. It became a bit much, actually, and although I attempted to hang on and ignore all the narcissistic onslaughts coming at me, it became too great a cost to personally deal with over my own sanity and peace – not to mention the other outside stressors in my life.

Now I no longer feel I have purpose. I feel lost and destitute of soul, barely able to muster up the desire to even want to shine my light anymore. Frankly, I’m just tired, and if I could sleep the rest of my life away without any penalties, I’d be good for it. But I know this is just another way to run away from seeing my journey through. I just figure there has to be more to life than just what I’m experiencing, and I wonder if anyone else sometimes feels the same.

I’m tired of dealing with people in my life whose signs of “like” I often misinterpret when they are just people who literally spew their hatred against me. It’s unnerving and disappointing, really. As of late, I’ve been wondering within my thoughts to God why my life is set up this way. Then I’m reminded of Job, Hannah, David, and Joseph. Their lives weren’t cookie-cutter easy either. They seemingly had more frenemies than loving friends, and they struggled with emotional bouts of anguish too.

But in the end, I carry on and I strive to see it all through. I only have one life to live, and I want to know that I did live it despite the obstacles. I don’t really want to give up on my journey until my journey is over. I don’t give up that easily even when I want to give up. I’m just over the drama that narcissistic types bring, and I wish that I could live my life continuously free of that. Yet, I know that is not going to be the case necessarily. It just seems like an inevitable thing I can never completely avoid even though I feel like my life now depends on the avoidance of narcissistic craziness.

What I’ve ultimately learned from narcissistic relationships is that there will inevitably be more of the potential for more narcissistic types in my life to show me what I have truly learned from other narcissists. I wish this wasn’t true for me, but I’ve seen my own track record. I’ve been free even though I’ve presently dealt with situations on narcissistic scale. So, spiritually, it’s in my best interest to stay armored up and keep myself prepared for narcissistic war.