When you’re an adult child of a narcissist, it’s not only about what you suffered as a child. It’s also about repeating deeply ingrained patterns of behavior that you were taught, either overtly or subconsciously, by your parents. You likely learned that your needs were of lesser importance than others. You probably feel uncomfortable if you know that someone else doesn’t feel well, sad, or unstable, and you work often against your best interests to correct those feelings in other people. Even when your own “inner voice of wisdom” is shouting at you, saying that a particular friend may not be the healthiest person to have in your life, you ignore it. On an unconscious level, you often attract people who are similar to your parents; these people may not have many other friends, simply because “normal” people think they’re nuts. You, on the other hand, have no natural barometer for healthy relationships with other people.
I’ve spent a great deal of my life agonizing over the mysterious reason why I seem to attract so many insane people, as at times it seems like they simply come out of the woodwork wanting to be my friend. Accepting responsibility for one’s actions is an absolute necessity throughout the recovery process. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, and feeling like I have no control over whom I attract into my life, I’ve been forced to recognize that I have played a part in this. That said, it’s also been important for me to see that many of these actions have been on a more unconscious level due to my own upbringing. As a child of a narcissist, it’s like I was almost programmed to not have any sort of healthy boundaries. My parents taught me to anticipate their needs, to never question their actions, and to make them happy above all else. If I failed at these tasks - which inevitably, I always did, not really understanding the rules of the game of narcissism - anger directed toward me or other psychological torment would result. How did this programming manifest itself into my life as an adult? Well, let’s just say I’ve been non-judgmental to a fault when it comes to other people. Those red flags that normally go up when you meet a crazy person...yeah, those haven’t existed in my world. I would always look to find the good in anyone. I also had a very high tolerance level for self-centered behavior.
I can certainly recall many failed relationships - both romantic and platonic - that I’ve had with narcissists. One of the first was a boyfriend that I dated on and off for about 3.5 years, from the time I was 17 until shortly after my 21st birthday. He was handsome and wealthy, incredibly smart, well-read and talented (a concert pianist). He was also an abusive sadist who never moved out of his mother’s home (and with whom he had a very questionable sort of relationship), unemployed, an ex-criminal who had been convicted of grand larceny at one point...
Of course, I focused on the former rather than the latter. My parents had taught me the importance of wealth and appearance as paramount in the world. When this particular boyfriend began to behave in a strange way - such as by forcing me to model fetish clothing in stripper stores for him - my alarm bell didn’t go off, seeing that my own father used to make me model clothing for him, as I’ve described in earlier blog entries. I was merely a possession to this particular boyfriend, a very familiar role which I had played before not all that earlier in my parents’ home. Everything about our relationship was based on what I could do for him. How I looked reflected on him (so he frequently forced me to diet), and I ended up getting really expensive clothes and haircuts - going into debt to pay for these things - even though I lived on minimum wage jobs. I was only to have certain friends that he approved of. I wasn’t to discuss things about our relationship with others. Our break-up was a quintessential narcissistic scenario: I won a composers’ competition with a piece that I had written for him. Instead of being happy for me, he told me that the only reason I had won was because he had performed on the recording. He got very angry when I told him that the agency who awarded the prize had hired someone else to play it on a concert. It took a while (and a rape later) for me to finally kick the jerk to the curb.
This experience was - obviously - a bit of an extreme case, and I could write a book about what I went through in those 3+ years. Shortly after I broke up with this guy, I started dating someone else...and pretty much repeated the same cycle within a different context, equally as painful and damaging. After two years of that, I had had enough...or so I thought. What I’ve realized now is that I’ve repeated the same behavior in friendships ever since. The cycle: meet someone, immediately connect over some mutual interest (too quickly), hang out a lot, realize they’re nuts, they get obsessed with me, I freak out or try to set a healthy boundary, big blow-up fight. Repeat. Over and over and over again.
Case in point: the most recent scenario. Several years ago, I met a woman at one of my own shows where I was fronting a rock band. She was a fan of my group, and came to many of our shows, which I found flattering. We had a mutual friend who introduced us, and we hit it off right away, sharing many of the same musical preferences. Over the years, we went to many shows and festivals together around the country. I “thought” I had fun at these events. However, now that some time has passed, and since I’ve had the NPD revelation about my parents, I realized that I didn’t. I was just happy to have someone to attend shows and festivals with me, not having had a female friend like that in the past.
The first time Joan (not her real name) invited me over for dinner, I had a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember this now, but at the time, I ignored it...much in the same way that I ignored the weird warning signs at the beginning of several of my abusive romantic relationships. The night ended up being relatively entertaining, but that’s only because I didn’t really take note of the fact that Joan only talked about herself all night. I could have been anyone, and had I simply listened, Joan would have thought I was an amazing person. What Joan knew of me was that I was a singer in a band, and a good singer at that. I think I was her version of a “notch in the bedpost” - albeit not in a sexual way - to have a “friend” in her corner that was a “public figure” or something.
This phenomenon became more apparent to me over the years as we went to rock shows together. She would do everything in her power to get on the inside track of the “scene” even though she wasn’t a musician herself. She knew all of the promoters. She knew all of the musicians, or so she said; today, I realize that the musicians probably just thought of her as a crazy fan and were flattered, not to mention a little creeped out, by her enthusiastic attention. Often, she would beg me to attend events with her, claiming that she needed moral support due to some past trauma, only to leave me on the outside of a conversation. She wouldn’t speak to me or introduce me to other people. She would dominate any conversation of which she was a part. I just sort of would stand there, nod, and so forth.
When we traveled out of town to festivals, she was incredibly controlling about every aspect of a trip. We’d have to pick a hotel out months in advance. Every detail would be nit-picked over and over again, necessitating hours upon hours of phone calls and dialogue. On the trip, I was told what soap and shampoo and conditioner I could and could not use, due to her many chemical sensitivities and allergies. We couldn’t have the hotel room cleaned because that would make her asthma worse due to the cleaning products. We’d have to eat at certain times, and at certain places for her particular diet. And if I woke up early - which I always do, being the early riser and runner that I am - I would have to make sure to be extremely quiet otherwise she would get irritated. I couldn’t ever rush her to do something that I wanted to do. She’d keep me up late at night, even waking me up to talk after I had been asleep for a while. Seriously - on one of the trips, I actually wore the most industrial strength ear plugs that I could find, and when she woke me up, I’d simply fall back asleep as she chirped away at me, thinking that I was attentively listening.
Now that my own feelings seem to be coming to the surface more and more, I can easily see that I was miserable on these trips. Yet what did I get out of it? At the very core, I was stoked to have someone to go to shows with me, as there aren’t all that many women with similar interests in the types of music that I like. But that was about it. My therapist has suggested that I was re-enacting a scenario with my mother, as Joan was nearly twenty years my senior. It’s possible...I will admit that. I’ve heard and read that survivors of abuse often re-enact the scenarios with other people, just to have a chance to fix it.
What put me over the edge recently was that suddenly I became the object of Joan’s rage and paranoia. I had seen her do these kinds of strange things to “friends” in the past, saying that so-and-so was terribly mean to her just out of the blue so she had to cut them out of her life. I moved to the other side of the country from Joan about nine months ago, but continued to speak to her on the phone pretty regularly, considering how busy my own schedule is. In the past few months, though, she had been calling more and more often, wanting to talk about intense traumas each time. She would call four or five times in a row if I didn’t pick up - and I didn’t pick up only if I was not home. I couldn’t get off of the phone in less than an hour, and from the moment I answered the phone, she would deliver an intense rambling monologue about how someone had victimized her. I couldn’t get a word in, and she never simply would open a conversation asking how I was doing. I began to truly dread her calls, realizing that they just exhausted me. After researching NPD a couple of months ago, I started to see that Joan herself was a narcissist, and so I began to set boundaries with her. If I was in town, I wouldn’t stay at her house anymore. I limited the amount of time I would spend with her. With the phone, I asked that we could simply set a time to talk, rather than be bombarded with crazy frantic calls. I’m really busy with work, plus there’s a three hour time difference between where we live, so this just makes logistical sense. Plus I do this with most of my friends who don’t live here in town; it helps to have a “phone date” so that we will both be home at the same time to chat.
That request didn’t fly with Joan. What resulted was a string of nasty emails, meant to hurt me. She told me that I was uncaring and incapable of a “real” friendship, since I mainly communicated via email rather than the phone. I was lying; I ignored her phone calls. She could see me commenting on facebook when she was calling (I don’t know where she got that one from, honestly). How dare I schedule her in like any other appointment! Plus, I was JUST LIKE HER FAMILY - whom she has termed as abusive and sick to me in the past. To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised at her behavior, as I’d seen her do the same thing to our mutual friend who initially introduced us several years ago. I just knew it was coming, the firestorm of her narcissistic rage. How dare I not recognize how important she was...how dare I choose to spend a day with my husband (at his request) rather than speak to her for hours on the phone! Yeah.
I’ll admit, it did hurt, even though it didn’t really surprise me. Something interesting about my own recovery process is that things are starting to hurt with more frequency now. Rather than it taking a year or more to get upset about a particular situation, it happens within a couple of days, as it did in this case. I’m realizing that I’m starting to FEEL things for the first time, a common phenomenon with ACONs from what I’ve read.
In a weird way, I’m so relieved this happened. Joan was the last person in my life who was this way. Now that I understand the dynamic of a narcissist, it’s like I can smell it or something. It’s so obvious that I can’t believe I never saw it before; it’s almost like I’ve been in a cult for years and years and I’ve finally been deprogrammed so that I can see reality. Now that I understand the cycle, I can step off of the hamster wheel of insanity. I don’t have to go through this ever again.
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