As a Child of a Narcissist, when you cry it doesn’t fix the pain – they don’t get better. You are still trapped in a home with two parents who are emotionally immature, damaged, wounded and are so detached from their own pain and have no self-awareness. Without self-awareness, from a parent, you are stuck with them. As Is. I cried growing up, all the time. I cried because I felt unloved, unwanted, that no one would listen to me. I felt like a robot living my mom’s life, behaving like my dad wanted. I didn’t know who I was. After I met the guy who would later become my husband and faced his abuse and detachment, I began to cut. This was before it was a “trend” something you read about on social media. I didn’t even know this was a “thing.” I just scratched and scratched until blood came out. I wore long sleeves so no one would see what I was doing. Meanwhile, if I cried, I would hear “Why are you crying? You have no reason to cry” from my mom. Or my dad, when punishing us would say “If you cry, I will whip you more. Toughen up.” They saw my arms and said, “What did you do to yourself?” I can’t recall the excuse I made up. Maybe they said I was crazy.

When I tried to get away from my husband, a few years later – to escape back to Ohio, I was honest with him. We fought and broke everything in the house and then he grabbed our son and went to leave saying – you will never see your son again. I picked up a piece of broken glass and slit both wrists. It forced him to have to stop and take me to the hospital telling me all the way “They are going to lock you up in a jail or nuthouse! You’re crazy!” I just held the dish towel on my arms for dear life and hoped I wouldn’t be locked up.

I ended up losing my son, as I mentioned in my previous post “The Child of the Narcissist,” through the court system. He had AWOLed from the Navy and I was going to end up on welfare with no child support, since the father had disappeared. And when I did lose my son, I finally stopped crying for many years. I was numb. The crying from childhood never helped. Trying to commit suicide wasn’t an answer. Cutting was a waste of time and made me look stupid. I just went numb and then I began to soothe myself through men. This was my coping device. It was fun and exciting. There was a pretense that we would get married, have children together, get my son back, it didn’t happen.

I was now an emotionally immature and confused adult and the years of losing my son kept growing. He’d come for visits and my mom would play some mind game with me. For example: I’d send him back for a family event and then she wouldn’t put him on the return trip back to me. It was a never-ending battle. He probably had Reactive Attachment Disorder, but I didn’t know what that was back then. I know he definitely has Major Depression now and he soothed this with drugs and women. It is a family dynamic that I have worked on as a psychotherapist – now, but can only change myself. Back then, I just kept wandering around through life. Not crying but being numb to the pain, to life.

My baby brother died at 16, in a car accident. For this, I did cry. I broke down, finally, on the casket at the church and then at the gravesite where I had to be dragged away from the coffin. Ironically, the man who dragged me away was my dad’s best friend who would die a year later from cancer. After the tears, I flew back to California again and continued being numb. Only this time, I told myself that I didn’t deserve to be in a relationship. I just wanted to have fun and fuck life. I forgot I had said that to myself until just a couple of years ago. I un-did that curse that I put on myself right before Paul came back for good.

After my brother died, I was with an abusive person for a minute and left him for Paul. Neither of us were ready for a relationship. We didn’t even pretend. But there was something there, I wouldn’t understand until now and we had so many lessons to learn in the meantime. And even still, back then, he left, I drank a bottle of wine and sat there on my stoop in pain. Then there were other relationships, one after another.

I went to therapy, time after time. It was talk therapy as we were still figuring it all out in the professional world. My therapists never told me I had PTSD. They didn’t mention my boyfriends were narcissists. One told me my mom was and this never went far from my head while I was in graduate school for psychology. Crying never came back though, just struggling to live life. I couldn’t get it out. It didn’t seem like this would accomplish anything either. I held it all in.

I met a player and had a relationship with him in the 2000’s. I cried when he left for about an hour. I didn’t understand the games. There was a relationship and then there wasn’t. He was tricky, I was confused. Paul called me before him, and I almost went to him, but then I didn’t. It was one of those “Y” pathways in life where you want to go one way, but you end up choosing another. I felt lost and confused, choosing the other, and went through more life lessons. In 2008, a few months before my job took me on a roller coaster ride and when I didn’t realize I was going through peri-menopause, Paul called again and this time I planned to go to him, but then backed out at the last minute. I devastated him and it was the second time I made the wrong turn no the “Y.”

I moved to Ohio, in a fog of dissociation but eager to go full circle to change my life. This was a romantic delusion of jumping off into the deep end, hoping that this time I would not fall into an empty pool. I began to take narcissism more seriously as a path for my practice that I would open up a few years later. The lessons were learned, I was a good psychotherapist, good with boundaries, owned my own house and then I met a covert narcissist. Thank God I was the person I was then. It was 15 months of hint after hint and me going into denial, trying to fix it. Then finally my first experience with gaslighting – as a break-up and boom, out came the tears. For months and months, for hours and hours, a flood of tears raged from my eyes. During this period of weeping, I began to realize I was mourning years and years of unexpressed pain and suffering. I saw that I was humiliated too, as a psychotherapist. I saw the mistakes I had made with this last person and little by little began to pray and meditate and work on myself, workshop after workshop on narcissism until I really got it right this time.

I ended my curse, as I mentioned earlier, and Paul called one more time. He needed me and I needed him. We spoke on the phone for several months until he moved in with me here. We began a life together. Not the one we were supposed to have in 1989, or 2002, or 2008, but the one that was meant for us to live now. We know that it was not a coincidence that we didn’t get together previously, that other things were meant to play out in our life first. I know on a spiritual level it had to do with karma and bringing me to the Survivor Turned Expert, with a license to help people understand on a psychological level what it is to be in this type of relationship. I am an “experience” person, not a learn from other’s mistakes. I have to do it to teach it. It has to do with being an empath, a Highly Sensitive Person, and to intuitively connect with each and every woman (and now men are turning to me) who are survivors of narcissists.

The last time I cried, I got it all out. The tears created a river that I am happily kayaking down and able to see both sides of the shore. The dissociation has begun to lift (my final PTSD symptom). The way forward, for the first time in my life, makes sense. I say that to say, until now, I was guessing, following hunches, being led intuitively. When I look back on the past, to write it, it seems like another lifetime. I was a different person than I am now. When I look back on the first years of my practice, I was a different person than I am now. And when I look back five years from now, I will be proud of myself for finally bringing it all together. I am proud now but there will be something more significant then that I am starting to build now. Thank you for reading and joining me on this journey.