Living with a narcissist changes you. Being raised by one not only changes you, the changes you have to make to survive such a parent literally shape who you are, how you see the world, and your very beliefs—even your beliefs about yourself.
If you had been raised in a functional household by
relatively normal parents, the changes you make when you first get involved
with a narcissist are changes that overlay your fundamental Self, the Self that
was formed in a functional household with loving, supportive, normal parents
and role models. These changes are like a sticker that is affixed atop the
person you grew up to be. And when you break up with the narcissist, the
sticker may be painful and difficult to remove, but underneath, your original Self
still exists—a bit battered and wary, perhaps, but there just the same. In
fact, your original Self is probably what initiated the breakup with the
narcissist in the first place.
But when you are raised by narcissists, it is considerably
different. You may have an intact core personality buried under all those adaptive
measures taken to survive a narcissistic parent, but the person you know
yourself to be, the person you show the world, and the beliefs you have adopted
and live by are the only Self that you know. There is no “original Self”
beneath the layers of adaptations because she has never been allowed to develop
and come into her own.
And that is what therapy and recovery is all about: peeling
back the layers of adaptive behaviours and beliefs, salvaging what is healthy
and serviceable, discarding that which is maladaptive, and creating new
behaviours and beliefs that become your real Self. It is an arduous and often
painful journey, fraught with self-doubt and obstacles but a journey each one
of us can successfully complete given a good therapist and sincere motivation.
But we do not easily come to the realization that our recovery
from narcissistic abuse is a journey we must undertake alone. Because our
wounds were inflicted by others, too often we adopt the belief that our
recovery from those wounds is also in their hands. Our narcissists must stop
hurting us, must change their hurtful ways, must apologize for their sins
against us and make amends and then we will miraculously be fine. A parallel
belief is that once our Ns disappear from our lives through death or No
Contact, we will be magically healed and become normal, functional, happy
people.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The death of a narcissistic parent throws up all sorts of
emotional turmoil. From relief at no longer being the go-to person for working
off a nasty mood to grief at the loss of hope that someday it might get better,
ACoNs get every emotion the adult child experiences at the death of a normal
parent plus the unique combination of relief, guilt, and fear that belongs to
the children of the abusive parent. You are going to see the same denial,
anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance that everyone else has to deal
with, crowned with relief at being finally released from the chains of being
her whipping post, guilt for your relief (and anything else you may or may not
have done that the N thought you “should” have or not have done), and even a
kind of free-floating anxiety/unnamed fear. What you are not going to feel is
normal. Or healed. Or even free.
Why is that? Because you long ago internalized your N in
your head, where she will live and control you for the rest of your days unless
you get proactive about changing things. The source of the problem, whether
your N is alive or dead, is inside your own head and only you can fix that.
The good news is that you can fix this. The better news is
that you don’t have to wait for your Ns to die to fix it. The not-so-good-news
is that the fix takes time—years, possibly—and it is painful, and you may have
to let go of a lot of stuff you presently hold dear: ideas, beliefs,
possessions, even people. And you are going to have to do it alone because
nobody, not even a therapist, can do it for you. And in the end you will be a
different person from who you are today and a lot of people you know today are
not going to like the new you.
That may sound discouraging, but if you take the time to really
think about it, this is actually a good thing. How many people “love” you
because of your dysfunctionality? Are you the person who never says “no,” who
loans money, gives time, puts up friends, takes in unwanted pets, cast off
furniture and bric-a-brac, never complains or speaks up? Wouldn’t it be lovely
to have friends and family whose esteem for you was not inextricably linked to
your value as a pushover? An easy mark? The person they can depend on to never,
ever put herself first?
This who your Ns trained you to be: a person who puts
herself last and who never allows even her own needs to interfere with the wants and expectations of others. Does
that sound noble and good to you? It’s not. It is self-abusive and
self-destructive. And if you are counting on the death of those Ns who trained
you to be your release from servitude, you are in for a bitter, bitter
disappointment because their deaths will not release you from a prison in which
your own psyche has taken over warden duties.
The death of a narcissistic parent is an opportunity for
healing…it means that the active emotional assaults from this parent are now
over. Oh, there may be some rude surprises with the will and the obituary and
even the services, but those are finished within a month or so and then you are
on your own, no longer waiting for the next onslaught. But the Flying Monkeys
are still around and you can bet they are eager to remind you of what NM
thought, what is expected of you, and to keep her ugly legacy alive. And, of
course, there is the NM in your head, heaping guilt on you for wishing her
dead, being relieved at her death, and for daring to think of behaving or
thinking or believing differently from the way she groomed you.
Your narcissist’s death will not set you free. You remain
the same wounded person you were one moment before death claimed her. You still
believe you are unworthy or unlovable or a failure or ugly or worthless or a
clueless incompetent or whatever it was your N programmed you to believe when
you were a helpless child with no life experience to give you any idea of the real
truth about yourself. And you will stay stuck right there, captive of a dead
narcissist, until you take action to free yourself.
Only you can do that and you don’t have to wait for him to
die to begin. But nobody can set you free if you aren’t willing to literally
defy all that you have been taught, to question even your most fervent beliefs,
and to change at least some of what you believe and embrace ideas and concepts
that are antithetical to what you have been taught to date. Only by taking
control of your life, by becoming your own authority figure and repudiating the
pseudo-authority that Ns and their Flying Monkeys assume, do you have any hope
of becoming free.
And you don’t have to wait for your N to die to do that…