Ending relationships is hard. It doesn’t matter who we are ending it with—a friend, a spouse, a sibling or parent—the very act of terminating a relationship is emotionally daunting. Well, I should amend that to say that if you have a modicum of compassion and empathy, ending a relationship is hard. For those who have little or no compassion and empathy, it can be shockingly easy.
We imbue our relationships with
values greater than their intrinsic value. Suppose you, in childhood, spent a
summer in a camp of some sort, and each room contained four children and an
adult chaperone. And let’s further suppose that the chaperone for your room was
not a warm, nurturing personality but, rather, cold and stand-offish. But she
still provided adequate food, shelter, and protection for you and your
roommates. During your time under her care, you would find your chaperone to be
the adult you trusted with fulfilling your most basic needs, right?
Now, let’s suppose that you return
home to a mother who is much like your counsellor: cold, aloof, unemotional.
She provides you with those things necessary for you to survive: food, shelter,
clothing, medical care, the means to meet peers and make friends but, like your
camp chaperone, she gives you nothing of herself. She is the adult you trust
with fulfilling your most basic needs. And yet, despite both women being much
the same—cool, aloof, detached, unemotional, unengaged—you will have different
perceptions of and different expectations for each one.
There are things called “loaded
words” in our vocabulary. A loaded word is one that conjures up emotions when
the word is read or heard. The word “plant,” for example, is emotionally
neutral whereas the word “flower” has positive connotations and the word “weed”
has negative ones (my father once told me that a “weed is just a plant growing
in the wrong place—a rose bush in a veggie garden is a weed”). Words like “new”
and “improved” are positively loaded words, and words like “dirty” and “grime”
are negatively loaded ones.
There are other words that we
imbue with additional meaning, words that evoke more than just negative and
positive emotions. The word “woman” is fairly neutral (unless you are a misogynist)
but the word mother, for most of us, evokes a sensation of safety, warmth,
love, and comfort. Even those of us who had distant, unloving mothers can find
a longing for those qualities. If you are single, the word “husband” or “wife”
may evoke feelings of everlasting love, security, and happiness, in keeping
with the fairy tales both ancient and contemporary that hold marriage as the
Holy Grail of human interaction—“and they got married and lived happily ever
after…” Or it may produce feelings of intense longing or even loss, even if we
have never been married, because we feel deprived of the kind of relationship
that would lead to that Holy Grail and the feelings we expect it to spawn.
Of those words we can identify as
being loaded, “Mother,” perhaps, is the most loaded word in the lexicon,
particularly for those of us whose mothers were toxic. The internet is awash
with maudlin paeans to mothers and motherhood, women who are less-than-stellar
human beings are perceived to have acquired social sainthood through the
expedient of giving birth. Women who spend their lives being bitchy, demanding,
overbearing and toxic are eulogized as saints due to the singular fact of their
having achieved motherhood. And even women who, prior to giving birth, would
have been considered potential candidates for Death Row due to their
anti-social tendencies, find themselves being given the benefit of the doubt
based solely on their status as mothers. The public expresses disbelief that
any mother could deliberately inflict harm on their offspring, and mothers who
kill their own children are viewed with literal disbelief: “She was his mother—how
could she do such a thing to her own child?”
People who express such disbelief—that
a woman could deliberately inflict harm on a child to whom she had given birth—exemplify
a large segment of the population. They believe in the myth of sainted
motherhood: all mothers automatically and without reservation love their
children unconditionally and would sacrifice all, including their own lives,
for the well-being of those children. The virtually universal belief in this
myth makes it tough on the survivors of such women, particularly if the
survivors did not suffer permanent physical damage to which we can point as
proof. If we have no burn scars or broken bones or permanent lash marks, our
ordeal becomes a mere “he said/she said” in the eyes of mother-worshippers
everywhere. And, because we don’t believe and we cast a shadow on their belief,
those of us who speak out are often greeted with disbelief and scorn, our
feelings and experiences invalidated by people who, for whatever reason, are
unwilling to entertain the idea that their belief in the universal sanctity of
motherhood might be in error.
Some of us had unloving fathers
but, because fathers in our society are less imbued with saintly qualities, and
because our mythology and history are full of frightening fathers with belts
and with “dead-beat dads” who abandon their offspring, we have less difficulty
in getting people to believe our fathers were difficult for us to survive. In
my case, I had a good father and a narcissistic mother and some people excused
their disbelief of my history in maintaining that if it was “that bad,” surely
my father would have interceded. But they completely overlooked a few salient
facts: 1) he didn’t know; 2) my mother was not one to be controlled; and 3) my
mother was spiteful—had he known and attempted to do anything about it, she
would have rained even more hell and damnation on me in retribution…which
exactly why he didn’t know—I didn’t tell him and she never went completely off
the rails on me when he was home.
It takes a lot of personal insight
and work to come to the realization that the reason your relationship with a
person is toxic is not your fault and the closer the relationship—the more “loaded”
the word that describes your relationship status—the more difficult it is to
recognize that you are not the cause of the toxicity. Be it a parent or spouse
or sibling or long-time friend, you can be in an unsatisfactory relationship
with a toxic person and not realize that the difficulties in the relationship
are not due to you. In particular, if that toxic person is your mother, you may
see yourself as the cause of the dissention because you are viewing her through
the lens of hope.
You can use this lens of hope on
anyone. If you feel that the appropriate relationship between sisters is to
love and support each other through thick and thin, to be BFFs, to always have
each other’s back, you are going to be thoroughly shocked when you finally
realize that your sister does not see the relationship the same way. One of the
biggest mistakes we make in life is that we expect others to treat us the way
we treat them and, in our closest relationships, for people to feel about us
the same way we feel about them. We can live for years—decades even—in denial,
pretending to ourselves that these people (who might even be our own children)
love us like we love them, and puzzling why they treat us in ways we would
never dream of treating them. So when we focus the lens of hope on someone and
expect their behaviour towards us to mirror our behaviour towards them, we set
ourselves up for repeated disappointment—and a long-term toxic relationship.
When we reach the point of
enlightenment—this relationship is toxic and it’s not my fault—we are faced
with a decision: continue the relationship as it is (because the toxic person
is not going to change) or exit the relationship. Many of us opt for continuing
the relationship simply because are unwilling to “give up” on the other person—in
other words, we continue to harbour hope that the other person will change in
order to accommodate us and a healthy relationship will then ensue. It is a
false, futile hope because people—all people including emotionally healthy
people—make changes for themselves, not others. They don’t change to
accommodate others, they change because they feel a change is needed or will be
beneficial to them in some way. And so, in order to have a healthy relationship
with you, your toxic person would have to perceive the relationship as toxic,
recognize herself as the toxic one, and take matters in hand to change that.
Has she done so? Has she taken even the first step, to recognize that the
relationship is toxic? Probably not because, for her, it isn’t—and that means
she either doesn’t believe it is toxic for you or she believes that if you
think it is toxic, then you must be the one to make changes.
And in a way, she is right. If the
person with whom you share a toxic relationship cannot recognize or acknowledge
that it is so or, she recognizes it but writes it off as your problem, then you
will be the one who has to take the steps to rectify the problem. And because
you cannot change anyone but yourself, you are going to have to do the hard
work of determining whether or not you can endure—for the rest of your life—this
person being how s/he is right now. Or, you are going to have to start
marshalling your inner resources for ending the relationship and setting
yourself free.
If anyone tells you that this is
easy, don’t take advice from him or her. If the other half of this relationship
can be described by one of those loaded words—mother, father, spouse, grandparent,
sibling, etc.—then unless you have reached the “thoroughly fed up” stage, this
is going to be hard…possibly the hardest thing you have ever done.
What is necessary for success is for
you to harden your heart and put yourself first. As the child of a narcissist, you
may find this to be a very difficult thing. We are conditioned from birth to
put others first and as a result, many of us end up in care-giving jobs and/or
choose partners who need nurturing and caring. It feels like going against our
nature to put ourselves ahead of others, especially a significant one like a
parent, spouse or sibling, but do it we must. If you are looking out for your
narcissist’s best interests and she is looking out for herself (and she is),
who is looking out for you? You need to step away from the toxic person and
start looking out for you. It will feel uncomfortable and alien at first, but
start doing for yourself all of those little things you used to do for him/her—and
stop doing them for him/her. Don’t call once a week or once a day or whatever
your schedule is—let her call you. Don’t make his coffee, pack his lunch, or do
things that you aren’t also doing for yourself (like cooking dinner). Let him
iron his own shirts, let your mother’s call go to voicemail, tell your sister “No!”
when she wants you to babysit her untrained, destructive dog (or kid). Start
letting go of all of those thoughtful little (and big) time-and-attention-consuming
things that you do for them and turn that time and attention on yourself.
Start loving yourself. If standing
up for yourself starts fights, then don’t start a fight. Keep silent, smile,
remind yourself that this what you are giving up—THIS—whatever it was that made
you feel defensive or hurt or stressed—is what will be in your past.
If you live with the toxic person,
either move out or make that person move out. Don’t call the person, don’t
accept calls from him/her. Don’t read texts (but save them for evidence) but
respond, just once, “Please stop contacting me.” If you are married, file for
divorce. Get a restraining order if they won’t leave you alone. Take every step
necessary to separate your life from his/hers because if they cannot see that
they are toxic to you before you reach the “fed up” stage they are never going
to see it.
We are often tempted to write that
final “what you did wrong and how you hurt me” letter but, in truth, they don’t
care. You will only be giving them a blueprint for how to hurt you again in the
future. Many times they will make attempt after attempt, either personally or
via flying monkeys, to reel you back in. They are without honour and think
nothing of lying to you, telling you the lies they think you want to hear, the
lies that will bring you back to their side, the lies they will use to bind you
to them.
The biggest of those lies is the
profession of love. It is what we all want—we want the words but even more, we want
to be the recipient of the deeds and the demeanour and the attitude that says
we are loved. Beware when professions of love and unaccustomed attention begin
to arrive as you are pulling away—they are the ultimate lies, the big guns,
trotted out to guilt you back into harness like a tame pony walking in endless
circles for their benefit rather than your own. Those words of love, were they
true, that attention, were it sincere, would have been caressing your ears and
warming your heart all along, not just trotted out like the good china for a
special occasion.
You have to harden your heart to
the very things you have yearned for all of these years. It sounds
counter-intuitive to do so, but the truth is, it is all deception. You will not
be hardening your heart to the love you have always wanted, you will be turning
away yet another onslaught of fakery, of being taken advantage of, of being
snookered and rooked and taken in by a toxic con-artist. The fact that this
person shares blood with you or spoke vows with you or has been at your side
for uncounted years is actually immaterial: this person has taken advantage of
you, betrayed your trust, and treated you like an afterthought for most—if not
all—of your relationship and now it has to stop. And, unfortunately, the only
way for you to ensure that the toxicity stops is to remove that person from
your life.
This is not something to view
lightly or undertake in haste. This needs to be a decision for the remainder of
your life, not a position to take as you wait for the toxic person to change.
This is a permanent step, a platform from which to launch the rest of your
life, a life that will not include the toxic person. No birthday or Christmas
or Mother’s Day greetings, no watching the person’s Facebook or Instagram to
see how she is doing or if he has moved on. It is the locking of a closed door
and the utter destruction of the key. It is the first step in more than a new
chapter in your life, it is the prologue to a whole new volume.
It is not easy and, as someone who
has removed both toxic family members and a toxic spouse from my life, I can
tell you that it is worth every tear shed, every urge squelched, every overture
repudiated. You can come away whole
from a toxic relationship, even one of many decades long—but you can only
succeed if you refuse to drag bits of it with you.
It isn’t easy but weaker, less
determined individuals than yourself have done it and succeeded. Remember to
love yourself first, make choices based on what is good for you, not for the toxic person you are
leaving behind. If s/he truly loved you, if the relationship had the barest
chance of being healthy and mutually rewarding, it would never have become
toxic…the other person would have put you and your well-being and happiness so
far ahead of his/hers, that the toxicity could never have gotten a foothold.
With two people giving to each other, thinking about the welfare and happiness
of the other, a relationship thrives. When both people in a relationship are
focussing on the happiness and well-being of only one of them, toxicity is the
inevitable result.
The relationship may be beyond
saving, but you are not.
