Ending Toxic Relationships: it's not easy

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.

Narcissism’s Relationship Trap

Before I knew anything about narcissism, before I entered therapy, before I realized that nothing I could do would make my mother love me, I got married to a man who I thought was a prince among men.

I had already been in terrible relationships with abusive, selfish men and in my 27-year-old wisdom decided that any man I could live with for a year and still feel good about would be The One. I had long since given up the notion that my partner had to be handsome or buff or Mr. Personality…I had settled on sober, dependable, trustworthy, intelligent, reasonably well-educated and having a steady job that paid well as indispensable criteria, and once I found a man like that if, after a year, I had not discovered he was a wife beater or a skirt chaser or mean and punitive, he would be a viable candidate for marriage. Nobody, after all, can hide their true personality for a whole year, ya know?

Well, I was wrong…in fact, not only could he hide the reality of himself for a whole year, in later years I found a friend whose boyfriend concealed who and what he really was for four years. I probably don’t have to tell you that my marriage didn’t work out the way I wanted it to.

What brings this up today is that I realized that, after figuring out that my mother was a narcissist, I recognized that my ex-husband was one too…and this weekend I realized that my present husband shares many traits and tastes with my narcissistic ex-husband.

But this is not a bad thing. You see, during that first year, my ex (who I will call “James” here to prevent any confusion) was exactly what I was looking for: he was patient and accommodating, dependable, trustworthy, and all of those other things I was looking for in a partner. He was an engineer, so he was technically minded, he was highly intelligent, and better educated than I was. His personal interests included finance and economics and politics, and he had little quirks like keeping a logbook of all of the money he spent on fuel and maintenance of his car, recorded with the date, reason for cost, and the amount. He also regularly calculated his gas mileage from this log. He could watch TV movies back-to-back for an entire day, movies he recorded on VHS tape…and he would watch those movies with a magazine in his lap, reading articles on finance and economics while he watched TV. He liked my cooking. He was a good earner and seemed to be good with money…all things that should make a good husband.

But, interestingly enough, everything I said about James in the previous paragraph also applies to my present husband! Even that quirky little thing about recording the costs for the car…James kept a ledger book in the glove compartment, my present husband does it on his smart phone. My relationship with James lasted 13 years and my husband and I have been together for the same length of time. But with James, after a decade I was a crumbling shell of the woman I had been when we met, broken, barely functioning, suicidal. Earlier this month my husband and I celebrated our 11^th anniversary and I am looking forward to another eleven and even more.

So, what is the difference? Why would I respond to these two very similar men in such a different fashion? The answer lies not in what is similar between them, but their differences. And not superficial differences but those things that go deep into a person’s character.

One of the problems we ACoNs may face is choosing friends and partners and inadvertently choosing to bring more narcissists into our lives. Narcissists are very good at mimicking normal, they are excellent at making themselves look like the answer to your dreams…until they have you hooked. And they have an almost unerring radar for finding those of us who were raised to be a scapegoat, a provider of NSupply to narcissists near and far. They find us like wolves find wounded prey animals and then they do whatever is necessary to get us into position for the kill. And we, deprived of the most basic love and nurturing during our formative years, are suckers for people who appear to fill our shamefully neglected emotional needs.

James knew I was burned by flaky men who took advantage and then took off. They got what they wanted by pretending to give me what I needed. Raised by a narcissist mother and a largely absent father, I was hypervigilant to the moods of my narcissist and learned quickly that anticipating her needs/wants and providing them before they were demanded was the best way to stave off the explosions of wrath. My mother was extremely volatile, emotionally, and had the terrifying ability to go from sweet and smiling to a full-blown screaming rage in the blink of an eye…and back to sweetly smiling just as fast. Living with her was like living in a mine field with just a few paths of safety mapped out…and one of those paths was to give her what she wanted before she demanded it.

This, of course, set the stage for my “operating condition” for the years that followed. I managed to hook up with men who, like my mother, had volatile personalities and, to prevent explosions, I employed my hypervigilance and anticipatory ways. Whatever, whoever they wanted me to be, I would be in their presence (just like in my childhood, however, the mouse would be and do whatever she wanted when the cat was away). This pattern of behaviour, however, was not conducive to the establishment and perpetuation of a healthy long-term relationship. Once the men got what they wanted from me, they abandoned me or abused me until I left them. By age 26 I had three children and had been abandoned by my last boyfriend when our child was only a few months old.

I was never a stupid person and I tried to learn from the events in my life. What I had the most trouble with was figuring out when a person was fooling me and when he was sincere. The father of my youngest child stayed with me throughout my pregnancy, supported me and was what I considered to be kind and loving. Once the baby was born, however, he began pulling away and by the time I had recovered from my Caesarean enough to return to work, he was gone. For a long time I wondered what I might have done to drive him away, but I later learned that I was the first of three women he did this too…he even married the third one but abandoned her and their baby when the child was just a few months old. Obviously, he had an issue but just as obviously, I seemed to be incapable of determining whether or not a man had an issue that would cause him to leave me—or abuse me—before getting involved with him.

James seemed like a breath of fresh air. He was a professional man, unlike my previous lovers, well-educated, well-read, well-spoken. One of the things I remember finding wondrous about him was his patience, something my mother and previous male partners seemed to have in short supply. I remember James taking me to a pharmacy to fill a prescription and I apologized in advance for the time it was going to take, for taking up his valuable time waiting around for me. He shrugged and said “No problem…why don’t you leave the baby in the car with me while you are in there, then you won’t have to deal with him as well as everything else?” I was amazed and I remember congratulating myself for finally finding a man with some patience and sensitivity. How could I have known it was just an act?

Well, forty years later, I have the answer to that question: if he seems too good to be true, he is. Real people have flaws and they show them. Nobody is perfect…oh, he can be “perfect for you,” as my husband is for me, but that means that he has flaws that you find acceptable, even endearing…imperfections that you can live with or even enjoy. A person with no faults is either faking it to impress you or s/he is a narcissist, being what will attract you until you are hooked and s/he can abandon the disguise.

James managed to last for an entire year and, against my better judgment, I married him. I say “against my better judgment” because I let my logical mind and my need for security overrule my intuition, which had seen—and dismissed—numerous red flags during the year. I had already failed at marriage and didn’t really want to marry again, but I had made the cardinal error of letting him know too much about my inner workings…he knew just how emotionally insecure I was and how badly I wanted a house of my own so I could feel secure (somehow I had equated the two…I believed when I had my own house, I would no longer feel as if the rug was about to be yanked out from beneath me). When I balked at his blandishments about marriage and he finally took on board that I was afraid to get married again, lest I fail at it another time, he bribed me with the promise of a house of my own. And that was the tipping point.

Superficially, James and my present husband are very much alike, but when you analyse them, what shakes out is that my present husband is the genuine article…he is, in real life, what James pretended to be for the year before I married him. My criteria were fine…what I wanted in a husband was not unusual or unhealthy…for the last eleven years I have had a husband who fits that criteria very well. They even share some quirky behaviours, like the log book for the car and where James watched TV with a magazine in his lap, my present husband has his tablet and is reading on-line articles about politics, economics, and finance while watching movies he has recorded on the PVR. The difference between James and my present husband is that I gave James enough information in our early days for him to figure out what kind of man I wanted and he recreated himself to appear to be that man; my husband was himself from the beginning and over time it became obvious that he really is what James pretended to be.

For the longest time I wondered what I did to cause James to change from the loving, patient, attentive man I agreed to marry into the monster I ended up with. For more than ten years I turned myself inside out, trying to find the magic key to unlocking the door behind which was hidden the wonderful man I married. I took the blame for his change, believing it was something I did or said that caused him to turn into a cruel, manipulative, short-tempered, selfish, inhumane excuse for a human being. I believed if I could discover what it was I did or said that caused him to change, I could have the man I married back. It was not until I discovered narcissism that I began to understand that the monster was the real man, the loving partner I thought I married was the fake.

It was an epiphany and the implications were huge. It wasn’t my fault…he wasn’t a monster because of something I did or said…or didn’t do or say…he was a monster because that was the real man, the man behind the mask of kindness and patience and love. Where I was at fault was in letting him know early on what I needed or wanted in a partner so that he could create himself to be that person. In seeking to evoke his empathy with my sad tale of childhood abuse and bad luck in adult love relationships, I gave him a detailed blueprint of what he needed to pretend to be in order to win me. And, in my tales of a life of woe, I confirmed to him that I was a well-trained scapegoat, a well-skilled provider of N-supply, a person who would subordinate the very essence of herself to obtain even the merest crumbs of approval and affection. I was as irresistible to a narcissist as a wounded hare to a fox, and he was determined to not only have me, but to bind me to him through marriage so that I couldn’t just pick up and walk away when his abuse became too much.

In my epiphany, I further discovered that I was a willing accomplice in my victimization: I told him everything he needed to know to entrap me. I let him know what hurt me, I reacted to probes into my feelings so he knew what my triggers were. I ignored the red flags that popped up regularly, even when my conscious mind knew better…I ignored them because they got in the way of what I wanted. If I acknowledged them, I would have to end the relationship and start all over again with a new man and a new set of unknowns. The idea of going it alone, with no man and without wanting a man in my life, never occurred to me.

It took ten years for me to really wake up and see what had really been going on. Even then, I knew nothing about narcissism, but I knew I had married a male version of my mother and that was a bad thing. My fear of my mother coupled with her hostility and indifference to my feelings led me to contemplate suicide for the first time when I was nine, and to my first attempt when I was seventeen. James and his cruel indifference led me to the same brink. And when I finally put them together, thanks to a heavy hint from an insightful therapist, I was horrified: I had married the male counterpart to my mother and had been trying to resolve my issues with her by trying to find ways to make my marriage work. I had taken on all of the blame and responsibility for the flaws in the relationship, believing I was somehow provoking his gaslighting, triangulating, and fault-finding. And as long as I believed that, I was trapped in the web, a willing but unwitting prisoner.

My present husband, on the surface, is much like my ex. The difference is simply that James was pretending to be what I wanted in a man, my present husband actually is. And at the time I married James, I had neither the knowledge nor the self-confidence to actually see that James was pretending and because I lacked those abilities, I set up a hurdle for him to leap, reasoning that if he could succeed, then he would be a good husband. In theory there is nothing wrong with that, but in practice I made a critical error: the hurdle I created had nothing to do with reality. I could have set up “he can knit potholders” as the hurdle and gotten just as accurate a result.

We who were raised by narcissists are especially vulnerable to them…they can pick us out of a crowd like a cutting horse can cut a calf out of a herd. And we respond to them because we have been conditioned to do so…they fit seamlessly into our “comfort zone,” especially if we haven’t done any real work to redefine that comfort zone. And while we can design little rat mazes for them to run through to prove to us they aren’t going to hurt us, if our little mazes aren’t based on reality, it isn’t going to work. And even if the mazes are based on reality, if we allow ourselves to dismiss those red flags, if we explain them away, then we still end up at the end of a narcissist’s specimen pin.

Coming from a narcissistic upbringing makes us vulnerable to choosing these kinds of partners…and friends, too. We need to learn to put what we want to see in people secondary to what we really, uncomfortably, observe. When we can start acknowledging those red flags and not dismissing them, when we can put the fairy tale relationship we carry in our heads away and stop trying to fit the most recent lover or friend into the role, we begin to make progress. Key to this is to stop trying to find reasons to find a person acceptable…to give up the idea that we can or should remake a person to fit our ideals…and simply accept or reject a person based on whether or not they already fit into our own personal scheme of things.

And that brings me back to my husbands…obviously my criteria and my tastes have held constant and what I wanted was neither unreasonable nor unhealthy. My mistake was in ignoring the red flags and not allowing myself to recognize that James really didn’t fit my needs, he was just pretending to. My present husband, though, fits the criteria admirably: he is, for real, what James merely pretended to be for a year.

In retrospect, it turns out it was not all that difficult to do. If you start with a realistic and healthy set of expectations in a partner, pay attention to the red flags in the people you meet, avoid the temptation to try to change people to fit into your criteria, and have sufficient patience, your odds of successfully avoiding the relationship trap set for you by your narcissistic upbringing are excellent.