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.

How Narcissists use Guilt to Control You

As the children of narcissists, we are all familiar with that awful nagging feeling of guilt. If you were indoctrinated as a child by a narcissistic parent, you know not only the feeling of guilt for your behaviour, but guilt for just thinking about doing something the N won’t like and later, guilt that continues long after the deed is done—even if amends have been made.

One of the most powerful weapons a narcissistic parent wields is that of guilt—but for it to work, we have to be complicit.

What is guilt?

Guilt is part of your conscience. Its purpose is to keep you on the straight and narrow. If you are contemplating doing something wrong, your conscience will send you a little pang of guilt to give you a taste what you are going to get if you go ahead and do it. Then, if you go ahead and do it anyway, your conscience sends you more guilt to punish you and to motivate you to fix whatever it was you damaged with your wrongdoing.

In a person with a healthy psyche, someone who grew up in an emotionally healthy environment, this works exceedingly well. It is part of our internalization of morality, and occurs gradually as we mature, moving from external controls on our behaviour to internal. We grow into moral beings and do what is right for no other reason than it is right, not because we fear consequences or expect reward: this is normal, healthy guilt.

Unfortunately for ACoNs, we may internalize the morality but, because we learn that morality from narcissistic parents, it may be strikingly different from the morality learned by others who had more normal, emotionally balanced role models. A normal parent will encourage their children to strike out on their own when the time for separation from the family draws near. They will facilitate individuation, encourage kids to make their own decisions, move into their own quarters, contribute when help is needed and solicited, and generally behave like an adult. Such parents will try to keep their own separation anxiety at bay—or at least hidden—lest it check the child’s forward impetus. Good parents, appropriate, functional, emotionally healthy parents, want to see their chicks successfully fly. Narcissistic parents, on the other hand, often want to keep them tied to the nest with fear, obligation and guilt.

It is easy to see how an engulfing or enmeshing parent binds their children to them with overwhelming contact, expectations, and demands. But even ignoring parents prompt guilt from their marginalised offspring, especially if there are other children in the family who are not ignored and scapegoated. These ignored children often grow up feeling inadequate, that they were somehow defective, and feel responsible for the treatment they receive from their dysfunctional parent. They feel stupid and further inadequate that they have been unable to figure out what is wrong and fix it so their parent can acknowledge and love them like their siblings. This makes them feel guilty—their sense of inadequacy, their apparent inability to live up to the unspoken expectations of their narcissist parents, makes them feel guilty for falling short of the mark—a mark they have not yet been able to see but is obviously there and, based on the observed acceptance of the siblings, attainable. This guilt is toxic guilt: it is guilt that does not come from real wrong doing, it comes from the manipulation of your conscience to see wrong doing—on your part only—when, in fact, you are not committing any wrongs at all. It is a tool, implanted into your psyche early in your life, to give your N a way to easily control you in the future.

How it works

Narcissistic parents raise their children to believe they are wrong about anything that is contrary to the family party line. If mother turns little Nell into a household servant, Nell is wrong to object because of all of the sacrifices her Mum has made for her—twelve days of labour and a gazillion stitches to produce a gargantuan infant who cried all of the time and wouldn’t let Mummy sleep or have a life. But Mummy put up with it and bowed to the overwhelming demands of the infant Nell and for that Nell owes Mum—and she owes her bigtime!

The price is never finite nor does it have an expiry date: the fact of being born makes Nell beholden to her mother for the rest of her days. The specifics may be different for each NParent and SG Child dyad, but the outcome is the same: the child becomes Fearful of the loss of the parent upon whom they continue to depend emotionally (and sometimes economically) long past the time they should have individuated and struck out on their own. The child feels a deep sense of Obligation to the NParent that goes beyond any logic or tit-for-tat accounting. That obligation becomes an ingrained part of the child’s belief and value systems—she owes her parent for her very existence, as well as any investment the parent has made (food, clothing, shelter, lessons, etc.)—and the parent, being the authority figure, gets to determine how—and for how long—that obligation will be repaid. To keep the child producing the desired product—Nsupply in whatever form the NParent wants it—there is Guilt. Whenever the child appears to be contemplating disobeying a parental command, guilt is the weapon that will whip her back into line.

Why?

Because guilt hurts. It is a very uncomfortable emotion that literally makes us squirm. People who lack a conscience do not have to deal with guilt: they rationalize and justify it away. But people who seek to avoid feeling guilty because of the discomfiting nature of it, do whatever they can to keep it at bay. Narcissists know this but they do not share it, so they can shamelessly manipulate others with no sense of guilt on their part, and they manipulate you by inducing guilt.

As we get older, we internalize the values our parents taught us, good and bad. So if your NParent heaped guilt and punishment on you for violating their self-serving demands, over time you will absorb that; you will come to believe that they are owed your fealty, that your proper role in life is to sacrifice yourself for them, to care for them even at the expense of your own life and other relationships. Their wants are needs that surpass your duty to all others, including your spouse and children.

Once you have been successfully indoctrinated, you may take on these values yourself. Some of us will pass these values and beliefs and expectations down to our own children, while others of us will recognise that something indefinable is wrong and treat our own children differently, all the while submitting to our Ns ourselves.

You control yourself for them

When you reach the point of internalizing the values of the N, when you have come to believe that you are bad or wrong to not want to continue to cater to them like a servant, when you reach the point that you not only believe but act on those beliefs, you have been overtaken by and are trapped in the F.O.G. (http://narcissistschild.blogspot.co.za/2017/02/trapped-in-f-o-g.html). Your Ns no longer need to apply manipulation techniques to control you and get you to do their bidding, your own psyche, so well trained by them, does it for them. They express a desire and you provide it, despite inconvenience, cost, or even detriment to your marriage and family. You become the taskmaster and they need to step in and provide you with a refresher only when you show signs of coming out of the F.O.G. and thinking rationally about the situation. But as long as you independently capitulate to their wishes, be the person they want you to be, all is good—for them.

But all is not so good with us. We are caught in a vise, squeezed from both sides—our sense of obligation to our NParents vs our yearning for the freedom to plot our own course without being interrupted, side-lined, or co-opted by the parents we should have outgrown years before. We feel anxious but don’t know why. We have glimpses of dreams in which we are fully autonomous, able to go and do and think and say whatever we want without guilt suffocating us and pushing back to where we are—but don’t want to be. Guilt controls us and, because we don’t like the feeling of guilt—it brings up mental images of abandonment which are terrifying—we do whatever is necessary to send the guilt back to its lair, waiting for the next time we have an independent or “disloyal” thought. People who seek to avoid feeling guilty because of the discomfiting nature of it, do whatever they can to keep it at bay—and if that means catering to the giant maw of need that is our NParent, that is what we do.

If we are conscious of what we are doing, we might feel bad about giving the short-shrift to our children or spouse in favour of our ravenous NParents but that won’t stop us, it only adds to our guilt. Often, however, we are not conscious of how our own families are sacrificed to the demands of the narcissists in our lives, sacrifices made solely because we are stuck in that F.O.G and we feel compelled to protect ourselves from the overwhelming guilt that comes with resisting the N’s demands.

If we have the audacity to open our eyes and we screw up the courage to resist the toxic guilt, our Ns are ready to drag us back into our roles through manipulation and heavy-duty guilt tripping. They send in flying monkeys to reproach us and turn up the guilt in an effort to push us into reassuming our roles as NSuppliers; they instigate smear campaigns to shame us to people outside the family circle in order to recruit them into contacting us with further reproach—toxic guilt is the hammer with which they attempt to beat us back into the narrow confines of the role defined for us by our Ns, that of their personal source of unlimited NSupply.

They can’t succeed without your help

Like it or not, believe it or not, if your NParent successfully manipulates you with toxic guilt, you are complicit in your victimization. Why? Because as long as you are willing to avoid feeling guilty by doing their bidding, you are allowing them to manipulate you. You do have the option of saying “no” and refusing to be manipulated, but like anything else in this life, it is going to have consequences. In acceding to their wishes, you avoid the consequence of feeling guilty by allowing yourself to be emotionally enslaved; by resisting their wishes you invite the consequence of feeling guilty—either way, you will have an unpleasant consequence to deal with.

Guilt, especially toxic guilt, is an ugly, painful thing. It makes us feel ashamed, even humiliated. It can even feel physical, with unsettled stomach, shortness of breath, muscle tension, sweating, and a general feeling of revulsion—it is understandable that we would want to avoid those feelings, to not have toxic guilt rattling around our brains and generating the anxiety symptoms in our bodies. The easiest way to avoid them is to capitulate to your N’s expectations, no matter how outrageous, self-serving and disruptive to your life those expectations may be. It works—but only until the next time.

The other way to avoid the toxic guilt is to confront it. Deconstruct it. Take it apart, examine it, and come to your own conclusions. Do you really, truly owe your N a lifetime of licking their boots? At what point does your child’s obligation to you end? Did your obligation to your NParents end at that time? Why not? By deconstructing toxic guilt, by examining it minutely and finding and keeping only the kernel of healthy guilt that the toxic guilt was built upon, you free yourself from toxic guilt—and from the manipulations and machinations of your Ns.

Will that stop them from trying to manipulate you? No. Will it stop the flying monkeys from pursuing you? No again. It will not change anybody but you. It may have a knock-on effect of improving your relationship with your husband and kids—and it may not. In fact, if your husband or kids are on your NM’s Flying Monkey roster, it may make things worse as you step out of the F.O.G. and they stay tightly wrapped in it.

So why do it? Well, if you are truly happy as you are, if being manipulated by NParents and doing their bidding and devoting your life to them and theirs really thrills you to your toes, then I can’t think of a reason for you to change your current situation. But if the manipulation and the drama and the expectations that you live your life as an extension of theirs has worn thin, then perhaps it is time to give the devil you don’t know a chance. You already know what the next 10, 20, even 50 years are going to be like if you stick with the status quo and if that doesn’t make your toes curl with happy anticipation, your only alternative is to make a change and not let the Ns control you anymore.

They can’t do it without your cooperation, and you are under no obligation to give it.