Why the Silent Treatment is the Weapon of Choice for Narcissists
By: Daisy Chains
Tags: Domestic Abuse, This Happened To Me, Narcissism, Women, Relationships

Don’t rely on your memory

You have been so used to the gaslighting, and being presented with different versions of events, you forget how disorienting and confusing it can be. It may be an everyday occurrence for you but writing down his actual words and behavior can make it easier for someone else to see him for the abuser that he is. Record anything that makes you unhappy or uncomfortable.

What is normal daily life to you will immediately sound alarm bells to a therapist or relationship counselor. Try to find one who has experience of helping domestic abuse victims.

Being believed is vital

If your mental health is going to survive, you need to surround yourself with people who know that you are telling the truth, even if they haven’t seen any evidence of abuse. Find people who know you well enough to stand in your corner, no matter what.

Cut toxic people out of your life

This might even be your immediate family, but if they don’t believe what you’re telling them, they are siding with the abuser.

If they want to believe but don’t want to listen to you, just tell them there is always another side to any story, when they are ready to hear it and leave them to consider their views. Don’t try to argue your point if they have made up their minds.

The best resource I have found is Lundy Bancroft’s book “Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men”.

Lundy had 15 years of experience working with abusers and their families through a program called Emerge, at the time of writing this book. It is full of useful tools, strategies, and insight.

Don’t take any blame on yourself

This is the first mistake that an outside viewer is going to make, that it takes two to tango. They want to see both sides as equally valid emotional beings in the situation, as would happen in most other relationship breakdowns. But not so in the relationship situation with a narcissist.

They hate you and want to destroy you because everything good in you makes them hate themselves more. It gnaws at them when you are sweet and loving and caring. They want to pummel your love into the ground and leave it bleeding and open and broken.

They want to make you into nothing so that they can feel something.

They want to make you into a little, terrified nobody, so they can feel like Superman with the power to do mighty things.

Don’t accept anyone saying you must have done something to upset him. This simply shows a lack of understanding of the nature of abuse.

When you are in a relationship with a narcissist nothing makes sense. They throw you into a spin and then make you feel like the cause of your own confusion. You are not the cause of the confusion, they are.

Speak your truth

“How dare you speak to me like that?” he yelled at me down the driveway of our former marital home.

And in one rare, karmic moment, the right response came to me, “Because I am not afraid of you anymore.”

At that moment it was true and no matter what he managed to throw at me during our divorce proceedings in the months and years following, and in using our children against me, fear was not a feature.

Despite everything, I always have that perfect exchange of words to hang on to. And it’s true. I found my voice and I am not afraid of him anymore.

“Do you realize what this has cost you?” he yelled at me on another occasion, meaning the legal cost of our divorce.

“Yes, I can never get those 20 years back”, I replied.