1 year after divorce — I realized it wasn’t just toxic, it was abuse.
By: Maureen Fitzgerald
Tags: Narcissism, Healing, Divorce, Narcissistic Abuse, Toxic Relationships

Migos and I in Neskowin, OR

Coming home from a long road trip of searching and reflecting on 29 years of life, I slowly drove down a familiar street filled with shops and restaurants I’d always loved. There was a new sign on the corner I did not recognize, or perhaps I hadn’t wanted to see until now.

It read “Narcissist Abuse Counseling”.

Despite the year and a half of therapy I had already endured due to an explosion of a marriage followed by divorce, those three words had never made their way into the same sentence for me. I knew my ex-husband to be a narcissist, but I had only categorized him as toxic and someone to never speak to again. Abuse, though? I was unfamiliar with this word its application to my life.

I followed my curiosity and found the book POWER: Surviving and Thriving After Narcissistic Abuse by Shahida Arabi. Although resistant to reopen the wounds of my marriage and divorce, I felt myself leaning into the words on the paper as if it were the only way home. The knot in my stomach tightened and I reminded myself to take deep breaths as Arabi laid out the patterns and manipulations of narcissists. The love bombing and idealization. Stone walling and devaluation. Gaslighting, and triangulation. Each applied to my relationship with my ex-husband. Did he and those other motherfuckers get the same handbook or something?

I’d been categorized by my therapist as a co-dependent because of my ex-husband’s addiction issues (which I’d only learned about after we had tied the knot). I’d believed that I had enabled his drug use, and that I was in a relationship with him because I was also broken. And because my wounded inner child just had to save this person for validation. I spent a year and a half ruminating on the relationship and justifying what happened, trying to understand how I enabled his behavior. Because of this, I’ve been endlessly white-knuckling my emotions, believing I could not trust myself because my codependency was so out of control that I put myself in a miserable situation. I did not believe I could make good decisions and I lived in shame from my “brokenness.” I believed I’d unconsciously “asked” for this toxic marriage. While I do possess codependent tendencies, it was an unfair evaluation given the broader picture.

Even after a year and a half of therapy, I’m still at times irritable, incredibly emotional, easily triggered, anxious, self-loathing, prone to panic attacks and even suicidal. I’ve had flashbacks and triggers from the slightest of incidents. Why did I get so emotional? — I’d ask myself later. I’ve struggled to believe that my close friends or my caring boyfriend actually love me, and my commitments to new goals and ambitions have been fruitless because my inner critic relentlessly reminds me I have nothing to offer the world. I’m often frustrated with myself for not being more confident and emotionally stable. People go through break ups, you’ve been in a lot of therapy, just get over it…

Doing all of this work on healing and still having emotionally explosive moments only heightened my shame that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was far crazier than I had ever thought — and perhaps even a lost cause. I worried I was too sensitive for this world…

Abuse, though.

That made me pause. Suddenly my neurotic behavior made sense: why I’d go into a three day emotional roller coaster from the slightest of issues; why being around people made me irritable, even angry; why my inner critic was so profoundly adamant that I was worthless and unlovable. I realized then: while I categorized my ex husband as an addict and a narcissist, I would forever label him as “my abuser.”

I won’t go into details about his fucked-upness, and I don’t tell this story to “out” him. I tell this story because I’m tired of feeling ashamed and embarrassed for having endured this. I’m tired of protecting him, in case people find out he’s broken. I’m tired of deflecting people’s “I’m sorry’s” with “Yeah, well I was broken too.” I’ll make note that I was not physically abused, and I am thankful to not have been a victim of physical violence, but the invisible scars that emotional abuse leaves are ensnaring and crippling in a different way. Simply put, my abuser was a psychological terrorist.

I was naive in believing all humans have empathy and a soul that cringes to see others hurt, but in educating myself on the psychology of this personality disorder, it is clear that not only do they have no empathy, they actually revel in your pain, too. They are leeches that glob onto your life and suck out your spirit. It’s done so insidiously and meticulously, you don’t even realize they’re doing it. Not until you find yourself thousands of dollars in debt and on the verge of killing yourself, you are forced to make a choice : get out or die.

I now know, that was not my fault. It was not my codependency, and I didn’t enable his abusive behavior. My brokenness did not attract and enable another broken person in which we “co-created” a toxic relationship. Nor was this a part of “God’s Plan” to guide me to enlightenment. This was a bad person who intentionally and deliberately did bad things.

All I know now is that while this relationship was not necessary to propel me into a journey of self discovery and healing, I will continue to use it as fuel, and refuse to be just a victim. When I start to feel frustration or toxic shame about my emotions around “not being better,” I will have compassion for the fact that my heart and soul were broken deliberately and that will take some time to heal.

As Arabi poignantly writes at the end of her book, “You fell in love with a narcissist precisely because he made you feel exactly what you yearn to feel about yourself. You fell in love with the unconditional positive regard that you deeply desire within yourself. Now you just have to start giving that to yourself.”

It’s true, I wasn’t always an A student when it came to self love and compassion before my marriage, but starting from -50 is a climb. I know now that this will be an intentional practice of showing up for me, every single day.

When I filed for divorce, I took a colossal inventory of my life. What did I want to keep, enhance, or discard? Throughout the last year, I’ve strengthened my relationships with friends and family, cultivating much realer intimacy while also creating boundaries for the first time in my life. I’ve worked hard to shed my own toxic habits such as drinking and binge eating. I am reading, writing, journaling, exercising, walking, eating healthy, drinking water, limiting my caffeine, etc. etc. all to make sure my eyes stay open and I never find myself in a toxic relationship again… And yet I still feel like I’m sleeping with a gun under my pillow. Yes I’m sleeping, but not well. I cannot let my guard down. I can’t be less than perfect in my daily living, because someone will burst through the door at any moment. And if you’re not prepared and paying attention, you’re fucked. So it’s not hard to understand that some days, I worry that I haven’t moved the needle at all.

I’m sharing this story to just exhale, and acknowledge this has been fucking hard. To acknowledge my gratitude for the books, people, and places that have been a source of love when I didn’t have it for myself.

And most importantly to acknowledge that none of this was my fault.