I’ve been looking back on the narcissists I’ve dated and I can’t help but think of how, at some point, someone always told me that being (and staying) in these relationships meant I did not love myself.
I have a problem with this stigma for two reasons:
- relationships with narcissists are abusive therefore being in a relationship with a narcissist means you are a victim of abuse. This notion that you, the victim, do not love yourself because you are focusing on surviving the cycle of abuse is unfair. The abuse, itself, is hard enough — the added guilt does not help.
- in a very odd plot twist, this belief isn’t true. In hindsight, I’m realizing that my role in these toxic relationships was proof that I loved myself all along.
Yes, I looked for love in all the wrong places but that’s exactly why I found it. My dedication to making these toxic relationships work highlighted the way my self-love hid in plain sight.
Loving these toxic people mirrored back to me just how much I subconsciously loved myself. Or, at least, wanted to.
And here’s how.
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1. Projection
It is argued that our lives are a perception of our reality and that each of our realities is a unique projection of who we are.
If this is true then we are naturally being pulled towards different projections of ourselves through the people we love.
Case in point:
At some point, we’ve each experienced having feelings for or being drawn to, someone for seemingly no reason at all. Whether it was “love at first sight” or just meeting someone who wakes something up inside of us.
Seemingly, without cause.
- These are nuances of us naturally being drawn to our own projections; projections that have materialized into our physical reality for one reason or another.
- These are also the exact moments we become attracted to and eventually fall in love with ourselves.
These karmic encounters have specific lessons of self-love to teach us; lessons we will likely only learn through those particular individuals. This is why they wake us up inside.
It’s through these toxic projections that each person we fall in love with becomes another opportunity for us to love ourselves — no matter how toxic they are. Because that is their role.
That role can only be fulfilled if we play our part in these toxic relationships, which is projecting the love we have for ourselves (that we currently cannot access) onto other people.
Essentially, all of our lovers are projections.
Whether they’re toxic or not.
We’ve been coming face to face with different aspects of
- who we’ve been
- who we are
- who we’re in the process of becoming
and we’ve been falling in love with them all.
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2. Mirroring
The mirroring I discuss here is not a reference to the narcissistic love-bombing tactic where narcissists emulate their victims in order to gain their trust and prepare them for abuse.
The mirroring I’m talking about is when the masks fall off of the people we love and we see exactly how their flaws reflect our own, even if it’s to a different degree. In my relationships, one major flaw that was mirrored was addiction.
I’ve always been an addict.
For years, it was Benadryl and very briefly alcohol but once I started eating edibles in 2017 I developed a problem. Weed was just too much fun and seemed to ease all of my problems. When I started smoking it in 2018, I became a full-blown addict while dating a covert narcissist named Jamel.
Jamel was an alcoholic.
His drinking was so bad that even his mother warned me about it early on and I saw for myself how right she was. Jamel would sometimes get so drunk he would leave a bar and drive to my apartment drunk, come in have sex with me, and forget it happened the next day.
He had the key to my place so when this happened I was usually asleep and woke up to him forcing me to have sex. I coped with this by getting high right after. His drinking was constant throughout our relationship and so was my smoking habit.
When my habit reached an extreme, I’d finally left Jamel and was getting high around the clock as I coped with the traumatic breakup and impact of the relationship.
I smoked:
- when I got up
- before I went to bed
- before and after I showered
- when it rained
- when I wanted to go for a walk
- whenever anything stressful happened (minor or major)
There was never a bad occasion to get high.
The problem was the guilt that was growing because this is when I began stealing and gambling on my health just to get high. This was also how I ended up being raped by one of my former drug dealers.
My addiction was ruining my life the way Jamel’s drinking played a major role in the dissolution of our relationship. I couldn’t deny the similarities.
I also couldn’t avoid looking at the mirror he held up to me.
I had nagged Jamel for using alcohol to run his life, solve his problems, and kill his liver when I was doing the same. I couldn’t function without weed and if I ran out I did nearly whatever I could to get my hands on more, including stealing from my mom.
I never compared his drinking to my smoking because alcohol wasn’t my vice, weed was and weed was natural. So I saw it as different because I saw my vice as superior. I didn’t even see my smoking as an addiction at all, but it was. It always was.
This is when I began to realize it takes loving toxic people to show us just how much we subconsciously want to love toxic aspects of ourselves.
This connects back to the point about projection because we tend to look at the people we love the way we struggle to see ourselves. I say this because, essentially, these people are us.
They mirror us.
Jamel mirrored me and although I didn’t like the face of his addiction I still loved him and tried to be gentle with him and help him quit. I still stood by him for as long as I could, three years. Even as an alcoholic, I still saw my whole world in him.
The catch-22 of mirroring is how it proves these people were never special the special ones — we were.
The reason it takes another person for us to recognize this is that we tend to avoid darker aspects of ourselves until they’re reflected in someone we fall in love with. This is how we subconsciously show ourselves that we aren’t so bad. This is also why it’s necessary that opposites attract.
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3. Opposition
Something common about toxic relationship dynamics is that although we are attracted to people who mirror us, these same people also oppose us in very integral ways.
The traits we lack, in some way, tend to be the ones that these people exhibit nearly to a fault. As a result, these same traits trigger us deeply when they appear in them. But they trigger us deeply enough to evolve.
For example; I dated a malignant narcissist named Dwayne who was dangerously paranoid when it came to people. He always thought anyone who interacted with him had an agenda or some shady ulterior motive.
He would not take the chance of being emotionally available and even prided himself on never trusting anyone 100%. This is the same ex who beat me up and cheated on me and planned it out because he just “knew” I was cheating on him.
I wasn’t.
His paranoia seemed extreme and unwarranted to me.
Now, I understand that when you walk around hurting people with the same vicious intent that he did, the heaviest consequence is looking over your shoulder for people who might want to even the score, when you least expect it.
But even in his extreme, Dwayne showed more discipline than me in one area where I was showing absolutely no self-control — I was too trusting. I was trusting to an extreme. Instead of heeding every sign and believing every red flag I saw in him, I chose to trust him and believe him.
Even when something in me knew something about this man was off. Even when I saw it for myself. after the beatings began. The lack of trust I had in myself made it clear to me that I was not a good friend to myself.
I was actually a danger to myself.
Knowing this filled me with so much guilt and deeply self-deprecating emotions; to the point that when I was told how much I hated myself I ultimately believed this. Failing to realize self-hate is one of the most important stops on the route to self-love.
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4. Self-Hate
The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.
With this in mind, if we are being accused of hating ourselves then it can be argued that we still love ourselves.
It takes love to hate and it takes a significant amount of care and consideration to take the time to hate. Therefore, self-hate is the attention we pay ourselves when we’ve gone long enough avoiding ourselves.
Dating people toxic enough to provoke guilt in us for our tolerance of their abuse is the first step to eventually making the choice healthiest for us.
This is necessary because underneath all the layers of disappointments and failures that we refuse to face are opportunities we create to heal when we end up face-to-face with them in our:
- lovers
- friends
- family
This is bound to happen because we’re constantly looking for ourselves. We try to love our flaws when we love them in other people. Loving these flawed people is proof of how much we want to love ourselves.
Flaws and all.
That’s how much we love ourselves even when it appears to others as “self-hate”. It’s not uncommon for people in toxic relationships to grapple with a sense of self-hate.
It’s the way we handle our abusers that shows how we should be handling ourselves. How we treat them previews how one day we will treat ourselves once the lesson is learned that it is us we’ve been seeking to love this whole time.
This lesson usually presents itself at rock bottom when all is lost and we’ve become intolerant to the abuse and/or turned off by the toxicity we’ve been accepting into our lives.
For me, this moment came when I left Jamel in November of 2020 after he revealed he had been cheating on me by putting a used condom on my bed. The ending was explosive and initially left me deeply wounded.
In many ways, he was all I had and I was left to truly face myself for the first time in my entire life once I ended our relationship. In other words, I hit rock bottom. At rock bottom, I lost whoever I thought I was my self-hate reached an all-time high.
I blamed myself and looked at every place I went wrong because realistically I also wasn’t perfect in that connection. I had faults too.
Taking the time to feel this hurt transformed my self-hate.
It slowly turned into self-understanding as I realized exactly where certain faults lay. The time I took to confront my self-hate made me gentle with myself because I was on my own and was the only friend I had.
For three years, I took time to finally stop dating, or mingling and just focused on myself. Eventually, self-hate essentially showed me where to find myself and offered me an opportunity for forgiveness of self.
I had practice with this because of grace and unconditional love I showed the toxic people I dated was an active practice of forgiveness. At rock bottom, it was simply my turn to practice it on myself.
This is where I took baby steps towards self-care and self-preservation as I learned to stand by myself instead of abandoning myself just to love a man the way I’ve always needed to love myself.
Sometimes self-love begins with self-hate because the whole point of self-hate is you being fed up with your own bullshit. My battle with self-hate taught me that what’s hiding behind it is self-concern.
I was only so hard on myself because I knew I was failing myself. My self-hate was a voice in the back of my head trying constantly to save my fucking life. It wasn’t trying to shackle me, it was trying to set me free.
My self-hate was trying to take my blindfold off so that I could see things clearly enough to free myself. In hindsight, I understood that self-hate leads to the most crucial pitstop on the journey toward self-love.
Self-preservation.
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5. Self-Preservation
The final act of self-love in these toxic connections is walking away from them. This happens when
When it came to Dwayne, I walked away from him once my self-hate reached a point of absolute disgust with myself and with him. With me, for tolerating his bullshit. With him, for the bullshit he was responsible for allowing me to tolerate.
The last beating nearly killed me and directly after I was given proof that he was still cheating with his ex. That was it, my mind and heart had had enough and I realized I needed to save myself.
My disgust made it impossible to stomach him and my self-hate exhausted me because I was tired of feeling so damn weak and unreliable when it came to keeping myself out of bad situations. Self-trust is an important form of self-love and I was tired of knowing I could not trust myself.
Even though I escaped my relationship with Dwayne with my life it took me too long to trust the only person who mattered in every equation — me. But it happened because I kept choosing survival over abuse.
Self-preservation is a valid route to self-love because it forces you to tap into your survival instincts and get away from whatever it was that’s become a threat to you.
What really makes this route to self-love powerful is the fact that not only do you get away from the threat, but you tend to avoid it from then on.
This is why many victims of abuse can pinpoint indicators of abuse in people and then skillfully avoid them or detach from them if they are already in the process of bonding.
For example:
After I left Jamel, I took a long time to look at how I’ve treated people and I grew a distaste for exhibiting those behaviors. As a result, I no longer had the tolerance to accept it in anyone’s treatment of me.
I was also much more experienced and dodged a lot of bullets based on the fact I not only knew what red flags to look out for — I knew what red flags to spot. Slowly, I began building trust with myself and developing a very gentle relationship with the version of me that had been wounded.
Because of this, I learned to let go of abusers and hold onto me. I also learned when to leave and in time it took less and less for me to leave as I began leaving sooner and sooner.
Every dissolution made more room to access self-love as I learned gradually to listen to my intuition and trust myself before anyone else.
Because the path to self-love is not linear, the healthiest thing any toxic relationship can offer you is the understanding that the dedication we show toxic people highlights the subconscious way we remain dedicated to falling in love with the uglier parts of ourselves.
We are all toxic to a degree.
Consequently, we are all going to require toxicity, in some way and at some point. Not only to learn what toxic habits in us need to be shed by seeing it in other people.
Not only to learn the skill of discernment when it comes to the types of people we allow into our lives and in our hearts but to understand something that often goes unnoticed — loving toxic people is how many of us who come from toxic backgrounds first learn to love ourselves.
It’s how we show ourselves that our dark sides are capable of being loved. It’s how we start learning that it actually is possible to make peace, and even become friends, with the parts of us we are afraid of.
Especially those parts.
We forgive their appearance in our partners because we are looking at them through the eyes of love. This is why these toxic features don’t scare or deter us when they show up in our lovers.
Loving them is also how we actively exercise that love toward ourselves. In loving these toxic mirrors, we are vicariously viewing our own flaws through the eyes of love too.
We subconsciously love those parts of us we think we consciously hate. It’s just easier to love them when other people are wearing them — but when we run from ourselves we often run into ourselves. When we fall for these projections, we maintain falling for ourselves.
We are inherently finding ways to continue falling in love with ourselves and in my case, toxic relationships became the only way I inherently fell in love with myself.
So, maybe the critics are right. Maybe we are looking for love in all the wrong places. But maybe that’s because in our unique journey of life that’s exactly where we’re going to find it.
About Me — Linda Sharp
The writer who has to write in order to stay alive — I am not kidding.
medium.com
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© Linda Sharp 2023. All Rights Reserved.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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