I Love You … I Love You Not …

By Jo Lucas

Everyone wears a mask to a certain extent. A face that we show the world in the best possible light we can be. We all have different masks for each scenario, friend, wife, employee, daughter. But someone with NPD … wow! … their mask covers up what can only be described as a cruel, cold and sadistic, tormented twisted soul.

I can vividly remember the Sunday afternoon when he finally let me see the real him, when he lifted the final mask and showed me his real face, it scared the hell out of me. It tormented and gave me nightmares for years after. He was unrecognisable and a complete stranger.

It took him twenty-seven years to unveil himself fully to me … and that was only after I had been discarded by him and he had moved on to his new supply to play with them. Our life together, dogs, home, and I literally meant nothing to him anymore, there was no longer the need to hide his true self from me. So, he walked through the front door, smirking and laughing at me crying in a heap on the floor, fixed himself a new mask, and walked out of our life not even looking back at the devastation that he left behind.

Living through, and ultimately surviving, an emotionally abusive relationship with a narcissist is absolutely soul-destroying. I barely made it out and nearly three decades of living in this situation took its toll on my sanity and health. I left that relationship at the age of forty-six, exhausted, confused, and with my self-identity so broken that I didn’t even know what food I liked. I had a hairstyle and colour chosen by him and wore clothes that he liked. I didn’t recognise myself and I really did believe I was crazy, stupid, and unloveable.

Looking back at my life, I felt like I was living in a fog. I was riddled with doubt, and fear and lacked any self-esteem. I was unrecognizable from the confident, vivacious and ambitious person that had entered into that relationship at the tender age of Eighteen. He stripped nearly all of me away and when we finally split up I felt like I was in a dark void. My whole existence and purpose had been for him. I was alone for the first time in my life and terrified.

Every minute detail of my life revolved around and was controlled by him. We ‘shared’ a Facebook page. Well, he actually logged in on mine to laugh at my friend’s posts and read my messages. He had all my passwords … if I objected he would insinuate that I had something to hide, was having an affair, or was up to no good (he liked to say that to me most days), so I gave in to defend myself and prove my innocence … and played right into hands. I trusted him with everything, our money, home, and even my personal fears, hopes, and dreams. I shared everything with him and in return, he’d mock and humiliate me to find any chance he could to strip another layer away from me.

“When you have his attention, you feel like you’re the only person in the world, that’s why everybody loves him so much”. — Marge Sherwood from Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’.

And yet to the outside world, he was the most charming and generous guy. The life we portrayed to everyone else was that of a perfect relationship — soulmates! People would tell me how lucky I was to have such a great guy and sometimes I believed them as he could be so warm and loving. I would finally think that he was back to being himself again like in the early days. I learned to realise that this was normally short-lived and then the criticisms and snarky comments would soon start again. We’d be out and suddenly his mood would darken, and he’d mention something that I had said or done that had embarrassed him — completely untrue but by the time we’d cut the trip short and drove back home I believed him and would be apologising for ‘my awful behavior’.

Whenever I entered the house, I would be literally shaking with fear at who was going to greet me. It was like living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — would it be the loving him and I’d be walking into a bathroom with a hot bubble bath, candles, and a glass of wine … or would I find him standing behind the front door waiting for me holding my hidden journal that he’d found. Red in the face with anger as he stood in front of me screaming about what I had written in my journal. I learned not to write anything that could be used against me in arguments from then on until eventually, it was just easier not to write a journal at all.

“… it’s like the sun shines on you, and it’s glorious. And then he forgets you and it’s very, very cold”. — Marge Sherwood from Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’.

And through all this — I believed I loved and adored him. He would sometimes be so vulnerable and talk about the abusive childhood he had until he actually cried and sobbed. I would genuinely feel so sorry for him that it hurt and upset me. So I tried harder to show him love and be the perfect partner, but this would be used against me time and time again until I had no sense of reality or if anything he ever told me was true. I covered for his outlandish lies all the time — I was often so shocked at the number of lies he told people every day not because of what he was saying to them but because he was so good at it and never felt any guilt.

The idea that we wouldn’t be together terrified me, I really thought that I needed him, he constantly told me that I’d be nothing without him — and after hearing that for years I actually believed him. That’s the thing with being in a narcissistic relationship, you become so trauma bonded to them that you are likely the last person to see them for what they actually are and you justify their lack of your boundaries, coercive control, and criticisms as the fact that they love you.

You actually feel lucky to have them, you honestly believe that no one else would want you — you’re told that every single day until you believe it. In fact, you believe every single word that comes out of their mouths — even if the voice inside your head is screaming for you to wake up and listen to your gut feeling. You just keep pushing down your intuition until its roar is nothing but a distant murmur … but it never really goes away and you live every day in a state of sheer confusion and in a world where something doesn’t feel right but you’re not sure what.

It’s taken me four years to get to be able to write about this without fear of someone watching and reading it over my shoulder. I still struggle with my self-esteem and confidence but know that I’m getting stronger every day. The main thing I’ve learned through all this is that no matter what, listen to your intuition and if you feel that something is ‘off’ it usually is as a healthy loving relationship shouldn’t hurt.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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