Because of the trauma we suffer as victims of narcissistic and emotional abuse, we tend to ruminate about our past long after the period of abuse is over. The past can dominate our lives, through such things as intrusive thoughts, so much that it’s as if the painful period was our life in its entirety.
How can we break free from the past? There are many methods that can help, such as meditation, putting our trauma into words, using self-hypnosis to treat the past as something no longer relevant to our present lives, or using auto-hypnosis to imagine a new, idealized family to replace, in our minds, the abusive family we grew up with.
Another method, suggested by Michele Lee Nieves in this video, is to rewrite one’s life story. Instead of rehashing the same old pain from before, now that we’re out of the abusive relationship, we imagine a new, positive end to our life story to give us a sense of hope and purpose in our new lives.
To give an example, I’ll rewrite my own life story here and now. I’m going to parallel it with many points in the legendary life of the Buddha: this is not meant to imply that I’m in any way even remotely comparable to him in the saintly or enlightened sense (I’m quite the opposite, actually, and I don’t mean that in the dialectical sense!), but rather that both life narratives chart a course from the realization of suffering to a striving to end that suffering. I find such correspondences to be inspiring in my quest to be healed. Let’s begin:
I was born into a petite bourgeois, middle-class family who fancied themselves very capable. My parents imagined themselves to be the ultimate authorities of their world, like a king and queen.
My mother, as I’ve explained many times in a number of posts, was a habitual liar, gaslighting, triangulating, and doing smear campaigns against me and my cousins to the rest of the family. My elder siblings, her flying monkeys, helped her bully and emotionally abuse me. Because of her many needless fabrications, I can see her as the very personification of illusion, the māyā, or powerful, illusory magic, as it were, that addles the mind, deceives us, and thus causes suffering.
It was as though she’d died shortly after I was born, for I afterwards felt little affection from her, just the illusion of maternal care masking an agenda to keep me in her control. I was a sensitive child, and the rest of the family had little patience for me. My father wanted me to get a high-paying job in something like business: I had no interest whatsoever in such things.
When I was a young man, I finally ventured out into the world and learned what it was really like, as opposed to the world my family had hoped to keep me inside, with superficially pleasant things to keep me distracted from the truth. A number of things I saw outside made me understand the illusions of home.
I realized that my mother, the personification of all those illusions, was getting old. Her ideas about me were old and outmoded, having no more usefulness in my life. In fact, they’d never been useful.
I realized that she, as that personification of māyā, was a sick woman. Sick with breast cancer, but more importantly, sick with some form of pathological narcissism.
Finally, she died, not only physically, but also as any kind of guide in my life. In fact, she’d never been a real guide. As I said above, it was as if she’d died only about a week after my birth.
A fourth realization came after her death, though: I learned of people who overcame their trauma, and who were able to live their lives in peace, in spite of their previous suffering. I thus decided that I wanted to achieve the same peace.
Naturally, there was resistance from the family, but I insisted on having my way. I renounced them as the toxic environment that they were and are. Even the inheritance money my mother left for me–a lot of money!— I gave up, insisting that the lawyers give my fourth in thirds to my older brothers and sister.
I gave the money up–an act most people would consider foolish, of course–because I felt it would be hypocritical of me to feel such animosity towards my mother on the one hand, and yet say, “Oh, but gimme-gimme the money!” on the other. I had to be consistent with my principles: if I was to renounce the family, I had to renounce everything, even sacrificing the good parts.
Also, giving up the money was my way of telling the family that my motives are far from always self-centred, an attribute they used to justify their bullying and demeaning of me. If all there was to me was selfishness, why wouldn’t I just take the money? I had a perfect legal right to it, and I could still say that Mom’s giving it to me came nowhere close to compensating for all the injuries she’d done to me. Still, I gave it up…because contrary to what the family believes about me, not everything in me is about getting more and more for myself.
Finally, I gave up the money because I didn’t want to feel in any way obligated to have anything to do with them anymore. I didn’t want to be beholden to them at all.
My next move was to learn everything I could about the root causes of the abuse I’d suffered (narcissistic mothers), and about how to heal myself. I learned a lot of useful things, but I also turned a few bad corners (e.g. spending a lot of money on an online course that gave me only minimal help; also, sharing many of my blog posts on these topics on Facebook pages with unappreciative members…a.k.a. haters). I’ve found myself more inclined to find the answers I need on my own.
I’ve also found meditation helpful, though temptations distract me. I’ve been assailed by doubts about whether I correctly interpreted the meaning of what happened to me as a child; this is known as second-guessing. The guilt-tripping and shaming that that toxic family subjected me to, as well as all of their gaslighting, was the basis of my second-guessing. Overall, however, I’ve managed not to cave into these doubts.
Other temptations have not been so easy to resist. Feelings of anger towards my former abusers, sometimes in the form of intrusive thoughts, distracts me from focusing on what I call the Three Unities (those of Space, Time, and Action) that give me soothing peace if I concentrate hard enough. Other times, it’s lustful desires that break my concentration. Usually, though, it’s simply itchiness. In the long run, I manage to overcome these distractions.
Now, outside of the healing power of meditation, I nonetheless struggle with my emotional pain, and it causes me to manifest self-destructiveness in the forms of sleeplessness, poor nutrition, and a generally unhealthy, irritable mood. Add to all of this my C-PTSD tendency to catastrophize any problem, and I can pull myself down very low.
Thankfully, I have the love of my wife, who–despite how difficult she finds it to be patient with a man as irritable as I am–makes sure I get a reasonable amount of fruit in my diet, among other healthy foods. She is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Since her having helped me through my worst emotional period, just following my mother’s death and my estrangement from the family, I have shown more resolve in practicing meditation and in formulating a philosophy to help me heal. When it comes to the roots of narcissistic abuse, I’ve come to understand certain basic truths:
- While the experience of a kind of, so to speak, psychic mutilation is common and universal, some have it far worse than others.
- This psychic mutilation is a lack that gives rise to desire, which in turn causes more suffering; and those whose psychic mutilation is more severe (as among those with NPD or other Cluster B personality disorders), causing in them even greater desire, those people in turn cause ever more suffering.
- This suffering and psychic mutilation can be healed.
- It can be healed through the following: having the right understanding of the above three truths; making a firm decision to heal; speaking with kind, rather than violent, words (to oneself as well as to others); acting with kindness and selflessness to others; writing, with the most vividly descriptive of words, about all of one’s pain; making an effort to resist the old, painful habits, while striving also to revive and sustain new and healthy habits; always being mindful and remembering to strive for the goal of healing; and meditating with the most focused of concentration.
In the process of moving towards this goal of healing, we must remember to strive with diligence, but also with moderation. We mustn’t expect too much of ourselves too soon, and we mustn’t beat ourselves over the head with shame when we inevitably fail from time to time. At the same time, we mustn’t be lazy or complacent, lest we backslide into our previous, mutilated emotional state.
One thing to remember is that the ego is an illusion, the narcissistic looking at oneself in the mirror or pond reflection, a defence against psychic mutilation. This fake ego, taken to extremes, leads to pathological narcissistic states. We aren’t permanent entities unto ourselves; there is just the infinite ocean of the universe, and we are all just drops of water in it.
As difficult as this all will be to understand and achieve, we can take refuge in the notion of our universal potential to be at one with the peaceful, oceanic state of what I call the Unity of Space, what Hindus call that identity of Atman with Brahman. We can also take refuge in all the teachings we have learned from, these written here above and those from outside sources. Finally, we can take refuge in the community and empathy of fellow sufferers, fellow victims of narcissistic and emotional abuse (whether online or in one’s immediate physical vicinity); and we can take refuge in the internalized parental system as discussed here.
In life, I will continue to face difficult people, and will face challenges; there is no escape from problems, but if I face those difficulties with the philosophical ideas laid out here, I should be able to cope reasonably well. Happiness doesn’t consist in an absence of problems; it consists in the ability to deal with them.
Along with problems, though, life will sometimes give us blessings. We should always be grateful for every good thing that comes our way, and never take blessings for granted. Besides, gratitude, felt regularly, increases happiness.
I have a lot to be grateful for, especially during the past twenty-four years. Instead of being the absurdly wrong things the family claimed I would be (My mother wondered in her lies if I, an ‘autistic‘ child of about nine or ten, would ever even make a good garbageman; my bully-brother F. growled that I’d be “a loser for the rest of my life” back when I was a teen), instead of me being any of that nonsense, I have become a successful English teacher, one who not only teaches the language, but also aspects of Western culture, as well as political concepts.
I have a wonderful wife whom I love dearly, one who also suffers my ill temper with far more patience than I deserve. Now, if I can fully heal from my early traumas, she’ll see how much of a good man I can be. My wish for her to see the very best version of myself should be plentiful a motive in me to strive hard for that healing. This success would give a much-needed, and much-deserved, happy ending to so sadly-begun a life.
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As you can see, Dear Reader, I started my narrative with the sad, inauspicious beginnings associated with the family’s narcissistic abuse. Then I moved into a gradual transformation of the bad beginnings, through my reflections on all that was wrong, into a growing sense of knowledge of myself and the world surrounding me. I ended on a happy, encouraging note, one that would inspire me to continue down the good path.
When you rewrite your life story, my suggestion is to write in a similarly transformative narrative arc. Good luck with it! 🙂
Infinite Ocean 