"Waking Up from Abuse"
Awakening to the reality that your entire life has been a lie is about the harshest wake up call you can get. I speak from experience. I've actually done it twice now.
The first time I "woke up" was when I finally realized I was the survivor of childhood narcissistic abuse. It wasn't until I had my own kids that I started to understand how troubled my childhood really was. I had to stumble upon the terms "narcissistic personality disorder" and "narcissistic abuse" myself, and learn about them on my own. Let me tell you, though, the pieces finally began falling into place and I'm grateful they did. No matter how agonizing this journey is, has been, or will get, it's worth the discomfort -- however extreme. The alternative is way worse.
What makes narcissistic abuse particularly treacherous is
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Some never wake up from it at all. They go on believing they deserve to be mistreated, and that's all they ever get. They spend their lives just trying to be good enough and never feeling like they measure up. Or, they go on to perpetrate the same kind of abuse. That's the tragic legacy of toxic families.
(Then, if you're like me, you wake up a second time to realize you married into the same kind of toxicity, and you now must make a second escape. Or if you didn't get married as a "child" to escape the abuse you grew up in the way I did, you now recognize you have gone from one abusive relationship to another, with the same types of people. This is not a coincidence, but more on that in a later post.)
The more adept the narcissist, the better they are at hiding their true nature from people they don't have to spend a lot of time with. Moreover, they can be exceedingly charming. Other people can never quite believe they could be so cruel, because they're always so pleasant to be around. Narcissists even know how to make you feel good about yourself, and better yet, important (for awhile anyway). In fact, that's how they lure you