Was he an abused, cringing husband–or a narcissist weaving webs around me?
The trouble with narcissism is that once you’ve been a source of narcissistic supply, you’re addicted. Online research into narcissism, borderline personality disorder and abusers, has shown me that my reactions have been normal, that it’s very hard for anyone to just “get over it” after dealing with people like this.
He wasn’t so perfect, because if he were, the image would have matched the reality, and he would’ve let nothing snap the friendship in two. The true measure of his character has been demonstrated by his failure, even after a year and a half, to do anything to try to repair or reconcile, to make any show of sorrow or remorse over what happened.
I tried once, but failed because of his wife’s hard heart; it is up to him to do his part, to make apologies for what he himself did not just to me but to Jeff, and not leave this all on my shoulders to fix.
But he does nothing, absolutely nothing. This shows a poor character and selfish, narcissistic qualities.
I had expected, believed so much more of him than that, thought he was a good person. But his behavior, his lack even of basic Christian decency in this matter, proves that I was deceived.
And this after we had given sacrificially of our resources and time to help them in many different ways and situations, and after so many times I had given him someone to talk to in times of hardship and heartache.
Nobody can help me because the friendship I had was so rare, so hard to find again, and not something you ever get over. You can’t just go out and find another one just like it; it takes time and coming across just the right person at just the right time.
And I don’t even know if he misses us or regrets what happened, if he only keeps away because he’s (justifiably) afraid of my husband’s anger at him over all the things he did, or if he just doesn’t care.
If he truly misses us, or just misses playing D&D with Jeff. If he remembers all the kind things we did for him.
All I can do is hope that he only has narcissistic tendencies and not a full-blown disorder, that he does miss us and won’t stay away forever. That he will one day get the courage to eradicate the violence and abuse from his life. That he will stop enabling his wife’s bullying of others, eradicate the narcissistic behaviors, and make things right with Jeff and me.
If he does, I will give him full forgiveness. But you can’t truly know another person’s heart, so I still hope that our friendship was not just a fiction, a web woven by a narcissist, but real.
That one day he’ll wake up and realize he shouldn’t have let it go, shouldn’t have allowed me to be bullied, that enabling his wife’s bullying was immoral.
Both of them fit the traits of narcissism. I, of course, am not a psychologist, but like anyone else who must deal with narcissists in personal life, I need to understand what I’m dealing with.
And abusers tend not to get diagnosed because they think nothing is wrong with them, so the victims of their bullying and abuse have to go by the behavior they witness.
When I read the characteristics of a malignant narcissist, I could swear I’m reading about Tracy. And it’s frightening how well she fits.
Who knows what the future holds.
I do want my friend back–not as an enabler of his wife’s bullying, but as he once was, 2006-2007. And without being forced to be friends with his wife against my better judgment.
She used what she perceived to be society’s “rules” to guilt and bully me into being friends with her.
(I never heard of these rules and certainly don’t follow them in my own household; if I did, Jeff would fight it. Yes, he has many female friends, and it doesn’t bother me. I have many guy friends, and it doesn’t bother him.
We believe in faith and trust and treating each other like adults with personal autonomy who can tell for ourselves who to be friends with. I’m not his mother, and he’s not my father. But she didn’t even live by these rules herself, but made others live by them.)
I was polite and kind to her, but she was never satisfied, apparently wanted me to be buddy-buddy with her and share all my secrets, etc.
But I couldn’t do that with someone whom I observed abusing my friend, abusing her children, and bullying me. Richard told me even more things she was doing behind closed doors.
But they both pinned the blame on me. She imagined slights which I never gave, but refused to believe that her perception was not reality–
–which she also did to Todd, who’d been friends with her husband for 6 years, but finally walked away because of her rages.
(She then proceeded to lie and misrepresent what he “did” to everyone else, so that they believed her and thought he was crazy.)
It wasn’t just me, because Richard told me–in her presence–about other friends he’d lost because of her, about them coming to him and saying, “We just can’t handle Tracy anymore.”
When she bullied and verbally abused me in a narcissistic/BPD rage, giving me no chance to defend myself, and refused to apologize for being nasty, she lost all rights and claims to my friendship, whether I’m friends with her husband or not.
But this time, it would be on my own terms–which means, friends with him, but never with her. But Jeff wants nothing to do with either one of them, is furious with them both.
And the most tragic thing is, I have no clue what happened. The winter of 2009-2010, everything was fine between us all. I don’t recall much bullying of me going on at that time, I was led to believe that Tracy had long since stopped holding her inexplicable and irrational grudges against me, and everything was fine.
But somehow, over the spring of 2010, for no reason I ever knew, they just both started being mean to me. Though when I tried to bring it up with Richard, he acted like I was imagining it, and got angry with me.
And this from the guy who once begged me not to be mad at him.
Both of them started behaving like asses to me, on Facebook and off, even though we still went over to their house for D&D, and we still had birthday parties and holiday dinners together.
All I can figure is that it was an outgrowth of their own problems at home, as Jeff and I could both see them constantly snarling at each other and the kids in the months before the blowup on 7/1/10. I witnessed two outright instances of physical abuse committed by Tracy, right in front of me.
And that in itself tells me the blowup had nothing actually to do with me, but with their own problems at home. I just made a convenient scapegoat.
Just as she did with Todd two years earlier, Tracy took something I wrote, added reasons and motivations which did not exist, refused to believe that she misunderstood it–
–and made me the cause of all the problems that only existed in her own head.
Tracy painted everything I had ever done with a scarlet brush. She tried to say her narcissistic rage was somehow going easy on me, even though I did nothing to deserve all that.
My “friend” Richard accused me of “not saying two sentences together” to her for a month and a half. But I have no clue what month and a half, and I’m just a naturally quiet person who usually has no more than one sentence together to say to anybody.
That’s just the way it is: My mind doesn’t work fast enough in most social situations to say much. My “friend” could see very well over the past two and a half years that it was just the way I was, that my chattiness with him was a rarity. And I hadn’t been acting any differently than what’s normal for me.
Also, his own mother is just as shy and quiet as I am. AND his other friend’s wife treated HIM the same way Tracy treated ME.
So you’d think he knew how it felt to be treated like crap and have someone try to keep you from your BFF because she didn’t like your personality.
He had no excuse NOT to be empathetic to me.
Yet he twisted this natural part of my personality into somehow being “more offensive” than Tracy’s nasty, vicious, deliberately hurtful verbal abuse of me!
He made up yet another social rule I had never even heard of (something he had done before as an excuse to chide me). Then he waved it in my face to minimize and justify Tracy’s inexcusable behavior and verbal abuse!
What kind of sick, twisted people are they, anyway?
It also brought back old humiliations and insecurities:
- Being teased and ridiculed throughout my childhood with no idea why the kids kept calling me “weird.” With no idea why they were mean when I was always a nice, sweet person who was far too terrified of people to be mean to them.
- My brother making me feel like everything I did or liked was “wrong” somehow.
- Going to college and finding yet more ridicule, bullying and rumors, from an ex-boyfriend, from the Zetas for being shy (see my account here), from a guy (“Shawn”) who I thought was my friend, but apparently was yet another narcissist, from a guy who said he loved me but just wanted to control me. (See here.)
- Going out into the world, to be constantly accused of doing things I had not done. To hear again and again about how shy I was and how “wrong” it was to be shy–as if it were a character failing rather than simply the way I was born, the way my brain works.
And now here it was again, someone bullying me just like the kids on the playground, making me feel like crap, like I hated her, like I was a horrible person who was just awful to her and trying to do horrible things–
—when I was doing nothing of the kind, and her own behavior was driving me further and further into my shell.
And this after all the things we had done to help her and Richard both.
And now my best friend in the world, whom I trusted completely, whom I respected and told all my secrets to, whose friendship I valued like a rare gem, whose good opinion I always coveted–
–now agreed with her and let her bully me verbally, manipulate me, and try to control me.
She won’t even let me speak to Richard unless I go through her first, so it’s impossible to work anything out with him.
She’s like the ogre at the gate who’ll eat you up if you say one wrong word, and will not let you pass into the garden. Yet Richard tried to tell me, “She’s not a monster.”
If he doesn’t see that what she’s done is terribly monstrous, then his own judgment is severely lacking.
It’s so devastating that I feel myself retreating back into my shell so far that I fear I’ve lost all sorts of ground that I gained over the years.
I wonder if I’ll ever feel safe enough to venture back into trying to make a close friend, except for the ones I’ve known for years.
And yet there she was on Facebook, telling everyone what a wonderful day she was having because of yelling all those horrible things at me.
When I discovered NVLD in 2000 (see here), it was an answer to everything I struggled with my entire life, not just socially but in other ways as well. I discovered that it was not a character failing or “weirdness” or stupidity, but brain wiring which is different from the mainstream.
It was a huge lift to my self-esteem as I discovered there was nothing actually “wrong” with me. It was just like having ADHD or Asperger’s or dyslexia or some other thing: It’s no one’s “fault,” just the way you’re made.
It explained everything. But Richard decided not to believe in it, as if it were the Easter bunny, as if he could just proclaim me not to have NVLD, snap his fingers, and I would be all better.
Richard and Tracy both used the e-mail I sent Richard on 7/1/10 as an excuse to start making up all sorts of things to pin on me, all sorts of excuses for their own behaviors.
And why? I have no clue. I can only imagine that I was a convenient friend for a time, when they could get something out of me–money, food, shelter, free babysitting, narcissistic supply–then they made up excuses so they could toss me aside when they no longer needed me.
Which is something I could imagine her doing, but I never thought my “friend” was like that. I trusted him, believed in him, thought he was an awesome person, considered him my best friend ever.
And that’s what hurts the most.
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