Julie Anne Smith

Wasted Years Mourning a Narcissist: Reclaiming Our Lost Selves and Thriving

[Update 10/17/14: This post went viral back in the spring when a popular Facebook group posted it.]

In The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the character Grushenka had been mourning for years for the love of her life, after he married someone else.  But the wife died, and he came back, wanting to marry Grushenka.

However, in the course of one evening, Grushenka discovered that this guy was actually a scoundrel and a con man, who only wanted to marry her because she had done fairly well for herself financially.

That evening was sufficient to break her of her grief, and make her wonder how she could have spent all those years mourning this guy who clearly did not deserve her love.  Then she was free to pursue her passion for Dmitri Karamazov.

It is the same when we mourn a narcissist.  I have grieved and waited for exes to come back to me, exes who lied to me, who abused me, then dumped me.  When it finally hit me just what I was grieving and waiting for, the grief began to go away.

I have grieved and waited for Richard to come wanting to restore a friendship with us.  Two and a half years I’ve waited for this!  But when the character of the narcissist becomes clear to us, we can finally stop grieving and move on with our lives.

Richard’s character, too, has now become glaringly clear to me.  I am trying to cut off all contact with him, period, including this blog, for my own mental health, and to work on forgiveness during Lent, by blocking him.

But he has been resisting and trying to keep me tied to him by going all over town with his Android phone, using various internet connections, to stalk my blog every day instead of once or twice a week, because he knows I want him to go away.

He figured out how to bypass the blockers, and has read the posts explaining why I blocked him, so he knows very well that my motives are to move on with my life and forget him, yet he keeps this up to taunt me.

It is a sick, sick game, and tells me that as much as I did not want to believe it, he is indeed a narcissist, apparently a malignant one.  Maybe even a sociopath.  That I need to get free of him and never look back, never mourn him again.

I have every right to do as other bloggers do, and keep tabs on who’s reading what, to tell me what posts are popular, who’s coming back, etc. etc.  I shouldn’t live in dread of what I will find in my statistics.

Over and over again, I find websites on grieving narcissists, which say that we begin to get over them and reclaim our lost selves when we realize they never actually loved us.

Maybe we dated them for a few months or a year, maybe we were married to them for 25 years, maybe they were a pastor who love-bombed us and then spiritually abused us, maybe they were a parent, or a friend of 5 years.

Maybe we’ve waited for years for the narc to come to us wanting to restore a relationship on healthy terms.

Julie Anne Smith’s blog was started three years, I believe, after she left her spiritually abusive church, because it had traumatized her so much that she wanted to spare others the same pain.

It’s perfectly normal for us to go through this pain, denial, grief, and eventual acceptance.  It can take years.  I’ve seen bloggers who have been writing for years.  But if we keep going, it happens eventually.

My blog post ended up in the Lawsuit Archive for Julie Anne’s blog :)

I’ve just been reading through the archive put together by Brad Sargent on Julie Anne Smith’s blog, when right at the very end of part 3, I found my own blog post, BGBC: Chuck Smith’s Counter-Blog Proves Julie Anne Smith is Telling the Truth.

I was surprised because after conversations with Julie Anne, I expected to be posting this as a comment to the archive.  I had a prepared comment which removed the comments relating it to my own situation.  But hey–guess I won’t have to bother after all…..  [Update 11/22/14: This was fixed.]

And we all support each other, lifting each other up as we struggle to heal from our various abusive situations….

“Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?”–Galatians 4:16

SheepEnemy

I’m not sure where this image originated, but I found it on the BGBC Defamation Lawsuit Archive on Julie Anne Smith’s blog.  I also found it on some Tea Party site, but I am so NOT linking there.  😛

This is for anybody who’s a whistleblower.  On Smith’s blog, it was used to illustrate spiritual abuse, and how the congregation can turn on the one who realizes they’re being led astray.

Julie Anne Smith is going through this right now, since her former pastor sued her for defamation (and lost) because of her blog, and she still gets attacked through online comments from her former fellow congregants.

Heck, Chuck O’Neal himself (the former pastor) has even started his own counter-blog from outrage over losing both in court and in public opinion.  He and his wife have escalated their campaign to vindicate themselves, taking it to ridiculous levels.

He even used the URL of Julie Anne’s original blog (before she switched from Blogger to WordPress), changing it from blogspot.com to .org, obviously to fool people into finding his blog instead.

I’ve seen the counter-blog, and it convinced me that Julie Anne is telling the truth!  He’s so blinded by his own megalomania and abuse that he doesn’t even recognize how it shows through everything he posted!  From the above linked archive:

As I have noted elsewhere in this Archive, one wonders if anything would actually have satisfied Mr. O’Neal in his craving and quest for “protecting and defending” his family and his church.

Wherever that urge and urgency comes from, it seems to have driven him to great lengths to refute the alleged lies of his nemeses – Julie Anne Smith and Meaghan Varela – with everything he can.

In addition to his church-related duties, he spent time with press releases and documents and other tasks related to preparing for the lawsuit.

He was already required to pay over $60,000 in the defendants’ court costs and attorneys’ fees, along with his own courts costs and fees for the services of at least three lawyers. But what could have been next – once the lawsuit had been dismissed?

It turns out that he is continuing the battle that he believes he has been called to engage in. His ongoing campaign deeply involves his family and his church in further activities. Some of these have been relatively predictable, while others have been quite unexpected….

According to the O’Neal’s website, Mrs. O’Neal created business cards that label Meaghan Varela and Julie Anne Smith as liars. These cards were designed to be handed out, used in public, perhaps even slipped under car windshield wipers.

The BGBC “Mothers Who Will Not Be Silenced!” campaign also now features magnetic van-vertisements for display on vehicles, with the all-caps slogans: “LEAVE MY CHILDREN ALONE!” and “I AM A TRUE SURVIVOR” plus the O’Neals’ website address.

From Julie Anne’s blog:

The story of spiritual abuse needs to be told. People are being hurt emotionally and spiritually by pastors who use bully tactics and we need a place to learn, to talk freely, and to heal. I will not be silenced. (source)

“I will not be silenced”–Hey, that’s what I said!  😉

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