To Every Girl Who Has Ever Lost Herself To A Narcissistic Man

Have you ever entered a relationship convinced that the script of you guys meeting each other was written in heaven?

Have you ever so deeply loved a person that you were confident that you would never love anyone that way – ever again? Well that was precisely what happened to me.

But as you can tell from the topic, it wasn’t meant to be, and my romantic dreams were dashed for good. By the time I had left the relationship, I was nothing like my former self. The world was all grey and shadows. Love and happiness were no longer what I believed in; it was just like those fairy tales that my parents would tell me when I was a kid.

I was awash with sadness loneliness and depression. I would find it hard to stay in charge and control of my life. Of course, I spent many weeks with terrible thoughts and wet pillows.

The grief and pain took so long to heal that at one point I began to believe that I would never be able to pick up the broken pieces of my heart. Not to mention never being emotionally strong enough to love again. To me, love was as distant from my thoughts as the stars from the earth.

But of course, from my introduction, you can tell that it wasn’t all doom and gloom at the beginning. I was such a happy girl who loved to live life. I was the smiling type who always saw the positive in all the negative problems I had, and for the things that were going well for me, I was always grateful.

But all that came to a screeching halt, when I met this narcissist.

I went from seeing the world as bright bold and colorful to seeing gray and sadness everywhere. My relaxed and balanced emotional self-became a wreck of anxiety and depression. Before I would always go to bed, hoping to wake up later in the morning with joy, but that wasn’t the case anymore.

I would go to bed tired and sad, and then dread the thought of a new day. I became a mere shadow of myself.

At first, I was ashamed that I let myself be used and abused by him. I would spend long nights and many weeks beating myself for being such a fool. It was one thing to know that he was a narcissist and there was no changing him but it was another thing to know that and still let myself be tortured by his emotionally draining antics. It gave me sleepless nights for weeks. I knew better but I refused to do better, and that regret kept stinging me, and its poison helped keep me intoxicated with self-doubt, low self-esteem, and negativity.

I trusted him

As naive as I was back then, I trusted him without a shadow of doubt, he was into me just as I was into him. Sometimes I even felt that he was even bigger and believe you me that I saw all the social signs you could ask of to show someone was trustworthy. He was smooth with his tricks.
But then tricks are tricks, and no matter how good they are, they don’t last. So I would completely trust him on delivering on his promise, but that never happened. He would instead break my heart again and again.

He made me feel safe.

At first, I was shocked at his level of commitment to the relationship, he would always be there for me in the times of need, and he would even go the extra mile to make sure that I was okay. At that point in time, I felt like he was my Superman. With him, I felt completely safe and then it progressed from me being safe and complaisant to relying on him. But I didn’t know I was walking into a trap. This was what he wanted all this while. He wanted me to trust him enough to let my guard down. Then he went into attack mode. With all my defenses down, he could and would attack me knowing that I was defenseless and vulnerable at this point.

I loved him.
Yes, I wholeheartedly loved him and I paid the price for that. I had ignored one of the very few red flags that showed up as we dated. At some point, I had found out that before I met him, he left a lot of broken relationships in his wake. Instead, I loved him with every fiber of my being. But it was to be a mistake with my choice of emotional, physical, psychological, and financial investment. He was a man who didn’t know what love was. But I stuck by him hoping that he could be changed. In fact, he convinced me to believe that he did want to change, but with him, it was all smokes and mirrors. I finally had to learn the hard way; narcissists can’t be taught how to love. It isn’t a part of his nature and thus will never understand what it means to be in love with someone.

I gave all that was in me to someone who would never understand nor appreciate what it means to do that. He was just going to gobble it and ungratefully ask for more.

He made me a prisoner of my love.

Photo by Kleiton Silva / Unsplash

I got stuck in my complete obsession to love him. I was a day dreamer, and I believed in love. I had always had a positive outlook towards humanity, and I was also a believer in having a soulmate. When I met him, I taught that I had my other half, my soulmate. So when all these issues began to pop up in my relationship, I stuck with him. Thinking that all would be fine and that I just needed to try harder. But after frantic denials, I had to accept the fact that I had made a bad decision.

He wasn’t a friend and him being a soulmate was a ridiculous stretch.

He was such a negative person too.

He would know me enough to trigger my buttons and then taunt me concerning my insecurities. He would make fun of me and yet scold me for being way too sensitive.

Day by day his sly but acidic criticism would wear on my self-esteem until I hardly saw any value in myself.

He was good at emphasizing on my weaknesses and brushed aside my strengths. Yet I would go crawling back to him, in my naive mind, I believed that I was fighting for the right cause and that at the end I would be rewarded for my struggle with a solid relationship – poor me! I just hadn’t realized it yet, but I had become a narcissist’s fool.

I lost myself to a narcissistic person…

With time I became a mere shadow of my former self. A strong, happy and confident girl slowly faded into a weak, depressed and anxiety-ridden girl. All I saw around me was negativity. I soon began to believe all that he said and insinuated.

I started to believe that I was worthless and I wasn’t deserving of love and affection.

Every time I let him have his way, he would say one thing and then do another. He would always make sure that everything about the relationship was all about him and that I didn’t matter. I let him manipulate and deceive me into doing things that I wouldn’t have done if I were in my right mind. But I did them, and that was sad.

But I found myself again.

I went through the worst of circumstances for someone who didn’t even love me back. I did all the growing up I need to do to make the relationship work – remember that I loved this person, but all the changes and improvements were one-sided and yet he jeered me for not being good enough for him. I had given everything of me and more. It is an understatement to say that the relationship was bad. I would love to say that nothing good came out of that relationship but I wouldn’t be justice to the truth of the matter. Nothing happens without you learning something new from it. You could glean wisdom from the worst of circumstances that come your way. And if you choose to find in that wisdom of life lesson, you move on from that crisis a stronger, wiser and better human being.

It doesn’t mean that I immediately came out of it great.
Yes, I went through long depressing moments and for a very long time I felt like I was a wreck. But because I never gave up on finding my former self, he didn’t continue to torment me psychologically. I vehemently refused to stay a wreck because that also meant that he had won at the end, that he would forever control me and whatever fate I had laying in front of me.

So I fought to keep my tattered being together as the winds of life blew strongly all around me. Second after second and minute after minute, I worked on taking one step at a time. I was determined that I would make it out of the rubble that was once my life and personality before the storm.
Stone by stone I began to rebuild my life. I would build back my self-confidence and become a far better person than I was before I was in this relationship.

He had hurt me so much that I had decided that I was done. I couldn’t take it anymore. He had to leave my life for good.

So too the way he treated me, I started believing that I wasn’t deserving of true love. But with time and a conscious consistent effort to become better I realized that I was force feed a terrible lie. He was the one that wasn’t deserving of all the love I showered in him. It was as if I would putting all of my treasured emotions into an abyss.
THINK ABOUT IT.

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