What I LEARNED Living With A NARCISSIST (Covert Narcissist)

I learned that the words I love you so some people literally mean nothing now my stay the [ __ ] away from me this is what I learned living with somebody who at the time I actually didn't think it was it was nasty um I was living in this reality tunnel of their sob story which was that they had PTSD the person I was living with had escaped from a war zone when they were a kid they'd escaped a genocide and had lived in another country where they were a foreigner where the foreign religion and they were very very poor and they went to live in a wealthy country where they were bullied so she did definitely have PTSD she was definitely the victim of very very unpleasant circumstances they were on for a long time but that blocked me from seeing the two things like that she could be a victim and have PTSD and also be a vicious predator as well because you know I'm a left-leaning sort of a chap and would be the you know background in psychology spiritual view of the world and very forgiving sort of like well you know she suffered a lot and these sufferings they manifest in these patterns of behavior um and I didn't I didn't know at that time that you could authentically be really a victim and be an artist I didn't know at that time and it's important for everybody to learn that you can that a person can be the that the action narcissism is rooted in PTSD nicest Psychopaths borderlines history on it all personality disorders that are reaction formations to extreme pain and suffering and childhood that's normal I didn't think it was at the time so it was a big learn for me to get my head around that there was also I think an element kind of I don't want to say it was it was sexism but it was my view of what men were like and women were like didn't really account for the the level of aggression that I was doing with I didn't think women were aggressive like that I didn't think that this goal would be running a vendetta against me which she was and I was very deliberate was very targeted and it was really deeply malicious and I think there was this sense of me well you know women and nurturing their mothers you know by nature their biology everything is is nurturing and growing people in healing people which is why there's more women in psychology and then generally in the caring professions it's usually a woman's it's usually a woman's space so women are intrinsically nurturing and kinder than men because up until that point in my life my my own childhood experiences of trauma and suffering were where the hands of men and of boys older than me then I got into the martial arts which is a world predominantly of men fighting with men and then I was working in my club security so and I was working for low-level criminals I was working for but you would they would be classed as organized crime and I can give you names of people who've had books published about them in films or we were associated with and that I actually directly work for but don't be don't be impressed this very low-level organized crime this call it semi organized crime and so I was I'd know it's it's men men of the bad guys men are the ones who who do this stuff and because of that rigidity of my thinking I couldn't see the extent of violence though woman was capable of and they combined that with another blind spot that I had to and that taught me living with this goal was that the violence takes place in more than one arena violence isn't necessarily snipers tanks and bombs violence can be emotional violence violence can be psychological violence violence can be propaganda that's why good effective military powers don't just attack at the physical level they'll attack at the psychological in the emotional level as well they'll do the yang and the yen approach to warfare so I didn't know women could be that violent and I didn't class what she was saying as violent when I wrapped my head around what was actually going on and I cuz it supposed where you could say it was sexist is slightly patronizing I did that the women wouldn't be capable of that that level of malice that is the that's the territory of men vendetta's malice a desire for revenge yes I was younger I had more naive entities thing but I genuinely believed that I genuinely believed that women were just they used to say we used to call women the fairer sex the softer sex I know that I'm capable of that well hello my lesson on that one and it helped a lot to realize that aggression narcissism psychopathy is not owned by either sex viciousness savagery is not owned by other sex when I started to do more work with women who were the daughters of narcissistic mothers then I realized how equally vicious it's in human nature this is not it's not a gendered thing so I learned that I learned that trauma is contagious PTSD is contagious I learned that living with somebody who was cycling through some very strong emotional flashbacks actually started to emotionally disregulated to remotely diagnose my axe you know I'm not qualified so I'm not a clinician and even if I was nobody would take that seriously oh I think my ex-wife is like this that really oh do you really but based trying to be dispassionate based on observations and she would have covered all of the bases for cluster B and all of the niches that the the different varying parts of the cluster B spectrum and there was goal orientated psychopathy there there was clearly histrionic behaviour she was obsessed with how she appeared to the world and she was an excellent PR agent excellent truly did an amazing job of controlling everybody's perception of focus I've rethought she's wonderful real conscientious animal loving the voice was very high-pitched and sweet and gentle loved animals was working to save the environment so and so forth everybody loved her and so she's very charming and very nice she was entered herself very well the only comments that I did get was that sometimes she dressed in a way that was perhaps a little over-the-top in terms of provocation unnecessarily sexual like her but some family meetings we would show up and a bit yeah that'd be some some ass and titties threw me out and there was a sort of a tone deafness in sort of sometimes engaging what was appropriate and what wasn't as far as pushing the message the message the narrative and the signals outward I am very sexually attractive so without realising so you need to don't turn that down in this scenario you can dial up over there if you want to it was a little bit tone deafness there which is interesting because years after I had split with her I was speaking somebody about the the connection in the research that's being drawn between autism amongst women and psychopathy and when I was with her when I couldn't look at the possibility of her being a narcissist I did think that she was autistic she was also highly intelligent a published scientist her work was published a peer-reviewed and published then and was well received people were using it for their research bright bright person but I communicate with us sometimes and I'd be like the lights are on but I don't think anybody's I think anybody's home there's a really strange experience of being with somebody but also feeling like they're just not there and I only really got to grips with that years later when I was with somebody else whom I wasn't living with them but we would spend weeks at a time together and this little voice in my head would be like you're not supposed to compare but how does this compare and I'm like well this new person is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but I always feel there's a human there I always feel as a presence of a human being so even if the behavior was weird or annoying or she's been cranky or which all humans are it was always within a context that I could get to grips with and I go okay I understand what's going on here with my eggs I never knew what the hell was going on and it was extremely distressing because I think when we communicate with each others like a baseline sort of a connection and empathy the empathy and me and the empathy and new kind of reaches out and you sort of you know it's never perfect but you sort of reach for each other in that way and that just never happened with her never it was never there and so I interpreted that because narcissism was not a possibility in my mind there was like oh this is PTSD that's led to autism while autism spectrum disorders are not narcissism and never the twain shall meet I thought at that time that's actually not true as I say some research indicates that female autism may manifest as like a histrionic meaning like hyper sexual very very sexualized mode of communication and psychopathy highly goal orientated even said but but immoral to the point of breaking moral boundaries and even legal boundaries which actually this girl did she broke several legal boundaries when I was with her not big ones little little things small things but important things like really really extremely important things so that's another learn that I had yes she could be an artist yes you'd have PTSD and narcissism in fact narcissism is is a manifestation of complex post-traumatic stress disorder yes you can be autism spectrum and the cost of B disorder spectrum as well that exists and it was a strange experience to be living with somebody where I felt like the lights runnin nobody was home and there was always something up I even went to the point because of course because also as I said to detect a lot of the boxes for all the different things with psychopathy narcissism borderline all day histrionic was there but there's also this terrible thing we call covert narcissism which is truthfully more vulnerable this should be called in the literature is called vulnerable narcissism or fragile narcissism and that was the stuff that drove me completely bonkers and I was searching for an answer I was looking for you know where's what's what's going on here because none of this makes sense and it would make me for the cognitive dissonance is extremely stressful those of you have lived with narcissus you know exactly what I'm talking about and I started to change any complex post traumatic stress and he issues I had from childhood were inflamed and so I started to warp my behavior changed massively I got massively more stressed and anger management issues from my 20s that I thought were completely gone came back with a vengeance that was just one thing depression anxiety massive insomnia eating problems I started have real bad problems are just eating like a lot couldn't stop kept eating all the time it's now looking back up well probably I'm trying to suppress the feelings of anxiety and food is a good way of day and that I couldn't couldn't and wouldn't go back to drugs and alcohol because it already had that pair of my life from and go back to it so what's a legal way of doing the same thing it's not quite as effective as snorting coke and drinking yourself half blind but if you eat enough cake you do start to normal it home and yeah I realized that it's contagious you're it's a it's called and some people call it secondhand trauma if somebody cycling through massive swings of emotional dysregulation you will - and I didn't know that I had no idea that that was the case I learned that the words I love you so some people literally mean nothing that there are human beings walking around who have no moral boundaries I learned that there are people who will target people they see as being vulnerable but resourceful so if you're vulnerable but resourceful if you're if you have something they want and you have weak boundaries you're like catnip for these people you're gonna become you're going to become something that they get obsessed with because they want to harvest you they want to mind you they want to strip mining for your resources and saying I love you and deliberately trying to evoke love from you it's just part of their natural strategy I didn't know that I learned that there are people out there who will accelerate the intimacy and the high rate that's not a good thing the whirlwind romance and the and the the sex actually at the time I took it very romantically and I was like oh we're so sexually compatible and we're so into each other the first time we went out for a date we went straight back to a hotel room and had sex consecutively 10 times in one night which I was like well you know that just proves the connection and I'm looking back now and it was a pretty good thing other than that you know you get a stimulus response like you get turned on under certain conditions and she's a really nice-looking goal and and that's that's all it is so I would never mistake lust for connection ever again I'd never make that mistake again and I think I would finish by saying you need to what I learned and what I want to share with people and tell them to watch out for apart from everything else I just said is what they'll do is they won't just accelerate the intimacy like they'll wanna have sex you really early and they'll want to give you a lot of sex really really quickly they'll want to move in with you very early in their wanna speed that side of the relationship hot but I've never really heard anybody talk about this they'll try and pull as much love from you as possible they'll try and get you as invested emotionally in the relationship as possible whilst not investing in it themselves so they have to do a lot of double talk and they have to run like a side by side act where they're going okay what do I need to do I need to be the goal that loves this guy and their votes as much love and intimacy from this person as possible but it's not the real me so they split themselves so I now need to go into that mode so this sucker who's looking into my eyes with love and seeing his kids in my eyes I need to do that now that's a game that I need to do right now and put effort into that was holding back complete coming out of the relationship it was very very hard for me to look at the fact that she never loved me the way that I loved her and that she was incapable of loving me the way that I loved her and that she had deliberately sort of provoked and evoked as much love and as much connection for me as she possibly could whilst offering me as little that she could get away with whilst still keeping the scam going which it was a scam a total scam for all my sort of understanding of psychology and the fact that I was a self-protection instructor for ten years before I ever met and I was scammed I was completely scammed and I was scammed if you look from the beginning to the recovery period I was only with this girl for three years but I was scammed out of six years of my life because it took me three years to recover fully and that was with work that was with effort it's very difficult to recover from this type of stuff not impossible takes time and it's the recovery process is deep because the wounds are deep so you have to end like I couldn't do this recovery process without getting into what is the nature of reality do I believe in God what is the purpose of life what does it make it like I had say it was like having a house that was so infested with some sort of rot or lice that we had to strip everything down to the foundations and even dig out some of the foundations and start again such that the person that I am post the relationship has very little to do with the person I was before it's it's that deep the recovery process has to go that deep because the wounds are so deep what I learned was there's a deliberate provocation of your attachment trollman and you'd say well I don't have attachment trauma and I would say every human being does every human being has attachment trauma and attachment trauma separating and individuating from your parents is in and of itself traumatic being born is traumatic for you and for your mother and that's just a fact of life you're with your parents you're with your family you're physically with your mother and then you've separate and it's painful what the Narcis psychopath does and what this goal did to me was provoked that original attachment trauma which snaps in do this consciously they just know they scan for weakness and and she attacks the weakness every single time that that attachment trauma was inflamed again in my life because attachment trauma when you detach even if you do volitionally and your parents are like good enough they're basically psychologically healthy they're not drunks they're not a narcissist they don't beat you it's still traumatic and you'll sell experience here as a rejection so you individuating from your parents gives you a wound everybody gets that gives you a wound that feels like rejection and you'll become hypersensitive to rejection for the rest of your life there is a kind of Perpetual daily re-experiencing of that rejection that the narcissist and psychopathy does to the codependent and it's done multiple ways multiple times a day but it you relive it daily and it gets I don't think you not to it I think it actually gets more painful with time so how do you reject somebody multiple times a day when - let us say neurotypical normal whatever that may be non narcissistic adults who are in a loving relationship have a problem and they fall out with each other and over something you didn't put fuel in the car you put the cap back on the toothpaste or whatever it is when two adults argue you don't you you should only be arguing about the behavior and attacking the behavior you shouldn't be attacking the person that's a logical fallacy in a debate if just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I have to turn and say well anybody who believes that would be Duke hurt that's called an ad hominem logical fallacy it means to the person to the human ad hominem to the man rather than to the arguments are no not attacking the argument I'm now attacking the person that's not an okay thing to do but they do more than that they attack the root of who you are the essence of who you are and they don't just attack it they'll let you know they don't just attack it they let you know that they hold you in contempt for it that they reject you utterly as a human being for it now I was smart I wasn't that smart with this girl and it wasn't you could say oh well it's a good-looking girl loads of sex you just got overwhelmed and brainwashed by sex I was like it wasn't that simple I really did love it I really really did love it I loved sorry let me rephrase that I loved the shell personality that she would put on to get me to fall in over there I really did that I loved nobody I loved a ghost that person did not exist that was a ghost in the machine it was a program that she was running a hallucination that she was projecting to keep me brainwashed while she fed off me while she drank my milkshake what I realized was beyond the sex beyond the physical attraction there was love that I really really did love her and that that love was being used as the leverage and the hawk and the stick at the same time so like a slave master I was chained but the chain and the whip was the same thing the chain and the whip and the potential for reward was all the same thing so how do you keep people surprised you caused them to suffer you say do as I tell you I'm going to [ __ ] and if you do do as I tell you you'll get to go into a bigger slave house and you'll get like an extra half portion of gruel every day because you've been a good slave and I'll let you leave your slaving half an hour earlier than the other slaves you're like wow yeah this is great and it reduces us it reduces us to the wretchedness of bootlicking masochistic submissive slaves who by the end of it are and this is the terrible shame that stops people from going to therapy or coaching and I'm from getting help the PTSD part of the PTSD in the sea PTSD of the experience of narcissistic abuse is watching yourself behave in such a shameful and humiliating manner begging for scraps begging for mercy and they're not just begging for mercy but when you offered the scraps and you get the mercy you're disgustingly grateful you're pathetically wretchedly grateful your sniveling and groveling in your own filth whilst they stand above you it takes time for you to get to that point but you will get to that point because you're being to quote Gaslight slowly and systematically driven insane quoting that the film gasps like from 1944 the American version you're not insane you are slowly and systematically being driven insane by somebody who's running an agenda on you so that's what I learnt living with an abscess that was it was it was hard it made me a better and a way way stronger human being on the other side of it it fundamentally changed some of my core beliefs about love relationships and unlife and I am I'm grateful for the experience as awful as it was I Oh be Wan kenobe that Martha strike me down lord Vader and I will become more powerful than you could ever imagine I was struck down that I'm talking about one of these relationships I she went through the most recent one I was struck down but I really did come back far far stronger on the other side of it and I believe everybody can it's just that it's really really really tough to do ladies and gentlemen thanks for your time for your attention and I look forward to preach again soon Cheers folks if you enjoyed that there are more episodes for you to watch right here please click on that if you want to subscribe to me do it here and here is a PDF for you that is completely free

Channel: RICHARD GRANNON

Views: 263,101

Keywords:

Id: GOIH9tO3AG0

Length: 26min 34sec (1594 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020