It was our 11th anniversary on the New Year of 2021. Our daughter woke up early but wanted to go and play so it was just us two in bed on a late Friday morning. I was on my phone when he fully woke up and he snuggled his back against me because I still have a stiff neck from the night before trying to get our daughter to sleep in her big girl bed that isn’t big enough for two.
We are both enjoying whatever silly viral video on our screens when the roughhousing started. I start poking at him, he is poking at me, and we’re both laughing. Since I’m restricted to laying flat on my back without hurting myself, I tighten my arm that his head is resting on. I don’t feel how tightly I am against him until I hear him yell at me “that fucking hurt” and the very same second he retaliated by grabbing my arm then pinching the area where his head was just resting and slamming it down.
Now before I go on, it’s not unusual for our roughhousing to escalate on either side that one crosses the line. Usually, there is a little yelling and retreating. However, this was the first time that there has been intentional malice.
Immediately I just want to get out of the room because I don’t want him to see me cry. I should also explain I’m not a crier, not at movies, funerals, health scares or family emergencies… but something about this man makes me want to cry myself in a corner. So I go out to the other bathroom across the apartment and I silently wipe away the streaming tears. I see the spot on my arm immediately turning into a bluish bruise. I hear him come out of the bedroom, move about the kitchen and make himself coffee. When I hear the baby gate close from the kitchen I walk out of the bathroom intending to beeline it to the bedroom. No such luck.
He turns towards me and I’m still trying to not engage because I know he is at a ten and I can’t compete with that temper. He says to me “so you’re just not going to apologize…” and I start to walk to the bedroom again because I can feel the hot tears just rising.
Get into the bedroom and close the door is all I keep saying to myself. Don’t say anything back right now. He continued to yell ” how many times have I told you”… and his voice starts to trail off because now the tears are falling. And I get to the door and I hear him mutter something. I still don’t know why it made me turn to him and show him my arm and say “oh so it’s ok for you to do this to me” Without any delay, he says in the same tone of anger ” you’re not going to die from a pinch moron”
The rest of the day and onto the next day, we avoided each other. Said little to nothing to each other. Dinners ready, something about keys, and if our daughter needed something. I begin to sleep in our daughter’s bed, again, still with a stiff neck. It’s a great bed, just not made for two.
On the second night I woke up around 2 am and just couldn’t go back to sleep. So I went down a google search of validation that we were in a toxic relationship. I’ve known this for years. I even bring it up every so often but he will tell me, relationships have ups and downs. This is a rough patch. Things to make me overlook my bad behavior as well as his. Tonight is different though. Tonight I find an article about narcissistic abuse.
Whenever I’ve heard about narcissistic people or behavior, I’d associate it with the extreme side of dictators and cult leaders. So being the avid cult documentary watcher, I click on the article about narcissistic abuse and then another one on NPD and another about child abuse being linked but not proved to narcissism. At this point, nothing is setting off alarms, but more of a curiosity about a topic I’ve never really paid much attention to. The lightbulb moment doesn’t come until the article specifically about narcissistic abuse in relationships.
At first, the outline of signs is vague and easily I’m able to deflect in my head. A grand sense of self; yeah ok even my daughter likes staring at herself in the mirror and singing to her own face. Arrogance; yeah he has always been confident in his opinions. Gaslighting; I’m not even really sure someone can alter your reality. Lack of empathy; well his childhood never really fostered acknowledging emotions.
Then I get to further into the article where the examples they gave for each sign and now it’s hitting my memory bank. A grand sense of self, they (the narcissist) believe that they are above the rest, made to be successful. Now he is an intelligent guy and spends a lot of time on his craft. Explains things in his area of expertise that I can’t follow sometimes. But the Underbelly side of that is he will constantly talk about how a business should run or how to turn something successful without having any experience with turning something into a hot commodity. Will explain why it won’t work out in the long run when he hasn’t even made the first step in the business plan. Lightbulb.
Arrogance. For this example I need to give a little backstory, we both are considered minorities. He believes we are the same because we are both considered Asian / Pacific Islander. I do not have that same opinion because I’m biracial and have been on the border of both races like so many biracial kids experience. The reason I bring this up is that I feel we all have our own racial experiences that have shaped us all. Meaning that the way I’ve been treated as a middle eastern looking brown girl in middle school when 9/11 happened vs. being an Asian guy in a Hispanic/ Black community isn’t the same. We don’t have the same biases. Now 2020 has been a year of racial injustices and social issues being brought to the forefront. We have had many conversations and even arguments about our differences. I’ve tried to explain he can’t imagine growing up as a black man or black woman so you can’t begin to have an understanding of how their community feels or hurts. He would go on to say the wrong things out of pure arrogance. Let me be clear he wasn’t saying the black community shouldn’t be hurt or unheard. He just felt it could be handled differently. Lightbulb.
Gaslighting. Now, this is one I only truly connected with Stockholm Syndrome type behavior. How can someone alter your reality? How can someone make you question your own experiences? Why would you believe them when they did it? Then the article asked the question “Have you ever wanted to record this person in conversations because they would later deny saying it? and that’s when the motherfucking lightbulb shattered. Yes, I did! So often I would tell him he made a comment that hurt my feelings and he would say “I never said that” or you’re taking that out of context.
I started thinking why did it take me so long to make the connection? That’s when I realized, I’ve always read the most dramatic stories or was given the most dramatic examples before so it didn’t seem like a likely jump into my world. And now I know how people getting signed up for cults, all those hours of documentaries, and this sentence in an article I was reading at 2 am gave me the perfect understanding. The more I’m reading the more I’m connecting my experiences with each narcissistic abuse sign.
As the silent weekend crawls by, I’m wearing long sleeves or sweaters. I’m covering up because it hurts when anything touches it, but mainly because every time I see the bruise I cry again. So I wear long sleeves to protect myself from the reminder and to protect my daughter’s natural curiosity. I don’t want her to see it and ask about mommy’s owie. Not like I’m going to run the whole story to her, she is 2. I don’t want her to associate a bruise with mommy. I also don’t want him to see it anymore than I showed him in the first few minutes. One, I don’t want him to know I’m still hurt. I’m a strong female remember. I’m tough. And second I want him to ask how I’m doing so I can show him it’s not purple and black. That’s the narcissist and empath cycle. He doesn’t in case you were wondering.
And by the third day of long sleeves and trying not to look at in the shower, it pops into my head “this is what happens in abusive relationships, they have to cover up with makeup or turtlenecks. And the very next second I think “how dare you put yourself in that category, over a pinch. You didn’t get punched or kicked or anything horrific you got pinched. Stop looking for excessive sympathy. Get it together.
On the third night, I’m putting my daughter to bed and my best friend and I are texting about everything in life that’s important and not important at the same time. And I don’t want to add any stress to her plate. She has a real life. With her own family and their stuff going on in this incredibly difficult pandemic year. It’s not my place to add on to it. The conversation is going on and I finally just ask her “can I share something a little traumatic” knowing because of the kind soul she is that she is going to listen to me without judgment without a holier than thou response.
And I just tell her.. and I keep telling her and I even send her the picture of my arm that I took in the bathroom earlier. My phone ends up dying as my kid is just about to fall asleep so I don’t move to charge it to get back to her. I know she will understand. My kid falls asleep and I can get back to text her a wrap-up text for the night. But as I sat in the dark with my phone charging I just needed to put all of this in words. I couldn’t hold it all in anymore.
I don’t know the next step or what’s going to happen. I don’t know if we will be able to speak about it openly or pretend everything is back in its place in a few more days. I’m not writing this to shame him or but myself out there as this warrior for self-worth and confidence. That I’m not.
I’m writing this intending to share it. With the intention of that one sentence in the article that was my shattered lightbulb moment. My goal is to give someone else some type of perspective on their situation. My goal is to show you it’s not all at once, it’s not like you walk into a group and say sign me up for your cult.
It’s not like you go to the Narcissist Newspaper and say can I place a personal ad? It happens over time and it’s easy for you to see the red flags because I placed them so perfectly in the paragraphs above. But you overlook them in real-time because you see how your daughter laughs with her whole belly when they play together. You overlook the moment he jokingly called you lazy because you have had called him the worst names in your head. You overlook when you asked him to give up caffeine with you during your pregnancy he said nope because he didn’t have to.
You do it because there are good moments that last longer than the bad ones. You hang on to the positive memories because remember you’re just going through a rough patch.
Like I said earlier, I knew I was in a toxic relationship but would often downplay the situation to my closest friends because I didn’t want them to hate him or pity me. I didn’t want to be judged for staying or even complaining.
I would praise him often to them, “he is such a good Dad.” I would tell anyone I spoke with about parenthood, he was a natural and I struggled with postpartum and drinking. I would never tell anyone that he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night to feed or calm her down from her night terrors. Or that after I got off work he would check out with her, and would tell me on more than one occasion “my time is over now.”
I would never give the full story. Until tonight.
I hope that someone finds something helpful in my story. At the very least it’s allowed me to release what’s been running in my mind since the new year.
Photo by Marco Michelini from FreeImages
