My name is Emily and I consider myself to be a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
Like many before me, it was several years before I understood what this abuse was or the full extent of its damaging effects on me.
In fact, I didn’t even realize I was being abused.
Until I was reduced to a ghost of my former self, nervously curled up on my living room sofa, heavily pregnant with my second child.
On that day, I decided to ask Google a question.
It might seem odd that I turned to the internet for answers, but I was too embarrassed to ask my friends.
Not embarrassed about being abused, but embarrassed because I wasn’t sure if I was being abused or going crazy.
Feeling like you are going crazy when you’re not is a significant symptom in narcissistic abusive relationships.
So, I asked Google a question I never thought I would need to ask:
Why do I love someone who abuses me?
An odd question, I know.
The rhetoric (especially in the era of the #metoo movement) is clear – if you’re in an unhappy or abusive relationship, you should leave it.
The problem was, I couldn’t leave because I was in love with the person hurting me.
He was like a drug to me.
I couldn’t imagine my life without him.
How would I survive without him close to me?
Narcissists can make us feel this way.
They have an ability to big themselves up while simultaneously putting you down so that they become your whole world.
This is what had happened to me.
I knew it was the relationship that was harming me.
When I looked at my life as a whole, everything else felt fulfilling, including work, friendships and hobbies.
But my relationship with my husband was abusive.
So abusive, my health was suffering.
I had chronic insomnia.
I was sometimes so confined to my anxiety that I couldn’t leave my sofa.
I was terrified of him coming home yet didn’t want to be apart from him (a paradox I still can’t quite understand).
My mind was filled with doubt, fear, confusion, guilt and distrust.
I felt sick all the tim
I would go through periods of not eating and I would become emotionally distant.
So, on that day I turned to Google, I found Vivian McGrath.
I read through Vivian’s blog posts, watched her videos and took her quiz.
That day, it was like a heavy fog had lifted.
I was being abused by an out-of-control narcissist.
Someone who was so far gone in his narcissistic world that there was no chance of him ever changing or recovering.
That moment was a combination of liberation, exhaustion and indescribable anger.
I had been tricked for 8 years into believing everything negative in my marriage was solely my fault.
I had been clambering around trying to please someone who couldn’t be pleased.
Gaslit into thinking I was imagining things when I wasn’t and used and discarded as soon as I became worthless to him.
I will always remember that as being one of the most conflicting realisations of my life.
It had all been a lie and I hadn’t ever understood the true nature of my own husband until this moment.
Months later I would tell my therapist and life coach just how embarrassing I found this.
I felt foolish and naïve – two attributes I would ordinarily never assign to myself.
I thought I was smart and strong.
Instead, he was the smart and strong one. And I was the supply he required to soothe his fragile ego.
So, what is it that Vivian taught me about my relationship?
How did I discover it was specifically narcissism at the centre of the emotional abuse I had experienced?
Here were my clues: E
- Everything was my fault
When I say everything, I mean everything.
I was the problem in all instances, even when the problem had very little to do with me.
If he lost his job, it was because I had been distracting him too much.
If he didn’t get to the second stage of a job interview, it was because I hadn’t given him enough time to swat up for it.
If he put on weight, it was because I wasn’t encouraging him to work out or because I was cooking the wrong food.
Every single thing that went wrong in our marriage was assigned to me in some way.
Even when he cheated, he led me to believe I had conjured it somehow.
Now, of course, there were times when I DID make mistakes, but I always felt secure enough to own them.
I took responsibility for my faults.
But he couldn’t do this.
Accepting responsibility for his mistakes would have meant revealing his vulnerabilities, and his fragile, narcissistic ego would not allow this to happen.
2. I was “crazy” whenever I was onto him.
Sometimes, my husband would disappear for days on end or come home late from work without explanation.
Other times, I would overhear him on the phone at
But he would try to convince me, each time, that I was imagining things.
He would convince me I’m paranoid or jealous.
If he muttered an offensive word at me under his breath and I later mentioned it, he would not only deny all knowledge, but accuse me of showing him up in a bad light.
3. Every conversation was about him.
I noticed early on in my relationship that my husband liked to talk about himself. And in all honesty, I didn’t mind at first.
But after a few years, when life became busy and stressful, it began to get to me.
Whenever I talked about my experience of something, he would quickly turn the limelight onto him, often hijacking my experience and rewording it slightly.
So, if I were to say:
I’m so tired today
He would respond with,
I’m absolutely knackered too, I’ve had no sleep, I might go take a nap
No conversation focused on me or my experience, instead, we were always discussing him and his.
4. He lacked empathy and was exceedingly selfish.
Empaths can give narcissists the supply of attention they need.
But, in my case, this empathy was never returned.
Even in my darkest moments, I was alone with little support.
He would laugh at me when I was expressing any unhappiness or become cold when I needed love.
He seemed to have a gap where empathy should have existed. And I was the person trying to fill it for him.
5. His reactions were inappropriate and excessive.
Narcissists have fragile egos and, when bruised, their reactions can be extreme.
I found myself walking on eggshells around my husband for years so that he wouldn’t be triggered into screaming, smashing things up, storming out or humiliating me in public.
Family events were frightening, social activities packed with anxiety.
I couldn’t enjoy a meal in a restaurant with him in case he blew up.
He was volatile and unpredictable.
Life wasn’t fun anymore because I was unable to relax.
Of course, he’d tell me I’m imaging it all.
He’d even go so far as to suggest I take anxiety medication.
I didn’t need medication.
I needed a healthier romantic relationship or no relationship at all.
6. He said he had done things when he hadn’t.
My husband was a compulsive liar.
He needed to big himself up to hide his fragile and insecure centre.
Often, I would hear him describing his achievements to our friends, but these stories were always exaggerated.
He told me he had qualifications that I later found to be totally bogus.
He told me tall stories about his family members and lied about how successful his friends were.
In reality, he had never worked hard enough to achieve anything.
But, when I confronted him, it was the same old story – I had imagined it all.
7. He recycled people.
I learnt about recycling when I began reading about narcissistic personalities.
My husband was a classic recycler. Let me explain what that means.
He would go from person to person, sucking from them what he could in order to get the supply his narcissism needed.
Once he became bored or felt he could get no more from that person, he would discard them and move onto someone else.
However, after moving through several people, the first person he had discarded started to look shiny and new again.
So, he would go back and recycle them, reviving the relationship and starting over.
Relationships were never balanced. He either absolutely adored someone or bitterly hated them.
One day, he will try to recycle me.
I won’t let it happen.
8. Forever the victim, never the villain.
In recent weeks, I’ve been reading a lot about the ‘drama triangle’.
The drama triangle is a model used in psychology to demonstrate the roles we play in any life drama.
The three roles are ‘villain’, ‘rescuer’ and ‘victim’.
The roles are interchangeable and we have all played one of them at some point or another.
But a narcissist cannot be a villain. This would mean accepting fault.
Narcissists can only be a victim or a hero.
This is why they blame others for their mistakes.
People feel sorry for victims and this sympathy feeds the sensitive ego of a narcissistic personality.
I could go on and on.
I have at least a dozen more traits that I’ve finally come to understand as symptoms of a narcissistic personality.
But hopefully, the examples I’ve provided have given you a full enough picture.
Once I had formed a more accurate profile about this stranger I had been living with, I was able to create a plan.
I knew I couldn’t stay in the relationship.
I knew I had to find a way out, as embarrassed and ashamed as I felt. I realised that this love I felt wasn’t real love.
It felt real, but I was in love with a fraud which meant my love for him was fraudulent too.
So, I began to keep a diary.
This helped me to recognise patterns in the behaviour so that I might be able to stay one step ahead.
I recorded the content of every text, phone call and face to face conversation.
For my own sanity, it helped to see how I was being manipulated and controlled so that I could remove myself from psychological harm.
I also signed up to Vivian McGrath’s mailing list and did a ton of research in narcissistic abuse.
Then, I found a great therapist and life coach and enquired about a local group I could attend alongside women in a similar situation.
I also told my friends and family what was going on.
To my surprise, they believed me.
As soon as I stopped entertaining and feeding the narcissism, my husband changed.
He didn’t change for the better – they never do.
He changed by discarding me.
One night, he packed his bags and left me with a new baby.
Of course, he blamed me.
He made up hundreds of silly excuses for leaving me.
But I knew why he was really going.
He was going because I had stopped supplying his narcissism with what it needed to thrive.
He felt vulnerable.
He left because I stopped the cycle of abuse.
After just a couple of days of him being absent, I felt better than I had done in years.
I felt freer.
I felt more able to effectively work and parent my children.
I felt less tired, less stressed.
I spent my evenings with friends or just by myself watching TV and taking care of myself.
He had had me convinced I couldn’t live without him, but I was!
Not only was I living,
Being free from abuse means I now have a much stronger sense of self and am discovering more about my wants and needs.
I am meeting new people and enjoying socialising.
Had I not ended the cycle of abuse, I would have faded away into an invisible, permanently damaged person.
Instead, I am wiser and happier than I have ever been.
But I want to make one thing clear.
I chose a narcissist. I have to take some responsibility.
It is never the victim’s fault.
Narcissists choose their victims carefully and
But, for me to ensure that the pattern does not repeat itself, I have to accept my role in the relationship.
I was co-dependent, try to fix a person who cannot be fixed.
While I am not looking for a serious relationship yet, I am going to approach any potential relationship in the future with
I still have a little way to go – but the main hurdle has been crossed and I am on the path to recovery.
It takes time, especially after years of daily torment.
But I urge anyone in a narcissistic abusive relationship who might be reading this to take a leaf out of my book – your relationship won’t change for the better.
But YOU can.
Guest writer: Emily
Emily is one of Vivian’s subscribers and followers
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