Truth

"Narc Madness: The Narcissist Therapist & Facebook"

Ollie is right that "most therapists" still don't get it." I agree about how short the sessions are, and as soon as you warm up you are out the door. I have been in therapy some have been good some have been bad, but I have a deep concern about narcissism. This was written about on other articles, but the psychology world is kind of failing in warning people about narcissism and sociopathy. If you show up as a CPTSD child abuse victim and ACON, only very few therapists will even understand how to address those traumas. Maybe in the past ten years this has gotten better but one still needs to be wary.The personality disordered may even be in the field themselves.

Of course being a Christian, I do not agree with everything in psychotherapy, though I've had a few Christian therapists along the way. Ollie is right to warn people in being careful on being careful Facebook boards and online groups.  We have to be careful predators can enter those places. Some know that some ACONs are vulnerable people especially in the early stages of identification of the problem and breaking away.

It is interesting how he points out how narcissists will use narcissism as a "shield" since it is a personality disorder. Some people believe that malignant narcissists can be "cured", I do not hold such hope even if these people are well-meaning folks. There is part of us who would love for everyone to be good people and to have consciences.

 He is right about some of the support boards being full of personality disorders especially borderline personality disorder where disordered people expect others to cater them.  There are a few"safe" small boards but even there, and if you find one, be happy for it, but if certain psychologists, psychiatrists, ,"professionals" and personality disordered are there, be careful. He gives good advice, in walking on and just staying away from people that don't treat you right. We have to carry the rule of "no contact" with the toxic into all arenas.

See: My Counselors and Me

Psalm 1:1 The No Contact Verse and We are Refugees

Smakintosh made a very good video here. I never considered Psalm 1:1 in my no contact before but do now.  I have followed the biblical commands to depart from the wicked but this Psalm is extremely revelatory too. Scornful is an interesting word that one can think of when it comes to the narcissist who degrades and mocks you. Smakintosh is right when he states we are commanded to depart from the personality disordered by God. Profligate is a very interesting word, those definitions definitely apply to narcissists and their evil towards other people.  The word disquieting sums up so much of my life in dealing with the narcissists in my life, they took away my peace for decades, and disturbed and made me anxious. As a Christian, the Bible gives very direct advice for us to apply to our lives, and this verse is direct basically saying Get Away from people like this!

Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.




I feel like a refugee too. During my first no contact, I literally went on the run. There is a side of my personality where I always think about running away. My husband wonders at some of this vigilance but I know where it comes from.

 I pray Smakintosh's new move works out for him and his wife and they enjoy their new community. While I live in the same state as one of my main narcissists, I have not lived in any of the same cities as any member of my family since I was 21 years old. Thank God for that, they would have turned my name mud in whatever community we shared. I won't even live in the same town as a cousin as long as I live. Creating physical distance from narcissists is usually a good idea. They can't smear campaign you to your neighbors or try set-ups for revenge as easily.

It is hard to move, I've been through some tough ones myself. Just thinking of my old loved small town can be tough coupled with the grief of so many who have died there. That town in my life was a literal refuge and in that way probably will always have part of my heart in that I escaped a horrible place in the big city.  I have enjoyed where I live now too, it is a small enough town where I can be comfortable.  I do believe a move to escape narcissists is usually a good idea. I have fled them myself, and "saved" myself with moves. For many ACONs, physical moves can literally save their lives, and their emotional health.  I wish mine did not know where I lived.

We are refugees. My dreams during my life often were filled of packing bags and being "in danger" and being on the run. I have often pondered the meaning of these dreams. I shout to my loved husband in many of these dreams to help me and sometimes he is there running with me and other times I am looking for him. In most of these dreams, I am hiding or running from my family. You know your Mom and Dad were not nice people if they star forever in your nightmares as villains. I used to even feel guilty about these dreams years ago but not anymore!

The psychologists would have a field day with my dream life. This description of being a refugee in Smakintosh's video hit home for me, I was always seeking shelter or refuge. I wanted saved from the evil. At a self help group, I told two friends, I never feel safe, I always feel the streets loom and that danger is like an anvil over my head. My refuge in this life has come through God. I agree He is my only refuge. When I feel this way, I have to go pray to deal with it. Like Samkintosh God has rescued me from very wicked people. I pray now for His protection everyday.

ACONs are those seeking refuge, and following their conscience, instead of being destroyed or owned by the wicked. I understand now why I feel like I am on "the run". I was a refugee.

Psalm 9:9  The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.

My Favorite Song when I was 15

My favorite songs

Living Next Door to the Country Club

I wrote this essay some years ago, in a senior center memoir writing class that allowed disabled people in it.  It was the year my husband's first lay-offs had occurred before we moved here. While the elderly people fondly remembered good times on the farm and grandchildren, there I was, just starting to process my crazy childhood and life. Hopefully my essays didn't shock them. I have added a few corrections here.

I was raised to marry into wealth. My mother had escaped her hardscrabble farm kid's lifestyle and had escaped to a big city by the age of 19. Poverty suffered as a child is easier then as an adult. At least when you are a kid, it's not your fault.

So while I would be an adult of currency exchanges, Save-A-Lots, scrimping every penny and living in fear of ghetto criminals, shopping was a fun hobby to my parents, the overpriced mall a center of delights. I grew up among Ethan Allen furniture, private school education, vacations and in high school lived on what was considered the richest street in town. Thank goodness, I had no idea what would await me as adulthood beckoned.

My parents lived on a near six figure income by the late 1970s and I grew up clueless. I had no idea what a sirloin steak really cost, my mother would fill 2-3 grocery carts full should relatives visit from out of town and think nothing of it. I didn't realize that a 5 course dinner could sent you back forty dollars. I grew up in a house that if the Russians had bombed, there would be food for a year. Today towards the end of every month my fridge is absolutely barren.

                                   this isn't my mother's collection this is a normal sized one.

Money was wasted on strange things. Thousands of dollars on china figurines was spent freely. One day I entered my mother's living room during a warmer December day to see at least three-five thousand glass snowmen of various kinds standing like a snowman army. My eyes bugged out as I calculated how much money she had probably spent on the endless variations of clay, porcelain and fabric Frosties. There had to be at least $30,000 dollars invested in this particular shopping spree. My mother should have bought stock in Hallmark.

For my father there were car parts to be refurbished in the garage, and entire "muscle" car in one side of the garage to be redone, and endless gadgets and tools. He had everything from an air compressor, two or three riding mowers and endless construction and house re-modeling items.

I was no spoiled kid, as I actually got goaded by the other high school kids for living in a 6 bedroom house next door to the only country club in town. While the neighborhood kids went on constant vacations, and got to play golf, we never joined. Everything was about keeping up with the Joneses, model households, "work til you drop, children or not. Today several family member's houses look like untouched museums and the houses you see in magazines. While I would get a decent number of Christmas gifts for good pictures, I didn't dress like a rich kid. I was befriending the kids who lived in the projects and the working class neighborhoods nearer to my school. My mother didn't buy me very many clothes and when you show up in high school wearing the same 2-3 outfits over and over, it establishes your social rank more then your parent's address.

The rich kids of my neighborhood rejected the whole lot of us, my family didn't realize that farmer's daughter and that a man with an New Jersey accent who cussed his head off in a Honeymooner's a la violent Fred Flintstone fashion don't quite fit into some upper class enclaves no matter the pretensions made. If anything after the neighbors called the cops, on my Dad cussing his head off so loudly they covered their children's ears, we were forbidden to play with the rest of the neighborhood teens. They avoided us like the plague. One popular girl fled my house during her first visit, when my father stomped up the stairs screaming about some lost papers and throwing things. She was petrified. At least she could run away, I was stuck!

My family never had heard of women's rights. While I was a good student, having free laborers came first. I still remember 10-14 hour workdays, scrubbing, polishing and dusting the 3,500 square foot house we lived in. Cinderella just wasn't a fairy tale. Before anyone says, "Quit yer whining all kids have to do chores!" This was a labor camp with a mean drill sergeant by your side. Perfectionists out of the gates of hell--Mommy Dearest and Daddy Dearest nightmares that made Joan Crawford's whining about the wire hangers and chopping down the tree in the backyard a slight tiff. No one would ever realize there are 5,000 ways to rake leaves the wrong way or even fathom that a rake had to be held the right way. I would grow up with a lifelong distaste for housework and yard work.

As college rolled around, my father kept threatening to throw us out on our ear by the age of 18. Having a father who won a full-4 year ride to university due to extreme math skills I did not inherit meant as a normal kid, you were simply resented. I worked 30 hours a week, my last two years of high school in restaurants as a salad and prep- cook. I used to hoard money like a fiend. The irony would occur to me years later. At one point in late high school, I had the greatest amount saved in the bank that I would have for the rest of my life which was $5,000. College and payment on my first car soaked it up like a sponge.

Things got only worse, in college, I in youthful idealism chose art education as a major not realizing it would sink me into future poverty. Some people make that one bad decision that turns their life on the dime towards the bad. For some it's getting pregnant as a teen, dropping out of school, doing drugs. This was mine 3.4 grade point average or not. I was good at art and actually a very good art teacher in the few years I got to work in it. The subject of art had served as my escape for survival. It was not only an interest but a vocation, but sadly my declining health blocked me from the good teaching jobs.

My parents hated what I stood for. The money I got for help to get through college was paid for with as pound of flesh attached even as I worked my way through college in the dorm cafeterias. I was called an evil hippie and a prima donna because I wanted a state school education and wanted to be a high school art teacher. One would think I wanted to run away and join the circus or had become a prostitute by the reaction of my father to my choice of a future career. He even tried to get me to join the convent and got angry when I refused, saying they would pay for my college.

No one warned me of how hard it was to make a living. No one told me that young adults could struggle. No one told me or prepared me for the fact that life may brings struggle or turmoil. With parents who could indulge in immediate gratification, what did I know? My mother who had no college even got a $40,000 a year job via my father who gave it to her. No one told me how to write a check, or how to budget or that the wrong step could lead to years of poverty. No one told me that things had drastically changed since the Baby Boomers made their first steps out of college. There were losers and winners and the winners had money.

By age 22, even with a part-time $14.00 an hour art teaching job and then making the decision to go back to school for a paralegal degree, I was considered a wash-up by my family. The summer I graduated from college, my 20 year old sister was marrying the ex mayor of a big city's son. She never would have to worry about living out of milk crates or struggling to pay bills. My parents would tell me, "Why can't you be more like your sister?". She went to community college and met her husband right after high school graduation. She has never lived on her own and went right from her twin bed covered in Garfield sheets with stuffed animals on top to her suburban housewife bliss. I wondered if the marriage was arranged since she never dated in high school, went from zero to 60 and they both treated each other like they were entering a business partnership instead of showing normal love behavior like kissing and hugging one another.

My sister had reached the pinnacle of success in my parents eyes by being engaged at age 19. My college graduation was ignored and neither parent showed up. One of my friends drove me to my college graduation. I would be stuck living at home for a year paying a small amount of rent and saving money for my great escape into my first no contact.

The years then came where as an adult, I would visit my mother's house with the perfect rooms, with one room of new furniture equaling a year's salary for me and my husband. Two doors down from multimillionaires, she added onto the house, and remodeled to her heart's content. After my father died, the insurance pay-offs made her even wealthier and more self satisfied. She has no idea what my day to day life is like. She doesn't know what life without money is like. The glass snowmen stand on patrol every winter with their empty eyes surveying the suburban landscape.

See:  Money, Snobs and Narcissists

Made Some More Cards

Being Housebound Sucks

                                               [picture source]
"Let me out! I just want to see a coffee shop and the library again!"

You feel like winter will never end. You don't get to go out and do things other people do. For me it is a dismantling of my entire life over and over. My church probably thinks I have dropped out. I have not seen but 4 human beings in the last month. Food is tasteless. I am addicted to the Internet. I watch shows and read books where people have actual lives and go live theirs instead of having one.  County jail time at this conjuncture in my life would be nothing compared to the sentences served inside. Involuntary pseudo "house arrest" on a tether made of temperature is the norm for me. When do I get to escape. I can mentally gear up for some months like this for winter and time in summer but when it gets too long the tears begin.

Last night I missed a dinner with friends, social invitations don't come to me as often as other people,
and when you disappoint people over and over, it only adds to the lonely and frustrated feeling. It was a Mensa dinner too and I have wanted to attend one for awhile. I'm not a member but wanted to see what it was like.  The friends came to visit me after their dinner but I wanted to shake my fist at the sky and scream as the temperatures stayed in the teens.  Today my husband is writing on a festival, I wouldn't mind going to and will miss. The cold and heat never let up, our weather has grown worse.

I had two months of illness from Dec-Jan. I do not know why I am not being spared when it is almost March. I need some air.  I need a vacation. I need to see some people.  The four walls of this apartment I pay way too much for are closing in. Paying for my cage and then guilty thinking "Oh don't complain, there are homeless people out there.". You could be freezing your butt off on a park bench.  More guilt thinking there are people stuck in nursing homes and even totally bedbound, it could be worse. Cursing the lungs and the body for the live unlived. Internet addiction grows. Doing the day to day chores from dishes to the walk down the hall feel like a walkway to nothingness.

So many things delayed, paper work for adoption, getting glasses, getting a digital hearing aid, going to counseling because I am like a rat in the cage and the temperature refuses to budge to 30-32, where I could escape. I feel for my husband who is having to do every errand alone including mountains of paperwork. I imagine Mini-Me happily driving around, and the Queen Spider enjoying her warm Florida days eating dinner out and at her community center while life for me narrows. Healing would come quicker with a good life to replace my bad memories.

Maybe I should move to a new climate, but I am tired of moving, tired of starting over, tired of goodbyes. So much has already been ripped away and I do not know how to replace it. The only climate that would work is Seattle and northwestern Washington State, but I don't have money to make the over thousands of mile trip to even see if I like it there. I've never been there. The cost of living means I would be living in a cardboard box on the street too. Heat does the same thing and could trap me as bad as the cold so moving to a more southern climate won't work either though if I was rich and could snow bird it, life would be far easier. Why did I get COPD so young when I never smoked in my life?

Then I was walking in the apartment hall for my exercise and saw two 80 something women going out shopping in 5 degrees. One had several shopping bags. How do they breathe out there? It gave me a strange feeling. How do they not fall out there on the snow and ice? Even with a walker the slightest bit of slush seems to make my feet act like a cartoon character slipping on thin ice.

I talk to doctors about this, they know I am stuck inside all the time, and the mobility and breathing issues. They tell me "Do your best," and "Don't push it" and admit there are reasons that if I tried to go out in 10 degrees, I would be seeing the ER. My circulation and body even shut down beyond the breathing if I get too cold. When I was young, I would push it. Who wants to have no life? Everyone wants one.  I would even throw up and have many bad things happen to me. I've been dealing with housebound issues since 1999.

I do develop my "own little world" and always have something to do, trust me, I do not get bored but while I can mentally prepare myself for a certain period of time when it drags out too long, it gets wearing. I sometimes wish I could just get on a bus and go see something new, without risking homelessness because I spent the money on travel instead of rent. How did my life get so blah? Is it my fault?

I'm just so disappointed. It's March and I've actually been struggling with being stuck inside and more since mid-November. The winters seem to be getting longer and longer. The money shorter and shorter. You just want to have a life like everyone else does. You pray to God asking "Why me?".

I think of things to change this but remain so stuck. Stuck behind a wall of ice. I think of things that I want to do and the body and lack of money that prevent them drives me insane. I try to come up with other options and fall flat.  One dreams of a better life, and visas to be seen not an endless prison sentence.

Why Is My life So Rotten?