Women who Love too Much Community Group
WHEN BEING IN LOVE, MEANS BEING IN PAIN... This group is to help women through the journey of realizing they can love themselves. To help realize that they are capable of having a happy, healthy, whole relationship and break the cycle of abuse and heartache from loving emotionally unavailable men.
Today was a very challenging day for me. I cried nearly half the day. The relationship has been over for 2 weeks, yet I can't seem to stop thinking about him. I came close to calling him a couple of times, but managed to stop myself. I am in so much emotional pain and it feels like I'm never going to get over this. Somehow, I manage to get through each day, but it is soooo hard. He's the last thing on my mind when I go to bed, and the first thing on my mind when I awake. I keep telling myself to stop being so hard on myself, and that he isn't worth my tears. Why, for the love of God, am I so hard on myself? The shame I feel is almost too much to bear. I am so afraid that I'm going to break down and call him and my resolve will have been in vain. I need to know that I'm not alone here. Can someone please help me?
The same occurs in narcissistic relationships. Love partners become hooked to the narcissist because emotional stability is unobtainable. Women go in harder trying to create a set result. This is why poker machines hook people. Women become severely addicted to narcissists, pushing the button all the way to their emotional, mental, physical and spiritual bankruptcy. Morbidly and dangerously they become so empty and powerless that they can barely perceive a life without the narcissist, and spiral into a deep dark pit. In essence the victim feels and becomes the annihilating depression that the narcissist avoids by feeding off her energy. He has taken your light and you have become his darkness.
1. To the extent that limerence makes you idealize the other person and blinds you to his faults, it can make you feel unworthy relative to him and you may be tempted, therefore, to settle for crumbs and great unhappiness within the relationship.
2. Your fear of chasing away this marvelous person may lead you to avoid the kind of confronting and engaging that is usually necessary to the development of a mutual and truly satisfying relationship.
In his chapter entitled Return of a memory and referring to an adult (with abandonment hunger through childhood neglect as mentioned by above) love relationship that is wrong for us but that we cannot end, even though it is not good for us, he says
In order to understand your Attachment Hunger it is essential that you realize that if is not a new experience . It is not occurring for the first time in the current relationship. It is the return of a memory. It is an emotional reminiscence of a much earlier time. Although the actual details of the memory may be largely forgotten the FEELINGS are as alive and intense now as, when they are triggered into your awareness by the loss or anticipated loss of an important connection, as they were when you originally felt them. And you originally felt them in the first few months and years of your life. What this means is that when you are ruled by Attachment Hunger, your state of mind is, in many ways, a re-experiencing of your state you were in as an infant or toddler. The qualities of this experience are those of a needy vulnerable being with limited perspective, underdeveloped judgment, little capacity for rational thought, and no will power. And you need not have had a particularly traumatic or deprived childhood to have known these feelings of primitive dependency. They are part of everyones legacy. They are deposits in everyones memory banks. So when these Attachment Hunger states take over, your thinking and judgment are distorted and ruled by the intense emotions of a time when you were helpless.
Does this relationship validate you? Does it make you feel good? Does it make you feel like a better person?
What we often miss is the beauty of No Contact. You are finally saying No More. It is your voice without the words but they hear it loud and clear as if you screamed from the top of your lungs Go to the Devil. No Contact is your pure and sweet rejection. It is empowering.
It is your last word. It is your closure. It is one of the most hurtful narcissistic injuries you could inflict. They have finally come to understand you know just who and what they are. They know the tricks do not work anymore. They know you are no longer prey or a pawn in their game. It is your last word.
No contact is so essential. Your pride and dignity are riding on it.
My therapist very rarely advises me, as such preferring to help me see the right answers for myself. But the one thing he has been absolutely emphatic about, ever since I told him about it, is that I must NOT contact my N, under ANY circumstances.
We do not want the NP back in our life... we only want them when we are hurting.
Dig way down inside and find the place that says, no more not ever never again and then just do not, no matter what.
I hope you do not think this No Contact thing is just to teach him a darn good lesson. If you do, you have missed the whole point altogether.
No contact is the strongest statement I can make to him.
The no contact rule was the best thing I ever did. Stay strong.
He was so cruel to me. I just called him to tell him. The opinions of society are brutal when a target states she has been abused and then she contacts her abuser, I can honestly tell you that such behavior is viewed as utterly stupid, dangerous, ridiculous and silly to the outside world. Its glaring bad judgment. The courts see mutual pathology and friends and other people just roll their eyes, turn away in droves muttering she is as crazy as he is, They will assume she lied about his abuse in the first place. It is a huge factor in how they win.
From the BPD Central Site - a Must-Read on Leaving
http://www.bpdfamily.com/bpdresources/nk_a109.htm
My therapist told me it was completely unhealthy to engage in useless talking to him and to STOP ALL COMMUNICATION!
NO CONTACT is the best to be hoped for; and this principle of recovery must be held to with tenacious trust that this is the best thing we can do for ourselves AND the N!
We must all let go of people who hurt us whether we understand why or not.
I had to treat no contact like a drug addiction. There were times I had to count the minutes, then hours of no contact. I marked days off on the calendar. My entire life went to hell and I finally got mad and took it back. I am making my own happiness these days. Its still a struggle but it gets better every day. I had to force myself through the initial no contact but once I started to see our relationship for what it was it became easier and easier.
You have the upper hand with no contact. Hang on to it for dear life.
The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
Keep that list of horrors he has done and print off those articles that really zing in on what he really is and read them both with your breakfast cereal. This helps reinforce our No Contact commitment and keeps the malignant optimisms/magical thinking were often prone to away.
I have no contact with my brother who is a P he still tries the manipulation through emails and my mother is a P. She tries through letters, same words, same game. It is very hard not to respond, you just have to keep reminding yourself what would happen to you if you did respond. It is as though they still have part of your mind and it takes a lot of strength to break free and not respond.
I used those Olympic-class thinking tactics to picture how Id react when he came up to me on the street. Well it worked. I just said I have to go now, goodbye and walked away. No payoff from me! I gave myself a Gold Medal in detaching.
The No Contact rule is definitely it. I feel any contact with him is like sticking my hand in a snake pit.
I was coming out of a 18 year marriage. He saw my vulnerability a mile away!! I cannot stress the no contact rule enough.
Unfortunately as long as you stay with or talk to an N you will remain a form of supply for them whether it be good, bad or ugly. The only way you can achieve any type of victory over them is to walk away with your head held high and have no contact. The longer you stay, the longer you will miss out on your own life.
They deny they do it, deny they are the problem and lay the blame on someone else. That is why the no contact rule is the only way out of the frustration and extra hurt.
I notice your N makes no effort to even acknowledge how his behaviour has hurt you. Expect him to blame you and tell you that you are the unreasonable one the whole way down the line. They deny they do it, deny they are the problem and lay the blame on someone else. That is why the no contact rule is the only way out of the frustration and extra hurt. Waiting for an N to validate your experience or change the N behaviours could mean you will be trading emails at 90 and still not get any further going round in their crazy circles.
You deserve a rich full life. An N will rob you of that. Stay clear. No contact.
There is power in our silence. The power we gain during the No Contact period cant be emphasized enough.
Use the power of silence.
There is only one message they hear and that is the silence of No Contact.
Time and no contact is absolutely the only way, because anytime I have anything to do with him other than leaving notes for him when he comes to see the kids, it creates a feelings setback for me.
But after a while, something amazing will happen... you will wake up one day with a renewed sense of clarity, parts of yourself that you have long ago buried will begin to emerge and youll begin to feel strong again. If you continue to maintain NC, your energy will shift, your thoughts will support you instead of harm you and youll feel a sense of liberation, the likes of which you have not felt in years, if at all. NC is the key to our freedom.
There is a point where you re-find yourself (well at least that kick-start moment towards self-knowledge and emotional freedom. It is a never ending process), and life becomes an open field, your soul breathes again. No contact and time spent alone out of the crazy-making environment will help you greatly. My, you just have to stay stoic til youre out. Make sure that you give yourself every chance to recuperate your senses and not have your mind invaded by anyone.
Were the Amish with their shunning on to something? I think so.
After the worst of it was over, what I found to be key was to have no contact with him. None. Do not say go to hell. Do not say I love you. Do not, above all, try to sit down and have a dialogue, to reason with him. No response of any kind is the answer.
The best therapists tell us to stick like glue to that self-imposed No Contact rule. No contact works, but we need to give it a chance.
The more time I stay in NC, the stronger I get.
My no contact was my sabbatical, my retreat. I got to write out in my journal all the issues. I was able to ferret out the source, the root of all the problems. There is something very therapeutic about writing them out. Committing them to paper seems to capture the essence of it all.
It reminds me of quitting smoking, hang in there long enough and the urge for contact will pass.
Make a No Contact contract and write like mad in a journal. It really does get clearer and easier with time.
Any contact you make can and will be used against you.
Conduct yourself accordingly.
They are tricky. Here is one example. A mother co-parenting with an abuser called her x about a custody situation. He told her he was busy, call me again. She tried several times to call him and he filed harassment charges against her. She was set up. He did this deliberately. She failed to anticipate this response from him. The court ordered joint counseling, which of course was just wonderful NS to him. A lot of gullible people learn that the hard way.
Again, thank you all for your loving support. Special thanks to Immorq for the hugs! I'll be back!
It takes 21 days to form a habit, so keep at this. The first two weeks are THE WORST. The pain is excruciating, physical, you can feel your core being wrenched out. It tends to peak at around 14 days. Of course, any kind of contact exacerbates the situation. I highly recommend blocking him on FB.
Hang in there Silvermane, we're all on your side!! xo
BTW, artgrrl, thanks for the tip about "It takes 21 days to form a habit, so keep at this." I'm now going into week 3 without my N; week 2 was, to put it mildly, a real emotional test. I'm so glad I can come to Daily Strength, where I know I'm not alone.