truth

The Christmas holidays have been difficult - as it is for so many of us who are going through personal crisis of one form or another. I spent mine doom-scrolling copious social media reels on narcissistic discards. It was primarily to whittle away at the urge to pick up the phone and do something I will regret. And hoping to find an answer that will, finally, compel me to believe what I already know.

Dr Ramani, famous for her prolific content on YouTube and expertise on narcissistic relationships, couldn’t be clearer. Her content, interviews and book, It’s Not You, describe my experience as if she lived it with me. I’d read her book a year ago during another discard - it is probably best not to call it a “breakup” as that’s a normal part of life and I know there is nothing normal about my experience these six and a half years. I know. Though even now, as I write this, I don’t fully believe. It was unsettling to be able to tick every single description and pattern of behaviour. Even as I finally put the book down, I still hung on to the thought, “I won’t reduce him to a pathology”, that “without context we are all monsters”. I didn’t believe.

Jonathan Safran Foer, in We Are the Weather, wrote:, “The trouble isn’t that we don’t know enough; it’s that we don’t believe what we know.” He was writing about climate change, but that idea resonates in so many areas of our personal lives. Despite all I’ve learned—despite the painful clarity of my experiences—I find myself trapped by the same disbelief, especially when it comes to the person I still love.

There is a critical distinction between knowing something intellectually and believing it with a deep enough conviction to make different choices. I certainly “know enough”. Over our time together, very clear patterns had emerged. Predictable. Foregone conclusions. Breaking no-contact (another very popular phrase in the space of narcissistic relationships) leads to a set of known outcomes. I can see that decision map, with all the different possible paths, so clearly in my head. None will lead to a loving outcome, much less a sustained one. Each time I reach out - ignoring facts, self-respect or basic common sense - I face predictable consequences: silence, accusations, coldness or gaslighting that leave me humiliated. Eventually, when all the rage and offence have left him, he returns - framing it as ‘giving me another chance’ or expressing fleeting gratitude for my persistence. What follows is a short-lived reconciliation, inevitably undone the next time he is disappointed by “No” in any iteration.

I know this. Yet… Safran Foer writes, “Our minds and hearts are well built to perform certain tasks, and poorly designed for others. We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way.” I can calculate which path the hurricane will traverse, yet I struggle with the imperative to get out of its way; unable to quieten the voice inside that whispers, “This time it may be different.”

Hope. Hoping against hope. A problematic phrase and notion.

But Rebecca Solnit calls it the thing, the axe, that breaks down doors. Is that too optimistic and romantic a view to take on in our personal lives? Why do I cling to hope against all evidence? I had a therapist halt our sessions until, she said, I have done at least 10 sessions of EMDR. She said I already know all I need to know about what kind of relationship I was in and what I needed to do. She said I even know why I don’t do it, my false beliefs, my stories, my learnings and patterns from childhood. And yet. There I was, session after session, refusing or unable (take your pick) to act on that knowledge. Brené Brown wrote, “Knowledge is only rumour until it lives in the muscle.” Perhaps that’s what those EMDR sessions were suppose to do - calm the nervous system and cleanse it of CPTSD to make room for knowledge to to turn into belief. And maybe with belief, the necessary actions will become easier to take. Maybe.

But there may be other things at play that determines our ability to believe and to let go. Doing as I was told, I had sessions with the EMDR therapist that was recommended. But after an initial consult, we didn’t do the EMDR but ended up with soma-informed psychotherapy. In one of our sessions, I was describing a series of events that had happened in the days leading up to our session. She asked:

“Where is your anger?”

“Should I be angry?”

“Do you feel anger?”

“Of course I do.”

“When you shared what happened you were visibly angry. But by the end of it, it’s gone. Why do you think your anger doesn’t stay?”

“I don’t like what happened. It was self-centered, mean and callous. But he doesn’t want to talk about what’s happened. And I’m not sure it’s productive to stay angry. He says he won’t tolerate it. And maybe he’s right.”

“Anger is your body telling you something that shouldn’t happen happened. When you dismiss it, are you also dismissing the impact of what happened to you? An opportunity for understanding? Right now the anger has been replaced with this …. is it sadness? The room is heavy with it. Your posture has shrunk. You look very small on that sofa. That’s also another message your body is giving you.”

Is my inability to hold on to anger in the face of egregious transgressions what makes it hard to turn knowing into believing? In our haste to forgive and let go, are we not allowing the weight of the hurt to sink into our muscles and start living in our cells? Perhaps that’s the process, I don’t know; to feel it so viscerally that eventually our minds can no longer deny what our body is telling us. Because knowing something is intellectual, but it is also our minds that block our ability to surrender to believing. This same mind that makes up stories to support our desire to hold on to the lie that their behaviour was “human frailty” instead of “vampiric”.

Vampires. He once said to me: “I’m like a vampire. I suck all the energy out of you then I leave you. Then you get better and I come back to do it again.” He also asked at another time if I thought he was a narcissist. Because he’d read something about it and realises he ticks all the boxes. That was the first time that word “narcissist” entered into the reckoning of our relationship. But I didn’t let it stay long; reassuring him that labels were reductive and not useful. What was useful was to examine our behaviours and strive for the necessary changes.

Maya Angelou once said: “Faith is the evidence of things unseen.” Faith provides both the internal conviction and the motivation to persevere, especially when faced with obstacles or uncertainties. Perhaps going forward, the way is to no longer have faith in a better future, but trust in the evidence that is overwhelming; to place the faith somewhere infinitely less desirable and scarier. Place faith in a future where connection, fulfilment and happiness aren’t tied to my love.

Carlo Rovelli wrote: “You need to have courage to go against what you know.” When things are hard and scary, and not the immediate comfort or certainty we seek, Brené Brown tells us it is exactly the time when we “reach deep into your wild heart and remind yourself, ‘I am the wilderness.’”