“What is happening? What is wrong with me?” – me
How does an abusive marriage and family of origin begin? So very quietly, so very slowly you don’t even realize it is happening. It’s like a thief in the night, who picks just one small trinket to pilfer at a time. The item is so small it may go unnoticed for days, weeks or years. You don’t even realize it’s gone until one day, perhaps years later, you think to yourself, “Didn’t I used to have a…?”
That’s how my narcissistically abusive marriage began. In fact, I didn’t even realize it until we were married over 20 years and had nearly finished raising our three children. Naively, near the end and before I knew how to define our unique circumstance, I wondered how other marriages held together if their spouses were so terrible to them, as I felt my husband was to me. How could my friends want to hold hands with their husbands and smile at them with such love? How could their husbands treat them so well? Why did I feel as though I could see the love between others and not with my own spouse? Why couldn’t I look at him like that anymore? Why didn’t I feel that way toward my husband? What was wrong with me?
I spent years feeling as though something was wrong with me to feel anger, hurt, resentment and frustration toward my husband. From the outside in, we looked like we had it all. We had three beautiful kids, a thriving business, good status within our community and a nice house in a desired neighborhood. We had a cabin, a number of boats, a camper, all the toys you could imagine. We even had a house in Florida. We had it all! Why wasn’t I happy? Why weren’t we happy?
The reason was perfectly simple and brilliantly complicated: I was involved in a narcissistic marriage.
Yes, I had all the physical things I could want. I just had an emotionally empty marriage. All the material things, all the money in the world, couldn’t make me feel safe and loved and cared for by my spouse. I hadn’t felt emotionally satisfied or safe in years. I wasn’t looked at with affection and love by my husband. I had yearned for those things every single day without actually knowing it or being able to put my finger on what was lacking in our marriage.
I truly didn’t know what was wrong with me, with us, for so many years. Now I feel like a fool, but back then I was just emotionally wrung out, stressed and desperately needing something I knew I didn’t have, something we didn’t have. No matter how I tried to tell him what I wanted, that feeling of contentment within our marriage and emotional security with him, I wouldn’t, couldn’t, get those things from my spouse.
The tricky fact that made me miss the signs of abuse for years was that every day wasn’t bad. Part of a day would be bad, maybe it would spread into the next day. Then we’d have a few good days. Then something would happen to set us backward again. Then we’d have a couple good days. If they weren’t good days, we’d maybe have some ok or fine days. They weren’t necessarily comfortable, but they also weren’t awful. I became so trained in weathering the storms of my husband’s moods that I didn’t know life any other way. I thought our lives were completely normal and that was how everyone lived.
The other aspect of our relationship that delayed my recognizing things were amiss was the fact that when we had a good day, it felt like the old days. There was a small glimpse into our old lives and that little nugget of hope was enough to carry me through the tough days. There was still good in him. He wasn’t all bad. He was just stressed. He was having a bad day. Maybe he was depressed. There had to be a reason he acted the way he did because I truly felt he was still in there somewhere. I just needed to find a way to pull him out again.
Near the time that we began separating, I remember feeling as though he was so BIG. He had a big, heavy personality and demeanor to him. His presence in our family’s lives and the way he handled himself were so BIG. If he was in my car with me, he felt like a huge presence, not the normal sized man he was. His anger was BIG. His opinions were BIG. Sometimes I felt I needed to get away from him, even if it was moving into another room, just so I could breathe.
I believe that is the way of a narcissist. They become so inflated, so BIG, with their own sense of importance and entitlement and we, their family, need to become so small to cohabitate. I felt like I couldn’t even be myself around him, he was so BIG. I needed to accommodate him.
Another feeling I always had when he was around was a mist, or a fog, that was ever present and completely unable to be touched, shifted or dissipated. How do I describe the tension that hung in the air when he was there? It was everywhere and nowhere. It followed him around and strengthened with his dark moods. Yet even on a good day, it was still present.
This fog was so potent it felt smothering to me, yet it was impossible to describe. I have never given much thought to people’s auras before, but maybe that was what my husband had – an aura that sucked the calm and happiness from any space he occupied and filled it with a tension so strong it was almost able to be physically touched. When he left the room or the vehicle, it mostly left with him. Sometimes there was just a bit that would linger, keeping the tension in the space a while longer after he left. Sometimes it completely left the space with him, lightening the air and mood and leaving us feeling we could breathe a bit easier. Even now, I cannot describe it better than that.