The day I learned about narcissism will remain in my memory as the day, the moment, my life changed forever. I remember where I was, who was with me and how the conversation went. It was a moment that was the tipping point for everything that was to come. It was a blessing and a curse.

The person I was with, who had an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of our family,  encouraged me to research narcissism. They said my husband fit the definition of narcissism nearly to a tee and it could explain a lot of my confusion and the dysfunction within our family.

I was skeptical. I didn’t even know what narcissism was. I had to Google it. The information that popped up intrigued me. I saw links for things like The 5 types of narcissism. Personality traits. What is a Narcissist? Diagnosis details. How they appear and how they really are. 

I started reading. I read more and more and more. I started watching videos made by therapists and psychologists on YouTube. I listened to podcasts from mental health professionals and narcissistic abuse survivors. My head started to spin and I slowly felt all the answers to the confusion I had lived with for so many years fall into place. 

It was actually a surreal feeling to begin to understand that nearly my entire marriage had been a lie. Everything I had been led to believe was wrong. I wasn’t crazy. I was married to a narcissist.

Of course, I couldn’t diagnose my husband with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but I learned most narcissists never get officially diagnosed. As I learned about all the personality traits associated with narcissism, I could narrow down the probability of my husband being a covert narcissist to about a 99.9% accuracy. 

I remember watching mental health experts on YouTube as if my life depended on it. My life did depend on it in a way. I hid my phone and listened to the videos through my AirPods so no one would know what I was learning about. The experts resoundingly agreed that you shouldn’t ever call a narcissist a narcissist. I felt I needed to keep the things I was learning hidden. I didn’t want my husband to know what I was finding out. 

I took any online tests I could find to see if I had suffered from narcissistic abuse. I started therapy and talked it over with my therapist. I devoured any information I could find on narcissism for months and months. I began thinking through my life and using my newly learned knowledge to dissect moments, reactions, responses and phrases I had experienced countless times over the years and the manipulation my husband so easily used on me. 

He was an expert at manipulation! He could get my head spinning so quickly with just a few words or a pointed, condescending look at me that said, “You’re being ridiculous” or “You don’t know what you’re talking about” without using any words. 

All the new words and personality traits associated with narcissism were like a balm for my soul. 

• Deflection. 

• Gaslighting. 
• Lack of empathy. 
• A grandiose sense of importance. 
• A need for excessive admiration. 
• Manipulation and control. 
• Envy. 
• Fragile self esteem. 
• The inability to take criticism.
• Fantasies of success or power.

As I learned more about each of the personality traits, my certainty of his having a narcissistic personality only grew stronger. 

I was married to a narcissist. What was I going to do now? 

My first thoughts went to my kids. What had I unknowingly exposed them to for all those years? How had I damaged them by keeping them in a dysfunctional home? Could they overcome the trauma they had been exposed to? Could we recover as a family? Would they ever forgive me?

As I slowly began to think about every aspect of my married life and how narcissism played into our everyday lives, I was shocked. By this point, we were having a lot of “bad” days. By far, the bad days outweighed the good days. 

My therapist had me start logging our days with a short word about how that day had gone. Was it a good day? I’d write “good.” If it was just ok, I’d write that. 

I quickly found out that the days needed to be divided into halves, at a minimum, because our days were never all good or all bad. My entries started to look like this:

• Monday – ok, bad
• Tuesday – terrible, ok, bad
• Wednesday – good, ok
• Thursday – bad, worse
• Friday – ok, good

I had never realized how fluctuating the atmosphere within our home had become. It was just something I had gotten used to. I would warn the kids to be on their best behavior if my husband was in a bad mood. I’d beg my youngest child to “Please just be nice when dad gets home” to keep the peace. 

My attempts to keep the household at a somewhat neutral level often failed miserably. When we would hear the garage door go up, we all knew to be ready for anything. The attitude of the person walking through the door could be anywhere from happy to super pissed. There was never a rhyme or reason to his attitude. We never knew what would set him off. We just always needed to be ready for whatever walked through the door. 

Interestingly, this was always something my husband deflected back onto me. He had said for years he never knew what he would find when he walked through the door. By claiming that, he was always the injured party and was only feeding off our attitudes, not dictating the rest of our night. The deflection had always been a point of confusion for me. I never understood how we could be having a great day without him, then he’d come home and the entire feel of the house would change and it was my fault. 

Once I began to learn about narcissism, I got a wonderful toolbox of words and meanings. Deflection was one of the words I liked the best. It defined so much of what I experienced daily. My husband’s ability to shift blame off himself and onto me was top notch. I think he probably could have done it in his sleep. 

Before I knew about narcissism, I’d doubt myself. Had I been crabby? He was right, I wasn’t happy to see him. I could have been nicer. After learning about narcissism, I began to watch how our interactions unfolded. Wow! It hadn’t been me. He had come home crabby, changed the mood of the house, started picking out things he didn’t like about each of us and flipped the script back on us. 

Gaslighting was another word that resounded with me. I felt as though I knew my own truth, but my husband was so skilled at altering the events, changing them to fit his narrative. Some things were softened, some were exaggerated, some were left out, some were added in. I had thought I was going crazy, forgetting things and remembering events differently. All those years I spent in confusion made sense to me with the realization of what a narcissist was. 

Over the course of a few weeks of learning and therapy, my life went from foggy and confusing to harsh and dysfunctional. That realization was like a slap on the face. I felt my whole world shift and I needed to take some time to think through what to do next. I was a problem solver, but I did my best work thoughtfully. If we had a problem at work that wasn’t critical at the moment, I’d take it home with me and think about it off and on until a solution came to me. Narcissism should be the same, right? 

Oh, girlfriend, you have no idea.