War drums at dawn

As mentioned, The word narcissism is often synonymous with horrible toxic behavior. My experience of it has been nothing short of torture.

Characteristics of high levels of narcissism

The horrible. My wife.

• Feeling unrealistically special.
• Entitlement.
• Manipulative.
• Exploitative.
• Emotional immaturity.
• Lack of accountability.
• Apologies are rare and tend to place the blame elsewhere.
• Unwanted drama.
• Lying.
• Stealing.
• Requires a lot of attention.
• And then requires even more attention.
• Requires praise and gratitude.
• Boasting and gloating.
• Superiority complex.
• Temper tantrums.
• Dramatic mood swings.
• Rage.
• Silent treatments.
• You’re a peacemaker.
• Always the victim.
• There’s always something wrong.
• Nothing is ever good or even good enough.
• Highs and lows. Toggles between that superiority complex then back to the victim or bad mood.
• Sigh!
• The mood can swing day to day, hour to hour or even minute to minute and it’s often unpredictable.
• Her behavior was (and still is) upsetting but somehow I was made to feel like it was my fault.
• I was made to feel like I was the villain and she was the victim.

Those are some of the more obvious behaviors my wife exhibits all the time but for some reason I stuck with her. The last two in particular still took me a very long time to fully see through even after I became aware that I was dealing with narcissism.

Audio recordings

I used to record my wife and listen back later to try to decipher what the latest ranting and raving was all about. However, regrettably (well maybe not…), I used to delete certain recordings. Those were the ones that I thought just weren’t worth mulling over. She would be accusing me of not spending enough time with her for example. Or she would be accusing me of being more open with my family or friends than I was with her. Or that I was spending more time with our daughter than her. And the big ones:

• “You didn’t get me the help I needed” or
• “Are you just going to stand there and let Emma talk to me like that?” or
• “It’s your fault I have no relationship with Emma” or
• “I blame you that I’m so tired all the time” or
• “When I needed help, you weren’t there” or
• “I don’t ask for much but you couldn’t even do the one thing I asked you to do” (regarding some unrealistic nonsense that I have no recollection of being asked about) or
• “Cry cry cry, why are you so horrible to me, what have I ever done to you? What have I done to deserve this, I deserve to be treated better than this… crying…”
• “When I was sick, you just left me there and walked away”
• “After everything I do for you…”
• And so on, generally delivered with a nice mix of anger and crying.

Abuse

I used to think those recordings were implicating me as being a bad husband or being neglectful to her, or being cruel to her. I would delete them because I was uncomfortable with the accusations. I believed them. Another reason was that they just weren’t juicy enough, she wasn’t screaming or shouting and being abusive (she was), they were just her usual torturous whinging and whining.
Little did I know at the time that I was actually deleting clear evidence of narcissistic abuse.