Are good experiences tainted by a narcissist?

 

You would have had some good experiences with a narcissist or you would not have stayed.

But how good were those times?

Because you found out that they were a narcissist does that negate everything you experienced with them?

Once you start to look at the truth of narcissistic abuse your whole world crumbles doesn't it? It starts to look like a lie.

Many survivors say that all their time with a narcissist was tainted because it was all fake. 

Was what you experienced personally, in your own head, fake too?

I mean good feelings, good times, going to places you enjoyed? What about the good times with your kids or friends or even time alone? If you enjoyed some experiences why can't you still keep them as good memories? I mean they took so much from us anyway, why can't we keep our good memories, fake or not? Abuse can make us forget anything good.

Does someone being unkind to us take away all the good stuff too?

Keeping two opposing thoughts in your head leads to cognitive dissonance. It drives you mad. It makes you sad to remember good times so you block them all out. You go searching for a point where it was either good or bad and stick with it. It makes your head feel more sorted out. 

But what if in doing so you were making it worse?

By sticking to all bad it may give some closure but it also spoils the good things in life. If we make it all good it also does the same as well. But as a human our minds want us to have no dissonance in our minds so we do black and white thinking, all good or all bad. But is that true?

 When I met my ex he had nothing and was ill. I didn't really want to be with him but my world was empty of support from parents or friends. I had fled an abusive family of origin and was in a big city on my own as a teenager. My origins were very poor. He offered me stability and support and I gave the same to him. He built himself up and became successful and years later we were living the high life. Travelling the world on the firms expenses and having amazing experiences. When I look back at those times I can't take away the fact that I had the time of my life. I was with a hard man, selfish, demanding, ungrateful, king of the castle type but still I experienced some life.

When I say I had a good time I don't mean with him, I mean in my own head, on my own. My mind belongs to me and what I experienced was my own private world. I was on my own a lot during those experiences, when with him or without his company. I was invisible and became more so as time went on. But I can't say that I didn't have a good time.

I can't say that I didn't have a bad time either. So for my own closure, I saw that I was with someone who was narcissistic, but that I had had good experiences. It is irrelavant to me who I was with. Yes it would have been nicer if I was with someone better. But with my abusive childhood experiences that would have been impossible to expect. Being with him was not easy but I saw and tried the options and he was the best one.

In order to heal I let go of thinking all bad or all good, and sat with the dissonance of sometimes good, sometimes bad. It helped me to move on. I could still have my good memories instead of trying to block it out. It is not an easy way to think because you then have to deal with grief and loss. But I preffered that to feeling anger, hatred and bitterness. I make no excuses for who he was and how he was with me. I have picked at that for decades in order to heal. I had to make sense of it and making sense of it meant making that time and what I experienced then my time. Not allowing him to steal yet something else from me.

You might ask 'why do I even think this way'? It is because after having processed decades of child abuse and years of flashbacks to it, I learned that I had some good times. At first it looked all bad. My whole childhood was bad and I could not find one good thing about it. It was a lie. 

But then I started to look at who had shown me love because I thought no one had. I did a practice called 'Unsealing the well spring'' which I explain in my book linked here, and it opened me up to even tiny forgotten acts of kindness given to me. Kindness that I would not have seen due to my mind being clouded by only abuse, by 'all bad' thinking. 

This changed my whole perspective on abuse. So when it came to healing from narcissistic abuse by a partner I was able to see that during that time, although it seemed all bad, hidden in there was some good.

Good times with, friends, children anything you can think of let it stay and wash over you. Don't let them steal your good times or those around you.

It is my way of making peace with it all. It may not be for you. But it works for me. I refuse to let the narcissist steal my good memories because everything else was taken from me. I remember the bad stuff and I have gone over and over it. But I decided to visit all those pictures in my mind, the places I went to, the adventures I had and I took him out of the equation and see them as something I was experiencing on my own. They are my memories, he just happened to be there. I own them. 

I hope that you too will remember good times. Times when even complete strangers were kind to you. No matter how small those experiences were they all add up. They belong to you. Take them back and own them.