I just posted something over in Hoping on Michele's thread and thought I would be lazy and copy and paste it here too. It explains a little of what got me to the point where I am at. Someone had asked whether Michele had got a professional diagnosis on her husband being a narcissist.
I wrote -
"About the "professional diagnosis" thing. All I know is that I have known my H for nearly twenty years and was living with him for ten, so I do know him quite well. If an explanation of NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) fits the man so well, it doesn't really matter whether the description is official or not. It does help me to understand what the mechanism for his behaviour is, and how to handle it better. It avoids utterly pointless hope and optimism that H can be any different.
When visiting sites for people coping with NPD and reading about other people's experiences with a narcissistic SO, you find yourself just nodding in agreement and laughing out loud at things, because they ring so true and throw so much light on things that were HUGE puzzles before you had an idea of how their minds worked. Because they DON'T work in the same way as yours or mine, believe me. Thinking that they do makes for an awful lot of grief.
I can attest to the tremendous amount of relief and freedom that knowing something about NPD has afforded me. Both my late mother and H were/are Narcissists. Perhaps being brought up by one (or two) either pushes you to become one yourself (seems to have been the case with H, who had two grossly selfish and unloving, narcissistic parents) or turns you into a facilitator/appeaser type in order to cope. I feel I am the latter. My mother, while a narcissist, was a "loving" (dominating) one, rather than an "unloving" (indifferent) one.
If I had stumbled across this info right after the bomb, I don't know how differently I would have coped. But having had two years in which to grieve, to Divorce Bust, to try and work through things in my mind, etc - when I finally did come across it, I seemed to be ready to let go very quickly. It just made too much sense.
I also think if I had come across the NPD info and Divorce Busting well before the bomb, I may have been able to hang on to my marriage, but I would still have been married to a Narcissist, no matter what!
Listen to this. I already knew in my bones, years before the bomb, what the bottom line was - H would not be there for me should anything really bad happen to me.
Did this make me run for the hills? Nope. I took my marriage too "seriously". I loved my H. I just hoped that nothing really bad would happen to me. And I also felt that should something really bad happen to him, I would be there for him. H was the ultimate fair weather spouse.
So can you say that I am well out of this marriage?
YUP!
I still have the rest of my life to live, I will either make it on my own or find someone with the mental and emotional equipment (capacity) to cultivate and maintain a decent relationship or marriage with me.
In the end, no one is forcing anyone to accept a diagnosis, but we are free to draw our own conclusions and make our own decisions. My H already decided, without consulting me, that our marriage was over. I have now decided, after two years, that I am happy to let go and agree with him!"
Livnlearn
PS: Once again, for Pamila and others, here are a couple of links -
Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited is a thick book by self confessed and professionally diagnosed narcissist Sam Vaknin. I have had my copy of the book on order for many weeks. But a large chunk of the contents are available online on this site. Very interesting reading.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
