If My Wounds Were Visible
"Narcissistic abuse is covert, and often disguised as love and care, but it’s anything but. It’s not a single act of cruelty like an insulting comment, or verbal abuse laced with a string of profanities. It’s the insidious, gradual, and intentional erosion of a person’s sense of self-worth. It’s a combination of emotional and psychological abuse aimed at undermining a person’s identity for the sole purpose of obtaining control for personal gain. It can involve patterns of dominance, manipulation, intimidation, emotional coercion, withholding, dishonesty, extreme selfishness, guilt mongering, rejection, stonewalling, gaslighting, financial abuse, extreme jealousy, and possessiveness.
A partner who never calls you a derogatory name and tells you he loves you every single day can be a narcissistic abuser. A parent who never misses a softball game, someone who appears to be the pillar of her community, can be narcissistically abusive.
But all the homemade dinners, all the love and concern for you, all the perfect attendance to your extracurricular activities won’t mitigate the damaging emotional and mental toll of the silent treatments when you assert your opinion or disagree. There are disapproving looks or criticisms over the most trivial things. There is the subtle, but constant way you’re made to feel you’re not good enough, and wholly incapable of pleasing your abuser for any length of time. The moments of kindness or the surprise bouquet of flowers don’t erase the dizzying, circular conversations that exhaust you into submission. When narcissistically abused, you can never express a differing opinion or suggest your partner isn’t perfect or right.
The sweet gestures don’t cancel out the hundreds of ways your compassion and love are exploited and used to manipulate you. These gestures actually make the unpredictable changing climate that shifts from kindness and tenderness to coldness and subtle cruelty more confusing and stressful.
Lundy Bancroft, author of Why Does He Do That? provides an unsettling description of how abuse can be inflicted. His example shows it can cause great psychological harm, without the use of anger, yelling, or name calling: ‘…He (or she) can assault his partner psychologically without even raising his voice. He tends to stay calm in arguments, using his own evenness as a weapon to push her over the edge. He often has a superior or contemptuous grin on his face, smug and self-assured. He uses a repertoire of aggressive conversational tactics at low volume, including sarcasm, derision—such as openly laughing at her—mimicking her voice, and cruel cutting remarks. Like Mr. Right, he tends to take things she has said and twist them beyond recognition to make her appear absurd, perhaps, especially in front of other people. He gets to his partner through a slow but steady stream of low level assaults…”
The emotional damage caused by narcissistic abuse is cumulative, which is one of the reasons why the abuse is so hard to pinpoint. We often don’t recognize or become alarmed at what appears small and innocuous in a particular moment. Most of us subscribe to the mantra: “No one is perfect.” We don’t suspect we’re being used, deceived, or conned. We assume the best intentions from the people who claim to love us. The lack of public awareness and education blinds us from seeing the pieces of our self-esteem and identity slowly being chipped away.
Many people who’ve experienced domestic violence will tell you that the emotional and psychological abuse that is characteristic of narcissistic abuse is more painful and lingering than the pain of physical abuse. As a practic
ing psychotherapist, I know all too well that it’s much harder and takes a lot longer to heal a broken spirit than it is to heal a black eye."