Dancing with a narcissist

It’s a gorgeous morning, the kind you’d expect to see upon awaking inside August.

I’m writing out on my deck under the sun and in the peaceful company of my plants and exactly one caterpillar. Considering my intensive nearly year long training program in human relations and psychopathy, it’s no wonder I am opting to hang with creatures that can’t speak.

Preach to peace!

I could have easily named this post ‘dancing in a nightmare’. My subtitle almost read “Learning to stand tall while someone is chopping at your legs with an axe.”

But I’m not that dramatic.

Plus, I’ve been alchemizing HARD to transform the piece of coal that landed in my lap a year ago into a sparkly diamond, a precious thing of value, a touchstone, that I can carry with me forever onward, and I’m too proud of my efforts at rising to the challenge, transmuting, and evolving to play the “woe is me” card.

Life is a game. The game is difficult. It comes with ‘random’ deliveries of lessons.

Well, conscious choice to order the lesson or not, it will come all the same.

It will keep knocking at your door until you open it, rip open the package, dive into your assignment, and do all you can to pass the test of levelling up into the next version of your wizardry. (The good news is, it gets exponentially easier to level up the more wizardry you acquire.)

It’s my nature to be absolutely up for this.

I prefer to celebrate the success of my growth, no matter what instigates it, over carrying resentment at having to do it.

I am a victor and not a victim of my circumstance.

A few months ago, I shared with you that my present reality consists of an ailing father and, by extension, the woman-friend who resides with and cares for him out on the west coast of BC.

It’s an under-statement to say it’s been hard to be living so far away from him during this time, feeling as helpless as I do, and struggling at times to find ways to show that I care and to offer help that actually makes a difference. I’ve always been very close with my dad in a kindred spirit kind of way. He is someone to whom I can say anything and with whom I can be fully myself.

He is the reason I have such a love of music, and for that I am forever grateful.

Over the past year, I’ve flown out from Ontario to visit him four times. While there, I set a deliberate intention to fully embrace and enjoy our quality dad/daughter time together by doing puzzles, sharing stories, and expressing all the things I know my future-me would regret not saying while I still have the chance. Aside from offering emotional support by maintaining a gentle presence of compassion and understanding for what is a challenging time for all, I do whatever else I can like researching healthcare/housing options, gardening, making meals, sorting out his possessions and paperwork. All of this is a fairly normal unfolding. It’s only natural that the child of an aging parent would assume the role of care-giver. A cycle of life following the arc of its turning.

However, my personal experience with this has included an unexpected dimension.

I will be extremely delicate in how I put this next part.

The greatest difficulty has not been in dealing with the fact that my darling Dad is ailing and in steady decline but rather with the complicated, chaotic, and confounding dynamics that can only come from interactions with his friend, The Narcissist.

Never have I ever!

These days it seems the word gets thrown around a lot, similar to ‘trauma’ and ‘racist’. It’s become a popular way to denigrate someone who is simply annoying or appears overly self-absorbed or inconsiderate. The liberal overuse and misappropriate application of the word ‘narcissist’ has served to dilute it’s meaning and power in those cases where it’s true. I can admit I’m guilty of having thought of it as more of an adjective than a noun, a colourful descriptor rather than a clearly defined category of mental capacity or psychological illness. Well…..I was wrong.

It’s real, and it’s terrifying.

How maddening it is to have conversations with one who can only hear words you didn’t say and who can only look through eyes that regard you as an enemy.

No matter how earnestly you enter into an interaction with the goal of creating mutual understanding and harmony, of building a bridge, the narcissist’s raging inner fury sparks a flame that sets the conversation alight into a burning pyre of disintegration.

Gaslighting = fuel for setting things on fire.

There is a mind-bending surreality to engaging with one who is determined to undermine you. At all costs.

What’s worse is there’s a shocking dearth of self-awareness about their own involvement at having caused the destruction in the first place.

How’s that for drama?

Now that I’ve set the scene for the theatrics that have been unfolding over here in my world, let’s switch gears. I’m not one to waste too much of my time in the act of complaining. It’s just not my style, and it’s most certainly not the point of my writing and sharing all this with you.

Looking back now, it’s kinda funny how long it took me to realize that I was not sharing the dance-floor with a ‘normal’ human being. Despite our constant communication breakdowns, blips of disharmony, circuitous conversations that I thought were going somewhere but were only going nowhere, I still thought these were your typical, innocent misunderstandings between two well-meaning good faith actors who were simply crossing their wires. Once, I actually spent four solid hours on the phone with her believing we were getting to know each other and growing a friendship.

I was so darn naive in the beginning.

Now I can see it’s precisely my being so that invited this lesson to arrive at my doorstep in the first place.

It helps that I don’t see anything that happens as random. The challenging people we encounter aren’t just nuisances to judge and complain about and navigate around.

They are mirrors.

They are gifts that give you access to the parts of you that are so habitual, so engrained, that you can no longer see them operating in the shadows.

When it finally dawned on me that this woman was never going to be my friend, I knew she was instead a teacher. I had entered her Masterclass, and it was requiring that I grow up quickly into a version of myself who can handle conflict without over-compromising and handle loss without losing myself.

The situation at hand was not allowing me to stay the same as I had always been.

It was time to level up.

For many decades, I projected my truth onto others, as we all typically do.

I assumed all people are looking for a way out of their unnecessary suffering. I assumed all people are operating in good faith because I AM. I took on the emotions of others without even trying.

With a core wound of feeling misunderstood and desiring above all else to be seen, heard, known, I yearned so deeply for connection that I overextended my branches and disconnected from my roots. Caring for others meant caring too much about what they think. It meant hurting when they hurt. The lines between what they felt and what was mine were blurred.

This sensitive porous nature, wide openness, and trust in others might look healthy on the surface, and it surely can be when it exists in balance with discernment. In reality, my empathetic boundary-less default setting was an under-developed blindspot that ultimately diminished my ability to show up for myself.

Living with a permanently open door to my abundant stores of compassion made me a perfect target for a hungry thief.

So the story goes, a narcissist and an empath fit together like a lock and key.

One needs to feed, and the other doesn’t have the ability to say ‘no’.

Until she does….

Without boring you with details of our exchanges over the course of a year, suffice it to say that I’ve spent many days with a tummy-ache as a result of a jarring or mean text from her, and cried tears from being on the receiving end of nasty ALL CAP emails yelling at me about how awful a person I am. I’ve struggled with the guilt at the thought that I’m not doing enough to rescue my dad from his bad health and his even worse living situation. I’ve considered packing my life into boxes and moving across the country to be a good daughter, and to prove that I care.

I’ve existed inside the discomfort of limbo, and confusion, and irresolution.

BUT!

After many months of struggling to dance in rhythm with this stranger I can see what a gift her presence in my life has been.

She truly is an angel in disguise.

Where I used to take the bait off her maliciously cast hook, the one that would dig inside my wound of ‘needing to be understood’, I no longer reflexively go on the defensive and attempt to explain myself til i’m blue in the face.

Been there. Done with that.

Where I used to feel the impact of the ugly words she hurled at me and hurt in the soft place where they landed, I can now watch her operate as a character separate from me. I can so easily see that none of her anger, rage, desperate pain is even about me at all~ she was crying and dying inside long before we even crossed paths.

I’ve undergone invaluable lessons in discernment and building boundaries, shedding the old need to be liked or understood by everybody. All of this training has forged a more adult and wiser version of me.

The girl who entered the classroom believing that everyone wants to and anyone can change is now a woman who knows not all hearts can be softened with kindness, not all minds can break free from their programs. Not all people are looking to stop being victims of the harm they inflict on themselves.

Some wounds lie open for too long, some pain runs too deep.

And she is not mine to save.

But in a trick of irony and gift of mirror-magic, she has freed me from myself.

For that, I will always be grateful.

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In my never-ending pursuit of useful tools/wands/sticks to add to my inventory in this video game called Life, I have found two helpful items I’d like to share with you.

The first is this video by Chase Hughes, an expert in human behaviour and psychology. After I watched this video about six months into my Masterclass, I realized where I had been going wrong in handling the engagements of conflict. For those of you wanting to learn how to stand tall when someone is chopping at your legs with an axe, this video is for you.

Earlier this summer, in taking a day to read Transurfing Reality in 78 Days (and then reading it again into a microphone to create an audiobook series) one concept jumped out at me as the most immediately useful:

Dropping importance.

“All unbalanced emotions and reactions…are the result of over-stating the importance of things.”

Naturally, the author intended for this practice to be applied to any and many life scenarios.

I have found it to be the perfect shield for thwarting any external attack or attempt at manipulation by my narcissist Angel.

It’s turned me into a frickin emotional aikido warrior.

The antidote is so simple: to not make it important- whether it’s the hissy fit they throw, the judgement of you they cast, the words meant to bait you and hook you back into defending yourself all over again.

It’s not just going ‘grey rock’- it’s about not making it matter enough for you to have to ‘go’ anywhere. With no longer giving away your consent to be fed upon, you get to just stand right where you are. Tall. Firmly on the space you claim as yours.

Feet planted, breathing deep, you can watch them from a distance as they go through the script their character has been given to perform.

Their program need not be your problem.

Here is the first video of my narration series.

For the full audiobook playlist click here.

As always, I adore you for showing up and for reading this far down the page.

Thank you for you company, your time, your attention.

It is not easy to be a Human. But it is made soooo much easier when travelling in the company of others who care enough to care.

My heart is full of love and respect for you, my fellow dreamer.

Love,

Jacqueline

💖

PS I want to acknowledge the loving support and compassionate listening I received from dear friends along this journey. Karafree Rebecca Christopher Cook The Starfire Codes Thank you eternally, you beautiful kindred, you. 🙏