Battle Hardened and Attack Ready

I'm not a big believer in the pursuit of Why, particularly when it comes to the why of the way that Narcissists behave. I used to be. I used to be on an a quest to understand their actions, to comprehend their logic, to break all of the assaults and behaviors and manipulations down into little bite size pieces with explanation, coat them with the sweet sauce of exposition and make them more palatable for me to chew up and swallow.

I spent scads of time on this journey to understand. I wrote checks in an attempt to purchase relevance. I thinked and thought and thunk some more in my efforts to figure it and them out. The only answer I received had more to do with acceptance of their natures than understanding of their motivations; they do what they do cause they do it. But that was a different post.

In my failed Quest to understand the Holy Grail of Why They Do the Evils They Do, though, I did learn a lot. Most of what I learned concerned the How of their actions.

ACoNs are trained from day one to NotSee and to UnSee. We know the truth of most situations, in my experience, as we are generally intuitive, observant and highly attuned to the gestures and actions of those around us. These attributes are often keys to our survival. We know what's really happening, but we are forced by our Nfamily to carry those truths silently within ourselves and to keep mum. We know the truth of the evil deeds, but we are trained to protect the perpetrators from their own actions with lies. Then, in the ironic twist that is inherent to life with Narcs, we are blamed for their evil actions in the first place.

It's the definition of CrazyMaking. How does a child survive this paradox? We learn to UnSee, at least to the best of our abilities. Of course, it makes us sick and causes us great pain, but we become masters of denial.

So, when we try to get better, when we begin to walk a path we hope will bring us to healing, we often are surprised by the outright heinous, forcefully aggressive assaults that the Narcs begin to hit us with. We've been ingesting their lies for so long, making up our own lies to protect ourselves for so long that invariably at some point we began to believe them.

I remember telling myself that surely it couldn't have been as bad as I felt. They probably didn't mean it that way. I was being overly sensitive. I wasn't perfect either, and maybe I was being too hard on them.

No wonder I couldn't be honest enough to see their attacks for the declarations of war that they were; I couldn't even be honest with myself about the facts of the abuse I'd suffered at their hands. I was stripped to the bone emotionally and had no capability to understand my own actions, no less someone else's. Throw Narcissism in the mix and all bets of comprehension were off. It was all I could do to even cope.

In retrospect, though, I can see a clear pattern of escalation from the very first boundary that I drew with the N's to the final storming of the beach that resulted in No Contact.

In the movie Casino, Joe Pesci plays strongman Nicky Santoro, protector to casino veep Ace. His portrayal of the character is terrifying partly, I think, because Joe Pesci's what, five feet tall? Regardless of his small stature, no matter what he looks like or what he seems to be, though, he's a vicious, brutal killer. This is how Ace (Robert DeNiro) describes Nicky.

"You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead."

Set aside reason, forget about reasonableness. This is how Narc's against the wall of a boundary communicate; with an ever evolving and escalating series of attacks. Civil tools aren't going to get them to back off.

You want them to stop calling you to scream at you? They're going to call you to scream AND they're going to get someone else to call you to scream at you too. You ask them to stay away from your children? They contact those children in every way they can think of, even moreso than they've ever shown any desire to talk to them before. You change your number? They show up at your house. You call the police when they show up at your house? They show up at your work. You ask them to leave? They call your customer service hotline to complain about how you treated them while pretending to be a non-involved customer. You manage to find a way to cut them out of your life completely? They stalk you and find out who your non-involved friends are, make nice with them and try to turn them against you. You lock your doors? They peer through your windows. You move on? They hunt you down.


They do not stop. Ever.


They can go into a cycle of dismissiveness, sure. They'll move on at points, find new victims, stay away for awhile if they can find other sources of Narc Supply. Junkies can usually find a new supplier, you know (but that doesn't mean that they forget their favorite drug.) Mine did, and there have been times when I've been lulled into the deceptive calm; into believing that silence is equivalent to serenity and that maybe they've just given up, gotten over it, moved on. This isn't truth, though.

They are fully capable of changing their game, developing different tactics and strategies, and they're good at it. (This, more than anything else that I know of, speaks volumes about them. If they are capable of changing the way that they come at me to hurt me, then they are absolutely capable of changing the fact that they are hurting me. Simple math then makes it easy to deduce that the capability to change is there; willingness to do so is what's missing on their part.) I've made it hard for them to get to me, and this creates some space because they aren't willing to work that hard, at least not today. They're getting their fix somewhere else, you see, so right now at this very moment, I get a pass.

But I'm not off the hook from their attacks. I'm back-burnered, that's all. Sooner or later, I've no doubt, there will be a trigger (my money's on my oldest DD turning 18 in a couple of years) and then they will be back in force (probably coming at my daughters rather than me; predators always go for what they see as the easiest prey first.) We say in alcoholic recovery that the disease of alcoholism doesn't go away when we stop drinking, it just hangs out behind our backs doing push-ups and getting stronger, waiting for an opening to slither back into an active status. So too, I believe, are the Narcs lurking in the shadows out there, just thinkin' shit up.

I'm not a paranoid conspiracy theorist. I don't sit around detailing or stressing about the ways that they're planning to get me. I just don't ignore the truth anymore.

Almost two years ago, the DD's let me know that NSis and GCYB had been trying to contact the DD's via social networking. This was almost three years since the last time I'd spoken to either NSis or GCYB. We're talking absolute radio silence, not a phone call, a letter, nothing, nada, zilch. The DD's have always had private profiles, but we took the additional steps to systemically block NSis and GCYB (and the minions that I know of) from the DD's profiles. And I started checking NSis and GCYB's profiles once a month from a dummy profile. I didn't really want to know what was going on in their lives, but I know them pretty well. They've rewritten history to the point now that they really believe that I'm the bad guy, the catalyst of their unease and destruction. This works to my advantage in a way, because they're not careful, they stand so firmly on their false moral superiority that they don't particularly watch what they say.

I'd lay dollars to doughnuts that if they did succeed in getting a response from the DD's or making a connection somehow, they'd be crowing their success from the mountaintops. So, once a month, I check and see what kind of shit they're flinging on their cyber walls.

Two years ago just after Thanksgiving, NSis posted a whole bunch of pictures of the "family" as it exists today all dressed up and posed by the Christmas tree. And the title of one of those Norman Rockwell portraits of traditional family bliss: "FUCK YOU VANCI." Of course she used my real name.


After NM's drug induced and mismanaged near death stay at the hospital in April of last year, NSis posted a comment about how "all the family is here with us now." Then she followed it up with a clarification, "Well, all the good family." Then yet another clarification, "I didn't mean any of the extended family in [another state], just Vanci."

So, no. I'm not off the radar. The guns might be pointed in a different direction momentarily, but they didn't lose my coordinates, not by a long shot. So they'll come at me or they won't when they feel like it, and they'll escalate as they see fit. They never took my opinion or feelings into account in the first place, even when I was the glue that held their lives together, their indentured servant who spoke to each and every one of them every day. They're sure as fuck not going to take my boundaries or wishes into account now.

Just like Nicky Santoro, they'll keep coming at me, one way or another.

That's dark, isn't it? Frightening, even.

But guess what?

They can't touch me.

I've done the work to break the cycle, and there isn't a single person on the face of the planet that I care about who doesn't know exactly who the Narcs in my NFOO are, and exactly what they do. There also isn't a single soul I care about who doesn't know exactly who I am, what I've been through and what I stand for. They may have rewritten history in their minds, but I've got the facts, the proof and witnesses galore of what and who they really are, what it really is and who I really am.

I have truth on my side, and I stand ready for anything they can throw.

Come at me, bros.

And we'll just see who ends up in the (metaphorical) hole in the desert.

Love,
Vanci

Narc Attacks

A few of my blogger friends are currently under attack from the Narcs in their life and as a result I've spent some time today thinking about and remembering what that felt like.

It's been a long time since I had to endure the full-frontal assaults.  I disconnected long enough ago from the NFOO that we don't have many paths that cross anymore on a regular basis (i.e. I don't work with people who plan BBQs with the N's,) and what brief small town encounters we do have are largely non-events because I could give zero fucks about them.  That's right, you heard that right; how many fucks do I give?  Zero.

 My Narcs are the kind that really don't want to work too hard, you see?  They came at me fast and furious for the first year, but my reactions at that time were soft and shaky and they no doubt knew that if they kept it up long enough, I'd break.  Go back to my lifetime long pattern of giving in.

If they were betting people, I can assure you that that they went all in on my coming crawling back, repentant, to the hearth of the Clan.

Losers, then.

But after it became apparent that I was out, truly out, and that their old bag of tricks wasn't pulling me out of the hat, well.  They quit.  Largely.
A couple of half-hearted attempts were made, primarily when there was an out of the ordinary happening that they felt they could use: NM was hospitalized.  They called.  (And I went, something that I don't regret as it was a complete and total validation of the rightness of my decision to leave in the first place.)  But really, each of the random attempts to reconnect on their part were nothing more than a feeler.  As soon as they realized that I still wasn't going back to the old ways of game playing, well, they quit again.  Which I'm sure works out well for them: I'm a lot easier to blame when I'm not there being all pesky with my truth-telling.

Really, in the last few years, these attempts have seemed laughable to me.  They were pathetic stabs in the dark.  Nothing more.  They wanted the old, usable me.  They didn't want the new and improved version and they were just so fucking befuddled when they finally figured out that the version of Vanci they were looking for didn't exist anymore.  It was like watching the emotional equivalent of a Three Stooges routine where they're trapped in a dark room and trying to find the door.  They trip over everything, especially themselves.

But at the beginning, when every knock on the door, every phone call signaled another assault, I was terrified.  It's scary to have another human being stomp all over your safe places!  Especially when this safe place that you've so carefully created with boundaries and walls and double-chained and barred locked doors has taken you your entire lifetime to build and it's the only safe place you've ever been able to create for yourself.  And it cost buckets of blood just to build it.

And it's confusing to have to go to such lengths to keep out people who've spent their entire lives convincing you that this pain they're delivering on a daily basis isn't actually pain; that you don't know what you feel, that you just need to listen to them because they know what's better for you than you do and that if this thing they're giving you and calling love really feels like awfulness, well that's because there's something wrong with you and it's your fault anyway.

Everyone wants to be loved by their parents.  Everyone.

It's a hard thing to do, realizing that they don't love.  I didn't forget the 'us.'  They don't love. Period.

They spend forever teaching us that we are unlovable, that we are the reason that their love doesn't work, that we are responsible for the bad and never provide the good, that it is our job to provide in the first place and that we have failed before we start.

But it doesn't really have anything to do with us anyway, ever.
It's about them.

They can't love, or they won't love.  Either way, they don't love.

So take heart, dear friends.
In creating safety for ourselves and learning what we need, that we have a right to want it and taking action to ensure it, we are doing right by ourselves.

I've said to my DD's and some of the young ladies that I mentor often that I know this to be absolute truth:  I ALWAYS HAVE A RIGHT TO DEFEND MYSELF.  Always.
And so do you.

Sending lots of pixie dust into the ACoNverse tonight.

Love,
Vanci