Explain to me how all of that can be a lie when I still, to my bones, feel the niceness this narcissistic partner showed to me in the beginning. I have these good memories that tell me the opposite, and sometimes I get confused. I don’t know what is real and what’s not. It’s like inside me live two people: one kind of hates him or her, and the other just wants to give that relationship one more try. How can I bring that good person back?
This is what I hear almost every single day, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because this shows the level of confusion created by the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nature of the narcissist. The pain, the confusion, the disturbing dual reality—the dichotomous nature of the entire experience—people are left flabbergasted, wondering: how can this relationship be a lie when I felt the reality of it? I have the emotional memory. I remember feeling connected with him or her. They were there, listening, paying attention. How can you tell me it was all a lie? How can I process all of that?
They really grapple with understanding that it was nothing but a big illusion. They fail to understand that the person they fell in love with in the beginning did not exist. It’s really hard for them to accept that they were dealing with a facade, with the mask that the narcissist had intentionally put on to abuse them, to confuse them, to sell them a reality which, unfortunately, they did not know was nothing but a fabrication. This is why people say, “How can all of it be a lie?” Sometimes he was real, she was real, or at least that’s what I felt. You’re saying it was a lie?
This also shows the honesty of the person who is asking this question: for me, it was not a lie. At least from my side, I was fully invested in the relationship. I was doing everything I could to make it work. No, it was not a lie from my side. I know that. It was not a lie created by you. You did not contribute to that big deception in any way. You were just made to become a part of it, and that too non-consensually. You did not know that you were becoming a part of a narcissist’s shared fantasy, and that is what they sold you. All of it was a lie, and accepting it is like accepting the death of a person who is still alive. The irony is they are only dead to you; the person you thought they were is dead to you. That is what makes the grief so complicated and leaves you with an extreme form of betrayal trauma because you feel betrayed by somebody who does not exist. So who would you hold answerable? That’s the complexity of it all.
3. “I don’t recognize myself anymore.”
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