There is so much wisdom in the featured quote. It’s a kind of wisdom, however, that when we’re younger we don’t listen to. Of course, we know better. “Things that happened to you won’t happen to me,” and the like.
Valerie Jacobsen’s featured quote is telling:
My greatest regret is that I did not know THIS.
You cannot put your foot down hard enough to change the heart of an abuser, for hearts cannot be changed by human effort.
Resistance will either be dangerous for the woman (it can get a woman maimed or killed) OR it will persuade the abuser to find other targets. If the closest options are children, some of those children will be selected to pay the price for their mother's resistance. And the abuser will be able to hide the abuse of children from their mother just as capably as he had hidden the abuse of their mother from the community.
Resistance is no more effective than subservience, and it is DANGEROUS.
It is so sad that when we’re dealing with narcissistic abuse, there are NO winners. The fact that the narcissist insists on winning means everyone loses.
It means that when the only dignifying response you have is resistance, you give your resistance courageously, and it means there is always someone who will pay.
I know many people who paid for the sins of adults when they were children. Some very close to me and some who I’ve worked therapeutically with. Once the damage is done it can’t be undone, but at least situations like these are ideal opportunities to get to know the Saviour.
When I read Valerie Jacobsen’s quote, something struck me. There are many directions I could have gone given the nuances of the wisdom within it.
My choice, however, is to risk writing about the more general phenomenon of how we never think things will happen to us. “It’ll never be me who has a relationship with a violent, vindictive partner...” “It’ll never be me who must wrestle with irresolvable dilemmas...” “It’ll never be me who will mess up my own children, where so little of it is my fault...”
We always think bad things happen to others and we therefore stay in toxic relationships too long. We’re like the boiling frog: the pH of the relationship turns acidic or alkaline slowly, and we don’t realise how burned we’re truly becoming.
Of course, there’s the specific issue of the children in our care. We resist and the narcissist finds some way to get back at us. Their secret keeping is not only sociopathic, it’s ruining lives when we’re blissfully unaware.
The moral to the story is resistance is dangerous, even though resistance is the predictable and almost necessary response! See how impossible these situations are? The narcissist always wins, even if everyone must lose. He loves it when everyone loses, because if he can’t have his win easily, everyone ought to pay for it. Punishment is a reminder of who’s the boss.
If only everyone who read these words, or the words of the quote, began to trust their own assumptions less. If only we asked ourselves, “Could I have misread this situation? What if it’s a whole deal worse, and what about if I find that out in 20 years? What then?”
Narcissists need such special consideration it would take a mastermind to out-strategise them. But the fact is, we need to put in that kind of endeavour anyway, because if he’s like this, he won’t stop just because you want him to.
We seriously need to think through how we respond to a narcissist on a daily basis.
Image: Valerie Jacobsen
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