How surviving narcissism is like surviving cancer

(and, crucially, how it’s not)

Photo from National Cancer Institute Unsplash

Ten years ago, I survived cancer.

Last year, I survived narcissism.

The parallels are many. The tumour must have been there growing gently for at least a year before it showed itself. Perhaps there were signs but I didn’t see them clearly. For a few months, I had an inkling something wasn’t right but I kept it under wraps, even to myself. I was pregnant so it was easy to find alternative explanations for the things that didn’t quite add up. Once diagnosed, it was like a bus drove at me. I couldn’t comprehend that this huge tumour had been with me all that time and I hadn’t seen it.

How could I not have felt it growing under my skin, attaching itself inside my chest, so close to my heart?

I felt that no-one around could understand. My friends and family were immense in their love, care and empathy, but I never felt truly understood. I could never explain how crushing it was that everything I believed about my future had been brought into question. How scared I became of the uncertainty, of no longer being sure what was true, of feeling that my whole physical and mental capacity was gone, of being so desperate for tiny glimmers of hope that I would cling onto them even when the gloom around them was overwhelming. I oscillated wildly between being sure that if I just fought hard enough everything would be as it had been before, and being certain I could never survive. Not being able to control what happens to you is intensely damaging. Many times, through what was a brutal treatment plan, I thought it would be better to just give up, get out, let go.

But it was not really the treatment – surgeries, months of chemotherapy, radiotherapy – that caused the damage. It was what came after. The tumour was gone but its continued impact on my psyche was so real that I re-lived every moment over and over. I simply couldn’t get it out of my head. I consumed literature until my brain could not hold any more information, reading articles and books obsessively, oftentimes unsure if I had read them before. I tried so hard to make sense of it all. I couldn’t. I could not believe this was happening to me – to me. I didn’t know what I had done to deserve it, I didn’t know how to put it aside and get on with my life. I didn’t know how to get out.

Every single one of these things is as true for narcissistic abuse as it was for cancer.

Perhaps six months into my cancer recovery, I realised that a big part of the problem was that I felt alone in my experience. The standard narrative of the cancer experience and how I might feel was only partly relevant to me. There were things I read about that were nothing like what happened to me and things that I experienced that seemed totally out of place with others’ narratives. There were ‘common’ side effects that I simply didn’t recognise and out-of-the-ordinary ones that no-one else seemed to be talking about.

In particular, no-one was talking about having an aggressive form of cancer and a new-born baby at the same time. As an exercise in healing, I wrote my version of events down and shared it with others in forums. I received so many messages from women just like me, in the same boat, going through or having gone through the same thing, and each so relieved to no longer feel alone.

A few months into ‘no contact’ with my narcissist ex, I feel that similar healing might help, not just me, but others too. I want to talk about what it feels like when your story doesn’t fit the standard narrative of life with a narcissist. I want to explain a version that was different, more nuanced perhaps, less clear-cut. I want to explain a version that was not physically violent but that was mentally devastating. The catastrophic impact of physical violence was, thankfully, not part of my experience but I think it is important that non-violent and more ‘covert’ narcissism stories get heard too. I suspect that the reason there are fewer of them out there is that women like me feel that their experience was ‘not as bad’ or not ‘real abuse’ because it doesn’t tick all the boxes of the narcissistic playbook.

I don’t mean in any way to undermine the so-much-more-horrific stories I have heard by telling my own, but it is also the case that it took me a long time to accept that I was dealing with a narcissist because his behaviour didn’t quite match the oft-repeated and more well- known patterns. The differences led me to question myself and what was really happening to me even more, at a time when I was already being systematically manipulated into questioning everything I knew.

A lack of stories like mine made me wonder if I was indeed the ‘crazy’, ‘paranoid’ girl he said I was.

It wasn’t all a different story, of course. As with every such survivor’s tale, there were ‘signs’ early on, but I didn’t see them or I sought out more palatable explanations, just as I had with cancer. Certainly, I can tick the standardised ’idealize-devalue-discard-hoover cycle’ box for love-bombing – overwhelmingly the strongest sign. In retrospect, with all my newly- acquired knowledge of narcissist behaviour patterns, I see that what I experienced was very ‘textbook’. He pursued me almost obsessively – I thought beautifully – using a kind of forlorn love-struck approach that was worthy of a Shakespearean hero. He almost guilted me into it – how could I not fall for a man who adored me so? And who, of course, was handsome, charming and funny – tick, tick, tick. He moved way too fast, he told me I was all he ever wanted. Tick, tick. He told me his not-quite-ex was ‘crazy’ and was preventing him ‘being himself’. Tick.

He drew me a picture of a future I so desperately sought, he gathered my dreams and made himself into them. Huge fucking tick.

So far, so narcissistic…

There were other ‘signs’ that I missed too. He had no real friends, no long-term or deep connections to speak of. I should have questioned that. He took the tiniest of criticisms painfully badly, such that I soon learnt to shield him from any. Conversely, about almost everything else he was oddly unemotional. He was vain, too vain. And just occasionally, he would say things that made me wonder – he’d repeat things I knew came from someone else, including me, as his own ideas; he’d adopt a slightly different persona in front of some people at work; there were a few people he really didn’t like for no apparent reason; and little slips that indicated he thought he was better than other people.

But this was not the litany of ‘red flags’ that I have subsequently read about so often. They did not emerge strongly within just a few months. They were tiny examples of nothingness against a backdrop of gorgeousness. For more than two years, they were well-hidden behind a beautiful, fun, existential, creative, confident exterior. He was supportive, attentive, sociable, committed. He adored me and I loved him with all my heart. He was wonderful.

Until, quite suddenly, he wasn’t.

Almost overnight it seemed, everything changed. Like he just woke up one day and was someone different.

He started an affair, quite blatantly in front of me, but denied it over and over as if I was crazy – which he told me I was. He endlessly and ruthlessly stonewalled my attempts to talk about what was happening. He got angry and blamed me if I was confused or hurting. He started going away all the time but would return to our home as if nothing had happened. He would intentionally upset me and then be furious at me for being upset, saying he couldn’t cope with me and how emotional I was – using it as an excuse to leave again. Anxious of the consequences of trying to talk about it, I wrote him long letters and emails explaining how I felt, or asking for some explanation of what was happening. He simply ignored them all, shutting my questions down, treating me as if I was neurotic for asking them. He never verbally abused me, not in the way you read about, but he undermined my sanity, my sense of self, my esteem and my love.

I felt like I was on trial – that if I could just prove to be good enough, this man who had loved me so hard for two years might love me again. I am ashamed to say that I sought to control how my children acted, desperate to make them behave perfectly so he wouldn’t lay any more blame at our feet. Every now and then, I would be strong enough to ask him to leave, telling him I couldn’t take it any longer, that if he wanted to be with her, he should just go. He would point blank refuse, or later plead to come home, saying he loved me and needed more time. But a matter of days later, every time, he would do it all again, leaving me crying on the floor – replacing his mask as he walked out, off to go ‘love-bombing’ again. He got himself a new place nearby, without even telling me or the children. Then despite all but still living in my house and sleeping with me most days, he announced we were ‘no longer in a personal relationship’. Although heartbroken, I accepted that this was what had to happen now and tried to pack his stuff. I suggested we should therefore not spend any time together or be in touch all the time. He completely lost it, calling me cold and venomous, accusing me of being unkind and closing the door on us. He confused me so much about what he wanted that I had no idea what I was supposed to do. The couple of times I really tried to hold my boundaries firm, he cranked it up – entirely collapsing, desperate, sobbing. And I would rescue him, build him back up, care for him, thinking that it meant something – that he just needed me to be understanding, to love him more.

Within 24 hours he’d revert to his toxic self – as if nothing had happened.

Now I see it more clearly, the change – a protracted discard – wasn’t even that sudden. Just like its cancerous predecessor, the few months leading up to it should have told me something was very wrong. The process of devaluation was there but I didn’t know what was happening. It was too subtle, too insidious. Months earlier, he had begun to withdraw. He stopped being interested in our family life. He no longer wanted to take my daughter swimming, which had been their ‘thing’ for two years. He became resentful of the children if they were not always as loving to him as he expected them to be. He started a destructive process of withholding and then giving me affection and using my confusion over it to question my mental stability. He started to stay out without me, he started to tell my family I was too sensitive, anxious and difficult. He started to openly flirt with other women. I should have registered all these as the ‘red flags’ they had, by then, become, but I was in too deep. I loved him. I simply thought I needed to try harder to be the person he needed me to be.

We did finally split and eventually he moved out. The relationship counsellor we had been seeing told him that his behaviour towards me was cruel – she all but instructed me to get out. But he stayed in my life. The ‘hoover’ phase went on for months. Despite his rosy new relationship, he turned up and hung around everywhere I was. He was in touch with me every day. He created scenarios that meant I forgave him so much and continued to be his rock. He told me he thought he was autistic. I believed that maybe this was the explanation I had been after – the thing that ‘made sense’ of what had happened and of why our communication was so misaligned. I felt guilty for not having been understanding enough of him and his needs – I blamed myself even more. It was all a lie. We continued to spend time together and sleep together. His most sinister behaviour manifested in response to any attempts on my part to move on. He was intensely jealous. He watched me physically and monitored my social media. I caught him following me more than once. He messaged me all the time, asking who I was with, what I was doing. If he got any wind of another man, he spiralled in his behaviour. He used sex as a tool.

I could not understand what it meant. Why this response from someone who had left me, who was in a new relationship, who did not want me and told me so? I thought it meant he still loved me. I didn’t realise he just wanted to control me. Several times, I went back to him, hiding it from everyone. For a few hours, or couple of days, it would be just like it had been in the beginning. But it never lasted and I would be at fault if I expressed hurt or confusion about what was happening. I didn’t know what normal meant any more.

For a while, I really did wonder if I was mad, if I was inventing it all in my own head.

Reading this back, I guess it’s not so different to all the other stories of narcissistic abuse; the idealize-devalue-discard-hoover cycle is all there. The emotional manipulation, the gas- lighting, the lack of accountability…it’s all textbook stuff. But there was not the verbal or physical abuse I have read so much about. He exhibited so many of the traits of NPD, of the covert variant, but somehow without the more overt signifiers of abuse, I didn’t believe it. I am eternally grateful (if that can be the right word) to not have experienced those horrifying things but believe that because they were ‘missing’, it was harder for me to identify what was going on. This enabled him to manipulate me in ways that would have been impossible had he been hitting me or calling me awful names. He didn’t obviously look like the bad guy, so he was able to make me believe it was me that was to blame for everything – he attacked my mental health and used my empathy against me.

Ultimately, it ended because I finally took myself and the children away to Europe without him for long enough to get the clarity I needed. There, I read enough about covert narcissism to understand that this is what I was dealing with. It ended because I saw the truth and called him out on it, which he could not handle. And because my extraordinary friends and family supported me to be strong enough to take the ‘no contact’ plunge.

Cancer stole years of my life. Recovering from having gone through it was a tougher fight than the treatment itself. It took me years to stop seeing everything through the cancer lens. Already, narcissism has taken three more years from me – reducing true love to nothing more than a con. But just as I eventually stopped thinking that every new ache or pain was a reoccurrence that I would not survive, soon I hope to stop looking over my shoulder to see if he is watching. Much sooner than with the cancer, I know already that it was not my fault and I could not have seen it coming.

And in one crucial factor the parallel breaks down. There was nothing I could do to prevent the cancer reoccurring. I just had to wait it out and hope fate would be kind to me. By contrast, it is entirely in my gift to overcome this abuse and prevent him coming back. I won’t ignore even the mildest of symptoms. I know the signs now. The control is mine.

This time, my survival is in my hands.