Thanks to each of you for your kind thoughtful replies. Ami, I have long known how very, very powerful that validation is. It is for me the thing that I have needed most. I see the need and longing for validation in many of our posts. The lack of validation kept me stuck for many, many, many years. I wanted to hear someone else say that he had been a real problem in my life - someone other than myself and my therapist. My brother's and my experience were different and so we have never until now had a united voice concerning our father. Even when I suggested to my oldest brother and his wife a couple of years ago that our father was NPD, we laughed out of sheer astonishment at reading descriptions of our father that were so bizarre that noone had ever acknowledged before - of course descriptions of Ns do sound difficult to believe - they sound in sane! But I never heard my brother or sister-in-law actually accept the label NPD. But tonight my brother called me and asked if it had felt good when the Dr. said to me that the Personality Disorder was probably Narcissistic as I had suggested. He noticed that the Dr. affirmed what I had named and he knew that it would be helpful and it was.
I have spent so much time over the past years reading and learning about mental illness and the brain and the mind and today I feel as though I have passed my finals after years of study, I feel as though I have finally earned my degree, in a sense. My self directed study was right on and I found and directed myself with little guidance.
For brief moments I feel as though I have lost way too much to even try to start over again but only for very brief moments. Now I am certain that I can start yet another time and that at long, long last I will get it right this time. When for just a moment I start to feel sorry for all that I lost across these years I understand for the first time what a loss it is to feel sorry for myself and I will not let myself slide down that sorrow again. I will find a way to stand on the pile of refuse of my life to date and it will become a tall, solid foundation for something worthwhile.
I'm writing this because it helps me say it out loud but also because I have simply walked through the doors to my longed for freedom and I don't want to walk alone. There are enough of you who have had doubts about getting through this to another, truly another life and I am saying that we can get to that other life that is good and is joyful and is not a burden the way life under or beside or damage by an N can be.
It is not ever too late. To get to that one, single, solitary day when the psychological choke hold of the N is released and true life is experienced. It is simply never too late.
I am astonished at the power of N's to maim and kill and destroy the hearts and souls of human whom they supposedly love. They are silent killers and they almost always get away with their crime. Think about that - they don't destroy people the don't "care" about, they destroy the people closest to them and their victims are victims twice because society seems to simply look the other way.
"your (father, mother, husband, wife) wouldn't do that. They love you." But the only people who the N can destroy are the ones who love the N - that is an irony beyond comprehension to me, an irony that still fuels the fans of rage in my soul, rage over the injustice of it all, over the injustice of mental illness to destroy families, over the injustice of a person who can kill their own child, or their own spouse and over the insanity of people destroying those close to them. That injustice enrages me. I don't intend to get over that particular rage.
