Good day,
Tear tracks, I wanted to thank you for the compliment. I am considering doing some creative writing and that comment makes me beam!!!
And Gabben, yes, I’d have to say the sexual abuse and the subsequent fallout are high on the list of great losses I’ve suffered to NPD. They have wreaked a toll far deeper and wider than any eye could see. I spent a lot of my ‘tween and teenage years agonizing over the molestation that happened when I was five years at the hand of my teenaged cousins. I felt intense shame and unworthiness because I knew it was bad to “go with” your own family. I also felt as if there was some thing, be it hidden or obvious, about me that made me susceptible to sexual deviants. I remember trying to make myself “ugly” not washing my face, gaining a lot of weight, and choosing huge eyeglass frames and clothing to cover myself.
The rape at 12 by the crazy farm family, (orchestrated by a sociopath 18 year old and her impressionable, brainwashed 17 year old ga-lumph of a brother), was particularly emotionally damaging because of the overall trickery involved and the subsequent abortion. The abortion at age 12, did a number on my spirit. Once I recognized the heft of what had been done, around aged 17 or so, I was spiritually devastated. I went for about 2 years unable to pray or commune with God. My mother had refused to ever speak of it again. She and my father’s were pillars in the church community but I felt that I alone carried the weight of our evil deed. The abortion did the job of ratcheting up the shame-level already intensely felt following the two prior episodes of sexual manipulation.
Gabben, I can relate to the geometric pattern mentioned in the other thread about victim-hood with the third event of sexual abuse when I was 15. When I review it and analyze it for what it really is, I in fact, did have some thing about me that made me susceptible to sexual abuse/manipulation. It was in the way I over-responded to this 19 year-old man-boy when he turned a flirty word towards me on the bus ride home from high school. In my sheltered naïvetee, low self-esteem and self-deprecation, I trusted this tall, muscular Marine within moments of meeting him. I trusted that he would just walk me to his house quickly to check in on his ailing mother before walking me to my own home a block from the bus stop. I negotiated with him, during the physical assault, (I was being forcibly pinned), by telling him of my previous rape and the ensuing pregnancy, pleading that he not do this and devastate my family again. His decision was to rape me in ways that I could not get pregnant.
Around 20, I received the spiritual healing I needed. I went to God first for forgiveness and then a promise. The promise was to never again allow anything to ever come between Him and me. The comforting message in return was that in all instances everyone involved was doing the best the could do given the circumstances. From that I was able to forgive my perpetrators and myself. That has been the single most important factor in my healing from the abuse and the abortion. I carry with me many lessons of the unborn baby. If I’d given birth, the child would be 22 years old.
The depression and anxiety came upon me the hardest three years ago just before I found out about NPD. I was searching with all my might for answers about why I had become a shell of my former self, with agoraphobia and addictive behaviors and completely out of contact with my friends. I was sleeping and eating and rotting. I was making an attempt to pull myself up from the bootstraps emotionally when I passed some online depression test and found that a anxiety “for dummies” book applied to me. Okay I was depressed and anxious, Well, Why? I asked the ethos. And the word “narcissist” fell into my lap around Mother’s Day 2005 during a Today Show episode on “toxic relationships.” I’ve been in various stages of healing since.
Take care, sorry so long,
