mostly david ephgrave

There's a real fragility to my life at the moment as I carefully navigate the depressive trough I find myself in. It's so hard to express the damage a narcissist does to you. They present themselves as guiltless, while they're endlessly hypercritical of you. They're cruel, bitter, dishonest people who feel they owe you nothing and are incapable of processing criticism, however justified, without blowing up like a petulant child. And they see every interaction as something to win. It's all black or white with no shades of grey, so you're either toeing the line or a villain. And they'll lie without flinching and then seem to forget the difference between fantasy and reality in an instant. I read a tweet the other day that hammered home the problem I face: (Link to the original tweet.) That's my situation in a nutshell. My mother shows little remorse for the damage caused by raising me in such a toxic atmosphere and expecting me to conceal it. Her likely re...

While I'm slowly coming to terms with the abuse I suffered within a toxic family relationship and am learning tactics to cope with it, it's still hard to counteract the mental burnout. I'm dealing with many layers at once. Firstly, I'm receiving therapy for narcissistic abuse, which has specific and nuanced characteristics. One of the most painful aspects of recovery is learning you'll never rationalise with a narcissist. They'll never empathise, acknowledge or apologise for their behaviour. They can't be wrong. And they deliberately create drama to feed off; hurting you has an impact, and that's the best retaliation to hand if they can't compete with the truth (though if they can distract and deflect from their actions in the process, that's a bonus). And they have little autobiographical memory and endless double standards; it's one rule for you and another for them. On top of this, I'm gradually accepting that the person I thought they...

I'm struggling with dark thoughts at the moment; a familiar territory reinstated by my circumstances. The best way to manage difficult emotions is to approach them kindly and without judgment. Being hard on yourself for being hard on yourself is counterproductive. The physio I see for my vestibular migraines uses the analogy of keeping a glass topped up to prevent my vertigo attacks; if tiredness, stress or caffeine trigger symptoms, the trick is to minimise exposure to reduce the chance of it. With depression, that's more difficult, as with recovery from emotional abuse. You may have strategies in place to combat it, but when the problem's less tangible, it can be harder to identify the triggers, and therefore easier to blame yourself. And, like anything, the tools might not always work, particularly when you're challenged considerably. And if it's severe, you somehow have to keep yourself safe, which can be very hard when you're in a pit. The othe...

I'm struggling to process the loss of both parents; one to cancer and the other to end a cycle of emotional abuse. My nerves feel utterly shot. The past year saw my relationship with my mum unravel through being built on unsteady ground. Whenever her expectations tested my boundaries, I still did my best to meet them. Some of my earliest memories are the lies she made me tell - to hide four affairs from my dad when I was a child, right up to her secretly getting married seven months before he died, yet refusing to tell him, and insisting I lie about that too. And though it wasn't fair to repeatedly put me in this position, I met her terms, because I loved her.  I was a witness at the wedding to show forgiveness to the two people who'd made my childhood so traumatic, yet within months, I was accused of homophobia by a solicitor my mum refused to correct. And she walked off from my dad's burial, seconds after I'd lowered his ashes into the grave, disappearing a...