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 spend a lot of time ruminating over the events of my childhood and those surrounding my dad's death. It returns, repeatedly, without choice. That's the nature of trauma from emotional abuse. And the impact when it's at its worst is frightening and can put me at risk. Recovery's often a case of one step forward, two steps back. You occasionally make leaps apparently from nowhere, though progress is fragile, particularly when you've been conditioned to take the blame, or made to feel your pain's only real if the person who causes it can see it. I hope this doesn't sound conceited, but yesterday, as I lay in the garden mulling it over, a statement came fully-formed in my head. And though I'd heard it before, at that moment, it had clarity:  "It's not your fault. You did your best. And if your dad were here, he'd see it." I can't understate what a massive shift this is. And last night, I had a glass of wine to celebr...

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...

After a lifetime of narcissistic abuse that only intensified since my dad's death last May - and after a year of trying to preserve our relationship without letting her pathological lies pass unchecked  - I've reluctantly ended contact with my mother. When someone's mistreatment of you and lack of accountability makes you consider ending your life to escape it more than once, both as a child and as an adult, and telling them doesn't make them change their behaviour, self-preservation dictates to walk away. And when they twist reality so frequently that you start recording your calls to maintain your sanity, you're in an imbalanced relationship. How can you continue association with a person who thinks saying a lie out loud makes it real? In time I'll be open about my story, but for now, I want to be clear she doesn't represent me. And I have the support and testimony of my dad's family, his ex-girlfriend & family, the teacher I first opened ...