SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I’ve posted this many times before, I’m sure I’ll post it many times again, but I miss the days when a narc was a cop.

I don’t buy into the need to label a cheating spouse a narcissist, movingonward. I believe labeling places the focus in the wrong direction. I work with a few different divorce support groups, every time we have a member who begins calling their spouse a narcissist, that member will only usually come to the meetings for another week or two, then simply quit coming.

Our groups are focused on healing yourself. Not labeling your spouse. Diagnosing them won’t benefit your own healing. So they don’t stick around for long. There is a need to explore your experience, work through and understand what has happened to you and that includes who treated you that way. But affirmation can be a double edge sword. Unfortunately it is easier to see the speck in the eye of another while ignoring the beam in your own.

We’re all on a journey, some of us need to spend time focusing on our spouse/ex-spouse before we can move on with our own healing. And that’s ok. I just hope they don’t get caught there for too long, but ultimately it has little impact on my life and is far from anything I can control.

Might I recommend just skipping past the narcissist threads? At least it has helped my reaction to the growing trend of them over the past few years.

I did want to clarify something about gaslighting though. The first time I read anything about the term was on this site 7 years ago. The term was frequently used at that time as it is now. Considering the term is gaining popularity, maybe SI can be credited with popularizing it? But the biggest difference between gaslighting and a narcissist is gaslighting is a behaviour you can recognize yourself participating in. Recognizing it is a means to an end, to heal and change within by asking yourself why did I allow myself to believe this? While folks often argue the same can be said about discovering a spouse is a narcissist, I believe the vaste majority don’t actually go that far and usually stopping at the list of what a narcissist is and that’s why they did to me what they did, not why did I allow it. It’s a crucial distinction, often overlooked. But that’s just this armchair psychologist’s opinion.

^^^^^^^This! A thousand times ^^^^This!

Loukas you are right on. I totally understand the need to diagnose why a partner cheated. If you can label it, maybe there is a cure. But the reality is we only have control over ourselves. It took me about 5 years to realize that the reason didn't matter. What mattered was how I got the joke. All the signs were there. I was complicit in my own misery by choosing him.

I responded earlier but now that I’ve read page 5 all I can say is this thread is a huge dumpster fire that somebody poured kerosene into and it’s fixin to explode. Save yourselves!!!!

My first response was an emotional knee jerk reflex. I totally feel every person who has said pretty much the same thing I did. Nobody gets to decide my truth but me. And nobody gets to gaslight me about whether I’ve been gaslit (gaslighted?)

But here’s the bottom line. Trying to convince the person who is gaslighting you or misstating your truth is like fighting a pig in the mud. You get muddy and the pig enjoys it.

I would post a cheesecake recipe but I got the screen of death warning for doing that. So I’m just going to say again, save yourselves. Leave this thread without another reply and let it either drop off the front page or become an echo chamber.

The truth is that whatever someone else says has no bearing on what the truth is. I have brown hair and blue eyes. Someone can yell at me 24 hours a day that my hair is blonde and my eyes are brown. They can get louder, more insistent. They can enlist a few others to join in the chorus. Guess what? My eyes are still blue and my hair is still brown.

Yep ^^^^

And I can't help wondering, "Why are people soooooo worried about my perceptions and my truth? Shouldn't they be spending time worrying about their own lives?" But maybe that's the point.

I’ll post my story at some point. I don’t think I was married to narcissistic women. They made bad decisions which ended marriages and families. I would never get married again and I would not recommend marriage to any younger people. I do believe there is a vast difference in the genders working against a truly happy relationship. I’m not saying one gender is better than the other, there’re just different and most people won’t spend the time to learn the true needs of their partner. Statistics support marriage being a huge risk and gamble. Second and third ones even worse. Add kids to the mix and it’s almost an absolute disaster.

I’d rather see people labeled as assholes and liars than some sort of bullshit medical term like narc. 15-20 years ago it was almost unheard of. Now it’s part of everyday conversation.

movingonward, a truly healed person doesn't take offense to the rantings of an unhealed person such as yourself. I'm sorry that you had such a negative marital experience that has prompted you to never want to marry again and make generalizations that have been made by you. I think that's really where you've made your mistake here, trying to convince everyone that we are wrong and you are right. No one really cares, as we all have our own journey and we each have our own experiences that create how we look at the world. I hope, one day, that you will realize that your views are still being coloured by a terrible marriage and learn to trust yourself and have a happier life.

15-20 years ago it was almost unheard of. Now it’s part of everyday conversation.

There's a lot of things that didn't exist or at least was not commonplace 15-20 years ago that are standard parts of our worlds now. For example:
* smartphones
* netflix
* texting
* same sex marriage
* google
* the EU
* social media

People learn, they grow, language changes, the world evolves. A lot of people here lived in an era where women weren't entitled to have credit cards in their own name. I will never understand it when people start from the assumption that just because something is "new" must mean it is invalid or bad.

As I mentioned, the term narc didn't/doesn't apply in my situation either - that doesn't mean it doesn't apply for others. We weren't all married to the same people.

There's a lot of things that didn't exist or at least was not commonplace 15-20 years ago that are standard parts of our worlds now.

For example, I'm old enough to remember a time when women had the right to choose what they did with their own body. Times change - fast apparently.