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Originally Posted by Open Eyes
These individuals, like all individuals that are self centered never had the ability to appreciate you and your feelings and boundaries. Instead of respecting YOUR identity, you were supposed to cater to THEIR identity. This can go way back for a person who was raised to only have value when the parents got THEIR needs met.
These terms like emotional neglect and emotional abuse and emotional blackmail are all ways of describing what can happen to a child growing up where the parent or parents fail to realize their job as a parent is to help the child develop their OWN identity instead of constantly trying to control who or what that child can be.
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When I sit and read about narcissistic behaviors, there are so many things that I read that bring back memories of how my father treated my mother. A child has no idea what that means but THEY FEEL IT. That can cause that child to navigate their life thinking some of these behaviors are "normal" when they are instead unhealthy. Also, this can actually lead this child to gravitate to someone who is nice to them, but someone who is only being nice to them TO USE THEM.
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Hm well. I did not have parents like that, luckily. I'm fine with my parents, I think my story involves other people and other things outside family.
With these two people traumatising me... I didn't just gravitate to them just because they were nice to me. That was far more complex, thanks.... I had my own emotions, my own preferences. I did like their attentiveness or what I thought was attentiveness, but that just sealed the deal. If I hadn't had strong interest in them, I'd not have given a second thought to their attentiveness.
So that's where this was very different for me.
We can add to this some lack of emotional awareness that got worse over time as I just focused on work/business/hobbies and not people until I got more emotional and focused on these people then. But my emotional awareness lagged behind that new interest. Or it's not even about emotional awareness... it is, as far as me not paying attention to my own emotions, sure. But I was also NOT experienced about subtle manipulative behaviours. Mind you, most people are not.
That's why I took too long to realise that they had their own unsaid agendas. And since the romantic one did mental gaslight (quite a lot of LIES) and spiritual abuse (that was VERY bad), it was extra complex. What saved me from further damage (and trust me it was BAD enough) was that I kept my head screwed on and focused on objective behaviours. But my mind and emotions were very subtly but definitely being manipulated and that caused a LOT of damage. 3 years. This long to get over it as far as not getting pulled into the past and all the doubt and compulsively checking thoughts about their possibly good sides and intrusive feelings and memories (in his case only, for the latter, memories and feelings about her were never intrusive).
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The truth is that some people simply cannot SEE you no matter how nice you are as a person. The individual just want's an audience, a kind of fan club to service their fragile ego. You are permitted to be in their orbit as long as you are "useful" to them. What are the tells? Often a tell is "you don't make me feel good so I am discarding you". Then they will say "you did this and that when you should have done this instead", so they WANT to make sure you are left feeling you are not "good enough" and that is because this other person needed to have "all the power and attention". So, you were charmed and then discarded. You were only wonderful if you served and serviced, only given to so that you would serve. They say "I am special" otherwise I am angry. This you must believe.
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Yeah, charmed, and then abandoned. But keeping me around in case they need me again (her). But further manipulating me to pull me into their bubble fully so that they can do anything to me as they please (him).
I don't think they were NPD as in their main concern being "I'm special", but they had narcissistic traits for sure. They both were attention seeking sure.
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This is why you feel your energy is sucked out of you. These type of individuals get good at sucking people into their drama. There was something you enjoyed, something that made you feel worthy somehow right? Well, you have to get "something" to keep you present right? They DO know this and they feed you just enough so you keep FEEDING THEM.
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I said this above. I just thought I felt happy. Until I didn't.