Terror: Snapshots of Narcissistic Abuse

I first experienced terror in a nightmare at the age of 5. I sat on my bedspread, suspended hundreds of feet above the neighborhood below. A string dangled from one corner of the bright green and yellow coverlet, just out of the reach of a horrifying King Kong trying to pull me down from my unsteady perch. I couldn’t move for several heart-stopping moments. When I finally found my scream, I bolted to my parent’s bedroom.

Terror feels a bit different as an adult.

It is even difficult to write this. My innate dissociative tendencies keep interrupting my chain of thoughts. But it must be noted that victims of domestic violence and narcissistic abuse know the difference between fear and terror and all the shades in between. The confusion in the minds of those blessed enough to never face intimate terrorism happens because terror presents a blank face. Under my cheerfully detached demeanor, no one knew that I had lived in a state of perpetual dread for years.

I write about this because I recently had a conversation with one of my daughters. She told me for the first time how grateful she was that I managed to escape with all of them, even though it took a terrible court battle. In that vulnerable moment, I confessed to her that, looking back, I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t told the judge about my ex-husband’s violence. I will just say here that I am very glad that the FBI now compiles lists of those who grievously harm animals. More than that serves no purpose.

But I carried guilt for quite a while in retrospect because never once did it enter my mind to reveal those terrible secrets to the judge. It simply did not occur to me. I could have stopped all the wrangling in court, but somehow, all the violent incidents receded in my mind. So when I confessed this to my daughter, she surprised me. Despite the awfulness of the custody battle which scarred her childhood, she felt as if those revelations would have finished her off. The burden of terror would have been too great for her young mind. And then she asked, “Don’t you remember the terror?”

And suddenly, I did.

Terror and horror are brethren in the secret passageways of domestic violence.

I think of the traumatized soldiers with their blank staring gazes in old World War 2 photos, though I am not trying to create equivalencies in traumatic events. Still, I am merely making the connection between the paralysis and mental captivity that occurs when one sees things that humans were never meant to see.

A new friend I recently made told me of a coworker whose ex-husband stabbed her many times in an abandoned warehouse. She escaped by pretending to be dead. When I heard that, I realized that I had done this at the time of my divorce. I didn’t play literal possum, of course. Instead, I made myself as non-threatening as possible. That included keeping myself as blank as possible inside and out.

The opossum doesn’t choose to play dead. Instead, it is an involuntary response to terror. I didn’t choose to play dead either. My mind and body could only handle so much. Dissociation is a blessing at first. Later on, it can cause problems.

And my body remembers.

But only now, twenty years later, can I let myself feel the terror. It was a secret I kept from myself for the sake of my girls, to keep myself moving out of the horror, away from the abuse. With the recognition of that younger version of myself, who lived a life of slavery and mental bondage, comes a love for my younger self. All the messiness of abuse, the back and forth, the trauma bonding, all of it in its horrendous detail, no longer frightens me. I can tell my story because I am more than the sum of events in my life.

But in telling my story, I wish I could accomplish just a couple of things. Firstly, validate those who currently travel the road of abuse. I receive countless emails from women and some men who do not yet have the strength to escape. I just want to say that we do what we can in these situations. I do not judge you for staying until you have a way out. Prison is never easy to escape.

To those who don’t understand or think that abuse is a two-way street, understand this. We prisoners of war navigate our escapes very carefully and with what resources we have. Until you have seen up close what one person can do to another, you do not have the frame of reference to judge. How could you? And I hope you never do.

I created my website to encourage those who find themselves trapped in such situations. It takes time to understand one’s story. Telling the truth about who we are and where we have been can take decades, especially if we have not skeletons but corpses not of our own making in our closets.

What sets me free, inside and out, is the knowledge that on Easter Sunday, the innocent, murdered body of Jesus walked out of the tomb. And every day, He pulls me further and further out of darkness into his marvelous light.

I cannot recommend these two books highly enough.

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Isolation: Why Abuse Makes Us Feel Alone