Understanding Your Part In The Dance

When I wrote about taking responsibility for our part in the narcissistic relationship the article pushed a lot of buttons with readers and some didn't fully understand what I meant.  I realize this is a hugely important topic because taking responsibility, where we need to, can be the difference between getting past the relationship or not.

In narcissistic relationships it is easy for us to fall into a pattern of taking responsibility for the stuff that belongs to the narcissist in our lives.  Since he or she doesn't take responsibility the narcissist projects blame onto you!  We often end up feeling it is our fault and that the end of the relationship is our fault.  It is difficult to move past the relationship when you continue to blame yourself for the failure of the relationship.

Responsibility can be a tricky thing.  A narcissist has a personality disorder which means he comes from left field and doesn't often make sense.  The mistake we often make is thinking that he knows he isn't making sense.  To the narcissist he is making perfect sense!  For example lets say you took out the garbage last night only the narcissist insists that he took out the garbage and their must be something wrong with your memory.  Crazy making, right?  But this is a typical type of scenario in a narcissistic relationship.  The narcissist confuses reality and then blames you for it.  Is this your fault?  Of course not!  Your responsibility in that situation is to stick to your version of reality.  "I know I took out the garbage!"  Where you lose energy is trying to convince the narcissist of your version of reality.  It is an energy drain!  Even if he remembers that "yes you did take out the garbage" he won't admit it because then he would have to be wrong!  And a narcissist doesn't admit wrong doing!  At least not often!

When the relationship is over you are left with so many unanswered questions.  Perhaps the narcissist blamed you for the ending of the relationship and why he/she found someone else to replace you with.  Since the narcissist may have appeared to have moved on without the normal emotional reaction that comes with the break up of a relationship, you may be left wondering what was so bad about you that he can just walk away without any emotion.

As you sort through the ruble of the broken relationship it is normal to look for clues as to what went wrong.  In the narcissistic relationship so many people get stuck in this stage because there are no real answers.  Learning that a previous mate was a narcissist or had all the characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder can be a great relief but it only helps us on the level of the intellect, not the emotions.  It is on the emotional level we get stuck!

When in a relationship with the narcissist there is a lot of emotional chaos created and the painful memories are embedded in this emotional chaos.  Telling yourself the guy is nuts doesn't seem to have the power to reverse the embedded emotional impact.  You can know on an intellectual level he is nuts but emotionally you still seek his approval and validation.  This is because this pattern of seeking approval and acceptance was a large part of the relationship.  "Please tell me you know that I took out the garbage!  I need for you to validate my sense of reality!"


When your reality is invalidated time and time again you begin to lose your own sense of reality and become absorbed into the reality of the narcissist.  "Well maybe you did take out the garbage."
Once you are absorbed into the narcissistic reality you are trained, programmed and conditioned to accept his version of reality over your own.  So when he tells you that you are a worthless piece of junk and he never loved you, you believe it!  When he tells you that he has fallen in love with someone who makes him so much happier than you did, you believe it!  You have been conditioned to believe the narcissistic version of reality.

So what is your responsibility in this situation? It is not to take responsibility for HIS insanity.  It is to take responsibility for discounting yourself!  It is to take responsibility for looking to the narcissist to validate your sense of reality.  It is to take responsibility for looking to someone outside of yourself to approve of you.  It is to take responsibility for needing external love so badly that you failed to love yourself.

Our responsibility usually has to do with our failure to love ourselves.  Women especially are taught to be selfless.  We are taught to serve others at the expense of our self and our own needs.  But is it true that we should selflessly serve others?  I don't believe it is.  I believe this belief fosters another form of slavery!

What I have learned on my journey is that when you fill your own cup first you can give to others from your overflow!  But if you are so busy filling the cups of others, when your own cup needs filling, you are always giving yourself away and failing to take care of your own needs.  Even as Mothers we have to take care of our own needs in order to be better Mothers.  If you always feed your children but never ate yourself it wouldn't be long before you were so weak you could no longer tend to your children.

Perhaps you learned at an early age to seek outside of yourself for love, admiration, approval and acceptance.  Perhaps you had a rejecting parent or a parent that blamed you for his/her unhappiness.  And so you developed a pattern of trying to make that parent happy and approve of you.

What better mate for a narcissist then a selfless individual who is easily charmed by the Cinderella story and promise of a fairy-tale romance?  A narcissist in his/her quest for ideal love is also a fanatic for a fairy-tale romance.  Fairy-tales are really rooted in mythology.  The characters of fairy-tales are archetypes of the characters within us.

The divine marriage is the marriage between the inner masculine and the inner feminine.  It is by bringing those two aspects of ourselves together that we find wholeness within.  But instead of seeking wholeness within ourselves we often project that masculine part of ourselves outward onto a man, if you are a woman and vise versa if you are a man.

The handsome prince in the Cinderella Story is a great example of a man walking around with a hole inside of him and a glass slipper in his hand searching for the one woman who will fit that slipper.  This fairy-tale drives home the message that there is only one perfect person in the whole world that is ideally suited to be with us.

The fairy-tales have true love all wrong.  True love is when we marry the masculine parts of ourselves with the feminine parts of ourselves and within our own being, we develop a sense of wholeness and completeness.  We then attract to us, out of our own sense of wholeness, a mate who has also undergone the process of becoming whole.

What is the inner masculine and inner feminine?  The masculine is our intellectual, rational, practical, left brain and action oriented natures and the feminine is our intuitive, nurturing, creative, right brain, compassionate and empathetic natures.  The masculine is the part of us that tends to project out and the feminine is the part of us that tends to go within.  Our feminine nature is our more spiritual side because it is the part of us that goes within to the dark womb of quiet reflection.  This is the place where creative ideas are inspired.  The masculine is the part of us that takes action on those creative ideas and takes them outward into the world.

As late as the 1950's the roles between the masculine and feminine were split between men and women.  The women stayed home and played the role of the nurturing Mother and the Father went out into the world to bring home the bacon.  But the sixties came along and shook everything up because the woman was not using her full creative potential.  She was being suppressed. On the other hand the man was not really involved with his children and had to shoulder all the financial responsibility for the family.  He didn't really have the opportunity to develop his more soft, nurturing, creative side.  The "shake up" of the sixties was necessary to our evolution as a race.

Now that we are in the new millennium our roles have completely shifted.  The nuclear family really has outgrown its form. Since over fifty percent of marriages end in divorce it would suggest that marriage is no longer working for us in its current structure.  People are not getting out of their marriages what they had hoped for.

Our evolution as a human being requires that we become whole in ourselves rather than seeking outside of ourselves for our "other half."  I believe so many marriages end in divorce because so many people were looking to the other to complete them.  But it is impossible to complete another.  We have to complete ourselves.  As long as we seek outside of ourselves to be fulfilled we will be disappointed.

So whether you are coming out of a narcissistic relationship or not, you still are dealing with this issue of wholeness which could cause disappointment in any relationship as the partner fails to fulfill you.  Only with a narcissist you end up feeling that the reason the relationship is going bad is because you are somehow bad, to the core.

It doesn't serve us to go to that place in our minds to regurgitate over and over again those feelings that we are somehow deeply flawed.  You have a responsibility to yourself to love you!  Everyone has flaws!  Our flaws are what make us unique and beautiful!  Perfection is the great illusion!  If we believe ourselves to be perfect or believe another to be perfect, we are deluding ourselves!  If something appears to be perfect, take a deeper look and certainly don't marry it!

Taking personal responsibility is asking yourself where you have failed you!  Not where you have failed the narcissist!  You didn't fail the narcissist!  He failed himself!  And that is not your business!  Your business is you!  How have you failed to listen to your own gut?  How have you failed to honor and respect yourself?  How have you failed to love yourself?  How have you failed to trust yourself?

I recently worked with a client who discovered that she was so conditioned to focusing her energies on making someone else happy that she failed to look at how she could make herself happy.  Years after the narcissist was gone she, like many of us, was still focused on the narcissist and what she failed to do to make him happy.  Once she took her focus back to how she failed to make herself happy something clicked in and she felt a great relief.  She finally saw her responsibility in the relationship.  It wasn't her responsibility to him.  It was her responsibility to herself.

And that is where so many of you who are trying to solve your own puzzles will find the answers.  Once you stop trying to solve the problem "out there" and bring your attention back to "in here" you will get a sense of power and control back in your life.  Because you have no control over the narcissist and his/her behavior.  You can only change yourself.  And that....is your responsibility!