Abuse is abuse by whatever name its called

You may not ever know for sure whether your abuser is a narcissist but thats not important! 

The one big lesson I had to learn the hard way by being in an abusive relationship with a man who turned out to be narcissistic was that there is no excuse for abuse, its not your problem and not your responsibility to fix his issues and certainly not for you to be used for him to take it out on! 

By all means you can support him if he decides to seek help but he has to do it to help himself and if he doesn't want to get help when knowing that he could lose you, he is certainly not likely to seek help while he knows that you will tolerate it and clearly doesn't care enough about what he is putting you through if he is continuing to behave that way towards you and hasnt tried to get help to stop! Therefore this may well mean he is a narcissist but it doesn't matter what label can be assigned to him as it doesn't make it right nor is it going to give him the excuse to abuse you or be a reason why you have to accept it!

Your life and wellbeing should not have to suffer to accommodate the issues of another person that you are not the cause of!

I believed my ex narcissist boyfriend was damaged by his past and that he would get better in time when the trust grew but he got worse. I then thought that he was suffering from mental illness and most likely schizophrenic so I excused his abusive behaviour and believed it wasn't his fault because he was ill and tried to get him help but he wasnt interested when it came down to it but would promise to do whatever it took for me to not abandon him when I had had enough but he was just keeping me sweet! 

When we separated for a while, in that time he was the perfect person and showed no signs of his abusive behaviour but as soon as I got back with him, it would start all over again…

 I tried everything I could to help him and as a result he destroyed my life by gambling away my life savings, smashing up my home and my personal belongings as well as beating me up and making me feel exhausted, fearful and full of anxiety, not to mention obligated to stand by him as he made me feel guilty that everyone else in his life had abandoned him!

I wrote about my experience so I hope others who are trying to work out whether their abuser is narcissistic or not, will read it and it may give the answers that you need to decide whether you are being subjected to narcissistic abuse or just abuse but above all will realise that you don't have to suffer from abuse of any kind!

I could understand why he was abusive but it didn't make it ok

When I was with my narcissist boyfriend and he had beaten me as well as mentally abused me to the point of me feeling that I was going crazy, I had so much anger inside me that I wanted to kill him, even contemplating for a split second about throwing an electrical device into the bath whilst he was in it as well as having thoughts of stabbing him if he hit me again which I couldn't actually go through with when it came down to it but I did on one occasion fight back and I did so as I believed he was going to kill me and it was either going to be him or me. However I did question after these events whether I was any better than him for allowing myself to be pushed enough to lose control and becoming quite capable of acting exactly how he was, especially when I was aware that narcissists are often the way they are due to some sort of abuse that had occurred in their childhood! My abuse was happening to me as an adult and yet still I had been pushed to the point where I too was quite capable of inflicting the type of revenge against him or even anyone who caused me to feel threatened at that time that he was inflicting on me even though I was not the person who hurt him and I was well aware that at that time in a moment of madness I too was more than capable of losing it with anyone who happened to get in my way or piss me off at that time or just cross my path and they would have most definitely beared the brunt of my aggression that would not have been their fault either. He had been damaged as a child and was angry and now saw danger everywhere because of it and therefore he was, in a way, protecting himself and only acting that way because of his childhood injuries that clearly had destroyed his life and now I was more than capable of acting that way too after suffering the abuse from him. In a strange way I could actually understand why he was like he was!

What I learned from being in an abusive relationship

I have been out of the relationship with my ex narcissist boyfriend for nearly a year now and I still have no desire to have a relationship with anyone at the moment. What I learned from being with my ex narcissist boyfriend was that I was stronger than I realised and that there is nothing that life can throw at me now that I don't feel like I could survive. I have been through hell and I have lost everything because of it and I was shown very little support from my family and friends during the abusive relationship and after I got myself out of it. I therefore have realised that the only person I can ever count on is me and knowing this has made me feel empowered and that I am enough. I also have learned that I will always put myself and my needs first now and will think twice about helping others in the future as when the time that I needed help came after I had done so much for others, there was noone there for me!

The extremes of being in an abusive relationship

My ex narcissist boyfriend was able to make me feel like the most important person in the world and was loving attentive and caring as well as romantic.

During these times, I felt blessed and I was totally in love with him and would have been happy to spend my life with him. When we spoke about marriage and having a family together I had no reservations whatsoever about this being part of our future together. Valeri would refer to me as his wife and would introduce me as his wife on meeting new people.

Valeri had the ability to make me feel like the star of my very own romantic movie and like the luckiest girl on the planet. He would arrange candlelight picnics on the beach in summer where we would swim and lay down under the stars. He would take me to remote beautiful places to watch the sun rise or set. He would come to my home and leave love notes or a flower on my pillow in the night when I was sleeping or built a fire so that I would wake up in the warm and there was so many other things that he did that showed thought and effort that made me feel loved and valued as well as safe and secure with him in a way that I had never felt before....

However Valeri was also able to make me feel like the person he hated most in the world and would insult me, criticise me, accuse me of the most heinous crimes as well as mentally and physically abuse me and I feared him more than I had ever feared anyone and at times I hated him with all my heart for what he would do to me and for how bad, worthless, disrespected and unloved he could make me feel.

The problem was that he wasnt always horrible and after an episode of inflicting the worst possible pain on me, he would go back to being the most amazing man in the world and I would forgive and forget what he had put me through until the next time it happened.

In the end however I was finding it harder and harder to forgive him and still felt resentful towards him even during his perfect boyfriend times but it got to the point that I was unable to express to him how I really felt about the abuse he had made me suffer with after it was over and had to go along with his romantic guestures and play the part of the loving girlfriend when in reality I was struggling to get past the last bout of abuse he had dealt me on top of all the other occasions and especially those times when he had beaten me up which I was constantly afraid he would do again if it came down to it so therefore now had to just be submissive when he started on me and just take it rather than defend myself and run the risk of making him more angry and more likely to end up with him hitting me.  

When I tried to explain this to him in his calmer moods, he would just brush it under the carpet and refused to discuss it by saying that he would never hit me again and wanted me to just let it go so if I carried on trying to make my true feelings known or acted in any way other than respond to him being the loving boyfriend by being the loving girlfriend, this would just end up triggering his rage again so I learned the hard way that it was safer for me to say nothing and just pretend I was over it and didn't hold a grudge against him when it was over and he was back to being nice which was not easy as not only did I feel abused in the bad times, I was now feeling abused in the good times by having to go along with being in love and appreciate the romantic things he did when I resented him for tarnishing them all now but I was also feeling resentment that I was unable to express my true feelings and emotions about how he was destroying the way I felt about him in the good times due to his abusive behaviour in the bad times.

I just had to be the way he wanted me to be which I had to pretend to be on some occasions especially towards the end.  

Eventually I fled the relationship with just the clothes on my back when I knew another episode of violence was coming and I just didn't have it in me to endure it again and have to then go through the romance period again especially when I felt more and more in fear of what he was capable of doing during the abusive episode as I was certain that he would no doubt end up killing me in the end.

I was not sure if it would happen this next time that was almost certainly coming and he was already building up to and past the point of no return so I knew it would and could happen at any moment now and I was on edge and anxious just waiting for the fallout.

I knew that I had to leave before he got the chance to do it again which I was sure would have been that night if I hadn't have left when I did. 

Whether or not it would have been that time or the next that he may have killed me was not a risk I was prepared to take!

Domestic violence in Bulgaria

My time in Bulgaria  where for over a year I was a victim of domestic abuse and violence at the hands of a Bulgarian man, I witnessed first hand the fear and helplessness of knowing there was nowhere to go and noone to turn to for help, not even the police!

Instead they saw me as the problem for constantly requesting them to do something about an issue that was nothing more than day to day life in their eyes, branding me a trouble maker trying to make a scandal out of nothing and presuming I was not normal and taunting me.  Subsequently warning me from calling them again with implied threats.

This following article sadly illustrates the domestic abuse and violence issues and the challenges in Bulgaria to change a mindset of an entire culture where not only does this occur frequently, most perpetrators and victims (or the police) are not even aware that its abuse or wrong and an infringement of their basic rights as a human being.

July 28, 2018
Yoan Stanev

Human rights groups in Bulgaria have blasted a decision by the country’s Constitutional Court declaring an international convention protecting women and children from domestic violence unconstitutional.

Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court ruled on July 27 that the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence and abuse Against Women and children Domestic Violence, better known as the Istanbul Convention, contradicts the country’s constitution and thus will not be ratified.

My story is in the pages

Valeri and I 

The pages of my blogsite were  written in order of the events that occurred so I recommend that to make sense of it all you need to
read them in chronological order.

Although they provide an honest, accurate and detailed portrayal about many events that occurred during my time in Bulgaria as I recall them, sadly there were far too many events to possibly include them all and so I have written about the times that my mind brought to the forefront of my memory when I felt the need to write about it to process and heal from it all in a therapeutic way which writing has always helped me to do.

I must confess that I have written about it primarily for me and not with the reader in mind so my apologies if you find some parts a little tedious.

By doing it this way, without having to consider whether it was going to be of interest to others, I was able to write about it in a brutally honest and raw way, using the exact words and events  that were coming into my mind as I wrote.

This has helped me to make sense of it all and to express my true feelings and emotions freely which was something that at the time I was unable to do for fear of the repercussions of my ex narcissist boyfriend..

I hope that if you read my story it will however be of interest to you and my only desire is for you to understand a little more about narcissistic abuse!

I can only hope that if you ever find yourself in my situation then unlike me, you will recognize the traits of a narcissist before having to suffer from the abuse that I had to endure..

Should you have any questions or want more info or clarification then please get in touch.
Thank you

Narcissistic Abuse

My abuser 

It was not until I started to write this blog that I realised that I had been in a relationship with a narcissist and was a victim of narcissistic abuse!

Before my relationship with this man, I had an incorrect understanding of Narcissistic Behaviour;

There are a lot of misconceptions about what narcissistic behaviour actually is and before my experience, I thought
that  narcissism meant nothing more than a person being considerably more selfish and self centred than most, with an over cocky  and over inflated ego that boasted about themselves and perceived themselves as superior having little regard for others. I have added below a link for a more accurate description of narcissism and the traits of a narcissist..
https://fairytaleshadows.com/defining-narcissistic-abuse-pt-1-the-universe-of-false-selves-and-the-construction-of-reality/


https://pin.it/wfw5e4u542x5qe I have made it my mission to learn alot from being abused by a narcissist and about narcissism and have now formed my own opinion of why narcissists do what they do and what drives this behaviour in them. In the main most narcissist behaviour stems from trauma of childhood and not having their needs met and that has left them feeling starved of love and attention with a broken sense of self worth and self loathing that they cannot face so they cut off emotionally and create a false identity for the purpose of manipulation and to control others to gain advantage over them and getting what they want and perceive being entitled to.

My opinion is that narcissists live in the past and relive daily all the wrong doings that they perceive have been done to them through no fault of their own. This constant recall causes constant anger and turmoil in them and the raw emotion is what triggers the uncontrollable rage that they then inflict on the person that they are now with and start to blame for all these wrong doings done by others as well as perceive you by convincing themselves by their deluded thinking as being the same as all those others and like all the others, you are out to destroy their lives, deceive them, cheat on them and take pleasure in seeing them hurting whilst wanting them to fail. Despite in the early days them telling you about the dreadful way others have treated them and you feeling sorry for their pain and intend to do everything you can to show them that they are loveable and were unlucky to suffer such pain inflicted by others and that you will never hurt them and in time will gain their trust and change their ugly view of the world… but their view stays the same and now incorporates you in it as another person who has wronged them without reason and this is after you have done your very best and more than necessary to reassure them and love them.

You start to question if you are now seen as badly as all the others after doing nothing but show kindness, empathy and support, whether these others have been so bad or has he become so damaged that he sees malice and devious behaviour that is not there. Somewhere along the line, the pain he was caused has been so intense that his fear response has been triggered so far off the scale that its now stuck in the most intense mode that perceives danger in everything and everyone which is simply not there so his survival instincts are on red alert and he has to attack and desensitize to protect himself from this perceived danger… the result being he causes intense hurt and pain to others who in turn eventually abandon him or take revenge or have nothing left to give him and have withdrawn from him emotionally.  All of which are seen as acts that are to wrong him so he was right to be fearful and hurt you as you did what he expected in the end, totally unaware that his behaviour caused it as in his mind, he was just protecting himself from danger. This all reinforces his fear that everyone is the enemy and out to get him thus he needs to protect himself and inflict the pain on them and wound them enough to stop them having the power and strength to destroy him or leave him…

When I came across this checklist, I was utterly shocked to find that the man I was with had shown
pretty much every 101 of the signs of abuse that he had inflicted on me.

https://fairytaleshadows.com/101-warning-signs-of-abuse-by-a-narcissist/

https://pin.it/wfw5e4u542x5qe