I had a very intriguing session yesterday with my therapist. While discussing my digestion of the recent discovery of my ex-husband being a narcissistic sociopath, we decided to dive deeper into my relationships with “me focused” people.

This deep dive project made me tell my therapist about some memories that arose when a lot of different events, including the past 4 years of my life with my ex-husband started to put a lot of scattered puzzle pieces of my life together. For example, one key puzzle piece was that my dad was abusive and based on the things my mom has told me about things he did to her while married he is definitely a narcissist and my granddad was more than likely a narcissistic sociopath based on the family stories I’ve heard about him; which are 10 times worse than what my dad was doing to my mom. So there’s definitely a generational curse going on on my dad side with this mental disease. One of the memories that arose was one of my granddad when I was in high school around the time when he was falling ill with lung cancer. My dad was in town and left me and my sister at my granddad’s for some quality time. I was at his apartment trying to heat up some food in his microwave, but he had an older microwave and I didn’t know how to work it. I had to ask him more than once how to use it because he was being short with his answers like he was annoyed with me. Maybe, this was my third time asking him how to set the minutes and before I could finish getting my ask out he pushed me hard out of the way, started yelling at me and calling me names. My therapist asked me do I remember what I did and I replied that during that time in my life whenever anyone would yell at me it would remind me of hearing my parents arguing and I would freeze and I would block everything out. So in that moment I froze, blocked him out and walked away.

Then I continued to tell my therapist that prior to my family moving to another state I went to stay with my granddad for a little bit when I was 4 while my mom was getting everything in place with her new job and the house. I don’t remember staying with him, but this is what I was told and based on one story my mom would tell. When she went to go get me from him after this extended stay, she passed this dirty little girl riding on a big wheel bike and she thinks “ahh she’s a really cute girl somebody should wash her up, do her hair and be out here watching her.” When she gets to my granddad’s apartment she asks for me and he replies, she’s outside riding her bike you probably passed her. My mom then immediately turns from him, goes and picks up that cute, dirty little girl she passed not knowing it was me and leaves without grabbing any of my things. I then relay to my therapist that I am concerned, now knowing what my granddad may have been, what I may have been exposed to while living with him during that period of time. My therapist tells me if the body has no response to the thought of him then maybe, just maybe I don’t have anything to worry about but as these memories arise in due time will tell.

So I’m assuming to pull my focus from feeling helpless in this situation, my therapist asked me to think of a friend that I had or have that wasn’t “me focused” and to be honest I had to really search through my memories to find a person that wasn’t. Majority of all the people in my life that I befriended or more so befriended me were
“me focused”. A lot of friends that had befriended me was for their sole purpose only. For example, I’m very smart and in high school and college a lot of people would befriend me to help them with their assignments or get notes for class or to try to cheat off of. Once they realized that I wasn’t going to allow them to cheat off of me or I was going to make them put in work when we had group assignments those people would eventually fall to the waste side. But a course the narcissists, the tricksters, the manipulators knew just how to pull on the heart strings or spin their web to make me believe they were really my friend while they used me.

After thinking for a minute or two, I finally thought of a person that wasn’t anything like any of these “me focused” friends. My therapist then asked me to list what was different about this person and the main things that came to mind was this person was mellow, focused on their children and wasn’t visually self-conscious about their image. Then my therapist stated “so you said this person was mellow like their vibrations were low, mellow toned”, then asked me how did this make me feel? I replied it made me feel uncomfortable and like in typical therapist fashion she asked “why” and I replied, because I’m not used to mellow, I’m use to people who are high wired, high vibration and at the same time we both say “chaotic”. Then another puzzle piece fell into place, maybe I’m gravitating towards people who are “me focused”, high vibratory because that’s familiar. I grew up in a household that was “me focused” and chaotic. My entire life has been nothing but chaos, whenever there is a moment of peace or mellowness I feel uncomfortable and become anxious. That’s why I’ve always been a busy body, constantly active which leads to being burnt out and stressed out on the regular.  But also kept me from having to think or wallow in the pain that was my life.

I do want to know what’s “wrong”with me and what I need to do to fix the deep dark parts of me to make myself whole, especially after going through a traumatic marriage and separation. At first when I learned that I’m partly to blame for some of these hardwired poor decisions it saddened me and made me think that I’m way more screwed up than I originally thought. No wonder I attract crap in my life. But after a day of processing, I became inspired and felt better knowing this information.

So Mirror, Mirror on the Wall …. no I’m not to blame for what is attracted to me and no I’m not to blame for what I’m attracted to, but I am responsible for my attractions after I’m made aware to these factors that have made me hardwired to this dysfunction. Time to choose wisely. Time to change the woman in the mirror!