how to spot a monster

TW: Domestic violence, sexual assault, coercive control.

The beginning was only a montage. A shiny ponytail. Warmth. The mask. This was all it took. I did not believe in monsters.

The love bombing phase is like looking at a clear pond, and having a better version of yourself smile back at you. She kept me looking straight at this wonderful reflection, whilst her hands were covering land mines in soil. Almost immediately, like a fictional character, the anger was there. Surely, this was not real. She would just require more love. I would be the one to give it. Her house was putrid, with dishes in the drawers and bones in the bed. I would be the one to clean it. The walls had cracks and she would scream and break me, but surely, this was love.

At the three week mark she showed me where she wanted us to get married. I was so keen to attach myself to a sense of a future, one where she loved me. She would say she couldn’t leave her dogs, so I would leave my children to go to her. When she stayed at my house, she would scream, so I stayed at hers instead. If I didn’t, I would be bombarded with calls and texts and intrusions to my family home.

I was desperate to get to that shiny mask that everyone else saw.

She kept me awake for six weeks, and I tried to be young and casual and have no boundaries. When I crashed, she brought me presents to bring me out of my ‘depression’. Drugs and alcohol were the centre of her being, but I was not good enough. She told me her friends hated me before I met them. Before we went out, she would give me a list of my personality traits/discussion topics that were not to be ‘seen’ by her friends. Naturally, I was nervous and scattered, causing her friends to hate me more. I would need to love her harder. She would scream and crash through the house until her dogs would shake in panic. I betrayed my children by adhering to her every whim; she was already overdosing if calls weren’t answered. I had been loved before and I knew this wasn’t it, but everyone adored her! She told me so often! I chauffeured her around like a spoilt teenager, who’s controlling the house with her fury.

She ruined birthdays for sport, and six weeks into the relationship, on my 41st birthday, I’d had enough. She screamed in the guttural ways of control, and thinking once she had broken her phone and our relationship, I thought we were over. I spent the night with someone who cared for me.

It was not over.

I did not understand the narcissist’s patterns of love bombing, future faking, devaluing and discarding. I thought she must care for me, to pursue me so doggedly. I did not understand that the narcissist only ever wants someone who will ignore all red flags.

The six weeks became six months. The overdoses and threats of suicide became more common. She drove drunk and drug affected most days. She used intermittent reinforcement in conjunction with chronic gaslighting, manipulation and terrorising behaviour. She actively hated me. She would scream and bang and howl. Sex was devoid of intimacy and cloaked in humiliation. She tried to threaten me physically, but the only boundary I ever enforced was to ensure she didn’t lay a hand on me. Her former partners weren’t able to do this. I never slept.

Right before Christmas I was so scattered and broken. My family had decided that I was hopeless, pursuing addicts and putting their needs before the needs of my children. And they were right. I was spiralling, and not cognisant of how narcissists deliberately keep their victims awake and utterly confused. I also didn’t understand that the intensity of devaluation is such a calculated process. You are trauma bonded. You are told that you mean nothing, but you are not free to leave. You are constantly worried that if you do leave, one of their overdoses will kill them. You are also desperate for their approval. I was told repeatedly that the problem was me.

I told her that I had slept with someone else six months prior, thinking we were over. Narcissists are rarely happy, I had never seen her look so Zen. She was calm. It was the Get out of Jail Free card that she’d been unsuccessfully trying to secure.

It continued.

Living with a covert narcissist with such an endearing facade outside the house, and who would spend most of her time inside the house gaslighting me, led me to often question if I was going mad. Fortunately, an Instagram post that her ex had written, in which she called my partner a sexually coercive, covert narcissist, who is an emotionally and physically abusive drug/alcohol/gambling addict, was a turning point in my understanding of reality. I defiantly showed my partner this post, and angrily, she said it was all true. She then contacted the ex to take it down. (She refused).

The deceit continued. She wanted to follow my car home – with my child in the car – after she’d been drinking and taken Xanax. I refused. She was unconscious for three days. Her parents who had enabled her reputation, didn’t call an ambulance.

I proposed marriage a month later.

She’d kick me out in the night if I didn’t watch TV with her. She’d undermine everything about me. She wouldn’t let us leave the house in the morning when she was asleep, in case she woke up ‘alone’. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere because she had ‘anxiety’. She wouldn’t let me see my older daughter without her, in case I said something honest. We would creep out the door in the morning to work and kindergarten – when she was supposed to be doing the kindergarten run – so fearful of waking the bear. I did everything in the house. I was her unappreciated mother. She would abuse me relentlessly, and when I would go away to escape it, she’d then message and call relentlessly, saying that I would ‘end up alone’. She’d berate me for not saving enough money – I paid for everything – whilst she was in active addiction. She was the Mayor of the town with her Facebook posts and raising money for mental health. At home, we walked on eggshells so much, we were basically en pointe.

Eventually I left, ostensibly for good. So full of self-loathing, I feared what would happen if I didn’t continue to meet her needs. I shopped for her and took her parcels. I brought her food and cleaned her house. Tended to her in her ‘depression’.

Six months after I left, she was starting to re-write the story, and I couldn’t bear it. I went back.

Although I was much more aware of her behaviours, I still didn’t completely understand what she was doing. I had known bastards, but I couldn’t fathom that the person I did everything for, and was so devoted to, would actually hate me. I loved her so much, and would offer the public a humourous narrative of the ‘begrudging housewife with the fun-time dapper dyke’ partner. I upheld her narratives, because I wanted her to treat me like she treated her ‘supporters’. But narcissists are a black vortex, and use others to live; I only existed as fuel for her. I had no significance. I didn’t realise that everyone in her orbit was only there to provide ‘supply’.

She’d often told me that she didn’t have friends, just ‘drinking buddies’, I assumed that this was an alcoholic thing. I had no idea that they were a necessary part of her MO, torture women – have them leave broken and silent – create a sob story – resume life with her drinking buddies as a vulnerable figure.

Repeat.

Three years after first seeing the mask, I told her that she was a sociopath, who lies every time she opens her mouth. I was of no further use to her. She left her ‘depressive’ cave with a sob story, and a plan to get me out of town. This part, the being there, with the 20 missed calls and six texts and four voice messages both pleading for me to come over, yet saying I was hated by everyone, flooded me with cortisol. I was in constant fight or flight, and had been for years. My hair fell out.

She was toying with her current woman. She was out and about, rewriting the script. I was trying to work and survive. The discard was the hardest time I had experienced.

She’d always told me that she was only nasty to me, because I’d ‘cheated’ on her. When I’d point out that that obviously wasn’t true, as she was abusing me prior to that, and as one of her ex’s had publicly shamed her, she would talk of her enduring devotion to an even earlier girlfriend. How she was never abusive to that particular girlfriend, the one that got away.

I contacted that glorious ex-girlfriend. She told me that my partner had routinely abused her, and she had been contacted by several of my partner’s girlfriends, all with the same story. She was not the one who got away. She was barely 18 when she saw the mask, and it took a long time to heal from the abuse that she suffered in the relationship. She said that being ‘The one who got away’ was merely another strategy for my partner to belittle her women. To make them doubt themselves. She was now married and happy.

I sought comfort from people who understood. The ‘other women’, who had caused my partner ‘to not smile for a year’. We all had the same story, not only the horrific abuse, but also the most sinister of stories. When we had not answered our phones, we had all been told that she had been sexually assaulted. Mine occurred at 2am. I was at home asleep. I woke up to several missed calls and an initially despondent voice message. When she eventually called me once she’d roused herself from her hangover, she told me that she had really wanted to talk, because she had been assaulted. She told me a very convoluted and distressing story, and I raced right over. It wasn’t long before her initial sadness was overtaken by anger that I did not answer my phone. I was guilt-stricken. Admonished. Determined to always be available to her.

With the others, this story occurred because one girlfriend was in an exam, and another because she wasn’t given a lift.

During the discard, she would sometimes still call, during her hangovers, or when her needs weren’t being met. Asking me to come over, because she was ‘down and out’. The sexual assault story had deeply disturbed me. I’ve been sexually assaulted. There is a fucking line people do not cross. One morning she was continually calling, and I immediately asked, ‘when this happened, did you lie? When this happened, did you lie? When this happened, did you lie?’

She admitted it.

A current blew through me. I was in love with Keyser Soze. There was nothing this monster wouldn’t do.

Sadly, I thought her brief foray into honesty, would be the start of what I was promised. I still loved her. But I hadn’t understood that narcissists will sometimes tell the truth, and it will still mean nothing.

Although I could intellectually express what narcissism was, and I was staying in my parent’s house because of the smear campaign that was occurring, and I was flooded with cortisol due to living in fight or flight states,

I still couldn’t fully release her. I was desperate to be with the woman she presented to the public.

She released me.

She was sleeping with someone else, so she ensured that her ‘drinking buddies’ were filled with enough false stories and indignation on her behalf, that they would berate me in public. They made my professional life difficult and my social life non-existent.

We left town.

On one of my trips to the new place, with the Ute loaded up, I drove past her. I assumed that would be it. I hadn’t heard from her in a while, she’d gotten a new thing to toy with.

Two days later there was a voice message from an unknown number. It was her, very distressed. I called back. She didn’t respond. I worried through the night. The next day I had to go back to my old town. I walked into the hotel, and there she was, propped up at the bar, flirting with her latest victim. The distress was yet another con. There is nothing real in a narc who’s masking. Just wait until it falls…

After two months of silence, she texted. I became utterly dysregulated. She had the godawful swagger of a country man. She was boasting of sleeping with two women and being so drunk she fell off her stool. For two weeks I couldn’t understand it. I was spiralling, thinking I loved her. Knowing I knew who she was. It made no sense. She asked me repeatedly to go away with her for a weekend, because all her friends were ‘dumb’. She tried to accuse me of harassing her, as though four unreturned texts was the same as 34 missed calls, voice recordings and texts. She told her friends she had a panic attack when I was in the area over the holidays. After, she had contacted me. Lies upon lies upon lies.

After two weeks of dysregulation, in which I’d veered between wanting her attention and despising her continued torture of women – we had it out. Which is pointless. The first rule of dealing with a narc is to give them no supply. Two weeks after she’d contacted me for a soft landing – and instead we’d experienced the roller coaster one last time - she called, upset, asking if she was a good person. Narcissists gaslight themselves before anyone else. They have to believe they are good. I softened for the last time, and offered to mother her.

In the fallout from the fallout, I learned some important lessons:

1. They have nothing. The reflection in the pond was mine. She was performing in a way she thought I’d like. Just as she becomes a racist country man when she’s around racist country men. Just as she becomes someone with direction, when speaking to people with clout.
2. These people destroy lives intentionally and without remorse. They are incapable of caring. There is no moment where they change. In our last conversation she suggested that the reason we are over, is that I stopped smiling at her. This is the level of denial that they live in.
3. When you are utterly broken, there’s always the feeling of the fight that kept you safe. ‘Acts of resistance’ are what DV counsellors call it. When I lived with her, I eventually started to angrily respond to her abuse - ‘you may not love me, but I love me’. And I meant it. When the discard happened, I would tell myself that I wasn’t going to be beaten by a fraud. Not a boring, soulless, lying fraud.
4. You can’t change people’s minds. It hurts, but you can’t. People see what they want, and when you’re being presented with a genial mask, of course you’d believe it. The smear campaign was the best thing she ever did for me and my daughter. We got out. We needed to get out.
5. I never loved her. You cannot love someone who never existed.
6. Monsters are real. I believe this now.