i don't want to be his victim anymore

[sevenyears]

I discovered Les Carter from surviving narcissism last night. I had never thought that my uocpd xh had narcissistic tendencies - but, boy does he! He might not be on the high side of the spectrum, but he does exhibit a lot of their tendencies. I'm watching a video on when Ns play the victim card. In addition to thinking about it in relation to my xh, I'm thinking about how I might be reflecting some of these tendencies as well.

Our mediators tell me I need to stop being a victim (side note: we're in mediation for our custody dispute. The mediators see through XH and have told him he is mentally ill and hold him accountable for his manipulation and gaslighting.) We are still in this dysfunctional relation where I base my actions to protect myself from from him, rather than on what I want. I feel that co-parenting with him is frustrating at best, but not really possible. I'm trying to shift to parallel parenting. While I know logically that my daughter's behavior problems are due to her history (she is a foster/adopt daughter), I blame him a lot for for exacerbating these problems, and believe that I have to pick up the pieces whenever the children come back from him. A lot of my parenting of her is in response to him. I don't see yet how my parenting might be contributing to this. And, I don't know how to break the dysfunctional cycle that I'm still in with him. What part of the equation is missing? What works for you?

I guess this post is less about discovering the narc traits in my xh, but how to stop being his victim.

[GettingOOTF]

I used to have a victim outlook on life. I would get so upset when I read things like “stop being a victim” as I WAS a victim and I had valid reasons for being one. Trapped in a marriage with an abusive, manipulative man who refused to work, spent all our money, never cleaned up after himself and was diagnosed with BPD. My life was chaos. I couldn’t seem to get out of it. I had all these reasons for why when someone tried to give me advice or tell me to pull myself together.

What helped for me was seeing that I had choices. I felt like I didn’t have choices and was trapped because I didn’t like the choices I had. I didn’t want to leave the relationship because it was too hard, instead I wanted my ex to “get better” and start treating me well. I was very passive and gave all my power to others.

Eventually I was able to look honestly at myself and see that I was responsible for my situation. That if I wanted a different life I had to go and get it not wait for someone else to change.

There’s no easy answer to how to stop being someone’s victim or a victim in general. When I look back on that period of my life I see that I was always complaining about other people and expecting them to change, I never did anything myself to change the situation. All of this came from my upbringing, which is something I’m working on not being a victim of now.

A lot of breaking this mentality for me was confidence in myself and building my self esteem. I was able to do this with less contact with my ex and my family. When I was around them I slipped into old patterns.

The first step on my healing journey was no longer getting sucked into other people chaos. This was a big switch for me. Grey rock helped.

Hands down the best thing for me was reading and taking onboard Codependent No More. It focusses on alcoholic relationships  so I had to get past that, but it described perfectly my behavior. It was a difficult read but I highly recommend it.

It sounds like you are taking steps to break the victim pattern with thinking about parallel parenting. This is a huge step. You should acknowledge that.

It is so hard to see our selves and our behaviors the way others do. It’s next to impossible to see how we are as contributing to situations we don’t want to be in, but this has been the key to my life changing healing.

You are in a very emotional and stressful situation. Meditating with a PD is so crazy-making but you have the validation from the mediators aka a lot of insight into the situation. You are in the right path. Keep going, keep digging into the difficult parts of your life. For me it was ultimately all about me, never about my ex.