I Didn’t Know

Gen X didn’t have the language for narcissism or nervous system regulation. We learned the hard way what it takes to feel safe enough to embody.

“I didn’t know” are the words that ring through me. An anthem of compassion, an acknowledgement of tenderness when it all feels too much.

Ten years after my divorce, after escaping what feels now like a cult, I am still horrified by the level of processing occurring.

Blame it on Mark Vicente’s WTF is on my Mind?! Podcast… cause I am more than a little obsessed with the stories of those who have left cults. How they were sucked in, what atrocities were survived, and how the hell someone so bright, mentally and energetically, could have ever been sucked in at all.

Listening to this epic 12 part series, my nervous system exhaled, finally being able to place and name what it was that I walked through.

In this new home, embarking on a new life, a new decade of 50, I’m really a bit irritated and dumbfounded that this is what needs to come through.

Baby, we didn’t fucking know…

Allow me to digest this for the sake of my own sanity. And really, no judgments placed on my ex (I mean yeah, ok, a little), but this is not to rant or trauma dump.

For years I was a very successful psychic and shaman. My greatest gifts offered in service to others in exchange for financial stability and those coveted stars of Yelp.

How could I be so attuned to others while so oblivious to myself?

I felt foolish, stupid, fraudulent even at times, in the juxtaposition of what I could do for others and not know for myself.

And here’s how I was duped by charming…

I was groomed by an older man with a masters in psychology. With seven years on me, I believed he understood things I didn’t. That he saw my flaws and could help me grow past them.

All the red flags I was too naive to see as anything but fate. Ugh.

And a generation (and those before us) who had no clue this level of destruction had a name, much less that it was something we could ever hope to recover from.

Dysregulation

Gen X certainly wasn’t raised with the language of nervous system regulation. Hell, it’s only become a part of our mainstream conversation in recent years. Generations of women and men who knew nothing of this dimension of embodiment that allows embodiment to be possible at all.

My nervous system was regulated to his as means of survival. I attuned to him, watching him breathe and trying to sync up with it. I called it love. His nervous system so dysregulated, his anger so explosive, I co-regulated to him, completely leaving myself and choosing the only route of safety available to me.

Any time I’d come back to myself, wonder what the fuck I was doing here, concede to the wails of my own intuition, I was destroyed. Apparently systematically.

Screamed at, cussed out, threatened to such a degree it would leave me trembling. Not just in fear (for the threats were never physical), but in disbelief at the actions of a man who seemed so spiritual, aware, and insightful.

I would have a moment of clarity and look to my husband, who I believed to be my best friend and greatest advocate, for support. I would be berated and broken down only to be put back together in a way that further served his desires. My cracks became monstrosities, festering wounds pummeled open and repaired through his contortions.

Of course my intuition, my internal navigation, and source of truth, was weaponized.

I believe this to be the greatest violence against a woman… to make her distrust herself, to sever her so sincerely from her own intuition that listening to it begins to feel like its own betrayal.

Yeah baby, I know physical violence is arguably worse, but at least in that there’s a line crossed. A fuck no, I won’t allow this, that its somehow easier to justify leaving. The invisible abuse remains invisible until it slowly destroys you completely.

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The Two Faces

I remember the first time his other face came out.

An early date at a bar when he offered to buy drinks for all the patrons. He demanded my credit card to do so. I was shocked, literal cognitive dissonance, because excuse me, what?!?

His eyes changed, his face changed, his voice dropped an octave as he publicly humiliated me to such a degree that I froze.

That cognitive dissonance, I couldn’t rectify it in my understanding of the world, in what and who I wanted him to be. But he loved me. He believed in me… where and how did this version of him also exist?

I was shaken but not yet wise enough to leave. His other face had emerged and permission was somehow granted to continue my dismantling.

There were so many of these little fractures I couldn’t make sense of. Out to dinner one night, he flirted openly with our waitress, telling her he should bend her over his knee and spank her. Right in front of me. I was too stunned to respond, grappling with what had just played out before me.

In hindsight, there were so many wtf moments. Death by a thousand cuts. I wish I had more self-worth, more wherewithal to walk away.

I didn’t see it because I didn’t know that what was happening was textbook, the slow breakdown by a narcissist. My mind racing to make sense of what was occurring…. why I wasn’t good enough for him to be kind, or strong enough to leave.

Others certainly saw him for what he was, and yet my devotion to him so carefully crafted, I would disconnect from anyone who dared point it out.

I didn’t know...

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Harvesting My Light

The first thing that brought us together was an ability to talk of the spiritual, to discourse on conspiracy and the unseen. Of course there were moments of quick banter and ridiculous laughter too. But no man before had met me here in the place where my heart beat fastest and I took it as a sign that we were meant to be.

On our one-year anniversary we went to a psychic fair in Chicago. The messages given to me that day did indeed shape and change the course of my life. My first Akashic reading opened a life of possibility I’d only dreamt of. And there he was looking at me in awe.

I believed it was safe to finally let this side of me come into being.

Publicly he would praise me. Extol my gifts and celebrate my access to the invisible worlds.

At home he would fat shame, berate, and belittle me. Tell me that I needed to wear lipstick to be with him. Tell me not to get a fat ass like my friends. Tell me that people would often wonder why he was even with me.

He so handsome and me so… not?!?

I didn’t know…

My light supported the family. It provided when he couldn’t. I devoted myself entirely to this path of service. At one event I did 65 readings in a night. All the praise, all the awe, and it took a toll. I was depleted but couldn’t stop. I relied on it not just as a source of income but for any scant self-esteem I could hold onto.

During our divorce he would claim that he made me, that I was nothing without him, trying to hijack my gifts in a way that suggested they would evaporate without him.

Me at the height of the dissociation… wearing lipstick while being told others wondered why he was even with me.

Disembodied

I couldn’t feel myself. To do so would incur more hatred. And really, at 24, who is grown enough to embody themselves fully?

I knew nothing of emotional regulation, attachment styles, or fuck, even narcissism to name what was happening.

I believed love was enough. That if I loved him more, provided more, helped him find another job, it would all work out.

Naive, yes. But the self-betrayal of how long I endured this is what’s still baffling.

That I could be what others needed me to be, guide them to profound healing and transformation, while I was privately living in a nightmare of a marriage… It was too much to reconcile.

The time he threw a pair of scissors at me, I told him we were done. We went to Six Flags and called it our last night together, even getting t-shirts airbrushed with “It’s been a good run.”

I called his mother crying, regulating not just to the abuser but to the toxic family system that protected him. I couldn’t share these stories with friends. They would tell me to get out or judge me if I stayed. She offered a safe place where he wouldn’t be vilified.

I didn’t know…

She begged me to stay, saying I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I let her need, her love, override my own, believing that I was just being weak. Convincing me that I didn’t understand her darling boy and should forgive him for being temporarily an idiot.

I stayed. Not just for another month, but for another decade.

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To be processing so much ten years out, that there are still jagged lil edges where it makes no sense, to see how often I gave myself up…

I tried every damn trauma response without knowing it was trauma, a response, a name or its purpose. Fighting would only escalate the threats in front of our daughter. Flight felt far too overwhelming as a single mom, an entrepreneur. I could leave my body easily in a freeze response, scrambling to make sense of what I was feeling.

Fawning wasn’t just the best response. It was the only method that seemed to soothe the beast within him, allowing me to temporarily dissociate from the confusion I lived in.

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Always My Fault

Of course it was my fault. But the thing was, I believed it for so long.

I am, in my very nature, attuned to growth and evolution. I believed that each flaw he pointed to was something that I needed to evolve. That by hearing him, trusting him, I would become a better version of myself.

He wasn’t my savior, but as a therapist and with seven years on me, I believed he saw things in me I couldn’t see myself and could help me grow past them.

The pattern with a narcissist is not only blaming you for everything but also that you can never get it right.

If I did it exactly as directed, because of course I didn’t even know how to load a dishwasher the right way, I was still wrong. The rules would change. I’d misunderstood him. “That wasn’t what was said” hurled back at me so often I would just stand there and blink in total confusion.

Sure, it was gaslighting. But again, honey, gaslighting wasn’t a thing in our everyday language in the early aughts. There was just confusion… years of being in a fog, skewed away from my ability to trust anything outside of him, especially myself.

I didn’t see the pattern. I simply believed myself to be wrong, weak, broken, and unlovable. “I couldn’t do anything right” wasn’t a tactic, it was my accepted state of self, doomed to repeat on loop until I finally got it right and fixed myself.

On the fateful day I told him I wanted a divorce, freakin’ 15 years into our relationship, he called our eight-year-old daughter into the room and declared:

“Your mother just destroyed our family.”

My fault, my destruction, and the delivery to a child so cruel it couldn’t possibly be taken accountability for by him.

I didn’t know… but I kinda finally did. Which is why I was ready to walk away.

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Performative

I’ve used this word pretty casually as of late. I could spot it readily in others, but only in this most recent round of recovery can I see how performative I was.

It was a survival mechanism. Impress them enough to justify my rate, wow them so I get the stars and referrals.

Healing sessions were inherently performative because I needed the outcome to be my own validation.

I’m a great psychic, a mighty healer, so nothing is diminished in what was given, but I didn’t see how much I needed it to serve me, too.

Spirituality and healing became the place I could know my value when I could no longer find it at home.

I would dread going home, not knowing which version of him would be waiting. I felt like a fraud. Outwardly, a powerful seer walking her path of purpose, while being systematically dismantled moment by moment at home.

If I went out with a friend… what was I doing for five hours? Were we masturbating each other? (Kid you not, this was apparently a thing.) And then came the demand for how I would make that time up to my family.

I believed fixing others to be my only value and worth. In my youth, it had been school, grades, and teachers. Yet here, professionally, it became clients’ feedback and five-star reviews.

And by God, did that create its own imposter syndrome.

I had a client on my table the other day, the first in 13 months. Last year I walked away from performing healings for others. Something in my work shifted away from what was familiar and what no longer quite fits.

So, this session felt different… I could notice the growth immediately. The old version of me wanted to deliver messages from the other side that astounded, healing that transformed, to give them something they’d never experienced before.

This time instead, I listened.

I let spirit and the body of the client guide me. I was still as needed rather than filling every space with rattles or a drum. The silence guided me into places I may have otherwise missed in a constant dance of healing and doing.

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Recovery

Apparently, it takes at least seven years to heal from narcissistic abuse.

Seven years.

As I sit here today writing this, I am so over the recovery. I have looked in every crevice and unearthed every wound, and still I’m having fresh perspectives brought in by the shared stories of cult members by Mark Vicente! WTF is on his and my mind indeed.

My daughter sat down next to me as I was writing. “Mom, It’s been 10 years. What is there still to process?”

Babe, I’m asking myself the same damn question.

I know healing happens in layers, that it’s a spiral not a sprint. But one of the many things I didn’t know was that a podcast would bring so much revelation, finally helping me place what I lived. That there’s a narcissist’s playbook so insidious I can’t fathom how so many of them follow it to a tee.

People have asked me years later why I tolerated it.

I didn’t have an honest answer then.

All I can say is… I didn’t know.

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Embodiment Wasn’t a Destination

I didn’t know I wasn’t embodied.

Until I was.

I didn’t know trauma was stored within my body, why a knock on the door one day sent me cowering onto the kitchen floor.

That my desire to hide wasn’t just my Cancerian nature but was a wound crafted and pecked at so often it became a way of life.

I don’t believe embodiment is a destination.
It’s a coming home to oneself when it’s finally safe enough to do so.

It’s never an end game, a one-and-done, you-never-backslide type of journey, for I’m sure more will be revealed. I didn’t know how unsafe I was until the absence of unsafe became just as frightening to wake up to each day, never knowing what trigger would shatter me into a hundred pieces.

Fuck, I have endless compassion for that version of me. I hold her now as she’s never been held before.

I bask in the wonder and trust the impulse of my own intuition without hesitation. I celebrate the peace I’ve cultivated in my life and in my relationships, astonished that this version of me gets to exist at all.

The starkness is pretty drastic, even if it was never apparent from the outside.

I share the wonders of embodiment not because it’s trendy or because its totally necessary but because it’s changed me deeply.

I didn’t know.

And perhaps you too, love, didn’t know.

So let us celebrate the versions of us that endured, that lived through the pain so wisdom would be gained. The scattered parts of us that get the glory of finally knowing.

“I didn’t know” isn’t a bypass, its my ballad of forgiveness. We only know what we know now and every choice from here is one gleaned from the trauma we survived.