“When did you realise he didn’t love you ?”

Well, ….

Not – when he left me stranded at a party with strangers in the middle of nowhere and drove MY CAR home at 2am because I’d “disrespected him”. We’d been dating for less than a month.

Not – when he would encourage me to get drunk then sexually abused me sadistically and ignored my pleas that he was hurting me and to please stop.

Not – when he ‘allowed’ me to have one friend and my parents at our wedding, because I’d married another guy first and didn’t “deserve” another wedding.

Not – when he took me to his mother’s holiday apartment in the hills for our ‘honeymoon’ and wanted to watch DVD’s and porn all week while I cooked every night.

Not – when he would abuse me for having had a relationship before him even though he’d had multiple sexual partners and a history of using prostitutes.

Not – when I found him looking at porn magazines in a shop when I was pregnant with our first baby.

Not – when I had just given birth by caesarean and he stayed with our baby for over an hour while I was in recovery and he never came to check on me or enquire if I was okay.

Not – when our baby was one month old and he screamed at me with a contorted face like the devil that I was “shocking” and had to “be a better mother” because I‘d run out of bottles after staying up all night supplementing as my milk supply was dropping (from stress!) while he slept.

Not – when he pressured me for sex that I didn’t want after my caesarean and he wanted to watch pornography as our baby slept in the room with us.

Not – when I planned on killing myself when our baby was six months old because I was so desperately lost and miserable. I’m ashamed to admit I drove my car at an insane speed that night as she lay sleeping in her cot, thinking of how I could kill myself in one hit. Thankfully I drove to an area that reminded me of my ex and it was the memory of his love that stopped me that night.

Not – when I woke him in the middle of the night, crippled with abdominal pain and he asked me “can you drive yourself to hospital?”. I called an ambulance – and he went back to sleep.

Not – when he sat in the passenger seat in another foul mood over nothing and let me pump petrol when I was eight months pregnant with our second child as men glared at him.

Not – when I fractured my patella from a fall a few days later (no painkillers as I was pregnant) and he told me he was tired and pissed off because I had kept him awake all night by “moaning” in my sleep and was “carrying on about nothing”.

Not – when later that day I asked him to take me to emergency and he dumped me at the entrance, limping and heavily pregnant. He then drove off.

Not – when he forced me to pack up an entire house and move, with a fractured patella, two days before my caesarean.

Not – later that night, when he asked my father “is the baby ok?” but didn’t ask after me as I lay at the bottom of a staircase waiting for an ambulance to arrive when I had broken the patella in two whilst carrying moving boxes.

Not – when he abused me for not organising a 40th birthday party for him while I was in hospital having a caesarean and getting my knee wired (he barely acknowledged my birthday in fourteen years).

Not – when he moved into a spare bedroom and started encouraging our daughter to sleep with him for the next three years until I left him.

Not – when I caught him watching teenage girls in porn on our daughter’s laptop.

Not – when made fun of me to our children and would walk ahead of me with them and leave me trailing behind.

Not – when I cried about the way he treated me and he would tell me to “get over” myself and that I “wasn’t special”.

Not – when he would get drunk and corner me in the laundry or on the stairs, jabbing his fat fingers near my eyes telling me I was “lousy wife and a shocking mother” because the house was messy or he saw I hadn’t made the beds that day.

Not – when he told me “I married you because I thought I was getting a wife”.

Not – when he refused me small pleasures like restaurants but would send me a photo of himself grinning and eating expensive seafood at a restaurant with his mother as I looked after our children interstate.

Not – the countless times he roared laughing at my misfortunes.

Not – when he would check our bank account multiple times a day and abuse me over a twenty dollar purchase and scream that I was a “spender” even though I earned the same money as him.

Not – when he told me that I was either “sick, miserable or depressed” and that he was convinced I would “end up in a mental facility at some stage in my life”.

Not – when he laughed at my fear about a male co-worker who was stalking me.

Not – when he barely spoke to me or looked at me for eight months until I cracked and asked him for a separation after fourteen years of abject, desolate misery.

No.

I read this as I write it and I simply can’t believe it happened to me – strong, fiery me who had the world at my feet before the lights went out at thirty.

Absurdly, through all of those years I never realised he didn’t love me. It defies logic but anybody who has lived or understands domestic or narcissistic abuse understands this.

You see, I was raised with harsh criticism from a domineering father. My mother’s role was to silently support, wait for tantrums to pass, minimise bad behaviour and placate. I looked up to strong, hyper critical and emotionally withholding men. I didn’t believe I deserved praise and I associated harsh treatment with love and protection. The tougher I was treated, the more I could withstand – and the closer I was to earning my badge of worthiness.

It wasn’t the hundreds of moments and words that dripped acid on the fragile fabric of my self worth, nor was it the moments of soul destroying humiliation in front of strangers and my children that showed me he didn’t care for me. I kept fighting the tide and kept swimming against it without a clue of where it was heading. I always believed everything would be okay some day, even as I lay in bed alone and cried every night as I fantasized about suicide as a way out of the misery of my life with this man.

The moment I learned my husband and father of my children didn’t care about me was the moment I Googled these words …

“Jekyll Hyde husband, temper snaps, plays the victim, sarcastic, mean with money”

I expected to get irrelevant results that didn’t explain anything. After all, nothing had made sense for years and my friends and family simply labelled him a “stress head”, “money obsessed” and an “asshole” to try and make light of my woes with him if I ever hinted at the reality of my life. Nobody had ever called him an abuser. I thought abuse was physical. I knew the story of Narcissus but had never heard of NPD.

I fully expected I would close the laptop without being any closer to getting an answer to my confusion.

To my astonishment, Google threw back thousands of search results for something called ‘NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER’.

Back in 2013, I had never heard of it. Not many of us had.

I clicked on a website that gave the top twenty traits of a person with a personality disorder. My husband had eighteen of the twenty listed behavioural patterns.

This was the single moment when I realised that I was in an abusive marriage with a man that had a personality disorder.

I realised in this moment that this non-person was incapable of love – for himself, his parents, me … his own children.

I had spent fourteen years falling prey to a thing they were calling ‘gaslighting’ and I had projected love and meaning onto a Teflon canvas called marriage. What I had thought was a bizarre personality was just common behaviour of a disordered individual.

I realised that night, that I had been living a life made of sand with a fucked up stranger, who lay sleeping in the next room to me and our kids.

I also realised I could not fix him and I would not spend the rest of my life trying to fill his bottomless pit of ingratitude and emptiness.

From the next morning I never saw him in the same way and instead only saw fakery and glibness. None of it was real and he may as well have been a plastic droid with dead eyes and a pretend smile.

How had I not seen it ? My own father had earned me half way through the marriage that he thought my husband was a pathological liar and was stealing money from the marriage (and yes, turns out he was) but I just didn’t believe it. They talk about the fog – man was I in the fog.

To this day I don’t quite know how he broke me down so well – but I do know that raising young children takes our whole focus and as a mother I was at my most vulnerable.

The life and memories ‘we’ had built had no more meaning or value to him than if none of it had ever occurred.

The meaning of my life disappeared from under me that night as though the earth had swallowed me and the bed I was in. I spent the next twelve months gasping for air, trying to claw my way back up to earth through a year of hell.

Divorce against a malignant narcissist will expose you to what scorched earth, ruthless evil really is. Nothing can prepare you for their ability to lie, blackmail and deceive even at their own demise to punish you.

If you tell yourself ‘they’d never hurt the children’ – think again. You are so fucking wrong if you believe that.

A malignant narcissist will sacrifice their child’s wellbeing without giving it a second thought and considers it justifiable collateral damage that can be re-written and denied.

They leave not a shred of anything sacred between you and are willing to make children suffer in their obsession with winning.

I thought of the first time I saw him twenty two years earlier as he spied on me around the corner of an elevator lobby. I had turned to my boss and said “there’s a creepy guy watching me”. I thought of the diary entry I made when I said “the creepy blonde guy in the building is still stalking me”. That was when my intuition hadn’t been eroded and I had seen him for what he was.

The guy who worked out my name through the janitor I used to chat to, and pretended to be friends with them to strike up a conversation with me. The guy who brought his grandma’s apple pie to me at my shop to show me what a loving grandson he was. The guy who showed pictures of his nieces because he was a doting uncle.

The same guy who was hanging out at strip bars and using prostitutes but forgot to share that fractured side of his fabricated character to me.

He had them spent seven years gaining my trust through a long friendship and convincing me he was loyal and would treat me like a queen if only I would give him a chance. But that’s another story.

Not only did I not know who he was – he did not know who he was.

Years of him quoting lines from movies and famous people, his infantile humour and his shallow personality that always seemed insincere all made sense on that fateful Google night.

I remembered him telling me of his admiration of Hitler, and that ‘the wrong side won’. I remembered him saying the one time in history he’d love to time travel to was to see Hitler at the height of his power at a parade with thousands of people.

I was shocked by this but somehow convinced myself he didn’t mean it and was mimicking his father (who I believe to be a psychopath) who he was heavily influenced by.

I realised that night that my lifelong fascination with psychopathy and criminal psychology had attracted this personality into my life. Looking back on the movies that attracted me as a kid were movies like Bladerunner and vampire movies; the irony of droids masquerading as humans and heartless non-humans who will use humans as supply is of course patently obvious.

A few days before our custody hearing in July 2014, he agreed to see me so we could talk things through. I said goodbye to our children and they were so happy to think their father and I were going to talk. They had hoped he would drop his demands about custody sleepovers and a few other things they were unhappy about. He had caused a lot of damage to their respect of him through mistreating them during and after the marriage, as well as stealing our belongings and secretly recording them amongst other appalling things.

Ironically and I suppose sadly, this day was the day I experienced his pure, empty evil and have always remembered it had been the due date of our first baby some thirteen years earlier. That pregnancy had been the only time in fourteen years he’d been nice to me. Here we were.

My ex-husband took the opportunity on this day to produce an old newspaper article about a trauma my family suffered during my childhood. I had shared this with him as any wife who trusts her husband would – but never expects him to try and blackmail her with it.

With sadistic excitement in his dilated pupils, he slid the piece of paper across the table and told me “this is the tip of the iceberg”, “I’m going to destroy you, your father, your whole family …. and I will make sure you lose your children”.

I had long understood that he was never capable of love, but it was this moment I realised he was evil and truly was a malignant stranger.

I write about my experience now in the hope that even one person out there is having his or her ‘google moment’ by reading this and takes something from my experience to prepare themselves against a malignant narcissist or a psychopath.

Understanding none of it was real or mattered to them; realising that they simply do not feel anything is so vital to protecting yourself when trying to leave.

Namaste to all those who possess love in their hearts. May we pity these wretched humans who will live out their lives in deep self loathing with empty cavities in their chests that can never be filled.

The rest of us are okay – we have ourselves, and we have each other.

So he made sure he ‘divorced’ me a year to the day I left him. He thought he was clever and was making the last move.

He didn’t understand there was never a game in the first place except for the one he imagined in his mind through our whole marriage and ultimate divorce. But life is a game to them, an endless stream of chess moves and cardboard emotions while they try to ‘feel’ something and fill that void inside them.

I should mention straight off that my divorce was with a malignant narcissist and they operate very differently from the overt narcissist. Unlike the overt who loves emotion and thrives on dragging the drama out, the malignant narcissist is out to destroy, win and cut.

So without giving long winded detail, my divorce was intense and fast.

My ex-husband went on a scorched earth seek and destroy mission that resulted in his own children cutting ties with him more than four years ago.

This was his checklist for (attempted) divorce annihilation of Enemy No. 1 (AKA mother and provider of his children) :

Spend every last cent in joint bank account

Myself, my parents and sister to cut ex wife as though she never existed in our lives. Pretend she doesn’t exist. Show her no respect.

Pay a pittance towards child support. Hurt her through the kids.

Steal all property from storage – including kids beds and their toys.

Collude with parents to intimidate her with a caveat on our block of land under a bogus claim. Let her and the kids exist in the back room of her parents house. Make them suffer in a confined space while I refuse to settle.

Attempt to blackmail ex-wife for custody and monetary demands. a)Threaten her with her brother’s suicide b) Threaten to expose a secret trauma she shared with me from when she was 6 years old. Present her with an old newspaper article from 36 years ago to shock her. c) Threaten to make her father’s life difficult through false tax evasion accusations d) tell her that it is my goal to destroy her and her whole family’s life and then have her children taken away from her

Use a forged ‘loan agreement’ from the last page of an old Will she signed for me many years ago to claim that my parents loaned us $240,000 which they now want back.

Lie, lie, lie and deny at all times. Ignore legal requests for information, do not respond. There is no penalty in family court for lying …. so lie !

There are plenty of other things he did, but these points were the worst things that he did. A forensic document examiner threw out the forgery, the caveat got lifted as it was unfounded and we reached a settlement through quick mediation without going before a judge. I never got back the furniture or the kids toys so I bought new stuff. The blackmail brought me and my parents closer together. I filed for property child support through the authorities.

Basically it was all intimidation tactics on his part with some theft.

Ultimately, his attack did me a huge favour !

You see, I don’t know personally know anybody whose ex has tried to destroy them emotionally the way mine did but he forced me to face my greatest fears and look shame and fear square in the eye.

Guess what ? I did, and the sky didn’t fall down.

I woke up the next day and the sun had risen and the sky was blue. Then the next day the sun rose again …..

After years of this abuser ruining my happiness and betraying me in the worst way, I was now fireproof.

You truly know who a person is when you divorce them, and I am so grateful to him for leaving me with no doubt about who he is. I am relieved he left not a shred of anything sacred between us as it gave me pure closure.

It’s so easy to find closure with this kind of divorce as it kills every last nerve of feeling and he literally could not hurt me in any way after going through this.

He used his last card.

He got the money and the furniture but lost his wife and his kids. I don’t think it was much of a win for him, do you ?

I now see myself as Joan of Arc who survived the fire and thrived like a phoenix rising from the ashes. My kids are thriving and never mention him.

You’ll be okay.

Golden rule 101 ….. stay cool, grey rock wall cool.

I’ve been through it and the process taught me how to quell my natural fiery spirit and zip my mouth. I learned to be an impenetrable wall of cold rock that gave no response and no emotional entry point.

I’m in my sixth year of adopting this self control (which goes against every fibre of my being) and it has saved me immeasurable stress and upsets. In my case I am fortunate enough to have enjoyed the simplicity of ‘no contact’ for over five years. Not many people are this lucky I know, but the same rules apply albeit that my golden rule is ‘no contact’.

Staying cool and not engaging with emotion or tit-for-tat is the single most important skill you need to learn when preparing and enduring the marathon of a custody battle and ongoing ‘counter’ parenting with a covert narcissist.

Any shred of emotion or reaction you give them is a source of thrill for them. This is all a game to them, it’s not personal and they sleep just fine at night.

You need to master the cool approach to deal with a covert narcissist for the rest of your life as the parents of the children. You are tied to this person through your children forever. Cool, minimal contact with this ex is something you need to maintain to manage them.

Look on your custody battle as the training ground for how to deal with them for many years to come.

Rule 2 — Remove all emotion (just vent and cry privately)

It is not fair but courts and the ‘system’ are not fair and do not allow for natural human emotion. You will be portrayed as unstable, irrational and confrontational by the covert narcissist if you dare show normal human emotions (fear, protectiveness over the children etc.). He or she will remain cool as a cucumber whilst you get upset. They are able to do this as they literally do not feel what you feel and they see the whole scene as a slow game to ultimately win (even if they have zero interest in the kids or their emotional well being).

Rule 3 — Remember it’s a game

This is quite literally a game to the covert narcissist. They think in the moment and are focused on the game of winning the custody battle.

The covert narcissist will love every minute of playing the innocent victim in court and trying to get a reaction out of you through sneaky lies and button pushing. Don’t let him or her do it to you.

Remind yourself they are desperate for a reaction and don’t give it to them !

While your mind and heart is racing for the kids, the covert narcissist is feeling nothing but cold game play. Not a flicker of emotion or compassion is raised towards what the children want.

You must understand the way they play this game if you are to have a chance in a court situation.

Arming yourself with this approach will save you emotional stress as well as tens of thousands of dollars on rambling conversations with your lawyer as well.

Keep it perfunctory with your lawyer, and as tempting as it is to feel like they’re your friend and your support — don’t. This will only cost you money. Have those emotional conversations with your friends and family.

Rule 4 — it’s not personal

Yes that’s right. It’s not personal.

Exactly what you’re going through, the covert attacks, the hell you’re going through … well, it was always going to happen to whoever was unlucky enough to have children with your covert narcissist ex !

None of their game is particularly personal towards you, it’s a game and you’re just a character in their play. They don’t feel anything for you, it’s all just a game of life to them and feelings of revenge or malevolence towards you are really a reflection of the black empty hole of their own self loathing.

If you can get your head around accepting none of this is personal it will help you compartmentalise and endure the court system with less trauma.

Covert narcissists lose interest very quickly once the court part of the game and the limelight is over as real relationships with children and teenagers is something they can’t be bothered with.

My covert narcissist waited seven patient years for me.

He was there for my breakups, he patiently listened and quietly waited in left stage until his opportunity arrived. He gently smiled, amused at my story telling but I now realise what he was doing was studying me. My stories and openness served as an open book for him to absorb every detail and nuance about me. By the time I was single and vulnerable he knew everything about me he needed to; my hopes, dreams and fears.

Then the bright lights of my life went out for fourteen years.

Once he got me it all stopped and the ‘devalue, discard’ process began. The lead up was purely the ‘idealise’ stage which is over from the morning after they win you. Within a month of dating I was left at a party at two a.m. because I had “disrespected” him by talking to a man and not coming to him when he called out to me. I stupidly blamed myself and stayed with him.

This man, my former husband of fourteen years, waited for me as a platonic friend for over seven years.

He proposed within a year of dating (once he worked out what my prospects were) and the very day after our engagement he told me over a Greek lunch that he wanted a quick marriage and to start a family “sooner rather than later”. Those words ring in my ears almost two decades later.

His magnificent obsession was me — for seven patiently plotted years — until he won me and proceeded to treat me like garbage from the moment we had a child.

Half the appeal was that I was unavailable and in another long term relationship, and the other was that he had convinced himself I looked like a “young Jane Seymour”.

None of his obsession was really, personally about me. I was an object and a fantasy. If it had been another young woman with long straight hair and brown eyes that had worked in the building it would have been her.

From the moment he had me he insisted I dye my hair almost black, and wear red lipstick. Wanting to please this man who promised me the world I obliged. When it came to our wedding he demanded I only have one friend at the wedding because he wanted a small wedding. I hurt a number of people by agreeing to this, but as I had been married before in a large traditional wedding he used this against me and said this was “his turn”.

Slowly he poisoned my friendships, in particular that of my oldest friend who was a lawyer and I now realise posed a threat to him. He dripped on my social network like slow burning acid until I was alienated to him exclusively.

He had kept volumes of diary entries about me over seven years which he insisted on me reading once we became a couple in order to prove how obsessed he had been with me.

Mr calm, charming, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth blue eyed boy turned out to be a highly abusive, pathologically lying, very covert and malignant narcissist.

Part of his grooming tactics in the beginning of our relationship was to encourage me to drink with him most nights. I had never been a drinker, but within weeks of dating he had me intoxicated on half a bottle of whiskey and coke most nights which had me in a fog of alienation. It also provided him with lowered and confused boundaries for him to sexually abuse me which he did for many months until I became ill and decided to quit drinking.

Over the years he would lament that he missed the days of me drinking, but the sexual abuse was never discussed. We had children by this stage and it seemed like somebody else’s history.

Unfortunately I seem to be a magnet for this type of personality. I’ve had around six men tell me that they were addicted or obsessed with me over the course of my life, a couple of whom claim it’s lasted their whole adult lives since we knew each other at college. I’m old enough to find it disturbing and not flattering, and I find these days it incites a lot of anger in me as I realise this personality type don’t actually love us.

Every single one of them was either a controlling, quiet personality with insecurities. Atleast three of them would score high as narcissists, and one is probably bipolar. They loved the fantasty of what I could make them feel, and what I could offer them rather than truly loving me as a person.

I don’t find it flattering, I find it to be a good indicator of mental illness (bipolar sufferers are prone to wish fulfillment fantasy obsessions) or other issues around arrested emotional development or personality disorder. Any sort of obsessive behaviour towards another person is worrying, and in my experience they always turn nasty through jealousy.

The minute a man shows any obsessive, possessive behaviour towards me I’m out of there these days ! It’s a huge red flag.

There is a moment that I never forget which is one of the memorable ‘love bombing’ moments I experienced with my narcissist. It is a great example of the love game and love lies they tell.

As we sat opposite each other in an exclusive beachside restaurant he held up a glass of wine and toasted me with these words; “I am going to treat you so well you’re never going to want to leave me”.

Like a fool under a spell I believed him.

Ten minutes earlier he had been nasty to the waitress.

Fourteen years later I left him.

As a Quora defector who has enjoyed the highs and lows of the easy and somewhat addictive platform, I too feel inspired to write about my experience after reading Teguh Li’s piece (inspired by Antonio Kowatsch’s post) about why I’ve ‘broken up’ with Quora.

This was once me on Quora. Forgive the terrible, simplistic writing but it was the first thing I ever wrote on the web after surviving an abusive relationship and divorce with a malignant narcissist. Over the next four years I wrote hundreds of answers, made wonderful contacts and was voted ‘Top Writer’ on narcissism which amused me rather than flattered me as it was all a bit of a hobby for me. The Quora bubble turned out to be a wonderful healing tool for me though, and it all started with this silly posting that went viral ….

Ah yes, I’m yet another in the line of ex-Quora top writers who has been through the machine and has been spat out the other end. In my case it’s due to their name policy which, as long as I don’t have a paid contract to write for them, ‘we are done’ - and no Quora, I will not provide you with a copy of my drivers licence ! Naff off.

Yes, the trolls who delight over ‘reporting’ writers for all kinds of Quora “violations” such as alleged use of ‘fake names’ win. Quora then unapologetically blocks its writers over the use of ‘Pete’ instead of Peter, or in my case ‘Cat’ instead of Catherine. Unless you’re one of the favourite Quorans in which case the Quora policy appears to become a little ‘flexible’ and their faceless moderators simply turn a blind eye to it. But writing predominantly about narcissism and personality disorders isn’t sexy on Quora, and doesn’t put you in the protected inner sanctum.

I wanted to be a writer when I was young, but it wasn’t until I mindlessly posted an answer on Quora late one night in August 2015 that I became drawn into the world of the Quora machine which has been cleverly designed to hook you, and reel you in with the temptation of constant alerts for upvotes and comments. They truly are the slot machines of the online writing world.

‘Ping’ …. you have recevied an upvote. ‘Ping’ …. you have ten new followers. The entire platform is designed to be seductive, addictive and to appeal to the narcisstic traits we all possess. Social media has become a cancer in our society because of just this.Even the most old school and resistant of us still find ourselves checking for comments, and seeing followers gives a feeling of validation and acknowledgment we all desire.

With no real understanding of what I’d done, I received 412,000 views and 812 upvotes. For some reason, this flippant answer to the question ‘what life advise do you have for a 28 year old’ had gone viral. I suppose it was succinct and hit a nerve with the right demographic, but to this day I don’t understand why this answer went viral when other things I’ve written far better haven’t.

The mystery of ‘why’ will remain a mystery no doubt. I have seen answers written on Quora that are some of the most profound, beautifully written things I’ve ever read and they get a few hundred views and zero upvotes.

Frustratingly, the trend these days on Quora is to post a badly written answer but attach a provocative, pouting selfie or a picture of a semi naked woman and it gets thousands of votes. So is the state of our online public and their values.

So it is time to move on, and here I am now on Medium starting all over again, liberated from the lure of the Quoraphoria of days gone by but much happier to be Cat Diggs who will not change for anybody … not even Quora.

A life made of sand that can be washed away at any moment.

I remember reading this analogy several years back and I have never forgotten it as describes the emptiness of a relationship with a narcissist; in my case, a covert and very malignant narcissist.

The family life and home you pour your heart and soul into creating, means nothing to them and the cruel reality is that your entire relationship and family life is a one way belief, all coming from you.

Less than 24 hours after we separated, my covert Narcissist ex-husband had literally dropped the husband-father act and reverted to some unknown version of himself. He had announced our separation to his immediate family before we’d even had a chance to tell our beautiful children. He was already in ‘game play’, acting in a new character he had adopted.

14 years, a life built and two children meant nothing and washed away just like that sandcastle. There was no emotion, no grieving for what could have been or our children, no regrets for his bad behaviour … it was literally as though it had never happened.

I had lived the ‘cuckoo’ world of my Jekyll & Hyde husband for all those years, and until I googled his traits one night and got 10,000 results on Covert Narcissism I couldn’t have described my marital reality to anybody clearly.

Girlfriends envied me; “oh you’re so lucky he does the ironing … my husband would never do the ironing”. They all thought he was the perfect, domesticated husband. He was; but it was an act and a ploy to gain the upper hand on me. If he did the ironing, he was in credit and it would eventually be used against me.

A covert partner will praise you in public to his mother, and within two hours he can snap in the kitchen at you because there are dishes in the sink and be jabbing his finger near your eyes, hissing at you that you’re a “lousy wife and a shocking mother”. Yep, that’s life with a covert narcissist.

You walk a tightrope of being falsely praised for public appearance one moment and being denigrated and demeaned the next.

It is a life that always has a ‘strange’, slightly surreal feeling to it which is almost impossible to describe. There’s a feeling of glibness, and fakery which doesn’t make sense to you because you have a nice house, nice children and year after year you go through the motions of birthdays, holidays and the daily routine. Everything should feel fine, yet it doesn’t.

You wonder why you feel so dissatisfied and crave depth of conversation, depth of emotion when he seems happy to skim along on the surface of living. It feels perfunctory and like ‘ticking boxes’ through your marriage. You convince yourself you have depression … just like he’s been saying. As he goes through the motions, saying all the right things in the right moment you wonder why you don’t ‘feel’ it. In fact, you realise you’ve become so numb and dead inside that you don’t feel anything any more. You abandon all dreams and hopes, because you are told you are “just an unhappy person”.

It’s the same empty, strange feeling you got when you first started dating and he would throw the door open upon your arrival and exclaim “hi ya beautiful !”. It seemed rehearsed, as though it was learned from a movie and had been practiced on others before you.

It is also a life plagued with guilt. Constant guilt about every detail of your life, of your day, of your evening, of your relationships. Guilt with everything that you said today.

I’m not a good enough parent, I’m not a good enough partner, I didn’t say the right thing to that person in that moment, I didn’t go to University like He did so what would I know ?

A covert narcissist will also retard and change the way you see your own childhood and family.

After the acid drips long enough, and he plants questions in your mind you find yourself wondering ‘was my childhood REALLY happy like I thought it was ? Maybe I DID have a messed up family and childhood ?’.

You lose perspective, you lose your sense of knowing yourself, the reality of everything shifts under you and around you permanently.

If I try and simplify this abusive, strange and miserable marriage to the highly sadistic, covert and manipulative Narcissist I called my husband I would have have to say it was like living in a dark, surreal place with Jekyll and Hyde himself. It is confusing, nothing makes sense and words contradict actions on a daily basis.

Loneliness is another word that comes to mind, and only people who have lived in this type of abusive relationship can begin to understand the indescribable way they mess with your mental health and overall wellbeing.