I didn’t realise that I was being gaslighted until someone else had to explain it to me later on.
I didn’t realise the extent of someone’s manipulation and abuse until someone had to explain that to me later on too.
I didn’t realise how many times someone had lied directly to my face knowing they were lying until I found out so much of what they tried so hard to hide after the relationship ended.
I didn’t realise how much they pretended to be someone else, and that they had the audacity to call themselves an empath, kind, and pure.
Their so called morals and values certainly did not align with their actions and I certainly did not experience a person who was empathetic, kind, or pure.
Because when someone is empathetic, kind, and pure, they don’t come into your life and create pain and chaos, leaving everything in your life completely destroyed because of the fact they entered your life.
I didn’t realise how dishonest and how manipulative they really were, until it was too late and the damage was already done.
I didn’t realise that they were in fact a covert narcissist until later on when not one, not two, but three people had to point out the facts and explain this to me before I could finally accept the truth.
I didn’t want to believe that they were a narcissist but as time went by, and more and more evidence began to pile up, the facts and evidence became impossible to ignore, and the truth of what they were became clear.
I felt stupid, but I knew I wasn’t; it’s just that they were so very good at what they did.
And that’s what I want you to hear today; if you’ve fallen prey to any kind of narcissist or manipulative person, don’t feel embarrassed and don’t think that you were stupid for not figuring it out sooner.
You didn’t realise you were being manipulated and gaslit because you were being manipulated and gaslit.
They knew what they were doing because they had done this before.
You weren’t their first, and you certainly won’t be their last.
You loved with an open heart, you chose to see the best in them, and that's what you're meant to do.
You're meant to be able to love someone and see past their flaws in the comfort that they will offer you safety in return.
And even though you might not ever understand all of the intricacies about who they are, why they did what they did, or how they could lack a conscience and discard you the way they did, it doesn’t mean you can’t heal and rebuild something better.
When you're dealing with a narcissist nothing makes sense which is why your mental health and your emotional well-being probably suffered as a result of the relationship.
Sometimes the only thing that makes any sense at all is the fact that they are a narcissist, and once you accept that’s exactly what they are, so much of what you’re trying to figure out suddenly makes a lot more sense.
And in its own strange way, that becomes a form of closure and allows you to move on in the knowledge that no matter what you’d have done, or how much more you’d have sacrificed or given, the outcome with them would always have ended up exactly the same; because this was a relationship pattern for them, and they were the common denominator...
~ Mark Smith