Love is not measured by endurance - it is measured by joy

If it’s always painful, don’t stay. Love is not measured by endurance; it is measured by joy.

I truly believe that the worst wound - the one that permeates all your being - is the one that makes you lose faith in yourself. Are you with someone like that? Or surrounded by people who behave like that in a family dynamic? Or worse still, do you always choose people like that?

When your every belief and gesture, your every action, and (worse still) your actual intent has been questioned - sometimes for years - who are you after that?

If you decide - when you decide - that the pain, the shame, the lack of connection is unbearable, you're not alone. These feelings, often born out of narcissistic abuse, are overwhelming.

During those attacks that are upheld only by the flimsiness of intermittent reinforcement, you are told who you are. And because narcissistic people have zero accountability, it will be you believing their story.

Being broken is not the end of your story. I know this because l have felt it, lived it, and moved beyond it.

It didn’t happen in a day or in some epiphanic moment. It happened little by little, when the days felt empty at first.

 l felt worthless and undeserving. My giving was only validated when it came as self-sacrifice - my time, my money, my focus - even when l was poor, tired, broken or afraid. Somehow l was told that l didn’t count. And somehow l believed it. Deep down.

There was no “benefit of the doubt” or time and space even for a breath before the condemnation set in, and it was always my fault.

When this is what you are fed, the constant insinuation is the poison. It muddies the well until the water is undrinkable. The well of joy is long gone, and it is deep.

This feeling of being lost to yourself hollows you. It alters you, and your altered self is besieged by internal doubt and a profound sense of worthlessness. And you chase it and carry on hoping that it will change, and sometimes it does, briefly, but it always, always leaves you with a sense that this flow of good connection won’t last as though the time is borrowed, or on loan.

If you're fed calumny by those you love - those who should love you - you live in a distortion of reality.

Calumny is the perfect word for narcissistic abuse:

“A false accusation of an offense - a malicious representation of someone’s words or actions.”

This is what you live with. When you say yes by staying, by allowing, by not putting boundaries around yourself and this awful exchange.

Maybe this sounds, in a way, unbelievable because, of course, there are also good moments and good times, maybe years of history.

This may have been what they did in your family, generations of staying in misery. After all, leaving involves grieving, too.

This is so sad when it is in a marriage of long standing, where there are children, or it is a friendship of long standing. Something with someone you invested in.

But l think worst of all it is when it is a parent or child of your own. Because that kind of relationship is irreplaceable and almost too painful to bear the thought of losing. Others will have what you do not with their family or their children. So you know you can see when you don’t.

Good to remember - narcissists are masters at deflection.

You have become the expectation of others and not who you really are.

Being broken is not the end of your story. It can be a time of healing and mending, of rest, and of renewal. It can be a time of learning. About what you want and who you are without the deflection of blame. 

We cannot change what we are not willing to face, and that involves vulnerability. 

When we are not living in reaction, at first this might feel impossible and strange, but slowly we can begin to feel that the quiet feels like peace, and there is space and time to discover who we are and who we left behind in lieu of imagined belonging.

You can begin knowing this - that if someone doesn’t care about what matters to you, it is best not to “get in” with them in the first place, or if you are already in this kind of relationship, you seriously begin to plan or find your exit.

You are not going to be able to “talk things over” with this kind of individual or get them to “see your side” of things. Their horizon is just about them and what serves them.

You are involved with someone who doesn’t play by the rules. What is someone who moves the goalposts all the time? Is that not the perfect definition of gaslighting?

How much more proof do you need when feeling bad becomes your constant normal? When the only kindness you get might be from a stranger. 

Refuse to see yourself through the eyes of someone who diminishes you. Holding on is sometimes not a sign of strength when you have to endlessly prove your worth. When we hold on to someone who is not holding us, we are settling.

We can settle if we want for peace, but what kind of peace is that? It is staying because of fear. And sure, some of us may choose to do that.

l’ve tried that, and somehow, for me, it felt really pale, and having something pale with someone important rather than nothing doesn’t work for me. The message it gives me is that my value is questionable and that if l don’t ever deserve anything better, then l’m selling myself out for nothing.

If you feel the same, hold out for the joy. It might come to you in ways you never ever thought of, and it will always, always be better, because as my Grandmother once told me, “You can stoop down low, and pick up nothing.”

Hold on for the joy, it will come your way.