"Unless you’ve gone through it, it really is hard to comprehend that people like that exist. Because it’s not obvious you can’t just point them out in a line up. They can be a model to society in public but then behind closed doors it’s a completely different reality:

When you’re in that kind of dynamic you either abide by the rules of the narcissist or fight against them the entire time. That means trying to please them, doing whatever you can so that they’re happy but never succeeding at it.

You’ll never do anything that’s good enough and even when you do something perfectly, there’ll be something wrong with it. Or they will make up some intention that you had, that what you did wasn’t really in their best interest, it was only in your best interest.

Everything that they say about you will be something that they do to you. In other words: if they call you a liar, they are probably the liar. If they say that you had bad intentions for them such as wanting to make them feel bad, it’s very likely that’s what they’re doing to you. It’s a redirect, a re-focus on you.

Friends and family may still not see what you see because of the subtle drip-feeding of emotional abuse on a daily basis. They won’t see it because every little thing that has happened to you, out of context of the rest of what was happening to you, will seem very benign. It will seem as if all of those events were normal things that happen in every relationship.

In the relationship you don’t even realize why it’s happening, you just know something’s happening. They’re so good at orchestrating things in a way that make you believe that you are doing it to yourself.” -Anonymous

Survival Diaries

"Can't Just Point Them Out of Lineup"