Balance has been on my mind lately, primarily because my lack of it keeps launching me down stairs.  After 6 weeks laid up with a broken foot, I’m determined to regain my balance.  My physical therapist assures me that despite the neuropathy in my feet I can, and will, regain balance.

I almost didn’t go to PT on Friday, thinking how ridiculous the exercise are, and not believing they can fix my teetering body.  But I went.  The PT watched me walk towards her, and later told me she could see my body swaying as I walked.  That’s how out of balance I am.

When she said this it flung me back to the years I spent with a covert narc.  Actually, my whole life as I was raised by disordered people.  I have spent a lifetime out of balance.  Not physically – that is new, but mentally and emotionally.

Keeping you off balance is a great way to keep you on the hook.  Imagine you are a fish on a fisherman’s line.  You’ve managed to get the hook partially out of the roof of your mouth when suddenly he yanks it a new way and back in it slips.  This is how the narcissist works.  You might think the narc is aloof but make no mistake – he is watching your every move, and he knows when you are getting free of his hook.  Just when you get close, he’ll yank the line in a new way, and you’ll slip again into the abyss of self degradation.

As I write this it occurs to me how much like fishermen narcissists are.  They throw out a line and see who will bite.  While my ex narc was romancing me, hooking me, he was romancing others, trying to figure out who would be his best catch.  Lucky me, eh?

The point is this:  If you feel off-balance, you are with a narcissist or other disordered person!  Here are some of the ways being off balance manifests:

• your emotions and thoughts are all over the place.  Your feelings often don’t  match the situation you are in.
• you walk around in a daze, confused about what you are doing and why.
• you are completely unable to predict the outcome of any situation.  Just when you think you have it figured out, it changes.
• you feel the stress build around the time your mate will arrive home.  Even the best mood will dissipate in the black cloud that descends on your home as the hour draws closer for him to arrive.
• You often wonder who you are.  While you might agree with the messages planted by the narc, you having a nagging thought that something is not quite right.  You just can’t put your finger on what it is.
• you have difficulty breathing, sometimes wondering what right you have to do so.
• you feel incapable of even the most mundane tasks.  Difficult, or unusual tasks are completely out of your reach.
• you wonder when you became incompetent.  You ruminate over who you thought you were, but no longer are.

 

It seems impossible to think that the person who love bombed you could be deliberately gaslighting you, but he is.  The best way to visualize this is to think of a blind person.  A blind person’s hearing, sense of touch and spatial ability are the nonly senses available, and therefore become enhanced.  The blind person learns to “see” others by touching them.  Could I close my eyes, touch someone and then know what they look like?  No!  But a blind person can, and does.

Like a blind person, the narcissist has no idea what real feelings are.  As a result, they learn to rely on other cues to navigate the world.  Since they can’t read your feelings they read your body language.  They become masters with words, spinning words in ways a scolared poet could not decipher.  They learn to modulate their own body language, words and actions, to compensate for their lack of emotional understanding.  They become masters of romance, studying old movies, learning how to move, how to speak, how to kiss, how to make any woman swoon.

They become masters not because they are evil, but because they have no other way to navigate our world.

At some point their actions do take on a sinister note.  It is almost sad, because I believe they do not mean to hurt people, to leave a tsunami of pain and destruction in their path.  All they want to do is learn to travel through life successfully.  Unfortunately, at some point it becomes evil.  Watching the wave of destruction they leave makes no difference in their actions.  Time and again they will “apologize”, only to slip back into their old ways when they find no other way to get what they want.

This lack of feelings makes them hallow.  This is why the good times you have will never fill them up; they will always need more.  It’s as if in the core of their being they are nothing more than a black hole.  They suck in everything they can, trying to fill that void, but in the end the void destroys all it has consumed, then grows even larger.  Ugh.

Anyway, the more I’ve thought about balance, the more convinced I am that I need to regain both physical and emotional balance.  As I learn to modulate my body I will work on my thoughts and perceptions.  As I do my physical exercises I plan to do mental ones as well, reinforcing who I now am, what I believe, how I want to live my life.  It is only I that can reinforce how I want my life to look, so I’m on it!