Mushrooms are notorious for only being distinguishable as poisonous by the elite. It’s how they collectively protect themselves. If our individual and collective personalities continue to proliferate in such a disordered way, we would be wise to proactively develop a counter strategy. We must develop a new approach when compassion and flexible thinking are exploited. In no uncertain terms, when it is safe to do so, some of us need to hold the line in small ways—in this case, calling a horse a horse.

The lifeblood of language is only possible through relinquishing power: when a word leaves one’s mouth and reaches another’s ear. “Grey-rocking” and “no-contact” advice have their time and place; for me, they echoed the agency-stripping accommodations I’ve been forced to swallow too often. I couldn’t do it; I was filled to the brim. My body is metabolizing intense bouts of word salad: when someone says words in sequences that follow syntactic rules but rapid-fired so you can’t stop to notice they have no meaning. Word salad is strategic, a mechanism of misdirection. Direct language is an antidote to narcissism, a non-black-and-white intersubjectivity that never guarantees dominance or falsely proselytizes “truth” but is 100% honest. Exacting direct language is, at least, a surefire way to get a read on the person you are dealing with in flesh and blood at any given moment: Can they tolerate an external consensus that places restrictions on them? Can they accommodate others even if there’s nothing in it for them? Or do they balk at the request for adjustments? Is “no” enough?

I have read enough articles about triggers as superpowers for a lifetime, about sensitivity being like a carbon monoxide detector, and about how our bodies are trying to tell us something. I keep waiting for this steady collective strength to appear in all its terrifying glory, like the unveiling of a game-changing map. They say pain and fear are messengers; we are wise to listen, but I am no longer interested in protecting myself alone.

I’m not asking for compassionate or PC alternatives to official NPD naming, but ones that are precise and on the record. (After NPD abuse, my knee-jerk defense is to rename it “black-hole broken-cup disorder” or “soul-raping joker-faced syndrome.”) I am asking for suggestions on language that will distinguish the everyday usage of narcissism from when you realize too late that you’re deeply entangled with someone who doesn’t have the capacity to hold back harm. For when you require intervention more urgently than the time it takes to rewire every one of your childhood trauma responses.

Here is my call to this community of resilient deep thinkers: what do you wish was said instead? What language did you develop that you wish you had from the beginning to describe this bizarre exploitation style? Or are words offered by elders along the way that someone in the white-hot thick of it might not remember available? How do you explain this behavior to your children or prepare them for this dynamic in the world? During your recovery, did you feel a pit in your stomach as the word narcissist was casually thrown around? At the same time, maybe you calculated the personal-danger/societal-progress ratio of hearing the word aloud in public spaces. Hopefully, it wasn’t just in pop culture but in poli-sci theory, legislature, medical settings, schoolrooms, and good company with people learning to reflect on the first person and the collective impact.

Any suggestions on what else we might name it for those who find themselves in chat rooms at 3 AM, pouring over “dark triad”/cluster-B literature, drained, on the brink, watching their brains attempt to make sense of bizarre nonsense… clinging to lifelines of writings that use phrases like psychological murder and mental rape, praying that the accurate usage of this extreme language won’t be judged as “dramatic” by people from which they are asking for help and harbor? Suggestions for what to call it when this energy follows you (maybe because you’re now able to see what was always there) … but don’t know what to call it and can’t call it by its name… but can’t tolerate it anymore, either? We get to decide. Language is arbitrary, and form follows function.

Suggestions for alternative names to NPD are welcome in the comments below from experiences as affirmed by the victim of a fun house “love” that engaged in recon to target your weakest spots. “Love” that left you wondering how to compost your murdered self without accurate language. Relationships that whipped you in the same place twice when you attempted to describe them accurately.

Nuances in NPD diagnoses would benefit from reference manuals recognizing variants like covert, grandiose, or malignant, but a new paradigm could also be modeled off a five-alarm or def-com system. Could a renaming honor that little zombified ant? Or, maybe, in the tradition of Greek mythology, instead of Narcissus, Orpheus—master instrumentalist and enchanter? Orpheus lived out a tragic story: he loved, or at least he tried. He went to the depths of hell to rescue his beloved Euripides and succeeded because he was intelligent, charming, and determined. But it didn’t occur to him to ensure that Euripides was also in the light before looking back to unravel it all. From then on, he was a broken man. He was later cannibalized alive by the women to whom he could no longer connect while attempting to rest and grieve his losses.

I look forward to doing what the intersection of my life’s greatest griefs has brazened me with the capacity to do: metabolize how it is both about me and not about me with an understanding of consequences, object permanence, and shreds of compassion even after my most outlandish moments. (I am returning to myself.) I am curious about what language was harmful, helpful, or an absurd replication during your recovery from NPD abuse or what language you prioritize for the next generations. The more survivors I speak to, the more I realize that it irrevocably alters the way one sees. I aim to use my strange afterlife to call upon institutions (like mental health diagnostic manuals) to call horses by the name we gave them: to call pop stars and assholes “narcissists”; and call NPD something more nuanced amidst this evolution.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

I want to preface the following with a distinction between “a narc” and abusively narcissistic patterned behavior because this is so much bigger than any one individual. People who suffer from NPD (as opposed to narcissistic jerks) are so deeply traumatized and will take it as a reflection on them… but it isn’t. I’m not wishing to incite violence, but the idealism of “becoming the change I hope to see” doesn’t hold water when what I hope to see has been reverse-victim-ordered.

NPD has a high correlation with misogyny, racism, xenophobic discrimination, and all the other ailments of the world we are regularly told can’t be fixed. When the man to whom I was trauma-bonded (but didn’t yet comprehend had NPD) projected by screaming at me until he was sweating and his eyes were black that I had a personality disorder, I was naively trying to care for him and his sprained ego, ahem, I mean, ankle… and reacting to being snapped at that I “could stand to get him a cold drink”. He later made me apologize for suggesting this happened. At that point, I was hooked by a web of stealthy lies that reflected everything I had ever hoped for and belittled through the grooming of incremental boundary-testing, so my broken spirit acquiesced. My pupils were probably large and black, too, from fear.

A year and a half into our relationship, after much talk about his “very observant, quick-learning, self-aware and progressive path,” he grinned while he tested me with “suddenly realizing” who my closest friend was (he was attempting to suggest a threesome) and the sudden information about his possession of U.S. Confederate memorabilia. My gaslit bleeding heart tried to respect this complicated ambush of cultural heritage and sexual pseudo-liberation and told him, “Just don’t be hateful to people” and “yeah, I don’t need you two to be close”. In retrospect, it was the same grin that he had while I frantically searched for items I’m fairly certain he intentionally hid from me and, to this day, still has in his possession.

I would have said anything at that point so he would stop trapping me. Looking back, this fueled the entrapment. Then again, once the funhouse music and coercive rage started, there was nothing I could do. There was no appeal to logic or facts, no appeal to empathy. Even abrupt no-contact would have had severe consequences for my life, but I was also naively trying to get back to the great love that was first sold to me. Once the funhouse music started, I would apologize for things he did so he wouldn’t scream at me then he would scream at me for apologizing too much, mocking my lack of self-respect. He kept coming back because I had something he wanted, something to which he felt entitled, but it was pure sabotage.

Based on what I now know about my ex’s reputation (that was strategically hidden from me) and how furiously he screamed that I had “ruined everything” the first time I confronted him, I believe I was recruited to prove to everyone that he could keep an LTR. This was why he was on such deceitfully good behavior in the beginning. Today, the recovery advice relating to brainwashing and cult leaders has been most relevant. And since I proclaim honesty, there is a part of me that realized halfway through our relationship that I was deep undercover. Every day still, talking myself through the ambiguous grief of being in love with a man who never existed takes up most of my calories.

During my attempts to get anyone in a position of authority to hold my ex accountable for his psychological violence, half the officials told me, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, that’s incredibly abusive, but unfortunately that’s not how the law works.” The other half said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, and that’s not how the law usually works… but I see what you’re saying. Where are you in the process? I’ll tell you what I know.” I followed their advice as far as I could.

I was then repeatedly told not to say the word narcissist in a courtroom because it’s style of abuse is notoriously difficult to prosecute, and the precedent varies from state to state for its connection to the intentional infliction of extreme emotional distress. In my highly triggered state, this struck me as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, so I took a page out of his playbook. I proceeded to fight my way into courtrooms and get the word on any record as often as possible, even if it had to be mine. Today I still can’t, in good conscience, say that I disagree with myself. But I admit it was a messy process amidst an insufficient status quo.

Nowadays, I reassure myself about my worst reactions by noticing that this is not a pattern in any other of my relationships. I understand that it’s my responsibility to work through the shakes that making even simple decisions gives me after having my sense of self gutted by being regularly screamed at for being a “stupid, useless little girl that shouldn’t trust my body or judgment”. I wake up every day with a restraining order on my name because the reactive abuse was effective and remind myself in the mirror that I didn’t ‘lose it’; it was taken. Keep your chin up, kid. I tried to take the shame and secrecy out of what was already happening since there was no higher road.

But I still stand in front of judges who’ve heard decimated versions of the saga (but ask zero contextualizing questions) and simply accept the consequences. I go to therapy twice a week, plus domestic violence support groups plus EMDR for the laundry list of intrusive thoughts from the distorted intimacy. I’m resilient and adaptive, and I see leaps and bounds of the hallmarks of health since denying the continuation of this treatment. Every morning, I remember the most bad-ass advice I’ve been given so far: that my best revenge is to prosper.

More importantly, in these therapies, I accept my part, realizing that fawning is manipulative even when rooted in fear, and yes (go figure) I didn’t get enough unconditional love as a child. I was tenuously glued back together when my abuser met me, and he smelled it on me. Since he scapegoated my past for everything, it kept me reluctant to admit that all of these are true. I think it is a good sign that I am even considering my part and how to prevent it in the future. I’m proud to take what’s mine, but I am not strong enough to take it all, nor do I deserve to. I’m not willing to “get on with my life.” I’m actively discontinuing this tradition of complicity.

Suppose our best guess about the root of NPD is stunting around the developmental stage of object permanence (peek-a-boo age). In that case, I defer to all the mothers who contain their toddlers’ outbursts on playgrounds: letting kids live out Godzilla fantasies without repercussion isn’t healthy. It isn’t healthy (or loving) to let a toddler feel entitled to that behavior. It gets murky when the toddler is in an adult body with a credit card and voting rights. By the time they’ve grown into an adult body, it’s far too late.

We need to teach kids this discretion as early as possible before sending them back out onto playgrounds (and workplaces, and sacred contracts of intimacy) where sadistic Godzillas will repeatedly bludgeon them. It is a slippery slope to collectively tell others that it’s now their responsibility to metabolize violence far beyond interpretive doubts. I can live with my sandcastles being swallowed by the tide or stomped on by bullies; I can’t tolerate being assaulted behind the swings and then denied the language to accurately describe what happened.

The perks of constant interconnected global conveniences and entertainment come with a responsibility to exercise this hard-earned discretion, part logic and part intuition. If violence is cyclical, we need to find a way to support the wrenches in the wheel who have first-hand knowledge of how enough has become enough and connect them to developing little minds. We need to intervene because narcissistic traits are running rampant like bullies on playgrounds, except now they exact policy through the offices they hold or through their 200 million Instagram followers that enact their word like Gospel. And with so many networks, most behavior has gone covert.

It will be one of the wildest rides you will ever go on to call out narcissistic behavior, be it individual or institutional. Do so judiciously and take care of yourself during the backlash. Men in uniform will choke on their best attempts at trauma-informed language, gate-keeping your recourse. They may tell you the threats you made against coveted models of cars are more valid than what you endured with your body and psyche. Strangers (who know half the cherry-picked version of what happened) will scream at you in the street. People you’ve known since birth will tell you that “good girls don’t talk about that kind of thing.” Connecting your story to the bigger story will get you shamed (and forget to mention how it can be both). You’ll somehow be simultaneously selfish and at fault for giving too much. You’ll be “over-reactive” when it’s convenient and told your trauma is nothing special if you start making sense. They are shades of the same playbook.

However, it will be a rock-hard reclamation of self and reality. People will vet themselves, and flying monkeys will drop like flies when they know they can’t play you like a violin anymore. Some may say that fighting fire with fire makes the world burn, but we are already burning, and self-defense has long been distinguished from preemptive strike. Sauter it with precision.

Participation in this style of resistance calls for deep discretion. In recovery groups, I spoke with mothers who couldn’t fight back because they had kids they were protecting from their exes. I also interviewed someone who told me they wished they had fought back seventeen years earlier in their marriage to get their abuser to back off. (This account single-handedly helped me start sleeping better amidst the consequences of my body’s reasonable reactions to my ex’s gaslighting and reactive abuse.) If you need to get to safety before you use this hard-earned knowledge to fight a dark societal trend, let that get you up in the morning. Let that guide you to a centered safety one day at a time. We need you. We all need what your body now knows.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

In an oversaturated language, I ran out of words to describe the extent of the damage. Psychological murder and mental rape seemed more appropriate, but using spiritual, metaphysical descriptors in a secular world is challenging. You’re treated like you don’t know the strength of your words; you’re covertly tagged as hysterical. And yes, I am sensitive to that treatment, however inadvertent. It’s reasonable that any survivor of narc abuse would be. My ex’s treatment would have broken anybody, and I’m no longer available for conversations about how I could’ve handled it better.

Analogies have proven helpful: descriptions of the dark spider web I was living in are most proportionately responded to when I describe my narc as “less Taylor Swift, more Ted Bundy.” It illuminates his superficial charm and the unease and chaos that follows. Yes, people can be that improvisationally manipulative, down to their precognitive skeletons, reflexively transactional, even in their best attempts at loving and being loved. The conversations in recovery groups and with practitioners who don’t balk when I use words like sociopathy and violence (even though my ex never hit me) are markedly safer and more productive.

Back to mushrooms: they each have their taxonomy institutionally sanctioned as distinct from all the other mushrooms’ excellent works. Yule log mushrooms will not understand the coercion experienced by a zombified ant. They won’t relate to the alchemy that Cryptococcus neoforman wield. The zombie ant fungus spore babies did nothing wrong, but the ants need convalescence after their heads split if we expect them to return with their stories from the other side and rejoin the work force.

Even after having the mechanisms of NPD shoved down my throat for the last time, it broke my heart that people with NPD are institutionally abandoned, that their suffering is forfeited, and abuse acquiesced to. In contrast, because I had already shouldered violent amounts of blame-shifting, it further broke my psychologically assaulted brain to be told there was nothing I could do but metabolize it. Professionals told me they were baffled; that my ex (and formative family members) would never see it; and sorry, good luck. Stay hydrated.

Meanwhile, institutions collectively take on these patterned behaviors. It drives us to near extinction. As a student of global power dynamics, this parallel keeps me from accepting the radical acceptance stage. If one “can’t get well in the environment that made you sick,” how am I supposed to get well in a world where collective narcissism is running rampantly unchecked? It’s scary to let go of hopes for accountability; where does that leave my god- and grandchildren? (And the philosopher’s quintessential quandary: Why do we do anything without hope for change?) Radical acceptance is a powerful tool for protecting oneself in a damaging world. But the world is becoming one big rug, under which room runs out for things to be swept.

I’m not the only one at this trend’s mercy: I see it in the desperate relief of people in survivor groups. Self-accountability is essential in healing, but it’s too much to ask those already humiliated and repeatedly mortally wounded to bear the exclusive brunt of rectification while their brains (bodies) are functioning at an all-time low. Narcissists, being narcissists, will exploit this, and so on. It’s a societal extension of scapegoating that keeps suicide rates disproportionately high in narc abuse survivors. We are watching this socio-epidemiological snowball in real time. It turns voting polls into circuses. It lines Taylor Swift’s bank accounts with fur: fans crying at concerts, relieved that someone sees it… or is she embodying it? The whodunit is juicy.

Thoughtful choice of words is not diplomacy at cocktail parties; it’s our lifeblood. In a world quickly becoming a compassion vacuum, I was enduring a strange formula of social endemics like rapists and cults that were officially weaponized as only my burden, and recovering from severe abuse under the guise of love. I barely endured the aftermath of unremittingly brutal spiritual assaults (in part) because we’ve made too much wiggle room. During my attempts to not turn against myself this time, I have engaged with group after group of disoriented victims who gather. They hope to re-learn how to validate what was first dismissed by their formative caregivers, secondly, dismissed by their abuser(s), and thirdly, dismissed by society at large, yet is somehow officially only their responsibility. We are being told to run and hide from the air we breathe.

In interviews with narc abuse survivors, especially those entrenched in legal battles, one piece of advice repeatedly pops up: write everything down. Keep a log. Date it. Keep a journal of intuitions you don’t know where to place yet. Keep two paper copies. Fight dirty and record conversations, with or without consent. Even if it’s not legally admissible in court, it will ground you in the fact that you’re not going crazy. Ever notice how some folks get when they’re about to be inexorably caught red-handed? It’ll tell you everything you need to know about a person. We need to accurately get this behavior on the record. Ink is magical in this way.

Narcissism isn’t the word that should be attached to NPD abuse anymore. That’s not what happened. I needed that word to be stronger. I needed to be able to walk into a doctor’s office under Medicare and say, “A narcissist has attacked me,” and not have them look at me like I had been listening to too many true-crime podcasts. Fewer and fewer of us have access to gurus, homeopathists and publicly appointed attorneys that will understand this wavelength. I want those at highest risk for narc abuse who are emerging from having their childhood traumas subjugated to recognizance, coerced, lied to, puppeteered, tricked, then subtly raped, hollowed out, fed upon, then their faces rubbed in it like a bad dog to be able to walk into a medical office and say, “I have my suspicions that I am in relation with a sociopath.” They walk among us and don’t look like they belong in Taylor Swift’s music videos. I am beyond my attempted gestures of inclusive understanding being met with taunts of how history belongs to the victor.

Anything said will be bastardized if you lack the muscle to understand the need for gray spaces, grace for others, and reasonable interpretation. Not having the bandwidth for others who have explicitly expressed the need for support in enduring society’s cracks is not the same as cheekily weaponizing a disregard for transgressions of known boundaries. It’s why some people can’t stand that it’s not PC to say certain words anymore. They are sans the muscle that sees that they’re “allowed” to say these words, but there are harmful repercussions to vulnerable populations that have been begging people to stop for decades; it’s reactive abuse. It’s the basis of NIMBYism: that ideals are good in theory until someone must make a sacrifice that doesn’t directly benefit them. Accountability is being DARVO’ed in our collective ethics. “Consent” is being reduced to an annoying digital box we check to get to a main page. A new strategy is needed.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

The natural world is rife with much richer analogies than our “higher” cultured structures. We have been strategically separated from the knowledge that mushrooms are awesome. They are resilient, adaptive, adept at divvying up decomposition, and taxonomically distinguished amongst the many types. Consider three examples: 1.) Mushrooms that grow on New England Yule logs (morels, oysters, lion’s mane) are iconic, delicious, and indispensable to the ecosystem. 2.) Cryptococcus neoformans fungi are doing a different alchemical work: metabolizing radiation thirty-eight years after the man-made nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl. 3.) Deep in tropical forests, a spore called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (zombie-ant fungus) infects ants’ brains to alter their behavior. The fungus drives an ant to the top of a hill, where there is sunlight that the fungus can’t otherwise reach. It then releases spores for reproduction via the ant’s exploded head. (Plus thousands of examples of fungi soldiers in between!) Yet even in the natural world, parasite populations sometimes get out of balance.

Trauma is everywhere; the more humans there are on the planet, the more trauma there will be. A vast majority of us are living in a triggered state, and only some of us admit it. We also foster minds that can navigate the nuances necessitated by spectrums, strengthening our non-black-and-white thinking in an exponentially complex world. We are tending to those historically kept out of conversations or that need triage because of an immutable past. Institutional sanction may “seem like a trivial issue to some,” but although I didn’t have a say in the need for triage, my privileged access to narc abuse research was undeniable. I accessed it via sanctioned definitions plus survivor’s accounts.

Defending the farthest ends of imposed destruction is essential. In the mid-20^th century, the philosopher Jacques Derrida watched his non-binary deconstructionism weaponized by Holocaust deniers. It was a quick adaptation, one which he himself waded in. Comparisons aren’t logical in trauma-informed arenas; we cannot let it turn into an Olympic sport. First-person accounts are invaluable; they are tools against didactics. If “power over” is the enemy, let it burn. We will benefit from listening to those who have been to the far side: they embody a cipher, attuned to the most damaging collective dynamics.

I would never claim to know the trauma of someone chained in a basement for a decade. To an analogous but empirically lesser degree, it was maddening to hear people say they were “triggered” by things for which they have distaste or “gaslit” by someone who disagreed with them once. During the last chapter and harrowing afterlife of my NPD narcissist, my evenings resembled an Apocalypse Now hotel stay. The mechanisms found when local labor is coerced into performing its own resource extraction are not far off from what drives domestic violence, but it is not the same as the discomfort caused by calling someone out on their bullshit. All of these can be covert, blatant, or have spectacle. It is up to us to navigate the shades in between.

You can’t gaslight someone once or accidentally; it is a method, a grooming process. It is based on a pattern, and keeping a log of this pattern before throwing the word around would serve us all well. Trauma bonding isn’t what occurs when two people become friends by sharing accounts of their trauma, however true and deserving of recognition (think: Stockholm’s Syndrome). You don’t have PTSD from stressful experiences; you have PTS. Love-bombing isn’t over-zealous, misguided courtship, though the pattern of suspicion by its recipients is illuminating. The idealization phase isn’t a “honeymoon period” (think objectification). And the lyrical, colloquial usage of the word narcissist doesn’t do justice to the factions of survivors clamoring to get well in an environment made of this stuff.

It was a year into my recovery from acute NPD abuse before I found therapeutic environments where I could use the word sociopath, which was the accurate word. A year to find spaces where clinicians heard me say: “I’m not sick, I’m injured.” There is growing research that NPD abuse causes literal brain damage, cognitive severance based on coercive depersonalization, inflammation, increased cortisol and adrenaline, and a weakened immune system. Anecdotally, every hellish microsecond of my burning nervous system concurs. Without this patient narrative, my doctors were mistreating me for an inaccurate condition.

By then, I was regularly calling suicide hotlines because my support system was exhausted or my abuser had triangulated them. I cut ties with the rest because of their unnuanced judgments. My tolerance was at an all-time low, and I was realizing similar traits in the people with whom I surrounded myself: they were used to me allowing this behavior, too.

For a while, knowing narcissism is prevalent and underreported, I tried to stay with people’s best commiserative offerings. I believe in this practice of respectful witness but, exhausted from fighting for validation (mine and precedence), my stripped psyche has retreated. I will return. These days, I hold a policy that I won’t discuss “narcissism” with anyone who hasn’t done basic research into the condition.

 I spent a year navigating significant neurological and physical dysfunctions like sequential reasoning, short-term memory, debilitating fatigue, loss of coordination, vision impairment, constant pain and inflammation, sleep disruption, and seizures. My community insisted that eating well, stretching, and forgiveness meditations would help me feel better. I am absolutely not knocking the first two; recovering from narc abuse has taken more physical stamina than I knew I had. But because of the underestimation from all outward appearances, being asked to take better care of myself at that early stage was like asking someone to perform their own appendectomy. I was then criticized for not doing it quietly enough.

I still defend against forced premature forgiveness, though. Insistence on it is dismissive and minimizing. I’m grateful to now be in companies that don’t see it as a prerequisite for my recovery and acknowledge that it may never be possible. I don’t yet talk to many people from “the before times” because the level of sociopathic abuse I experienced is not well-represented by the public’s definition of narcissism. Few aspects of my life that are unscathed by it, about which I can chit-chat. I appreciated the sentiment to take better care of myself and extended grace to their confusion. But thinking positively was not going to cut it. So, I fought my way through.

Recovery coaches recommend not defending yourself to conserve energy. Paradoxically, however, I couldn’t get the treatment I needed without defending the gravity of the situation. I spent taxing amounts of energy defending myself against “breakups are hard” rhetoric. (Several times, my abuser manipulated my closest friends into relaying this message to me. Hearing his echo through them was spooky, but it taught me much about them. I was then ostracized for this accurate paranoia.)  I’m not saying the outlandish reactions that followed were justified (I was as surprised as anybody by them) or that the lack of narc abuse awareness caused them, but it made me significantly lonelier, angrier, and gaslit by proxy. I spent a year putting out some fires and stoking others — because my dangerously empathetic heart sees how this isn’t just about me or my ex — before getting to the actual work. The delay was (partly) due to a lack of shared vocabulary.

Part 3 will be published on Wednesday, 9/25/24

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

In 1980, the DSM-III first added narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) to its diagnostic manual. It incorporated the trait of passive aggression, which applies primarily to covert/vulnerable NPD. We don’t diagnose passive aggression anymore because most people are, to some degree, passive-aggressive. The term has desaturated. Today, the DSM-5 has yet to distinguish between malignant and grandiose pathological narcissism, while practicing behavioral therapists do.

In 2015, the WHO issued guidelines on best practices for naming infectious diseases. Dr. Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security at WHO, highlighted the importance of accurate, culturally attuned language around public health: “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected…(It) can have serious consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods.”

In 2022, pop mistress Taylor Swift qualified narcissist with the word covert in her mega-hit “Anti-Hero.” In 2023, gaslighting was Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year”. (The top contenders were oligarch, omicron, raid (as in police maneuver), LGBTQIA+, and queen’s consort.) TikTok regularly debates #NarcTok: over 2 billion accounts have engaged with the social media tag to date. This increased awareness is a double-edged sword: language is an instrument for our natural human desire to relate, but it is also volatile and amorphous. Collectively, we have established the vernacular of the narcissistic playbook but have growing pains around the necessary discretion about the degree of severity.

Narcissistic traits to the point of NPD are rare, officially occurring in 1-3% of the population. That’s equivalent to a median of 1.75% of every breakup song you’ve ever heard being caused by a qualifiable spiritual rapist. Paradoxically, however, the disorder is underreported because, at its core, it is an inability to recognize fault or seek treatment. While healing from all nine diagnostic qualifiers during later lied-about private moments, I found myself more qualified than my abuser to name it.

Ordinarily, this is problematic: intersubjectivities should be honored, and advocates have long fought for patient’s rights to validation. But this wasn’t ordinary life: it was dragged-through-hell-backwards-by-a-sociopath land. NPD differs in this bizarre “logic” even from other cluster-B disorders, though comorbidity can exist. It’s natural to have blind spots to one’s patterns, but narcissists/narcissistic collectives occupy a sinister corner because they are the dead-last person/group qualified to recognize their faults or be trusted to hold themselves accountable. Narcissus was doomed to only love his reflection, but the scariest thing about NPD is that there is no center of self to reflect upon, thus the constant need for external supply. While we foster safe spaces in society, it is important to outline when somebody has a diminished capacity to do so.

The following entries are aspects of my reflection as I (like everyone) move through a dangerous world in my overlapping roles. My formative years were spent under a regime of religious and regional patriarchy. Relatedly, but rarely stated in black and white: I was repeatedly raped as a child. My caregivers didn’t have the language to ask me why I was so sullen and numb, so of course, I didn’t either, and I was heavily medicated. I survived, adapted, and grew up. I was then repeatedly sexually assaulted as an adult.

Today, I am actively in recovery from domestic violence by somebody who claimed to love me. I have ample evidence of his vicious narcissistic abuse, but nowhere to put it. After he discarded his broken toy, I went rogue in retaliation. I was fueled by our collective lack of awareness about and institutional replication of the situation’s severity and received a slew of contradictory messages from a recovery culture that encouraged me to return to my intuition. I took full responsibility for it. Today, as a post-graduate researcher, I’m knee-deep in our messy global history and the philosophies on whether our current collective state needs to be so dire.

I have collided with the rising prevalence of this patterned behavior from deflective black holes. I have borne repeated witness to humans asking to be gods without knowing how. I am not in the business of prescriptive false prophecy, but contrary to my less-than-perfect record disqualifying me from this conversation, it has been the main consideration through every breath of my life.

When I was breaking down from my profoundly projective boyfriend’s reactive abuse (plus getting a handle on “the playbook” and calling his bluff), he convinced me that I had a personality disorder, and I deep-dove into research on the condition’s dynamics to keep from bursting into a million pieces. The relief from hearing others put language to the strange, inverted mechanisms that my ex used to break my mind, body, and heart was indescribable.

As I emerge from the typical narc abuse rabbit hole, these questions keep me up at night: What happens if two people gaslight each other? What happens if two institutions gaslight each other? How do you differentiate between demanding accountability and a projection? And why exactly is DARVO so effective? I appreciate reminders that profound losses of self come in different forms. It would be ridiculous for me to suggest my relationship with a narc was a thousand times more traumatic than your break-up. But I do not hesitate to say it was a thousand times more bizarre and convoluted than anybody gave it due. My recovery was from a distinct experience, the exact function for which we invented language.

Many therapists won’t work with NPD folks because therapy is futile without reflection. I hope to learn more from those who are willing. I must admit to derailing my recovery when I discovered some narcs do know that they’re narcs. Many of these channels are under suspicion of convincing satire. Contemporary therapeutic efforts primarily aim to help survivors re-personalize since NPD is difficult to treat (read: how to get a qualified narc to recognize their condition in the first place). NPD treatment is one of the universe’s perfect knotted paradoxes protected by bleeding hearts, flying monkeys, and narcissistic institutions.

In keeping with the prioritization of recovery and prevention, I intend to formally petition the American Psychiatric Association (who will publish the DMS-6) and the World Health Organization (who will publish the ICD-12) to consider these shifting dynamics. My call here is two-fold: to support each other in disclosing non-consensual sadistic patterned behavior when it is safe to do so and (relatedly) to create a language describing the extent of narcissistic abuse that occurs at the hands of people with NPD. It should be distinguishable from the increasingly acceptable narcissistic behavior. I would love to hear suggestions on an alternative to present to the institutions that be. Further down the road, I hope to incorporate these reflections in developing early education awareness programs.

While we work to get NPD individuals to admit a need for healing alongside us and prepare children for a world entrenched in narcissism, my proposal for an alternative to the official name of narcissistic personality disorder aims to extract the pop psychology usage of narcissism, giving another tool to those on fire from its unique style of fallout. If the official name is changed, narcissists will remain narcissists in the colloquial sense, and we should continue to engage with that rising implication. There is no reason to throw out the baby of this common usage with the bathwater during this learning curve. No cancel culture: we should be “allowed” to say the word… but we need to know what it is that we’re saying.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

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Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

As quickly as I could after the nervous breakdown, I kept going because recovery time from violent relationships was not covered by my health insurance. I was a sloppy, hot mess. (My lack.) I was very lucky to have colleagues, bosses, and a mother who understood the severity of my plague and initiated their own research, but the strength it took to get across the difference between this and a “bad break-up” was detrimental to my stamina, never mind tainting to my reputation and work. It was another catch-22 pitfall far beyond what seemed “reasonable” from the outside.

Unable to translate symptoms in extant paradigms

In retrospect, my bravado led to more confusion from my loved ones because I had helped them underestimate my injury. (Here, I am reminded of an oversimplified but useful adage: A psychopath will try to kill you, but a sociopath will try to get you to kill yourself. That the DSM-5 distinguishes patterned behavior from other disorders, but the law refuses to, baffles me.) Unable to translate symptoms in extant paradigms, I held it together the best I could, even while humiliated, weak, and disturbed, the way a witness to a murder is disturbed.

I learned compassion from my mother. Amidst her best understanding and patience, the intergenerational tension of what she knew I endured led us to not speak for a while. Plus, I now have a profound distrust of everyone, especially those closest to me and even those who had nursed me back to health after the final discard. I am working on it. Somehow, even after not speaking to my abuser for 9 months, he was still isolating me, though I take full responsibility for the new qualifiers of my inner circle.

I strongly believe that trauma is not competitive between us, but I can compare it to my own prior experiences: recovering from narcissism was more equivalent to recovering from an assault than my worst nightmare of break-ups,… strangely harder than recovering from an assault. The intimacy of the cut, the depth of the wound. I once wrote to my abuser, saying at least the serial rapist who I awoke in the middle of the night on top of me was honest about his hatred for me. But what do I know? I am (conveniently) a very damaged and dramatic person. It’s bulletproof.

I didn’t want to paint myself as a martyr

I spent 99% of our time together, wanting to know my ex’s concerns because I loved him, but I didn’t want to paint myself as a martyr. Near the edge, I permitted myself to unfurl, and he was the only appropriate direction in which to do that. Drained of empathy, I engaged in an aggressive experiment with what I knew would most disarm my ex: mirroring. I don’t know if he ever caught on to that, but I started doing things that came back to me through the grapevine that I was supposedly doing. Things escalated. Strangely, I am the only one with a mark on my legal record. I wholeheartedly accepted the consequences because appearances are extremely important to him: he’s not allowed to contact me either, and that was the best I could get.

I don’t intend to lie through omission; I’ve made it a practice to be transparent about my retaliations with anyone with the time to listen. But I have also learned to protect it from being further cherry-picked without the details of my provocation. Best behavior is a tall order from someone under such extreme circumstances. If you intentionally disorient a person so that you can continue to harm them, it is reasonable to expect a disoriented response.

I have no solutions to an ancient problem of evil

In my unchartered territory of recovery from intimate narcissistic abuse, I have no solutions to an ancient problem of evil. I’ve read accounts of wise men across millennia stumped about what to do with people who are inexplicably “bad seeds”; the parallels to modern behavioral scientists’ descriptions of NPD are spooky. The most cutting-edge advice I was given was to “grey rock” the narc if I couldn’t run and hide (like staying still enough so the raptor doesn’t see you while not addressing the raptor). Although this advice resonates much more than pop psychology articles that recommend extending even more empathy to a narcissist when that is precisely what they prey upon, I have been asked to do this too much for one lifetime. I wondered if researchers were talking to victims since the logic of NPD is that it hurts them too much to self-reflect. I reminded myself daily that the man I fell in love with and missed with my whole body was a ghost. I told myself this makes sense.

This wasn’t trauma; I know trauma well, and it isn’t a strong enough word. It was brain damage. Yes, the brain is plastic, and it heals like any muscle. But to suggest that my nervous system is separate from my body, that the transgressions against my safety weren’t violations of intimate contract, that the damage I endured was purely “emotional” or “psychological” is stigmatizing and limiting to both victims’ and to an understanding of the sociopathy that caused it.

I don’t know the answer to the unresolved vampirism of narcissistic abuse or its broader societal replication. But I do know that this was not a “bad breakup.” I have been heartbroken before and know it hurts your physical heart. I know it makes it hard to eat or care about anything. I’ve been rejected even when I did my best, and I know how inside out that can make one’s socio-animalistic instincts feel. Regardless of legal mischaracterizations, this was domestic violence. This was a covert and clever series of assaults.

Many survivors of narcissistic abuse report the silver lining of huge healing opportunities of self-growth on the other side. I am beginning to see that on the horizon. I wonder if I fatefully walked into the lion’s den to be able to name an enemy of whom I had been at the mercy since pre-memory. When all else failed, I reclaimed my base instincts of safety by refusing to water it down to what was visible or “logical.” I honored what my body knew and was healing from. I lost a lot of friends in the process (who, thankfully, had shades of frame of reference), but it is only because of this that I am alive and can write this essay. It was only by admitting what my body dealt with behind closed doors that I survived. My fingers type as my brain computes and my soul remembers.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

In my worst dissociative episodes, I had never felt so deeply without myself

I am familiar with (and very grateful for) dissociation. It has protected me in chronic and extreme circumstances. Dissociation and I are at peace, having decided together that it will always be an option and will show up as needed, but I vow to address the source, too. The invisible brain damage I experienced was like dissociation, but in my worst dissociative episodes, I had never felt so deeply without myself.

During the final discard, I barely felt my body. It was symptomatically congruent with certain kinds of brain damage, especially due to an extended lack of oxygen or recovery from light torture. My motor skills suffered; my coordination was unrecoverable. Although he once told me that he would “put his hands on me if it weren’t illegal,”… no, my abuser never hit me, but I had more bruises from misjudging depths, not clearing corners, or falling downstairs. (My lack.) It was like there had been a partial sever, and even while I knew it was happening, it made complex decision-making impossible and my relationship exponentially harder to escape. When I could barely put two and two together, everything felt like a trap, each choice a weapon. I hated myself for wishing he had hit me so someone might understand.

Each choice a weapon

This was dissociation to the absolute extreme: underwater, depersonalization, muffled sounds. Left to die by the side of the proverbial road when I was no longer useful or sexy to him, he then came back for one last round, mocking me for how easy it was, but I was just happy he wasn’t screaming at me, and loved him so much from the beginning I kept thinking there must be a misunderstanding that we could clear up to get back there. He told everyone we knew that I was begging him back when, behind closed doors, I was begging him to stop. (For any uninvested parties, there were surely two sides to the story. He said/she said.) I was black-eyed raged at our “incompatibility”, then told that we had “hurt each other enough” and that he “wished me ecstatic peace”. After months of begging him to stop doing certain things to my body, and because I wouldn’t shut up about it, he blocked me because I wasn’t respecting his boundaries. I “needed to check my blind spots.” He said he needed to take better care of himself.

My brain glitched. Every waking second that I didn’t have a direct distraction, my mind raced through this irony: even the symptoms were covert, though real, intense, and chronic. Even the symptoms were invisible. It brought up comments from friends like, “Yep, that’s heartbreak! Happens to the best of us.” Or “You must have misunderstood; nobody is that manipulative… You’re overreacting. You don’t understand the gravity of the words you’re using. You need to be more empathetic…” Salt on the wound because they were paler versions of the comments from which I was healing.

I hit my head up against a brick wall of illogical violence

I was called obsessive and mocked for how much real estate the discard took up in my brain. But my brain was doing that which thousands of years of evolution had primed it: trying to make sense. The glitch came because there was no sense to make (no matter my math), and so I hit my head up against a brick wall of illogical violence. I wrote out details of impossibly complex traps to remind myself that I hadn’t made it up.

Back in my physical body, I didn’t have the life force to stand up straight. I had severe fatigue and inflammation, the kind of symptoms that make every waking moment longer but are hard to confirm through a doctor. Much like their covert cause, they were hard to pin down and this made my bones hurt more. (My lack. If only I would let myself let it go.) How do you relax when you can feel yourself drained of the adrenaline that you depend on to up-and-run should it happen again? How does one safely sleep?

When his idealization of me wore off, and the devaluing began, the convolution made it hard to even know where to begin to address anything. Plus, I had been strategically made to forget everything I believed in.  Most days I was just glad he wasn’t screaming at me, taking the calm where I could; wondering where that wonderful guy I’d met had gone; and trying to find safe moments to bring up my needs (again). It was incredibly disorienting.

Being raged at that something you saw with your very own eyes didn’t happen, then shamed for daring to suggest that it did (never mind incrementally punished over the next few weeks in seemingly unrelated ways) … is disorienting. Not finding one’s keys where one’s hands last left them and then being mocked for being late for work and shamed for being “always in crisis” (even with a decent lifetime record of managing unspeakable ills) … is disorienting. Being screamed at to be humbler for apparently having a look on one’s face that was inferred to mean “Are you talking to me like I’m ugly?” when one is pretty sure their own face reflects the sentiment “Are you talking to me like I’m a toddler?”… and then screamed at for being condescending and making inferences about one’s best guess amidst silent treatments… is disorienting. Being made to watch movies, he knew had triggering content, then mocked when upset, and deathly afraid of sharing intuitions that there’s no way he couldn’t have known… is very disorienting. Being unable to prove any of it and having your community tell you you’re misinterpreting things… is maddening.

Suddenly, and for every second of the next year, I was a cave collapsing on itself: I could neither lie nor tell the truth. I could not find the words to express the critical level of disorientation I was experiencing because of that very disorientation. It wasn’t safe for me to be alone while I hourly reaffirmed my will to live, but to be around humans, I had to water down or omit the truth. I was caught in an illogical loop and had never been less able to reason my way out of it. I cracked. Meanwhile, in a separate space known as my body…

Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

I was being future faked

In support groups for narcissistic abuse, a word that comes up often is servitude. It took tremendous logistical energy to be with my partner: in a year and a half, he stayed at my place twice. Otherwise, I was covertly expected to stay at his (though not allowed to leave an overnight bag or have much say in household decisions), so I was increasingly living out of my car, rushing home to change for one of my three jobs or school (the program of which he couldn’t name to save his life), or rushing home to feed my pets (that he couldn’t have cared less about) and then back to him and his needs. I was allowed to regularly clean his home but was offered no equal support in my living space. Any protest was met with puppy dog eyes and sob stories that played off my body’s early-instilled disposition to please. I vividly remember hauling heavy rocks in a wheelbarrow in his yard. For a long while and the life of me, I could not remember why. In retrospect, I was being future faked.

This was also part of why I fell far below fighting weight, on top of the nerves: when I realized how weak I was and how unsustainable the living arrangement was, I attempted to recenter myself in my apartment, cooking at home and buying more groceries. Once he knew this, we instantly “had to go out to dinner,” or a series of plans would come up where he was able to control the payment and the food schedule (me being a working student and him living off of a recent inheritance, not the money he pretended was because his business was doing so well). Any objection on my part got me steadily disarmed and screamed at: how dare I doubt him. Wasn’t I grateful for the dinners he bought me?

Invisible enemies are hard to fight, particularly when the enemy strikes once

(For any well-adjusted person out there wondering why I would let myself be put in this situation, I am learning to agree. But I will also ask for you to remember that the grooming process is meticulous and intelligently customized. I was a frog in a slowly boiling pot. Additionally, invisible enemies are hard to fight, particularly when the enemy strikes once and then starts three other small fires to distract from the distraction. My body/mind/spirit had collapsed long before I was able to name this living situation as a source. There were always promises, and it took me longer than my body could afford to figure out what was happening. By then, he had figured out more of my weaknesses and whipped me into a solid panic.)

I would ask my significant other for a more structured schedule and a little planning ahead to ease my role. He would sweetly say, Of course, but the next day would have a very convincing “special circumstance” that made it so he “really needed my comfort,” but only at his place for some plausible reason. He was always keeping me off balance. My frustration of not being able to explain one circumstance without the caveat of the other (even if I knew in my bones that they were connected) was more exhausting than anything to which I will ever hope to “officially” point a finger.

Partly due to the chain-smoking of cigarettes that saw me through

I digress. In my body, my breathing was shallow, and yes, this was partly due to the chain-smoking of cigarettes that saw me through. Unable to hear myself think or feel my body, I found it impossible to limit the bad habit. This plausible dynamic was readily thrown in my face when I took myself to the emergency room during a respiratory attack, and my partner told me he was glad I hadn’t woken him up (though he played my sympathies like a flute to get me to take days off work when his body was sick or injured). I had also stopped taking a helpful asthma medication because my abuser named its steroids as the culprit for my erratic behavior.

Yes, I am a broken human who coped with smoking, but my shallow breathing was also because of fear. I constantly braced under intermittent rage and affection and then, confused, broke down more when he black-eyed raged at me that I was making him walk on eggshells. (Narcissists’ accusations are often confessions via projection.) Any bringing up of my discomfort with his behavior was quickly met with “How much longer am I supposed to deal with bad things other people did to you” rhetoric. His dog-whistling was particularly effective at keeping me on edge. Several times, scheduled check-ins for our deteriorating relationship were prefaced with terrifying road rage that I couldn’t prove was strategic but left my body on high alert while entering said check-ins, where I would be screamed at for not doing good enough for him.

I was slowly being disconnected from myself, and this left him as my only authority. Having been subtly isolated from my friends and family, I heeded his victimized pleas for me to keep his secrets, to keep things private. It couldn’t have been environmental; it couldn’t have been him. He never does anything wrong. Ever. Ever. When I had irrefutable proof of a single flaw, I got called dramatic and over-sensitive or told to be “objective about my feelings” while considering his more subjectively. It couldn’t have been the toll the relationship was taking on me and my inseverable body. (Months after he left me, I found solace in “The Narcissist’s Prayer”: That didn’t happen. If it did, it wasn’t that bad. If it was, it’s not a big deal. If it is, it’s not my fault. And if it was, I didn’t mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.)

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

I am a big believer in personal responsibility. I’m the first to tell you that I struggle with c-PTSD daily from multiple assaults and a strange cultish upbringing. I manage it through therapy, medication, art, movement, prayer, and joy. Although I reevaluate every moment of being in a body that was formatively taught to feel worthless and small, it rarely gets to the level of crisis unless explicitly provoked.  I bring it up in conversation under two contexts: when it’s culturally relevant and provides a chance for advocacy, or when I am overwhelmed by privately dealing with it more than usual in a day and have no other choice but to ask my loved ones for support.

Today, pharmaceutical companies profit from the separation

The history of strategic separation of the body from the mind, and especially from the spirit, is long and publicly archived. Spinoza established it in the Enlightenment of the Western world; Descartes reinforced it. It served the state and church’s agenda to keep people less than whole, so it was sanctioned and dispersed through universities. Machiavelli said, “Leave them something.” Today, pharmaceutical companies profit from the separation; rape victims shouldn’t expect justice; the most dangerous Black man is one that knows what his skin has cost him…and everybody knows it. Similarly, functional, mature, abusively narcissistic individuals are well-adapted to the divide-and-conquer technique of invisible violence through coercive tactics to the mind, then the body, then the spirit.

However, as much as it purports progressive definitions of non-physical violence, the law still only applies to overt cases

The legal definition of domestic abuse from the United State in which I live is as follows: “harassment; physical or sexual harm; severe emotional distress; a threat causing imminent fear of bodily injury by any household member.” However, as much as it purports progressive definitions of non-physical violence, the law still only applies to overt cases, and I was not allowed to press broad charges of “domestic abuse” but asked to specify the crime. Once, in a victim’s advocacy office of the First District Attorney, I was handed a “Wheel of Violence” to which I could point to every wedge. Because my experience was unqualifiable, I had the concept of consent explained to me like a kindergartner without anyone thinking to ask me what had led to my deep consideration of it. (If they had had hand puppets, they would have used them.) There was not much I could legally do against the man I publicly declared I loved for my safety without the “empirical” evidence of bruises and rape kits.

Gaslighting and psychological violence, being perfectly legal and culturally miscategorized, nearly killed me several times over. My c-PTSD made me low-hanging fruit for my narcissistic partner because he sensed that my mind-body connection takes extraordinary work and because it made me a bulletproof scapegoat. All he had to do was take intimate information I had willingly given him in hopes of intimacy, sever my relationship with myself, and watch me decline. It is never possible to completely know anyone’s motives, though we make our best inferences by observing patterned behavior. I may be best off to start with the dry facts: I know what happened to my body.

During the final discard stage of my relationship with an individual who struggles with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), I was in acute 24/7 pain. It was my third cycle of severe narcissistic abuse with him. (Perhaps I have too high a tolerance for pain.) After years of healing from the invasion of food, my disordered eating came back with a vengeance. I lost 30 lbs. off my already skinny body. In turn, this was weaponized as proof of my fragility.

Due to my partner’s well-informed, repeated, and intentional transgressions against my somatic triggers from previous assaults, I experienced emotional flashbacks so severe that they caused seizure-like events. (The details of my slow and steady carnal exploitation deserve their own essay. I shared with him what I needed to feel safe and loved. He told me he loved me to keep me around, then threw the rest out the window and screamed at me that his actions were “just reflexive”, told me I was overly sensitive and made me apologize for accusing him. It was disgusting.) My abuser was quick to scapegoat this on my prior traumatization, and I was mocked for it.

But I digress. Back to my objective body: My vision was dark around the edges. There was no medical reason for it, but I was peripherally half-blind. My ears rang. My joints hurt. My jaw would not unclench. I had a constant headache. I was perpetually inflamed in regions some people do not even believe in. All of this was weaponized as my lack.

My mental focus was shot. Concentration, memory: triggered and shot. I couldn’t sleep; I was once again plagued by nightmares, though it had been a long while since this was last disruptive. My hypervigilance reared its ugly head again by my jumping when anyone touched me unannounced. This was all my lack. I was not handling the breakup well.

This posture drew less attention lest another predator sniffed me out

My nervous system was on fire; my body was feverish and hot. My heart (as a beating, bleeding muscle) ached in my tight chest. It got worse during panic attacks and (since I am not triggered by the wind) much worse around similar power dynamics. My muscles buckled like ropes of rubber bands, some too tight and others loose and overused. I developed a hunch in my shoulders and spine from constantly protecting myself. Even after he left me, this posture drew less attention lest another predator sniffed me out. I developed energy hotspots between my shoulder blades that were shaped like psychic backstabs. These hotspots jolted with electricity when they heard me talk big about liberating myself from them. Western general practitioners rarely recognize this vernacular, and the translation took some time.

Photo by Hugo Jehanne on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.