Never Enough

The self-description of my Ex included her being a kind and caring person, which aligns with her behavior with strangers, but aligns only partly with how I perceived her in relation to me. There were gestures of kindness to me, but also devaluation of my person and invalidation of my needs. This raises the question: is she aware of the effect that she has on her fellow beings?

My Ex is aware that she is an opinionated person. She mentioned this when we started dating and talked about our personalities. I didn’t think much of it, because I can have a strong opinion myself up to the point where others perceive me as stubborn. I imagined ourselves having passionate discussions, which we had. However, I didn’t take into consideration that her opinion was inconsistent and subject to double standards. Some of her self-assessments are flat-out untrue, for example claiming to be never aggressive or to never retaliate. I think that she believes to meet a higher standard and chooses to ignore contradicting evidence in order to not face her own flaws. This misassessment may be one of the main reasons why she had unrealistic expectations for me: she expects people to meet a high standard that she ostensibly meets herself.

She is aware that she gets angry, however, she does not seem to grasp that the source of anger is on her side. Instead, she shifts the blame onto other persons and depicts herself as a victim. She made me believe multiple times that I’m at fault, because I treated her badly and made her angry. However, her anecdotes suggest that she behaved similarly with her family and ex-boyfriends, for example by giving them silent treatment.

My Ex showed some awareness about sabotaging relationships. She mentioned this during the idealization stage of our relationship, during which she put in effort to try to understand my viewpoint and reflected on her behavior. My impression was that she curbed this effort in the devaluation stage; I suspect that her justification would be that she already had put in so much herself, but didn’t get in return from me what she thinks she deserves. After the idealization stage was over, she seemed to be unaware about her effect on me or on our relationship.

She described herself as a hypersensitive person, which I can confirm. It’s plausible to me that childhood abuse contributed to that, because she had to be aware of danger stimuli in her environment. She seems to have an ability to read people, though the accuracy varies heavily: she made observations about strangers that I didn’t notice, but her interpretation was biased by her cultural beliefs and highly affected by her emotional state. Her perception of my emotional state was self-centered as to how it affects her–hence the lack of empathy.

I cannot judge about her therapy experience, but I can say that her goal was to improve on her mental health and on herself. She didn’t mention wanting to improve on how she affects other people in her life. She never mentioned narcissism. One of the key features of people with narcissistic personalities seems to be that they are unaware of the narcissism and how it manifests in toxic and inconsistent behaviors. Dr. Grande recites two explanations as to why people with personality disorders¹ lack the insight about it:

Somebody is not able or willing to explore their own personality, to understand it, to understand how it impacts relationships, because they are anxious, depressed, they have intrusive thoughts. There are a lot of other symptoms that get prioritized and tend to distract people away from more philosophical pursuits. […] Another theory we see around lack of insight [about] personality disorders is that the personality disorders to one extent or another are protecting the individual. Usually when we use this type of theory we’re talking about narcissistic personality disorder. There’s a fragile sense of self and that personality trait–narcissism–protects that individual, […]
—Dr. Grande²

Gaining insight from self-reflection would require the narcissistic person to face their fragile ego and internalized shame. To protect from that, a narcissistic person resorts to toxic behaviors like projection, blame-shifting, and denial of responsibility. My Ex lacked insight that her behavior was harming me, but so did I. Although my intuition was telling me that I’m being treated wrong, I chose to ignore it as far as possible, because I was attuned to conflict avoidance and my inner child, when faced with the threat of abandonment, was attuned to self-blame and self-deprivation.