How To Love Your Narcissist And Still Protect Yourself and Your Family

I hate to use the term “gaslight”, because my enneagram 4 wing has a really big butt and she takes up a lot of room inside my personality. We don’t like to use terms everyone else is using.

Nevertheless.

I think this will help more than one person.

You may be shocked at who you discover is willing to gaslight you - who it is that will try to tell you that your experience of them was not your experience of them. That you can’t be right, accurate, or correct in your perception. They truly will try to convince you that you didn’t see what you saw, didn’t experience what you experienced, didn’t hear what you heard.

I can promise you that there’s at least three people who’ve gone before you, who were put through the same routine: “love bomb, draw close, siphon energy, push away, mistreat, then gaslight”. It’s a dangerous pattern, and the damage is real.

When this happens to you, DO NOT RUN. If you run, they will catch on, and likely try to make you pay! When this happens to you, when the gaslighters gaslight….smile and wave. Just smile and wave.

If you say anything at all, simply say “Mmmmkay, thanks.”

Back away slowly. Smile the whole time. Tell them how wonderful they are - because they are probably a narcissist anyway. You see, even though they are gaslighting the crap out of you, you are still the one with all the power.

Because you can still find things to genuinely love about them, in spite of their behavior. But love does not have to equal access or proximity. Especially not when the well being of others you lead is also at stake - such as your children, if you are a parent, or your church if you are a pastor, or your team if you are a business owner. You can find ways to pray for them, and to care for them from a distance that keeps you and the people you lead safe.

Just put ‘er in reverse, sis. Back away slowly as you wave, smile, and keeeeeeeeeeeeep on backing away, until there’s miles between you. Then back away some more. Give them space to move onto the next person.

Oh, they will. They so will. They always do.

Because they are always looking for someone fresh and new and interesting enough to them, to siphon off some of the next woman’s spiritual insight, or creative energy, or joy. They are always looking for the next person to treat her as the screen upon which they get to project their version of themselves. Only to swear that they didn’t do ANY of those things, AT ALL.

Bless.

Trust me, they won’t go without willing victims. Like attracts like - and that is why you never really mixed as well with them at first as you wanted to. But the next person might be the perfect match. They will be thrilled to have each other. For a time. Always, for a time.

In other words, do not worry that your narcissist or gaslighter will miss you. They won’t.

But again: You have all the power. Because you know what’s up. You know what’s going on, and you are making conscious choices, for the benefit of the greater good, and with conscious love.

Hot Days, Hot Girlfriends, and The Middle of the Middle of the Middle

It’s Wednesday. Not only is it Wednesday, it is June 15th. It’s the middle of the week of the middle of the month of the middle month of the year.

Today is the middle of the middle of the middle. It’s the middliest of the middle. In my mind, this is significant.

The “feels like” temperature was over 100 degrees this afternoon. The purple basil, once flush with fresh leaf and blooms I had to pinch back every day, is looking a bit wilted and bedraggled. I hear my grandkids outside my office window, bouncing a basketball in our culdesac as The Preacher cheers their attempts and the sun sets.

In the hot, tired middle, we who are in it need retooling, desperately. After all, we have probably experienced sickness, difficulty, even betrayal, and our wide-eyed innocence is as wilted and weak as purple basil in a hundred degrees. I don’t know about you, but I have gotten older and wiser, and I’m just not mature enough anymore to shrug off cynicism. I have to avoid it. I even have to push back on it, everywhere I see it trying to languish my joy.

The tiniest consolations are as big a miracle to me, now, as walking on water. This world is so rife with strife and war and pestilence, that a glass of iced tea with an Alabamian friend, the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandchildren, or field flowers in the scorching sun, all alike are tender miraculous mercies, not to be taken for granted. Noticing something small - granular, even - something centered in the day I am actually in, pulls me back from the abyss of apathy that so many others in their middle seem to have fallen into.

Today has been as hot as the hinges on the gates to hell, but the birds are still singing out there, delighting in the blue hour. Wildflowers thrive, and wildly so, because they’ve become acclimated to the weather that is, not the managed outcomes of greenhouse conditions.

The Preacher picked up some Chinese takeout for our supper tonight, because I had a magazine article deadline. (I can’t feel upset about this, when I’ve waited all my life to be able to say it!). Of course, I went for my fortune cookie, first. It said:

The one who knows enough is enough, will always have enough.

So, on this middle day of the week, in the middle of the month that is the middle of the year, I stop to say to my soul, “It is enough.” Every ordinary day is crammed with glory, springing up even from roots set in parched, hot earth.

And because “I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate”, tomorrow I leave for Birmingham, Alabama.

Van Gogh said that, and I partly believe it. Because something akin to “fate” crossed the paths of The Preacher and I, with these friends - Mark and Jennifer, pastors of Life of Faith Church in Birmingham. It all began with them being “friends of a friend”, but now I don’t know which friend is the friend of a friend, them, or the couple who introduced us. I reckon we are all each others dear ones, now.

And because I hate travel, and never engage it without a good reason, you could say I’m an adventurer by fate, not choice. Whether it’s Italy, Nashville, France, or Birmingham - it’s all the same to me. I’d rather stay home, but the love of God compels me.

As does the laughter of a good, southern preacher’s wife.

Me, thinking about 18-wheelers on the interstate

I’ll be back, come Monday.

Have a beautiful, middle evening. And then a beautiful weekend, this sweet middle-month.