Narcissism

Hello everyone, welcome to the Said in Therapy Podcast. Have you ever considered going to therapy and you ended up not going? My question is why? In my humble opinion, I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. In fact, I believe everybody should go at least once in their life.

My name is Iman Tohami and I'm a psychologist. This podcast tells you all about everyday cases with everyday people who have everyday problems and difficulties, and sometimes they carry around really deep wounds. These are their stories.

And it is actually the first time I'm going to alter the voice of my patient.

My patient was kind enough to record her story for me and send it over to me. We didn't get a chance to record an interview. So the reason why I'm altering her voice is purely out of security reasons.

And I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but we want to be on the safe side. I think for next week or maybe as a bonus episode in between, I'm going to upload an episode that is more focused on defining and explaining a narcissistic personality disorder.

But for now I want you to listen to a story of a girl who was affected in a relationship with someone who very likely had a narcissistic personality disorder. We never can know for sure. But so far there are indicators to show that this might be the reason for his behavior.

And to give you a short insight, what is a narcissist? It's a buzzword everybody is using at the moment. You will find it all over the internet. There is a problem with that. Because the reality is, you know, when someone posts one too many selfies or pics um or, you know, using his dating profile to show all muscles or the great beach body they have, and they only talk about themselves.

Well, we might call them a narcissist. But the reality is it's not that easy. We cannot confuse a narcissistic personality disorder with other disorders or other personality traits that are not positive. So a true narcissist is someone with a health health condition.

So I want you to keep that in mind. And when we look at the DSM, we will find a few pointers and I will read them to you. So first, an inflated sense of importance, a deep need of excessive attention, admiration, a lack of empathy for others, and often having troubled relationships.

But it is a little bit more extreme extreme than that, because people with a narcissistic personality disorder would stop at nothing, absolutely nothing, to put themselves in the mess best positive light, and also to manipulate and shame others in the process.

As I said, my patient was kind enough to record her story. You are not going to hear my voice in between, but yeah, listen to it. And as I said, her voice is altered for security reasons. She lives in the Middle East and we want to be, well, careful about what we are putting out there.

Enjoy.

And this is my story of being emotionally involved with a narcissist. A time that's not very long time ago, I did not know that I was being dragged into a relationship that will make me feel very empty, very hopeless, very desperate, and on the verge of committing suicide.

I did not know because he was a dangerous person and I'm full of empathy and I usually evaluate human beings and people around me with how they're dealing with me and how they're treating me and other people. What you don't know about narcissists is that their existence is tied to destroying other people around them.

They don't want anyone with great potentials around them. They don't want to see anyone being successful around them. They want to be the center of attention no matter what at any cost. Even if what they'll do is inhuman or unethical.

What matters the most is them attaining what they want regardless of the coast. It started about two years ago. He was a nice gentleman who perhaps saw a lot of potential in me. And it started off by giving me a lot of attention, a lot of love, and chasing me for a very long time before making sure that I had emotions or felt something towards him.

So for about after six to seven months of being chased, I give in. I give in and the relationship starts giving me more attention and more love and more gifts and remembering small details about me in my life, remembering every single thing I do, being protective.

However, after him making sure that I felt the same and I was giving him as much attention as he was as he used to give me back in the beginning of the relationship, and after he made sure that I was completely in love with him, everything started to change.

Everything started to change because think of it as a flower. You find a beautiful flower and for the flower to grow and bloom, you need to take care of it. So what you do is that you put it in a suitable environment, certain amount of sunlight, certain amount of water, you check up on it every day, you put fertilizers to it, and you watch it bloom.

And then one day you get bored of it and you decide to cut off all resources on the flower. The flower would survive a day or two, but eventually it dies. Unfortunately, I was a flower back then. I was a successful woman at my work, I'm beautiful, I'm educated, I was doing my master's, and I was getting close towards finishing my master's degree.

And I always dreamed like I had dreams in my life. Um I would say that my family was proud of who I am and I had good friends and I was lovable. So I believe I was a very good target for him.

I guess he did not feel very comfortable being in competition with someone who's younger than him and doing as great as he did. Anyways, he cut off all the resources and I don't understand why. I'm confused. Totally confused.

Are you mad at me? Did I do anything wrong? What did I do to you? Are you mad at me because of what I'm wearing? Because I'm going out because I'm not spending enough time with you. I try I try to find a lot of reasons for me to understand why this is happening.

I mean, deep down I know that I did not do anything wrong. But on the contrary side, he makes me feel like it's my fault. He's turning tables on me. Um I'd start off by why are you wearing this?

Do not wear that, it's too tight. Cover yourself more, do not go out without telling me, controlling who I'm friends with and who I'm not, asking me to quit my masters because there is no use of pursuing my education and that I have to focus on my work.

Oh, I forgot to mention that he was my former manager. Therefore, whenever I did not do something, I'm sorry, whenever I did something that he did not like, work would be a pressure point on me. So it started off like that, controlling me, as if what I thought, oh he's being protective.

But I did not understand things back then. Incidents after incidents, it accumulates and I find myself months later very helpless, very empty, and I don't understand. You know, you're supposed to feel great in relationships, you're supposed to feel empowered by your partner, but I found myself feeling more weak and more in pain, more crying, more negative feelings.

And he seemed happy about it. The unusual part of it is that he seemed happy about it. And that's when I started noticing creepy behaviors out of him. Um I did feel that there was something fishy. I felt that he was seeing someone else, but I'm not really good enough when it comes to catching people cheating on me.

Unfortunately. Some way the relationship ends. He asks to end it, but in a very unofficial way. He's like, I will stop seeing you, but we will remain together. So it leaves me in a lot of confusion. Two days later the relationship ends and it gets exposed to my family.

I don't know how, but it gets exposed to my family. And as much as I'm very happy that it ended, I wish it did not end that way. I call him that night and I tell him that this happened and that he needs to propose.

Of course, he did not propose, he ran away. And later on I find out that he was cheating on me with multiple women. He talks shit about me. Excuse Excuse my vocabulary. He talks really bad about me and he tries to ruin my reputation in front of people I love.

So what I do is that after being desperately in so much pain, I found myself drowning in pain, drowning and being desperate, being hopeless. I think of every single way to commit suicide. Not to mention that I was on anxiety and depression pills.

So taking an extra dose of my depression and anxiety pills would definitely do the necessary. I thought of throwing myself out of the building. I thought of cutting cutting my veins. But the most easy for me was swallowing an extra dose of my pills.

I mean it's probably painless, but a deeper voice inside of me told me to stop. I had faith that things are gonna be okay. I did not know when, but I knew that things are gonna be okay. No matter how long it takes it, things are gonna be okay.

So a miracle happens and I reach out to Iman. I cannot emphasize enough on how grateful I am to meeting Iman because she has helped me so much find myself again. I'm still doing my best to find myself again, but I'm very close to that.

She was she was delight in a tunnel, in a very dark tunnel that I was drowning in, and she's helped me so much. So I get myself together. I remember that despite what happened, I need to forgive myself.

I need to forgive myself for the pain that I have caused to myself and for the pain that I have caused to others, to people I love. And it's a fresh start. I need to start all over again.

I need to focus on my studies and on myself and becoming a better a better person than who I was a year ago. I do a lot of medi meditating. I read more, I spend more time alone, I focus on my studies and I graduate with my master's degree.

Once later I find myself more at peace. I would say 70%, 70 to 80 percent at peace. I start a small project where I do university projects for university students and private tutoring, and I start making small money here and there.

I begin to feel a lot better about myself as I'm devoting my energy towards myself. I forget about his existence. Not to mention that even if one year passed, he still tries to destroy me, he still tries to ruin my reputation, he still tries to send people to me, and I ignore.

I totally ignored his existence, I totally ignored his trials and attempts in destroying me and making me break. I acted like he does not exist anymore. I don't know a person. I don't know that person, sorry, I don't know that person anymore.

And I move on. I focus on myself, I devote my energy towards myself. As I'm devoting my energy towards myself on becoming a better person, a better virgin of me, he's he's breaking. He's breaking, he's desperately asking for any reaction of my side, but I'm not giving him this privilege anymore.

I'm not giving him the privilege of knowing how I feel, whether negative or positive. And he's dying every single day to know what's in my mind, what am I doing? Because he initially thought that I would I would break.

He would see me breaking, he would see me crawling back to him, asking him to to come back to me. But unfortunately, I'm not this type of person. Because when I forget, I remove, block, and delete. That's what any one of you should do.

Never fall for their attempts to hoover you, never fall for attempts of you being love-bombed by their side. It's all fake. Trust me, it's all fake. As much as traumatic the experience was and unfortunately there are certain incidents that I wish I would forget, and they still honk me through the night being mentally, physically, socially and financially abused, but there was a reason why it happened.

And it's definitely for me to become a stronger version of myself. All I know is that I'm definitely, definitely a stronger woman than who I was a year ago, and I will not break. I will not break no matter how much he tries to do so.

So to end the episode, I would like to let you know that if you feel that you're in an abusive relationship, that there is help. I will try to link a few websites that you can use to find resources in case you need help.

And also, if you feel like reaching out to me, you can always do so.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode so far. If you have any questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The handle is always @saidintherapy.