Integrate not alienate

It is a known phenomenon that borderlines often end up in relationships with narcissists. Yes that's what I read after my breakup and it was not helpful at all: to know that my suffering was to be predicted. That I'm just a part of the statistic. Some people even write that such people end up together because they are similar and worth each other. Well that is not really helpful once you're in the post breakup shit. But I have found out how to leverage this situation to my benefit.

I see the narcissist as surrounded by a sphere of mirrors, each pointing back at himself. It's very frustrating as those are one-way mirrors, which means that anyone can see the narcissist while the narcissist can't see anyone but himself. And in this way a relationship with a narcissist is both people looking at him. But what happened this time, while everything was falling apart I had a glimpse of my own reflection in the narcissist's distorted mirror. And what I saw shocked me. What I saw was not pretty.

I wrote about my narcissistic traits in the previous post. That's one thing. Another thing I realised is that I've started to adopt even more of the narcissistic behaviors, and as the result becoming more like him. That was a terrifying realisation. But now I really had to ask myself: why?

Well I think that what I heard in a video by Sam Vaknin is indeed the case: narcissism and borderline are two different coping strategies to the very same problems that stem from childhood abuse (in case of the abuse-induced type of narcissism). One strategy has been more efficient in the past that's why it won and made it to this day. Btw, I think that gender plays big factor in regards to which strategy wins. By getting to know the narcissist I saw the other strategy in action, the one I decided against and I was naturally curious of it. In the end it's what I could have become. He had something I didn't have. Once I saw it in action I may have realised that actually in my current age and the western world I live in the narcissistic strategy is indeed more efficient. That's how I could flip from one coping strategy to the other. In certain situations I switched from directing my aggression at myself to directing it at others - just to give the obvious example.

I think it is crucial to recognize that it's not that I'm becoming another person, I'm just exchanging one coping strategy to the other. The underlying problems remained the same (the ones I wrote about in the previous post), the situation just enabled me to see them more clearly. Having two coping strategies is like having two points of view, which is so much more than one! It means that I can actually make use of this situation to learn a great deal about myself, that I would otherwise not be able to.

That's why it's so important to actually make use of such break up rather than try to "move on" as soon as possible. Integrate not alienate. Find a way to make sense of what happened and integrate it into my life. This shit didn't appear in my life for no reason. It happened in order to teach me something.

Now I have two lazy, black and white choices:

The narcissist's way is out of question because it's against my moral standpoint, and it leads to a life that is like being dead inside. The borderline way would eventually lead to a suicide. That's why it's the third choice that I'm forced to take, the non-easy way: take steps towards solving the underlying problems, towards recovery, towards growing up.