I just had a revelation that makes sense of one aspect of my ex's behavior that I've never before been able to understand.
He used to regularly bleat at me, "I need you to fill my looovve taaank!!" But no matter what I did, of course there was never any filling it.
One of the things he insisted would "fill his love tank" was my spending time with "the girls," aka his two teenage daughters... which was an exercise that most certainly did not fill *my* "love tank."
I could drive the 70 miles one way to his house, spend some time with him and both girls there at the house, then take one girl out for 1:1 time, return several hours later... and he would bleat at me, "I neeeeeed you to spend time with the girls!!! That fills my love tank!
And I would feel so confounded, and so chastised. <the voice in my head: "I *literally JUST DID* the thing you're saying you neeeeeed me to do for you!"> He would act as though it was something I refused to do for him. It was so crazy-making to have him express it as an *unmet* need, something I was "failing" or outright refusing to fulfill.
It's been years since I've been out of that relationship, yet I'm still putting the pieces together - unraveling and making sense of what it was all about, as well as putting the pieces of myself back together.
The revelation that just occurred to me about this particular aspect of our relationship is thanks to my brain's ongoing work to synthesize the immense volume of reading I've done to fully understand narcissism and all its facets.
In the same f-d up way that narcissists can't differentiate their own feelings from those of their partner, such that they accuse US of having anti-relationship or other negative feelings that THEY actually have, or such that they accuse US of doing things THEY are actually doing...
I think that perhaps in this same way, when I would return from spending an emotionally, physically, psychologically, and financially taxing few hours with one of his teenage daughters, he would look at me and see ***MY*** empty "love tank" and then reverse-project it as being his own! His own feelings instead of mine!
It's like an extra twisted spin on the already twisted game of "emotional hot potato." It's yet another appropriation of my personhood, of my soul, of my psychological energy.
So, I think it was quite possibly *that* that was going on.
Also, due to the lack of "object constancy" and "theory of mind" that narcissists seem to have (they lack those things), I also just realized that maybe my spending time with the girls wasn't in any way "real" to him, and therefore he couldn't take any true personal pleasure in it, because he wasn't there to participate in and experience it himself. So it, and all of my other efforts outside of his immediate physical and "emotional" purview, were "de-realized" in his mind.
Talk about the "law of diminishing returns"! Talk about an exercise in futility!
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