47-Domestic Violence WARRIOR: Amanda; Part 1

Transcript

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Hi Warriors, welcome to One in Three.

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I'm your host, ingrid.

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I cannot stress enough the importance of recognizing that abuse is not only physical.

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By now we are all familiar with the different forms.

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Even so, emotional and psychological abuse are still too often dismissed.

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My next guest describes her abuse in the next two episodes.

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In part one she explains the traits attributed to narcissistic personality disorder.

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Here is Amanda.

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Good morning.

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I have Amanda with me this morning, so Amanda welcome.

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Thank you.

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Thank, amanda, welcome.

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Thank you.

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Thank you, ingrid.

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Thanks for having me today.

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I'm really happy to be here and share my story in hopes to help someone else.

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Yes, and you have kind of a background of where you have been actively trying to help people and I think that's somehow how I found you.

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Yeah, that's what I was wondering.

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I am active in some Facebook groups and I talk to other women and kind of that's how I started actually helping to heal myself is getting into some of these groups after I endured narcissistic abuse and domestic violence due to my husband's disorder.

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So my goal today is to continue to break the silence of abuse, and after two years, of separating from my now ex-husband.

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I decided to talk about what transpired during my marriage on social media and I posted something on October 1st to honor Domestic Abuse Awareness Month.

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The concentration of that post was to bring awareness to mental and emotional abuse by someone who has undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder and, as someone who is a special education teacher, I've done a lot of research and it's not discussed enough and it's certainly not recognized by the courts.

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So I found during my divorce so you know there was some physical abuse.

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It wasn't, you know, straight up.

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He never punched me, he never used a fist.

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There was some body checking.

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There was some intimidation by proximity things like that banging on the door, things like that.

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Those were more of the intimidation by proximity, things like that banging on the door, things like that.

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Those were more of the intimidation and physical.

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But there was also some really insidious, horrible things that he did that I wanted to talk about.

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So on October 19th of 2022, I was falsely accused of abusing my husband and I was removed by the police from my home with a restraining order, and I was shocked.

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I felt like something bad was happening and coming, because two days before that, I started walking around the house and I started taking pictures of everything in the house, and I don't know exactly at the time what led me to do that, but I decided that somehow that this was the right thing to do, because he had been making threats that he wanted a divorce, he wanted me to leave, he wanted me gone, but he had been saying that for years.

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So to me it was crying wolf, but somehow things had just gotten so bad between us that I thought I needed to do this.

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So I was removed and this was a strategy by him and punishment after refusing $5,000 to get divorced with our attorney, he wanted to give me 5K to get the F out of his house and to get divorced and to be gone, and I refused and I refused.

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So he had his lawyer file it and you know it was unbelievable.

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The most interesting part of this order is that he wrote on the last page that the abuse started in 1997 and has continued to escalate.

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And I'm thinking who exactly are you talking about?

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In 1997, I was 21 years old and he was living in Los Angeles, so we met in January of 2016.

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So it didn't make any sense.

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So it just really brought to light some of the delusion that people with narcissistic personality disorder have, and it was par for the course for all the other things that were not true.

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So apparently he saw my post because I believe he stalked my page.

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I don't think he's.

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I feel like he's not completely out of my energy, although I wish he would would just leave me alone and move on.

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He stalked my page and it was brought to my attention that he started a smear campaign after I posted with more fabricated stories that I'm the abuser, I'm the problem, and the ironic thing is that all of these things that he claimed I can prove, if I really wanted to, that they're not true.

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I have proof.

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He claims that you know, I've used children, I'm a special ed teacher and, yeah, there's no proof of anything and I'm currently a special ed teacher.

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There's no way in the world I would still be able to do that if you know I was the abuser.

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So it's stuff like that that doesn't make any sense and I can tell how far I've come in my healing journey because it doesn't bother me as much, it doesn't trigger me as much as it would prior.

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You know, two years ago my head was spinning.

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I felt completely chaotic because I had been in this environment where nothing made sense.

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So now it doesn't bother me as much.

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Um, and once I educated myself and started doing the healing work, you know what he does is just expected, you know.

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I just I'm an acceptance of it because that's just what they do.

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Um, the more I learn, the more I you know, the more it helped me understand that it wasn't about me.

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It's just what he does because he has disordered thinking and he has zero interest in understanding because he doesn't have the problem in his eyes.

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He's a victim.

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He's always going to be the victim, right?

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So I'm actually going to go down the list of some of the things that I learned and also experienced at the same time, just to help reiterate what narcissistic personality disorder is and help you know if your listeners are interested and don't know much about it, like I didn't, to help educate as well.

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So and I have, you know, I have him blocked everywhere, so I really don't have to deal with it.

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So I guess he has like a fake page or something.

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I don't know.

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I'm not sure, but and I use the screenshot after I read it, I use that as content to educate as well that this is a smooth campaign and this is what he does, and obviously he's upset that I'm speaking, so there's something to be said about that, that he doesn't like the power that I hold.

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So you know, anybody who's neurotypical and irrational is not going to understand the delusion of a narcissist.

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So that's what I was trying to do for so long.

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Why are you doing this?

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Why are you causing so many problems, so much discord in our lives?

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And you know he says his mother was abusive.

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So okay, here you are in your life now as an adult who gets to choose.

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What kind of life?

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do you want to have know?

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here I am trying to build something with you and I feel like it's built on, built on nothing.

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It's built on sand, and every time I try to build, he would break it down and he would sabotage.

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So, but the continued drama is something that he uses to feel relevant, to feel powerful, to feel like he's winning something.

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It's this, it's as if he can't let go, and during the divorce that he dragged out, he continued with immoral, unethical tactics, but they weren't illegal.

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The things that he did were not illegal, but they were dramatic, they were ridiculous, and all the while saying he didn't want a divorce.

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So he had me removed from the home and then, soon after, wanted to drop the divorce and wanted me to come back, and it made no sense to me.

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So here you are pulling all these tricks.

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Uh with your lawyer and at the same time, you're texting me through the neighbor because we couldn't have contact through the neighbor uh, asking me to come back and saying he didn't want a divorce and he hates all of this.

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You hate it, but yet you're doing it.

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So it's bizarre.

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It was like some type of like uh, separation, like it's as if the divorce like this is just what we do or this is how this has to go.

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Is how I felt about it, because it didn't.

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That's the only way I could.

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I could rationalize it, you know, in my brain, because you know he has no self-awareness and no ability to self-reflect, so there was that kind of compartmentalizing of any you know the feelings that he has.

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You know narcissists lack empathy.

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So it was super confusing and I just chalked it up to.

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This is part of the disorder and this is what they do, and that that helped me.

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I could only control myself and how, how I, you know, carry myself through this, through this divorce.

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He asked me to come back and I said absolutely not, you know, and I truly believe that he wanted me to come back for more lives and more views.

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And what I learned was that when, even though they're lying to you and saying everything's going to be better, everything will be great this time and I'm going to do this for you and that for you when you come back.

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It'll only be worse, because they're going to disregard everything they said to you and their thinking process is oh, she accepts the abuse, she accepts who I am, she accepts what, what I do.

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So I'm going to keep doing it and I'm going to you know up the ante on on this.

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So I knew that, even though I was enduring abuse, that there would be an end point, uh, in divorce, versus going back to the roller coaster of the love bombing, the devaluation, the discarding, and hovering back and starting all over again.

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Right, because that is the entire circus that I was dealing with at the time.

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This is the cycle and it's super chaotic and it's pretty textbook.

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From what I've learned, you know I make a joke that they all learn from the same handbook and it's not a laughing matter, but sometimes humor helps me get through.

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Let me share some of the tactics that they use.

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So some of the traits of the narcissist they lack empathy, and empathy exists in several parts of your brain.

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You can't grow more, you can't get more.

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So I like to say that you know, narcissism exists on a continuum, much like autism.

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There are different levels because there are different levels of empathy within all of us.

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And so from a one to a 10, I'm going to say he's about a six and a half to a seven and the person I met at the end he did all these horrible things is.

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He really is, and it just showed how much he lacked, how much empathy he lacked.

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And, above all, control is very important.

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He had a false sense of control over me or his daughter, and he felt in control even though he was out of control, because if you are in control of self, you don't need to control other people or feel like you have to.

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They have to win and he'll cheat to win, and he has.

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He lost in our divorce and is now telling people he paid to get rid of me.

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Apparently, that was part of the smear campaign, which is really interesting, because we had to subpoena his financial, so he wasn't giving me anything freely.

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That was part of dragging out of this divorce, and even then he offered me a settlement offer with nothing.

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So there's proof right there that you know.

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I'm sorry.

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I have to say that's one of the most ridiculous things I've heard, and everyone I talked to paid to get rid of you.

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Yeah, yeah, he said, yeah, that he wanted to.

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Just he was so done with me because I was the abuser that he, yeah, just finally paid out so we could be done.

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And what did he say Like how were you abusing him?

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What was his claim?

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He said, from looking at the order of protection, that I hit him.

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He said I abused him, his daughter, who we had part-time, and the dog yeah, that was part of this order that I had been abusing him since 1997, even though we met in 2016,.

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That I was demanding more money from him.

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What did he say?

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Oh, that he came at me and I, in fear, I put my hand up to protect myself because I didn't know what he was going to do.

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As he moved closer toward me and I guess my hand hit him or whatever, or pushed up against him or whatever open, open hand.

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And he says in here that I hit him, but I but I used an open hand and the open hand is no excuse.

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It's still hitting.

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So it's very technical, yeah, it's very technical, but you know, but he could rush me.

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He's, you know, he weighs more than me, he's bigger than me, but you know.

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I mean intimidation.

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Yeah, intimidation is part of abuse.

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Using their stature or whatever to intimidate Unbelievable, yeah, exactly.

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So, yeah, and he says it's, it's continued to escalate.

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I fear for my life and moving forward, he wanted a divorce and I was like, okay, you got your wish and then he didn't want it again, even after this restraining order.

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So, with that victim mindset right, he created situations to claim victim status, even though I was defending myself against him.

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You know, yeah, multiple times he would create a scenario and he was, I believe, when he was reliving some of the pain and delusion with his mother of the past that he never worked through and created, tried to create that scenario with me and me being trying to rationalize with him.

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I would have conversations.

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I am not her.

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What are you doing?

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Why are you doing this?

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Attention, this is like air for the narcissist.

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They need supply, they need to be validated, they need to be admired and loved and it's all external.

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There is no internal system going on here, there's no internal love.

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Um, he needs a main supply to fill up on energy.

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So apparently, you know, when the narcissist chooses you, you see it as a compliment because there's something in within you, your light, your energy, your whatever personality traits that they like, that they want for themselves, and they don't realize like it doesn't work that way.

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You can't own my integrity or whatever you don't.

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That's not how it works, doesn't matter if it's positive or negative.

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You you know, and something that they do it's called the narcissist smirk, like once they see that they've got you wound up, they've got you upset, they've pushed you beyond.

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And for me, I am not someone who yells and I found myself yelling and he would just stand there and smile because he knew he upset me and that was the goal, that was the aim.

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So I felt like you know, he wakes up in the morning.

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How can I piss my wife off today?

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That's really what I felt.

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So I can feel better about me, you know, and there was, there was no, there was nothing wrong with that, I suppose in his eyes, um, public admiration.

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So we talked about the smear campaign.

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External validation creates self-worth to hide behind this mask.

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So actually we were creating a business together, we were partnering.

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We had a distillery, we were starting and we're partnering with a brewery, and it was supposed to be about us.

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It was our business and more and more it became about him.

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He wanted, he made the boots, he did the sexy part and I was doing more of the business side and he loved the attention that he was getting with the girls and he also did some art.

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He had a motorcycle theme and so he, you know, has actually some artistic ability and you know he'd post these things and he'd post his art and wanted the attention and whatnot.

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So, creating a public image is completely different than private behaviors.

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So he's very much a covert narcissist.

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He would give a stranger the shirt off his back and, wouldn't you know, give me what I needed or what I asked for.

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The behaviors behind closed doors were horrible and we'll get to that Manipulation.

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He says abuse toward me never happened, and it's me.

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But I'm the instigator, I'm the problem.

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I'm lying, I'm the abuser.

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He wanted me to think that and thank God I had enough sense to say no, this is what happened.

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I saw what happened, I heard what happened.

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So you cannot convince me.

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Otherwise I would dig my heels in on that, because I've heard stories from other women who were confused and thought they were the bad person in that relationship, when actually they're being manipulated and they were just so tired and worn down that they were in acceptance.

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Okay, maybe it's me right, and no one's perfect by any means, but this is an extreme, you know, since we have a constant internal war between entitlement and worthlessness, so fragile sense of self.

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So he would move from arrogance to you know, I'm not even the dirt under your shoe, so you know, and he hates himself and he told me I'm harder on myself than anyone, I know.

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And so how is that possible when you hate yourself?

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How do you love another person when you can't fill your own tank?

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There's no way that you can be with someone else.

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And he faked it, you know, for a while Arrested development, so lacking the ability to behave like an adult, throwing, you know, in this case, a man tantrum until he got his way.

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You know, sometimes I felt like I was talking to an eight-year-old, sometimes I felt like I was talking to a 15-year-old.

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Um, and a disagreement would turn into an explosion.

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They have, uh, zero sense of scale.

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So the smallest disagreement, you know, uh, you know, I don't want to go here for dinner, I want to go there for dinner would blow up and it would become a personal attack.

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And anything I'd ever told him in confidence, anything that I'd ever told him that may be an imperfect person, or any story.

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He would drag it up and use it as a weapon and actually create more details than what was actually true or what happened.

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And he continued that with the smear campaign, by the way, gathering information to use it to his advantage.

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So when I first met him, I thought we were getting to know each other and actually he was gathering information, he was banking it so he could find out, first of all, if I was someone he could manipulate and control.

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He was trying to find out what made me imperfect as a person so he could use that against me.

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He was, you know.

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Again, control and win is what they want to do.

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Yeah, he would gather information and then anything personal that I said and in a disagreement he would drag it up and he would throw out all these details.

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That wouldn't make any sense.

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It wasn't even about me and I don't know if that was something that happened in the past with his mother, or I can't.

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Even I can't make heads or tails of it.

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No accountability, no responsibility, no sense of no, no self-reflection, no self-awareness.

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When it came to me now, other people, you know, if you listen to him on the phone because he worked from home on his computer, I would hear him and I didn't know, even know, who that person was anymore.

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Um, he could problem solve, he.

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He was courteous, you know, he waited for his turn to talk, things like that that normal people do.

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It wasn't there in our relationship.

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He was totally footless grip as soon as he walked off and become this other person, it was awful.

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So what else Misogyny?

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So he hates women because of his mother, and I didn't realize that at first.

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But every woman that in my position as being, you know, his other half or his relationship with, is the one that receives all the, is the target it receives all this horrible behavior.

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Um, it did leach into behavior with his daughters, I believe his daughter who we have her time she was one who would fawn, so she would take an adult role, sort of, and make it okay for dad.

00:21:07.932 --> 00:21:09.375
That's what she would do.

00:21:09.375 --> 00:21:17.712
She would be the perfect princess and, you know, not react, not, you know, her true personality wouldn't really come out.

00:21:17.712 --> 00:21:20.872
She was quiet, she watched him like a hawk.

00:21:20.872 --> 00:21:29.493
She would, you know, pay attention to what he was doing, so she could tap into his feelings, so she could anticipate what was going to happen.

00:21:29.493 --> 00:21:36.164
And so I haven't really talked much about, you know, his kids, but that is something that I noticed with his daughter.

00:21:36.164 --> 00:21:42.694
I don't really talk too much about his kids, but that is something that I noticed with his daughter Rejection, so belittling, blaming their chosen target for problems and mistakes.

00:21:42.694 --> 00:21:46.099
Even if I wasn't even there, it wouldn't make a difference.

00:21:46.099 --> 00:21:50.390
It's my fault somehow Expressing rage and then denying his anger.

00:21:50.390 --> 00:21:53.335
So, you know, I started recording things.

00:21:53.335 --> 00:21:55.979
I have pictures, I have recordings.

00:21:55.979 --> 00:22:08.807
He would come up and bang on the door and scream at me to get the F out of his bathroom while I'm trying to take a shower, things like that.

00:22:08.807 --> 00:22:11.148
I have a lot of these things recorded.

00:22:11.148 --> 00:22:12.289
They have lack of object constancy, so.

00:22:13.171 --> 00:22:30.670
So if he decided that I'm bad, I'm bad continually, I'm just a bad person, it wasn't a mistake, it wasn't something that I said that I could take back, it was all the way, it was all or nothing and he also had that with himself.

00:22:30.670 --> 00:22:38.738
He believed that he was a bad person as well and he fought back and forth with that, choosing people they can use for their benefit.

00:22:38.738 --> 00:22:43.563
You know, I would say that all the time I was utility to him.

00:22:43.563 --> 00:22:52.030
I wasn't myself, I was an extension of him, I was someone he could use, and I don't know how many times before I realized he was a narcissist.

00:22:52.030 --> 00:22:56.420
I would say I don't work for you, we are partners, we're a team.

00:22:56.420 --> 00:22:58.523
I'm busy, I'm doing this and I don't work for you.

00:22:58.523 --> 00:23:00.676
He finds your value in the moment.

00:23:00.676 --> 00:23:05.182
He will mirror you and take on your personality traits and your opinions.

00:23:05.269 --> 00:23:10.281
So also in public situations, I noticed something that I would say he would take that on.

00:23:10.281 --> 00:23:18.521
He would regurgitate what I said and I thought, oh, that's interesting, and never say, oh yeah, amanda said this, I just thought it was kind of interesting.

00:23:18.521 --> 00:23:21.499
They attach and mirror versus connect with people.

00:23:21.499 --> 00:23:22.738
So that's what he did in the beginning.

00:23:22.738 --> 00:23:27.113
You know he wanted marriage, he wanted a family, he wanted a business, all the things that I wanted.

00:23:27.113 --> 00:23:27.795
He mirrored me.

00:23:27.795 --> 00:23:41.700
I was amazing, I was beautiful and that's who he was mirroring, because he wanted to see that, that type of unattainable perfection in himself.

00:23:41.700 --> 00:23:49.459
And then once, when the anger, the rage, some of that stuff started coming out and I started questioning him, then I was the bad person for questioning his behavior.

00:23:49.459 --> 00:23:54.653
Yeah, and he would have friends, like one particular friend that he had.

00:23:54.653 --> 00:23:55.355
He would would.

00:23:55.355 --> 00:23:56.577
It's so weird.

00:23:56.577 --> 00:24:06.902
He would act like him, he would take on some of his personality traits, he would dress like him, talk like him, react how I think that the other person would react.

00:24:06.902 --> 00:24:08.223
It's really crazy.

00:24:08.223 --> 00:24:24.547
And me, as a special ed teacher, I watch behaviors, I follow patterns and so I would pay attention, because you know, that's how I was trained, uh, to watch children in the classroom when we were looking for specific actions or behaviors from kids.

00:24:24.907 --> 00:24:28.936
I noticed that in my ex-husband, so that was interesting.

00:24:28.936 --> 00:24:35.656
He isn't honest about his decisions and how he impacts other people um, not just me, his daughters.

00:24:35.656 --> 00:24:37.441
So so there's, it doesn't matter.

00:24:37.441 --> 00:24:45.535
But the only thing that matters is the outside world and how they see him and how he's portrayed, because that is a place where he's going to get validation.

00:24:45.535 --> 00:24:50.738
They're going to tell him he's going to get the attaboy you know that he needs, because he can't do it for himself.

00:24:50.978 --> 00:24:57.220
He has no idea about how his childhood wounds affected his decision-making.

00:24:57.220 --> 00:25:00.534
There's no reflection there, like I'm the one that told him.

00:25:00.534 --> 00:25:11.221
Because of his horrible relationship with his mother, this affected some of the things he's doing now, like we did personal development classes together and at the beginning.

00:25:11.221 --> 00:25:16.738
So I thought, you know, when I saw some of these anger issues, I thought, oh, he's working on himself.

00:25:16.738 --> 00:25:22.500
I know he pops off sometimes and I call it spiritual bypassing.

00:25:22.500 --> 00:25:27.753
So he was going around the problem versus getting in and attacking it.

00:25:27.753 --> 00:25:39.573
So he was taking what he learned and regurgitating it and talking about it because it sounded good or made him sound I don't know like he was enlightened or a guru or something I don't know.

00:25:39.573 --> 00:25:50.173
So you know he would say some of these things and it, but he wasn't really connecting the dots there because if he was, he wouldn't be treating me or his daughter the way that he had.

00:25:50.875 --> 00:25:58.881
Back to social media, I created a version of a poem to share what really happened and it's called, but he Didn't Hit Me.

00:25:58.881 --> 00:26:13.186
There is an original version, but I just changed it up to shed light on some of the things that actually happened during my marriage and at the beginning of all this.

00:26:13.186 --> 00:26:15.814
So I was removed in October of 2022.

00:26:15.814 --> 00:26:17.538
In November, I just sat down.

00:26:17.538 --> 00:26:22.136
I had all this nervous energy because I was in fight or flight.

00:26:22.136 --> 00:26:28.076
I was stuck in this, still in this kind of place of chaos and getting a lawyer.

00:26:28.076 --> 00:26:29.178
What's going on?

00:26:29.178 --> 00:26:29.900
What happened?

00:26:29.900 --> 00:26:37.698
Trying to understand it, I just started typing and it was this continuous Word document and I created the list to typing and I it was this continuous word document and I created the list.

00:26:38.419 --> 00:26:40.280
I'm going to stop this episode here.

00:26:40.280 --> 00:26:52.373
Make sure to tune in to part two with Amanda next week, as she details examples of what she experienced with her abuser.

00:26:52.373 --> 00:26:53.615
She has also created a profile on the one in three website.

00:26:53.615 --> 00:26:54.617
Thank you for listening.

00:26:54.617 --> 00:26:58.175
I have shared the link to Amanda's profile and the show notes.

00:26:58.175 --> 00:27:03.539
I will be back next week with a second portion of my discussion with Amanda.

00:27:03.539 --> 00:27:12.884
Until then, stay strong and wherever you are in your journey, always remember you are not alone.

00:27:12.884 --> 00:27:24.861
Find more information, register as a guest or leave a review by going to the website 1in3podcastcom that's the number 1-I-N-3podcastcom.

00:27:24.861 --> 00:27:31.252
Follow 1in3 on Instagram, facebook and Twitter at 1in3podcast To help me out.

00:27:31.252 --> 00:27:34.162
Please remember to rate, review and subscribe.

00:27:34.162 --> 00:27:55.586
1in3 is a .5 Pinoy production Music written and performed by Tim Crow.

47-Domestic Violence WARRIOR: Amanda; Part 1

Amanda Webb

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