Yes! I am healing from a very bad marriage that was full of narcissistic abuse and gaslighting from my husband. In short, he committed adultery from the onset of our marriage, but he could not empathize with the pain that it caused me. He expected me to just forgive and move on and trust him again without giving me any reason to (but plenty of reasons not to). He was hungry for pity from others, and he allowed his family and friends to attack me with their words and blame me for not being willing to just accept the fact that he did not keep his vows and brush it all under the proverbial rug.
Rather than listening to me when I'd open my heart to him, he would be up in his own head, fantasizing about girls he liked back in the day. He stalked my friend online, lusted after her, tried to get a job working with her, and he compared me to other women constantly. Our honeymoon was a disaster because he told me he was thinking about and comparing me to someone else while we were intimate. What a great way to start a marriage! And yet he treated the whole situation as though I was the one who had to change and fall in line with whatever he wanted me to think. He could do no wrong in the eyes of his family, so they only served to hasten the demise of our marriage.
Narcissists and sociopaths do not know how to truly love people. They cannot empathize with others and they put on many different faces to rally as much support, pity, and attention as they can to keep in their corner, because inevitably, anyone with any self respect and dignity is going to stop putting up with their tactics. And that's when the narcissist will gather their troops to attack the empath and pour on the pity party for the narc! I don't know if narcs are capable of seeing their own folly, even if it is staring them in the face.
It's a horrible thing to go through, and I am so sorry that you and your children are going through it. God has so much better for His beloved children than for us to be abused and manipulated by people with such a damaging personality disorder. We can love them and pray for them... from a distance! I pray that you and your children will find healing and fulfillment from healthy, godly relationships.
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