My Story

Steve’s red flags had evolved into full blown narcissism after he literally got away with murder. He was a cop and killed a man while working one night. This man wasn’t a threat, and it wasn’t “in the line of duty”. This man was an item on Steve’s bucket list – he wanted to kill someone and here was an opportunity to do just that. There was never a consequence for it.

With his ego inflated and his sense of power and control, he became a force to be reckoned with. I lived with him like this for several years, enduring many types of abuse. I have been held hostage, dragged around by my underwear and thrown into walls, and even survived an attempt on my life. I will write about all of these in more detail in my blogs. I was in a terrible situation, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. I was afraid to be there, but more afraid to leave. Not because divorce is scary, but because he’d threaten to kill me and the kids if I ever left. I believed him.

Steve was an addict and an alcoholic. He drank and abused prescription narcotics which only magnified his narcissistic behavior. One day, after drinking all morning, he became very agitated with me. He was in a rage and threw me and my children out of our house. MY HOUSE, that I bought with him and made a home. I left, because it was more terrifying to stay.

Now, this is the part where it gets really weird. He MADE us leave; he didn’t want us…but almost immediately he began calling to convince me to return. He threatened to have me arrested with some made up charge if I didn’t come home. But then in the same conversation he threatened to kill me and the kids because I left. I was so confused; I felt like this was a game only he knew the rules to. There was no winning. I reminded him that he threw us out – I didn’t willfully leave – but he would not hear that. In fact, he made no sense at all. He would retell the events that just happened very differently. I couldn’t believe my ears. I know now that he was gaslighting me, but at the time I just felt like he was trying to convince me that I was going crazy.

I stood firm in my fear of him, I listened to my gut. Even though I didn’t want to be thrown out of my house I surely wasn’t going to walk back into it knowing he was angry enough to kill me. To punish me for not returning, Steve turned off my phone, took my name off of all our bank accounts and moved another woman into my house. I had no home, no money, not even a cell phone. I literally had nothing. I walked a couple of miles to a nearby restaurant and used their phone to call for help.

The city shelter was full and the battered women’s organization I called did nothing for me. During our homeless time, my children and I were forced to stay at Steve’s parents’ house. I was grateful for a roof over our heads, but immediately I knew it was a poor situation to be in. I was given a spot in the basement, and my daughters were given a room in the house. The basement was cold, and pipes dripped around me. I was miserable, but still, it was a place to live. During this time Steve would come over to visit his parents and go down into the basement with the sole purpose of abusing me. Here he would berate me, shove me into the walls, threaten me with either being arrested or killed, and even threatened to have our daughters kidnapped and chopped up. I literally could not escape him. He never spent his time there with his parents or kids, it was always in the basement with me.

From this point on the death threats and abuse intensified. Being that we were married and had children together, he felt he owned us. He was relentless in his harassment of me. This is when he flushed my mother’s ashes down the toilet. I couldn’t hide from him, he was everywhere. I got a Personal Protection Order against him, but still, I lived in constant fear. The PPO only applied to me, not the children. I had to allow him visitation, and I had to have an open avenue of contact for him to make the arrangements.

During all of this, I was trying to get a divorce from him. I had no money, no job, Steve made sure of that. I was trapped.  I ended up hiring a cheap family lawyer, who did a terrible job, but he was the only one who would take a payment plan.

Eventually I was able to get a job. As a matter of fact, I got 2 jobs – just to get out of that place! I worked all day at an office and in the evenings and weekends, I worked at McDonald’s. While going through all this I met a very kind man named Brett online who later became my husband. We are still married, and I thank God for him every day.

Brett and I had a plan to get married and move out of state. Honestly, this was very scary for me. However, at the time, I had no other avenues of escape, and I truly did love Brett. It was worth the jump for me. We got married and my daughters and I moved down south. We were happy, but we still had to deal with Steve. Much of my blog will cover all of that. It was years’ worth of death threats and harassment from him.

Now, my abuser is dead. He killed himself Thanksgiving week of 2024. I am not sad, nor sorry. I am thankful he is gone, and I no longer have to ever worry about him again. A small part of me feels bad for his daughters, who will never get a chance to have a decent relationship with him. But I truly feel that Steve would never get there – he truly was a psychopath.

What Helen* didn’t know was that I was wasting away due to starvation. So, yes, I was painfully thin. I had recently become homeless with my 2 children and feeding them took priority over feeding myself. I was already terribly self-conscious, and had low self-esteem, so this made me feel embarrassed and ugly. If I hadn’t loved my husband so much, I would have ran away and never come back.

I wish I could say that my future interactions with this woman got better, but they didn’t. My mother-in-law is a narcissist. She is one of the most toxic people I have ever met. She lies, manipulates, and gas lights…she has a whole treasure trove of techniques to get what she wants. And she usually succeeds.

I have been married to her son now for nearly 13 years. In that time, I have seen some of the most shameful and despicable acts a mother and grandmother can do. Her victims are mostly her disabled adult granddaughter, Sierra* (who is my stepdaughter), and were often my husband and myself until I set some hard boundaries.

When I first married my husband, I was eager to be accepted by his family, despite his mom’s initial dislike of me. I would go over and spend time with her, which I later realized was my downfall. Being in Helen’s presence was giving her access to my mind and resources, which she would happily poison and plunder. Only after going no contact with her was I able to find some peace in my life.

Prior to that, however, I struggled a lot. Helen would tell me some bald-faced lie, and I would get so upset that I couldn’t let it go. Most of the time the lies affected Sierra’s health, as Helen was her caregiver. She would tell me that Sierra was doing her therapy (she wasn’t), or that her adult diapers were changed often (they weren’t), and as a result, Sierra would suffer and degrade because everyone believed the lies. But not me…I knew better. I was married to a narcissist once, whose red flags rivaled hers. I knew the game and how to play it.

Seeing Sierra suffer ate me up inside. I would have my husband call the doctors and get her medical records with the intention of intervening and advocating for her. I would see the truth in black and white, and the blatant disregard of doctors’ orders and diagnoses was horrifying. When I confronted Helen, she would get angry and indignant. She would tell me I was wrong and begin to spew a “word salad”, which is like a bunch of nonsense explanations and talking in circles, in an effort to confuse me. If I persisted and showed proof, she still wouldn’t listen and would often cause some drama to divert attention. Usually, it was a pretty big FALSE accusation of some wrongdoing, by me or my husband, and it would spread through the family like wildfire. Never once did she own up to the lies, address Sierra’s lack of care, or apologize for spreading rumors and making false accusations. In the end, Sierra always lost, my husband was hurt, and I felt defeated.

The part that wasn’t healthy for me, was that I would pester my husband over it. I would nag and nag him to intervene or confront his mother – which he wasn’t willing to do. He felt his mom wasn’t worth fighting because she would win, as she always has, because she is just SO DAMN GOOD at lying and manipulating. As a matter of fact, all of his family did the same, none of them challenged her lest they be the next to feel her wrath. I couldn’t let it rest, and over time this caused a huge rift in our marriage. Finally, after seeing the damage it was doing to my immediate family, I went no contact and let it all go. Now, my husband deals with his mother, not me. My husband deals with his daughter, not me. I have had to walk away from it all for my own mental health, because if I don’t, the advocate and parent in me will drive me nuts. Despite me knowing how to play the game, the cost was too much. My mental health matters more than proving the narcissist wrong.

to be continued soon.