Catching up again.

Hello everyone and happy Sunday!

It's been a couple of months since I last posted. I have been trying to sit back and think about things and disentangle the mess I am in re: my earlier post "It's not my Story - it's my Nightmare".

I looked in here over the last few days and wondered if anything was getting better for everybody and found that @Shaz51 had lost her home. So sorry for your trauma, Shaz. Such a shock for you on top of everything else we have to deal with. Best wishes for the re-build.

I've been thinking a great deal about my ex-psychiatrist and have finally sorted the situation out. It's not that he was an extraordinary psychiatrist - it's that he simply did his job - knowing that, in the end, he was going to pull the rug out from under me and utterly destroy me. He waited a long time to do that. It must have been the highlight of his career! Of his sad and shallow life.

Some have said that he is a narcissist. I had found that difficult to understand as all I saw was the "kindest, most hard working, most dedicated, skilled psychiatrist, doctor, husband, father - steeped in integrity". Someone to emulate in a world where I had never known a worthy role model. What a show he put on for me!

I have been doing research on narcissism. Some sites attribute certain characteristics while others list more complex ones. It seems that the person I knew was too good to be true, and all the attributes he presented were just to lead me on and never give me reason to doubt his 'integrity'. In fact, all the attributes he presented to me - his trusting and vulnerable patient were, unknown to me, typical traits of a narcissist.

I have concluded that the reason that I have been swinging between believing that he is a narcissist and that that couldn't be true of the person I knew is that when I swing back to believing it to be wrong I get a short period of relief from my distress. I don't know what to do.