The following reflection is based on the story and paintings found in Rebecca J. Craig’s memoir, “Once Upon a Nightmare: Through the Looking Glass of Narcissistic Abuse” available now on Amazon.
“My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long?” – Psalm 6:3
We suffer loss in a multitude of ways. We lose loved ones through death, divorce, accidents, illnesses and broken relationships. Loss of a job, a meaningful career, facing an illness or changed way of life. No matter what the cause, you know what it’s like to feel as though everything around you is falling apart and shattering. Shattered lives. Shattered love. Shattered trust. Shattered dreams. Even your very being—shattered.
Broken lives are a part of the human experience. Where we feel as though a sledgehammer has slammed into the fragile case we keep around our lives and our hearts, shattering everything to its very core. What we thought of as authentic and true now becomes cracked and skewed; everything has an edge, and everything is seen through reflecting shards that twist and distort what we once thought was tangible and genuine. There is nothing more devastating and shattering than having your entire reality, everything you thought to be normal about life or about a person falling apart in a shower of tinkling glass. Your hopes and dreams for a particular future – shattered.
It does amaze me how fragile the lives we live tend to be at times, and how quickly everything can change and fall apart around us. Even our faith is changed in some way when such life-altering events occur. Not that one necessarily loses it—I would have been lost without my faith and the faith community I was surrounded by—but my faith has changed. My relationship and understanding of God has changed as a result of such events. Whether that’s good or bad I think is not the right way to look at it—but simply that it is. Our faith changes throughout life, our outlooks change based on events we go through. A broken and shattered cross is endemic of what the cross itself stands for—a broken and shattered humanity that strung God up on a cross when he dared get too close to us.
Trust between humanity and God has long been shattered. Trust between individuals also has shattered. Some events even cause us to finally, and at last, have cause to question trust in ourselves, shattering our illusions that we always know what’s best for us or thinking we somehow have some type of control in this world and of those around us. All of that is shattered.
“Shattered” is the world we live in.
Shattered was the world I was trying to navigate when I painted this, realizing my life was swirling down the toilet, and the realities had sunk in—I needed a divorce. That realization shattered me to my core.
Pastors aren’t supposed to get divorced, you see. As though being a female pastor didn’t come with enough criticism, being a divorced female pastor, I figured was like pounding a nail in the coffin of my career.
And on a personal level—I felt I was somehow betraying the vows I’d taken before God. That I was violating God’s will…all the things I’d always told my own parishioners were not issues when you were being abused.
Except, you see, I didn’t realize I was being abused. I could have easily identified the emotional and psychological abuse in another woman, but not in myself.
It would take my therapist, who had sat in on only one marriage counseling session before he was arrested for the second time and eventually sent to Leavenworth Federal Prison, saying: “I don’t normally get here this fast, but you do realize he’s a sociopath, right?”
Sociopath.
That hit home in a way the “narcissistic personality disorder” had not.
That was the word that woke me up. In that moment, I knew I could not ‘fix’ my husband. I knew no amount of therapy was going to make him better. I knew I could not save or stay in this marriage.
For the past two years I had endured his house arrest and two, going on a third, probation violation hearings. I’d watched as he continually fought the system, thinking the rules simply didn’t apply to him. That he was being unfairly treated and targeted—when the reality was, by using my position as a pastor in the community he’d managed to stave off the worst consequences he might have otherwise faced. The court system had seemingly bent over backwards to keep him out of prison. For my sake.
In the meantime, I’d watched myself become a mere shadow of who I’d once been. All in the hopes that one day, this chaos, these legal issues, would be over and done with. That some semblance of normal would eventually return and we could move on with our lives.
In that moment, I knew that would never be my reality. That it would only get worse, not better. That my fairy tale dream was dead.
This nightmare was never going to end. He would never let it end. He was not capable of letting it end.
I felt both horrified and relieved. Horrified because I’d failed to connect those dots and did not pick up on them earlier. Horrified that I’d spent over a year with that diagnosis sitting right there and simply didn’t know what it meant. Horrified that I’d enabled and defended him over and over again like the dutiful wife I thought I was supposed to be.
Relieved, because at least that meant I wasn’t going crazy, and I wasn’t the one being unreasonable like he tried to have me believe. Relieved that I was not responsible for any of what he was doing. Relieved…that there was possibly a way out.
Still, it meant doing the one thing I’d been hesitant to do: I needed a divorce. This marriage was going to kill me if I didn’t leave. It would take time to unravel the realities that I had, in fact, been manipulated and abused even if I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. It would take time to accept that the “love, honor and cherish” parts of our wedding vows had never been lived into by him. It would take time to realize he’d spent two and a half years brainwashing me into normalizing his aberrant behavior. It would take time to realize that the death of the relationship had already occurred when the other parts of those vows had been nothing but a lie for one of us.
It would take time for me to realize he abandoned me first and had subsequently forced his darkest hour onto me through his actions and decisions. While my head believed it, my heart had more trouble accepting that reality. Leaving him homeless, carless, and without a support system when he got out of prison just railed against my compassionate nature. Still, that aspect of my personality is also what he preyed upon and used to manipulate me and is what had kept me into this destructive cycle to begin with.
My grief, however, would eventually give way to fear and anger. Once the divorce paperwork was filed, all pretenses of love and affection he was still utilizing to try and keep me from leaving—disappeared; replaced with a narcissistic rage that lashed out from Leavenworth prison to try and destroy my career, my social networks, and my finances.
He would manage to shatter whatever remaining compassion and love I still felt for him as I descended down the rabbit hole of lies, secrets, and violence that had thus far been hidden from me. As I discovered the true nature of the crimes he had committed, and I realized—I had done the world no favors by standing by him for as long as I had.
