Growing up in a narcissistic family, Ava’s first memory, at three years old, was being beaten across the face with a belt. Her father, a sadistic malignant narcissist, regularly beat her and her two brothers throughout their childhoods. On that day Ava’s older brother, at five years old, was trying to protect her and their younger brother by hiding them in a closet, but that didn’t stop the beating they all got.

Ava has no idea how many times her nose was broken, but it wasn’t until recently, in her mid-40s, after extensive reconstructive surgery, that she recalled breathing normally. “The surgeon had to build a whole new nose from scratch because my septum and valves were collapsed,” she explained. “It was the most amazing thing. I had never breathed through my nose in my memory.” For Ava, the basic life-sustaining act of breathing has always been disrupted. She often held her breath while feigning to be asleep to avoid her father’s beatings. And even now when stressed she freezes up and has to remember to breathe.

With a functioning nose came rushes of crying episodes and flashbacks, some repressed but most horrific reminders of a brutal past. “It was like I was finally breathing out the memories,” Ava said.

There were memories of her older brother hitting and raping her. “The early protective instinct was beaten out of my brother. He was like monkey-see-monkey-do with our father,” Ava explained.

In addition to physically abusing her, her father terrorized her by removing the door to her room and watching her undress and then putting the door back on and removing the knob to trap her inside. He also verbally assaulted Ava, regularly calling her a whore. “He said being a whore was my only worth in life,” she recalled.

Some of Ava’s most painful memories are of her mother’s complicity with everything that went on at home. “I used to think of Mother as more benign, but after Father died I realized in some ways she was worse. She was just as sadistic. When I asked her why she didn’t protect me from my brother, she called his treatment of me a normal outlet for him. She used Dad to be an abuser by proxy. She thrived on it like oxygen. When I was a teenager she’d kick me out of the house and tell me I had brought it on myself,” Ava said.

Narcissistic Marital Abuse

Like so many people raised in a narcissistic family, as a young adult Ava repeated patterns she had grown up with. While still in her teens she fell into a disastrous “romantic” relationship with a narcissist. What started as a penpal exchange with a young man doing brief nonwartime service in the military quickly escalated into a miserably abusive relationship with a friend of the young man, who insisted on meeting Ava. He courted Ava with classic narcissistic love-bombing and a marriage proposal before they had even met in person. During their times together, things rapidly devolved, but whenever they were apart he would redouble his declarations of love and desperate pleas that he couldn’t live without her. Ava said she never even liked him, but after earning her college degree she didn’t think she deserved better and agreed to marry him.

“It was years of screaming belittlement that would literally break me down to vomiting,” she said of her marriage. In time she understood that her husband, in addition to despising her, hated women, had been sexually abused himself as a child, and was obviously gay but in self-loathing denial about it. “I eventually realized he was functionally illiterate and saw me as his meal ticket. He called me his paycheck with legs,” Ava said.

Breaking the Narcissistic Family Legacy

In time Ava grew stronger about setting up boundaries with her husband. “Although he hated sex, he wanted to get me pregnant, but I refused. He assumed we’d have boys and would say it gave him a hard on to think about having a boy. What kind of person says that? I have no doubt he would have abused them,” she said.

Nine years after meeting him, Ava finally divorced her husband and started dating other people. She says she found herself attracting narcissistic personalities but recognized the signs and never allowed anything to get serious. She began reading about narcissism and worked on herself in therapy and on narcissism recovery websites. Eventually she met her current partner, with whom she has had a loving relationship for the last 18 years. They share a thriving software business, a garden full of flowers, and four cats whom they consider their babies.

Looking back on her narcissistic family, Ava realizes she is the only one who got out without having her spirit crushed and becoming an abuser herself. “I fought like hell, telling them to take their f*cking hands off me, cussing and pounding on the door when my father shut me in. I never gave up my core values. It made me the scapegoat. My mother could manipulate my brothers, but she didn’t know what to do with me. I refused to accept when my parents told me no one would love me. When my father told me I was ugly, I thought, ‘I came from you so you must feel ugly.’ I didn’t have a name for it then, but I figured out it was projection.” About her ex husband, she said, “I recognize I married my family, right down to the last details. I was young and had been groomed for it. . . . But I didn’t have children with him.”

Ava’s brothers still live at home with their mother and continue the violent family legacy by abusing their girlfriends. “Mother hollowed them out,” she said. “I remember my little brother very young holding out his arms saying, ‘I love you Mommy,’ and her slamming the door in his face.”

If we are open to what experience can teach us, we humans have the capacity to learn throughout our lives. Often the most powerful lessons are negative ones, and for many of us repeating the past is the only way to understand it and ultimately move beyond it. For children of narcissists, marrying our narcissistic family is a common pattern. Yet for all its pain, it offers invaluable insight about how to break the patterns of self-destructive beliefs and behavior ingrained in us growing up. It is often what leads us in adulthood, as it did for Ava, to redemptive awareness and healing.

Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books. She is working on a memoir (read excerpts) about life, and few near-deaths, in a narcissistic family.

Need support? Julie provides specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world.  

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Photo courtesy of scroll.in, Creative Commons.