Narcissism, Flying Monkeys and the Friend Divorce

I lost it to my ex-wife, and good riddance

Many people have been reaching out to me about Kaz… (Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

“Devoted father who cooks and cleans. Requirements: no beatings.” That was my first joking take on a profile on dating apps during my first divorce. Except it wasn’t a joke at all, and I wound up running straight into the arms of a spouse who did everything but hit me. Till the very end, Karen insisted that she wasn’t like Piper, because in her exact and repeated words, “I never hit you.”

Lesson learned: don’t try to recover from an abusive relationship with a less abusive relationship. That’s not how it works.

Something was going very, very wrong with my life around this time last year, and I was losing my mind trying to figure it out. It would be one thing if I’d sunken into depressed paralysis; I’d done that many times throughout my life, going all the way back to adolescence. But in the wake of coming out to myself in early 2021, I’d been furiously working on myself. I updated my mental health diagnoses after admitting I have severe PTSD, along with either ADHD or trauma-onset ADD. Adderall had been a miracle drug, pushing me to productivity like I’d never even understood was possible.¹ I had a medical cannabis card, and for the first time in my life, my trauma responses were slowed down to the point that I could get ahold of myself and manage them.² I admitted I was on the autism spectrum, and had been diligently applying the lessons my older non-verbal son’s therapists had taught me to my own brain. I confronted my chronic mood instability and anger management problems, and had worked tirelessly to be accountable and make amends for my past. I was landing clients, and even getting callbacks from job applications.³

But things kept getting weirder. Every success I had, my wife told me I was on the verge of screwing up and losing. Every time I acted on my own behalf, she reminded me of the times I had withdrawn and isolated myself. She kept pushing me to take sub-minimum wage gigs that would ensure I’d never pay off my child support, let alone my tax debt. And other people were agreeing with her, people who had no reason to say it. My stress skyrocketed as I tried to reconcile what I was being told with what was in front of my face, including a recurring case of eczema that still flares up when I feel anxious or worried.

Then my wife took shots at my sexuality in front of my two children from my first marriage, and I finally snapped.

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My throat was dry from cottonmouth and vaping too much weed as I waited on our living room sofa. I had just gotten back from therapy with the final nails hammered into my courage. The next day, my half spring break with my kids from my first marriage started. The day after it ended, we were supposed to go to Vancouver together.

I had practiced what I was going to say, over and over, until my heart didn’t race when I said it. I thought everything out, owned my emotions and history, and planned what to do over the next six months. And I said it as she sat across the room from me, too focused on getting my own words right to notice what was happening on her face as I said it:

“You’ve lost my trust on my sexuality. The things you’ve said about me and my identity in the past week have been things that can’t be taken back or unsaid. I’ve worked hard on my life, and if I have a partner, I need that partner to be sex and body positive on the same level that I am. You’ve shown me repeatedly in your actions and words that you do not want this. And so, while I am not doing it today, or even before the summer is over, I’m going to divorce you-”

She cut me off right there: “Fine, get out.”

I blinked in surprise, and asked if I could finish what I was saying. I had a lot more planned after that. I had explanations ready about the transition and how to manage ourselves as we separated our lives, reassurances that I was not going to pull any surprises, that I wanted her to stay in the lives of my children from my first marriage. I had planned to sit right there, yoga breathing away the stress, while she questioned me, or cried, or asked for time.

“That’s…not how things work,” I said slowly. “And I’m not going to be thrown out of my own house. If you’ll just let me finish-”

“I’m the one on the lease, asshole,” she snarled, leaping to her feet. “You aren’t on shit. You’re trespassing now. I can call the cops.”

Oh no.

Worst case scenario, whispered a voice in the back of my head in surging panic. My hands trembled at the words I recognized from my horrific first marriage, the same triumphant sneer. But a gate was already smashing down in my head too. I had survived this once with Piper, and I had learned what to do the hard way.

“Call the cops,” I said, my voice suddenly dead. My face went slack, even as my shoulders tightened. Worst case scenario, worst case scenario. “You’re going to have to call the cops,” I repeated. “And it won’t work. If you’re going to do it, just do it now and find out.”

Like I said, I had faced it before. I had even gone back and looked up all the times Piper had dialed 911, claiming that I was menacing her, seen the transcripts and results. I had to prove every bit of reality to myself, coming out of that marriage.

“Don’t do this,” I added. “You don’t have to do this. You’re better than this.”

“I know,” she said with a hateful smile, and did it anyway.

She called her father on speakerphone after I called her bluff about the police, claiming that I was menacing her and refusing to leave and “in my space,” when I was standing on the other side of the room. The total lack of surprise in “Daddy’s” voice as my soon to be ex-father-in-law urged me to “just leave the house for a while, she’s having strong feelings and will calm down” was even more confirmation that my worst fears were true. It wasn’t the first time she had done this, and she already had a network of enablers. The whole time she screamed that I was a pervert, that I watched gay porn, that I hung out with “his perverted writer friends,” anything she could think of.

Finally, she tackled me from behind over picking up her car keys as I finally moved to leave with a hastily stuffed backpack. Fumbling, traumas from my first marriage flaring all around me, I eventually shoved her away, terrified she might trip, or worse.

“GET TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM!” I roared in a voice my throat hadn’t felt since the day I left my first ex-wife, bleeding and sobbing. She shouted back that I couldn’t treat her like Piper, because she had never hit me. She even called “Daddy” back and told him I had taken her car keys from her. Moving slowly, my back against the front door and not taking my eyes off her, I exchanged key sets.

“You can go ahead and fuck all the men you want!” were her final words as I shut the front door on her.

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Women just act out sometimes when they have strong feelings, Kaz… (Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

“Oh fuck,” I wrote that night to a friend I actually trusted. “The marriage was abusive, wasn’t it?”

I was still in shock at Karen’s mask dropping completely. When I thought about the marriage I had just ended, all I could remember was a sexless and unremarkable relationship, where I tried as hard as I could for as long as I could. But I knew one thing for damned sure: when someone tackles their domestic partner, it’s not the first abuse, or the second, or the tenth. It didn’t matter what my brain was spitting out at the moment; I knew painfully well I’d dissociated and repressed my trauma from the first marriage, and I had spent a long time dragging it out into the light.

But I finally had backup: my queer friends ,  the actual queer friends, not designer identities slapped over straight marriages.⁴ “You’re going to see a lot of true colors now calling itself concern,” said one lesbian, when Karen ranted in an email that she was “hearing concerns about your Twitter feed.” She was right: there was no god damned reason for anyone to take any note of my firmly pseudonymous Twitter account, let alone bother my ex-wife about it.

Just as she predicted lot of people who had called themselves my friends hit me with one “check-in” after another, always “concerned” about me, or about what I was doing. Even worse, they dismissed and minimized Karen’s assault, saying things like “women lash out when they have strong feelings.” A few conceded that what she did was “not okay,” but that was it. For a while I was terrified: I work in liberal politics, where you live and die on word of mouth. Even though people in queer politics welcomed me warmly, that was a small niche, not to mention an almost nonexistent client base.

Then I stumbled on an article about survivors of narcissistic abuse and its common symptoms, and the tumblers clicked into place, all at once:

• Moral paranoia. Check.

• Social anxiety. Check.

• Feelings of extreme vulnerability. Check.

• Lack of trust in institutions. Check.

• Extreme social isolation. Check.

• Confusion over right/wrong and good/bad. Check.

It was like a door I had nailed shut blew apart. I couldn’t unsee it: all of the people questioning and doubting me said things that I had never told them, but Karen had definitely flung at me in person or over email. It even worked both ways: I went back and re-read what discussions I’d had over text and email, and sure enough, things I never told Karen, but told people who swore I could trust them and they wouldn’t tell anyone, showed up in Karen’s accusations within days, sometimes hours.

It was a flying monkey attack, plain and glaring. That’s a term for a common form of narcissistic abuse: they commission others to “check in” on their victims, both to keep tabs on the victim and to pressure the victim back towards the narcissist. It’s always framed as benevolent concern, and it always tries to stuff the victim back into the deluded cubbyhole the narcissist built. Sometimes it’s unwitting, but by the time it happens, the victim has no chance of talking their way out of it, and there is no chance the flying monkey is going to snap out of it or admit any part of it.

The only thing you can do is shut the whole thing down.

I lost the friend divorce twice: in my first, I was so isolated by the time I left that I rebooted my social circle wholesale, starting with a couple of adulterous colleagues. The second saw most of my straight friends turn into straight acquaintances, with several cut off completely.

Lesson learned: don’t try to recover from a marriage to Borderline Personality Disorder with a marriage to Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

All I can say now is good riddance, and keep her.

1. It also has a miserable crash; I’m on Ritalin now instead.

2. I’m also painfully aware I’m an addict prone to stimulus chasing, and go to SMART Recovery meetings to manage it.

3. As it turns out, the best way to seek employment to get out of professional politics is to network as far away from people in professional politics as possible.

4. One such identified as “pan-demisexual,” citing her bachelors at Smith College. My partner Marie identifies as demi, and the circus of complex orientation/identity is best left to several takes on its own.