Love and Narcissism.

This won’t be laced with scripture or carefully thought out theology. Only my heart and the inner workings of the spirit as I’ve sat with my Father.

We’ve all been hurt and we’ve all suffered the hurt of someone else’s selfishness. Heck we’ve all hurt someone else because of our own selfishness.

But where is the line when one is righteously called a narcissist?

According to society it’s any ex you left on bad terms with. It’s any significant other that lacks emotional maturity. It’s any parent that either spoke too aggressively or too passive aggressively. It’s any friend that was confusing in thought or action. The people we now see as irredeemable and hateful individuals.

But true narcissism is much more than just that.

It's someone that makes you question reality. Someone who lives two lives; one for the public and the other for you behind closed doors. Someone who convinces you that you're broken and they're the hero. Someone who in one second lavishes you with compliments and love that make you feel like you're their whole world; only to diminish you to nothing in the next. Someone who when it's finally all said and done, paints you to be the problem in their perfect story.

This is a glimpse of narcissism.

This is a note to acknowledge the pain of a person. It’s a note to say it did happen to you, but it doesn’t make you weak. It’s a note to acknowledge the deep level of suffering that sent you into survival mode; that now plagues your mind long after the person is gone. This is an acknowledgment of that pain. A pain no one else understands as your life seems to go into a ruin.

So the narcissist, it’s the one who makes you feel in the exact way I described above.

And that is truth.

What they are not, is someone irredeemable and completely evil.

It’s easy to believe someone either is fully loving or is fully evil in every intention.

The in between remains a place too painful to reconcile. We want to believe that we are either crazy and they never hurt us or they’re a completely malicious person.

But I don’t think either is true.

My first judgement is to say it was all intentionally said and done. But that just left me with bitterness too heavy to carry and sorrow too deep for words.

What God has reminded me is that most people are just too ashamed to admit they have the ability to cause so much hurt to someone else. The truth is many people live in a world of deception that first captured their whole mind as a means to protect. So, the only way to keep going in life was and is to bring others along for the ride. And yes some are malicious, but most are just lost inside their own mind.

And if I stay here for too long I stay stuck in a perpetual cycle of bitterness and sorrow. A place no one wants to be.

So I’ve found a place away from there. A place deeply intertwined with my Father, and I’ve found comfort here. Comfort in the fact that someone I love still has a chance at redemption. Comfort in the fact that, at the core of humanity, it is not evil. Rather, it is in a fight between the flesh and the spirit that was divinely made in the image of God. Comfort in the fact that all people, no matter where they’ve been or what they’ve done, all have the ability to find redemption and reconciliation before God.

And this is a space I don’t want to lose.

It’s not our problem to fix other people, or broken systems, or even shine light on the people we fear are maliciously evil at heart.

It’s our joy that even amid this, we find rest and comfort in a King who will reveal all in His time. Sometimes in a time we will never see, and sometimes we might.

I’ve come to hate the term narcissist because society has turned it into an irredeemable diagnosis that traps you in pain. But I praise God that He writes a different story through a different lens.

You don’t have to let someone else’s pain make you forget the mercy and love the Lord first graced and gifted you with.

A gift you can continue to give.

You’re not crazy. You’re not broken. It is okay for you to hurt. And you don’t have to stay stuck in this pain forever. There’s a green pasture waiting for you right inside your soul where the Father dwells. (Psalm 23)

Tabitha Kerr