
We fed the narcissist – completely unaware of the consequences. Nobody warned us – and we were too young to understand the dangers. We just knew that defying her meant facing a wrath we could not survive.
We enabled her – as did everyone who knew it was best for their own well-being. From family, to friends, to work colleagues – we all knew that to challenge her meant being ensnared in a web of lies, dragged down into her toxic world. Confrontation was never really an option, so we chose peace – a peace that stretched into decades.
But what happens when the narcissist gets sick? Hospitalized, her fabricated stories now target medical professionals. She claims to walk around her room, but the evidence tells a different story. The medical staff reveal her non-compliance with therapy, her refusal to engage with rehabilitation. Yet, she insists she walks unaided, even accusing the nurses of dropping her.
It’s not just a matter of who you believe when your entire life has been shaped by her lies – the medical professionals or the toxic narcissist… you’ve seen her twist words into weapons, turn family against family with a mere whisper for your entire life.
Now it’s a matter of breaking your own toxic cycle. Realising that you are safe and that you no longer need to play pretend enabling her evil behaviour – allowing her fabricated world to continue turning.
Easier said than done though – especially as you watch this person, once a towering figure of control, now frail and weakened in a hospital bed… relying on you for assistance, for support, to be there for them in their time of need – in a capacity that they have never in their lifetime been there for you.
I can’t help but question if the narcissist would be in the same position she is in today if we had just confronted her in the beginning. If we had seen her web of lies for exactly what it was and instead of getting stuck in it – we simply stood up to it.
Would she still be as filled with delirium as what she is today if we had forced her out of the delusional state that she was in for so many decades?
Maybe the difference between us is intention – her intention was always to manipulate, to control, to bring harm – whereas ours was simply that of peace – of survival.
We saw what she could do to you if you weren’t obedient and we didn’t want to be hated the way anyone was who didn’t play along with her – and yet complying with her delusional state never enabled us to be loved by her anyway.
We gained nothing by remaining silent – nothing other than a breath of peace. For the most brief of moments she allowed us to feel happiness – until her next unrealistic demand came along… and once again she began playing one against the other, singling us out, isolating her only children from one another because as a team we would have been stronger against her.
And so, standing at the crossroads of a lifetime of manipulation and a newfound sense of self, a choice has to be made – do we continue enabling, offering comfort to the architect of so much pain, or do we finally break free, to speak the truth that has been suppressed for so long. It is a battle between ingrained habit and the desperate longing for ‘freedom’ – a word that I wear on a chain around my neck to remind myself how far I have come.
A decision has to be made, a commitment to oneself to step out of the shadows of the narcissist’s control. It won’t be easy, the guilt and fear are formidable opponents, but the first step has been taken. A path towards healing, towards reclaiming a life that had been dimmed for far too long, has finally begun… or at least it’s what I’m hoping for – without having to wait for her to take her last breath for us to finally be free.
If I could go back in time, I would warn my younger self not to feed the narcissist because if I do, then eventually she will end up consuming you entirely.
Although she’s in hospital, we can’t tell the difference between her normal state of evil, toxic, menacing delusion – and her medical state of delirium – because we fed the narcissist… when we should have let it starve.






