Let's Get Small

 Entry 1    8:32 a.m.

I miss Jenny and cry for her too much for my own good. I am crying as I type. I am immobilized in grief and depression. I am hoping this writing will help. Love you all.

As I am sitting here in the pre-nascent stages of what I hope will be recovery, cognitive dissonance is raging in my mind. I have gone through more than 85000 family photos and some of the hundreds if not thousands of video clips. As I am doing this, I often am listening to Dr. Ramani, and other psychologists and

Shadows and Light, Leiney at 7

 mental health professionals talk about BPD. At times, I feel like they are describing incidents that happened in the lives of Jenny and me, and often times not. The variations on the mental illness are great. Also, the overlap of behaviors between a person with narcissistic personality disorder and a person with borderline personality disorder are great. They share many of the behaviors. For example, gaslighting, splitting, mirroring, and what I am thinking about this morning, minimizing all show up in these relationships.

Minimization is a form of denial and gaslighting. The narcissist or person with BPD will often minimize your experience. It can be responsible for emotional escalation that often happens in these relationships.  For example, when something bad happens to the person with BPD, the planet has to stop for that person, but when something bad happens to the other person in the relationship, the narcissist or person with BPD will brush it off as no big deal.  An example of this behavior that comes to mind immediately for me is when I hurt my shoulder in 2021. I had injured my right shoulder. Really, I woke up and couldn't move it without being in excruciating pain. I had to get to the doctor, but really couldn't drive. Jenny was well enough to go out with whomever she chose each day, but was quite put out that I needed her to drive me to the doctor. She bitterly complained about it over text to a friend, as if it was the greatest imposition in the world. Contrast this with my constant need and willingness to drop everything to get her to the doctor. This was one trip. She grudgingly dropped me off at GHC Central urgent care and left. I went inside to be told that I may have had a heart attack, a preliminary diagnosis about which I called bullshit. I phoned Jenny to tell her A) they think I had a heart attack and B) it's complete bullshit. As readers know, she went to her friends to complain about me "claiming to have had a heart attack." She also claimed that I blamed her, "Of course it was my fault," she said. I didn't have a heart attack, never believed I had, nor would it make sense that I would have blamed her I was baffled as to why she would do this. But today, its clear that the minimizing behavior she directed at me also had to be spread to her minions, to the people she convinced I am an ogre. This is gaslighting, she was challenging my reality. She had shifted what I had conveyed, that it wasn't a big deal because they were wrong, into an alternate reality.

One of the oh my god moments of listening to the particular lecture from Dr. Ramani this morning came when she described the narcissist accusing the target of being dramatic when the person tells the narcissist something they don't want to hear saying, "Why are you always so dramatic and exaggerating, what is wrong with you?" That phrase was a constant. I heard it when I cautioned Jenny against driving on oxycodone, and later on oxycodone and fentanyl. I heard it when I posted on her Caring Bridge site on February 3 (https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jennygamache/journal), when she nearly died in hospital. It was her first bout of terminal dementia. I was honest in the post, and more direct than anyone had been to that point. She was dying. We knew it. I essentially said it. Here is the substance of the post of which she took umbrage:

Now for the harder news. She is, as I said, much sicker than she has been--and she has been quite sick for some time. She is also quite confused at times, as I mentioned above. Hearing this, I know many people will want to visit with Jenny and soon. Lots of people have already been visiting. Jenny, until now, has thrived on this. However, we now have to more closely control the visits so as not to overwhelm her, and to allow her family time with Jenny that is uninterrupted. Time is all we have and it is short. This isn't to say stop visiting, not at all. I encourage you to do so, in fact. But we do need to manage the visits as we move forward. People have been contacting me--please don't contact Jenny she will likely not respond--to visit with her. Please continue to do so. I will refer people who reach out seeking visits to Jenny's dear friend Heather, who has graciously agreed to coordinate visits. Lots of people have reached out, in fact. But, at this juncture, I can't manage the appointment calendar myself. So, feel free to text me if you would like to visit with Jenny, and I will pass that information on to Heather. I would simply put Heather's contact information up here, but scammers and spammers abound, even on CB.

These next few days or weeks are going to be harder than any of those who love her would hope them to be. Please know that Jenny loves each of you, appreciates all of you, thinks about you in the abstract and concrete. You probably have come up in conversations with me and others in our day to day living. She has a terrible time being able to answer voicemails, texts and emails. She feels guilty about it. It isn't because she doesn't love you that she doesn't respond to your outreach, she does. She is just so overwhelmed with the immensity of this fight, it now takes all her energy.

Keep her in your heart, and us in your thoughts.

When Jenny was discharged, she came home and read the Caring Bridge post and said to me she hadn't been that sick, that I made it sound as if she were dying, and accused me of being overly dramatic and exaggerating the seriousness of her condition. We did think she was dying, I wasn't dramatic and didn't exaggerate the gravity of her hospitalization. And while her response to my writing of the Caring Bridge post was twisted together with her abject denial that she was dying, she was clearly minimizing me, and treated me with utter contempt and as if I were a fool. Even her minion Heather told her she had been gravely ill. Still, in the haze of the eternal gaslighting, I started questioning myself. Was I exaggerating? Was this ridiculous? Was the hospital ridiculous when they sent 9 people into her ER room immediately upon arrival? I began to wonder. This is what happens over time. You get hit with distortions so often, you begin to question your own reality.

Contempt wasn't new. Looking back, I think much of the anger and meanness directed toward me these last few years really was contempt, abjectly so.