Why we remain? In almost 200 podcasts, there's been a common theme for me personally. Why am I still here? A lot of people have asked me. Why are you still here? We know why our cluster b usually remains in the relationship if they don't take flight.
Or if they take flight, they sometimes come back because they realize that, well, you would be receiving them. But why do we or why do I remain? I mean, I know that my wife is toxic. I know that my wife does not see me. I know that my wife is doesn't really have my back. And yet, each and every day I remain and I will go even further to say that I feel bad when I think about my wife. I feel the same empathy that I felt over 23 years ago when I initially met her and when this journey for me began.
I wanna share a post with you that I recently saw from the narcissistic support group, and I think this will pertain to people who are involved with anybody in the cluster b family. And it goes like this, and it's been posted by a woman named Lynn. And I don't know if she actually wrote this, but she posted this. And thank you for sharing. And she writes, they don't wanna offer you authentic love. They have zero interest in authentic love. Stop thinking you can love them better. You can't.
They are not interested. Even if they were interested they have no place to put that love because they can't reflect it back. So consequently, they have no empathy. So it's meaningless to say I love you. I love the essence of you. I really love who you are. It's meaningless.
It just slides off of them. First of all, they don't wanna receive love horizontally. They don't actually want it for themselves. It's kind of delusional this disorder. It's dissociative. So they say, I'm taking your love and adulation and it never goes to me. It goes to the false self that they created.
Think about that. That made a tremendous amount of sense to me. Narcissists or cluster b's never ever ever ever ever become better in any of their new relationships. Never. And yet we are concerned of losing them. We are concerned about losing them. It consumes us.
And I've talked about this in previous podcasts. The idea of them going off and having a wonderful relationship with somebody else just it just defies our imagination because how can they be that way to us? And yet they're gonna go off and find a new supply. And we all know that it's a vicious cycle. It's wash, rinse, repeat. That's a podcast I did quite a few years ago. It's the cycle that will repeat itself.
And so why do we why why do we why do we fear that? And why do we remain? I think for me personally, I remain now because there's no more self blame. I don't blame myself for the way that my wife behaves. The fact that she doesn't really care about me. It's not my fault. I've gone through fire to try to prove myself to my wife.
And yet, just like I just read, it kinda deflects off of her. Anybody can go through this process, and she will not feel like they truly care about her. She has a deep seated fear of abandonment. This is self professed, self confessed, she told me not too long ago. I did a podcast called black swans on the pond some years ago. These are black swans. When they reveal themselves to you, you need to take heed.
You need to listen to them because they are giving you an insight, a very rare glimpse of their thought process. My wife just recently told me that she builds up walls. If she feels somebody abandons her, the walls go up. And she thought and thinks to this very day that I abandoned her in some delusional way. So there's no more self blame for me. I'm out of the fog. I see everything objectively, and I understand things.
But why do I remain? Well, there are certainly extenuating circumstances, financial and such. I'm married to this woman. This is not a relationship that I can just casually say, well, you know what? I'm gonna break up with her. There are legal ramifications. We share a child together and certainly that child is basically grown.
But still, there are other ties. I'm not dating her. I can't say, well, you know what? Wow. I've really realized everything about her. So I'm gonna go ahead and end the relationship and move on. It's a little bit more difficult, and certainly the passage of time doesn't lend itself to making that any easier.
So those are some of the fundamental reasons why I remain. What are your reasons? Why do you remain in your relationship with your cluster b? Sometimes we have to take a step out from the relationship to think rationally and not in the heat of the moment when they're in a rage or whether they are in the love bombing stage. We have to take a moment to be rational. And when you start to think rationally, sometimes you do feel empathy. You feel you feel pain.
And that's where I'm at. To share that with you that there are times and there's a continuum of feeling that I do feel bad. And it's not a matter of feeling sorry necessarily for the circumstance, it's feeling sorry for the individual. Knowing that my wife has struggled many years with that feeling of abandonment, has gone through numerous relationships with that feeling of abandonment, and has not really experienced love in the true sense of the word. Does that resonate with you?
Think about it. Why do you remain in the relationship with your cluster b? We know that they are going to be very difficult or perhaps you don't know yet. This is one of the reasons why you listen to podcasts like Mayan or Torch to kind of compare notes to try to understand because perhaps you're still in a confused state of mind. You're trying to make sense of all of the crazy making that can happen in a cluster b relationship. The word salad, the silent treatment, the breadcrumbing, the love bombing. But when you make sense of all of it, then you have to ask yourself why am I remaining in this relationship?
I've talked about armchair quarterbacking. Everybody can give you an opinion. But at the end of the day, it's up to you to decide what keeps you in the relationship. A lot of people have emailed me at my inner torch at gmail dot com to let me know that they left, and now they're going back. Why? They have their distinct reasons, and I can't judge them for that. Only you can judge yourself and basically hold yourself accountable, not the cluster b.
The cluster b will remain in the relationship in many cases until you end it. Now there are obviously exceptions to the rule. When it comes to narcissists, they can screw around outside of the relationship, find a new supply and kind of just wait for you to end it. Or they may end it, and then maybe they're gonna come boomeranging back. Every single relationship is different. But in most cases, in the case of in my scenario, I think that my wife will remain in this relationship for as long as I tolerate it. I'm going to be the one who eventually has to end the relationship and in essence, in her mind, abandon her and play out the victim role for her as will happen in no I I would have to say that I I can certainly understand where this is going to go should that time come.
So think about it. Take some soul searching. Understand why you remain in the relationship. And I can tell you it's going to be painful. I think I explained to you why I remain extenuating circumstances and a very deep sense of empathy, which is what got me here in the first place. Feeling like I wanted to show my wife that not all people were bad, that you could have a loving relationship, but, unfortunately, my wife does not have the capacity to exercise that. And that's something that I've recognized over the years, and this is why I've been able to take away some of the self blame.
I've come out of the fog. I see the lay of the land. It doesn't make it any easier, folks. I will tell you that. But I can look back and say, yeah, the original reason why I started is why I remain. Because if you take away the extenuating circumstances of the marriage, you take away the child, there still remains that certain foundation of empathy that I still feel, whether it's right or wrong. A lot of people will argue, well, gosh, you haven't learned a thing. I've learned a lot.
But I still have that deep seated empathy, that desire, I guess, in some form or fashion not to try to impress my wife that I can love her any better, that I can be better than anybody else she's been with, but the feeling that I understand her. And, again, that's not an excuse. It doesn't make it right, and that's something that I have to work through as time goes on. Thank you for being part of the my inner torch community. Thank you for being a listener.
