Why Sometimes It Feels Wrong or Immoral to Leave a Narcissist

Leaving is a moral choice. Often, breaking up or divorce is viewed as a personal choice, but it has ramifications and is character-defining. 

Rossana Faye joins me this week to discuss why sometimes it becomes a moral dilemma to leave our narcissistic partner. Deciding to divorce is often not as clear-cut for many of us. 

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Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D., a mental health specialist and author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships, deconstructing narcissism, and understanding various other mental health-related issues. Her memoir, Love You More: The Harrowing Tale of Lies, Sex Addiction, & Double Cross, gives an uncensored glimpse into the dynamics of narcissistic abuse.

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Transcript

Kerry: [00:00:00] Often leaving for a victim becomes a moral dilemma. Today, Rosanna Faye joins me to talk about how she and I both resolved our moral inhibitions and difficulties so that we could find our own freedom. Rosanna, I'm so glad you're here to join me today. We're going to talk about a tough topic, one that doesn't get coverage. We really don't usually go here because there's almost a bias that's occurred where if you see any form of deception, dishonesty, or any kind of manipulation, it almost puts the burden on the person that it's happening to, that they should just get up, walk out, and leave.

We measure people by their degree of independence and their degree of autonomy without realizing there are lots of reasons why our autonomy is impacted. One of the ways it was impacted for me was spiritually, religiously. That I had grown up in a certain kind of home that really viewed marriage as the highest state [00:01:00] honestly as the most worthy, almost celebratory, and that to leave it without really clear reasons why was just not an option. It was actually a moral failure of the individual who does the leaving. Is this a new thought to you? Is this something that you'd seen much of yourself?

Ro: Just the morality of leaving, just the guilt and the shame that gets put on us and the obligation to stay. No, it's not new. It's very different for everybody. I know that spiritually wasn't the factor in my marriage, but the big thing for me was the investments that I had put in the marriage—my time invested, our families were meshed together, three children. And so what you said, like having a clear reason why, we don't really have a clear reason why we're leaving. We just know that we're not happy. We know that our health is deteriorating. We know that we don't feel good in this relationship and something doesn't feel right, but you can't put any kind of clarity on why that is. So just [00:02:00] leaving feels like you're leaving arbitrarily.

Kerry: Yeah, and even I consider what is a good enough reason to leave. If you make this relationship a different kind of relationship, say it's one of your kids, and say your kid's becoming really difficult, maybe they're betraying you, maybe they're even becoming physically violent, certainly they're smearing you behind your back and no allegiance. There's a lot of rebelliousness. At what point do you say I'm done raising this kid? Right. We don't think well of parents who walk away from children. We say that you should be there no matter what. So we put this high standard on love as if there is no end that love should go to. It should walk across the longest deserts and go into the deepest part of the sea. But yet when we get into these pathological love relationships, we say, well, the first sign of danger, the first sign of things less than ideal, you should be exiting that relationship. There's something wrong with you for sticking around. We would also say something's wrong with you if you don't stick around for a child.

Ro: That's actually a really, really interesting point because we would do anything for our children, right? That's what [00:03:00] society tells us, that we stick around because we've raised them. And so now in these pathological relationships or love relationships, any type of romantic relationship, it almost feels the same, like we've raised them, like we put so much into this relationship that we own it, that it's a part of us, that we can't just leave, and it has to be obvious to leave. I always used to think to myself, like I wish he would cheat on me and it would be obvious or if he just, you know, he would get into my face and yell and scream but not actually hit me, put his hand up close by me or punch a wall beside me and I'd be like, if you only just hit me. That would be so easy to just walk away. People would get it. I would say he hit me. I would be able to say that, but because I am saying, well, I just don't feel good and I'm being gaslit or lied to and I don't feel myself, that's not enough. That's not a reason enough and I still feel obligated to stay even though I'm in the same amount of emotional pain as I would be in physical pain.

Kerry: Do you think you could have really left if you'd found out he was cheating? I know now that you know he had [00:04:00] been cheating, but do you think that would have changed your decision?

Ro: It's a good question. I don't know. Maybe there would have had to been enough of it, but it was really something that crossed my mind a lot. Like I wish I could just catch him. I wish I could just catch him. I wish I could just say it. But then I think back, and there were a lot of moments, there were a lot of moments where I did catch him, but I was gaslit. I was made to believe it was just a fake call or it was he was on the phone with the pizza place, and I would believe it. I just ignored it and was blind to it. And also there was the thought of he could explain it to somebody and be really good at explaining it and say, hey, I was on the phone with the pizza place, I wasn't talking to a girl at three in the morning. He was really good at explaining these things. So, even if I did catch him per se, I don't know if I would have really went to that place and said, okay, I'm leaving.

Kerry: Yeah, I hear for you it really mattered that there was enough validity that you could stand on it factually and you felt that he could make even a better story, so it became a he said she said [00:05:00] situation for you, and that made it iffy enough. That that wasn't compelling enough for you to walk out. For me, it was about my obligation that I had made a commitment to myself. I had made a spiritual commitment to God to honor this relationship. And when I said till death do you part, I really literally meant till death. I'd already done that with Brad. I really believe that that was the honorable thing. In fact, the Bible talks about an honorable wife brings honor to her husband and she brings him a little spiritually closer to God through her spirituality. So to me, it felt like a loving sacrifice for me to be invested. And mind you, mine was saying all the right words. He was saying he was doing therapy. He'd never worked so hard. He was invested. I couldn't directly catch him cheating either. I mean, I caught him texting, and I knew that there was a lack of integrity to the relationship in the sense of loving me, but I didn't catch him red-handed cheating with someone. Now during the break, I knew. He had been cheating, but you could say, well, it was a break. Maybe he [00:06:00] had a different opinion of what a break meant than I did. To me, it meant we're still married. I'm still honoring the marriage vows. Maybe for him, he felt like this was the start of the divorce. Again, I could see the way that we could justify behavior, and that made it hard for me to feel like, yeah, that's a clear-cut reason, but here's what I discovered about myself. In that marriage, and that's not who I am today, but in that marriage, I'm not sure what it was that would have taken me to leave.

Ro: Yeah, I was just thinking that. When you say cheating, right, catching them red-handed, that's our own definition. What red-handed means is like, do we need to catch them in the act? Do they have to be, you know, clothes off in a bed? Do we have to actually see those text messages soliciting, which I witnessed it, I heard him on the phone speaking to somebody. For some people, that would be red-handed. But for me, it was like, no, I didn't see it. I don't know who that person is on the other end of the phone. So there really isn't even a question of would we have actually gone and done it. It's just thinking [00:07:00] back to the stories we tell ourselves, the way we lie to ourselves because we're so obligated. We're so committed. And there are so many factors. For you, it was more of a spiritual factor. For me, it was more like the obligations with family. But it's like, do I just confront this? How strong does it have to be for me to take that leap and do this really hard thing that I don't want to do? Leaving is really hard.

Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard. And I found that the closer I got to the line, the fuzzier the line felt to me. Again, I use the analogy of a child or even with Brad. Let's take Brad as an example. That last five and a half months of that marriage was rough. It essentially was no longer a marriage. We weren't intimate anymore. He was super sick. He was losing his mind. He accused me of things that were horrific, but I knew it was the illness talking. I was increasingly his nursemaid. I was basically helping a person prepare to die, and that cost me a lot. I mean, it was incredibly taxing on me. I [00:08:00] was really emotionally fraught. My health was going down and my whole life was being blown up. And it was hard. It was a hard thing. And there are people who don't stay when people get sick. They book. I mean, I've heard those stories, but the honorable thing is to see that out, to walk that hard road with somebody because that's what love does. That's why I'm feeling emotional saying that. That's what love does. So when do you say that somebody else who claims they're sick, has a mental health issue, they're really looking for help, and you're going to say, I'm sorry, this is too hard for me. I'm sorry you're being too offensive to me. You've betrayed me too severely, and I'm not up for this. I mean, all the way through this relationship, my ex kept claiming he had never worked harder. We did devotions together. He read books. We talked about these really tough topic books. He was in therapy. Me today, I would have left. But the me then, I saw all of this and felt like, how can I say I'm a psychologist? And I walk out on somebody who has a condition, a mental health [00:09:00] condition? Actually, it's a disorder, but the sex addiction would have been a condition he had. I mean, I knew he was narcissistic, but how do you walk out on somebody when they need you? They say they need you. I was so conflicted. That's why it felt like a moral problem for me.

Ro: Yeah, I can really relate to that with the addiction because as you know, my ex-husband is an addict and not only a sex addict, but drugs, alcohol, gambling. And a lot of the behaviors from his sobriety, like trying to stay away from that, going to therapy, going to AA meetings, doing the work, you know, being sober isn't the work, but that was what he called the work. He was doing everything to protect our connection, protect our marriage, when really it was more for him. It was more to show me that he's working so that when he could abuse me, when he could gaslight me and cheat on me and do the things that he was doing and make me feel this confusing space where I don't feel like myself and I do want to leave. He could use that card. Well, I have a [00:10:00] disorder. I have an addiction. And he did say that. He actually did say, would you leave me if I had cancer? He would say that. And he weaponized that because I wouldn't. Of course, I wouldn't. I would have been like you. I would have stayed through the hard times and I would have stayed till the end. And honestly, thinking back, I felt so bad for him. I wanted to help him. I wanted to protect him. There was a moment where he was on his knees and in my bosom just crying. Tears all over my shirt because he had spent all this money on gambling and saying that he was a bad father, a bad person, a bad husband, and I will hate him and I want a divorce. And instead, what I did was I held him and that bought me another two years with him. You know, I held him and said, no, I got this. We will take care of this family. This is just a little speed bump. We will get over this together. And I felt myself really taking care of him in that moment when I was the one that needed the care. I was the one that needed help. I was the one that was confused and still stuck.

Kerry: Yeah, so it makes it [00:11:00] hard for us to determine where the line is that we actually need to step across. When does the other person's psychological space, mental condition, or even difficulties—at what point do we have a sense of obligation or compassion? Maybe it's just a compassion versus when do we also equally then have compassion for ourselves and say that it's too much? I know, for example, there are institutions like the church again that have standards. They clearly say the standard is that according to the Bible, when someone has cheated. Now there are those who also say, but that also includes abuse. But let's see even what our definition of abuse is. It gets very murky.

Ro: Yeah.

Kerry: You know, is it abuse a person who fails to remember to call you to let you know they're working late and you think that they have been impinging on your right to be able to plan your evening? Then you made a meal that you didn't need to that that wasn't kind and thoughtful. Okay, maybe the first time it's not, but what if this is the 20th time that they've done this? Is that now then past the category it's [00:12:00] passive aggressive and they're being psychologically abusive to you? You know, again, like I said, you get close to the lines, the lines get super murky. It becomes very fuzzy to try to figure out these definitions of when is someone exceeded something that's reasonable. So it becomes a challenge of how do you then determine this and when something is unreasonable. So the church says not until they cheat or some say until they get abusive. Then there's also other, you know, maybe it's cultural. Maybe the cultural is you leave home, don't come back.

Ro: Yeah.

Kerry: And there is no place to return to. Don't expect that we're going to open the door for you if you leave this relationship. You made your bed, you lie in it. I've heard that saying a lot, that there are a lot of people who live in that reality. That there is nowhere to turn, there is nowhere to get some help. Maybe you have no financial resources, so what are you supposed to do then? And your family is saying don't come back. So it becomes super murky how you decide at what point is enough and this is the right reason or it's a good reason for you.

Ro: Yeah, that's tough. That's tough because also the [00:13:00] person you're trying to leave is really good at making those lines even murkier for you.

Kerry: Yeah.

Ro: And really giving you these, like any type of situation where you're faced with two choices. They'll go with and they'll sell the one that benefits them. They'll sell that one and you'll believe it. You'll say, well, yeah, that's true. I don't think I can be out there financially without this marriage. And yeah, you're right. The kids shouldn't have to go back and forth for the next 18 years. And also, yeah, I am breaking up with your family and you're breaking up with my family and that's going to be a big mess. And all of the things they sell you on to keep you trapped really affect the way you think about it. And what I'm saying before with the investment, you're invested also into the story we're telling other people and how good our marriage is. And so that part is really tough.

Kerry: Yeah, I know people who've left these relationships and find out the whole community has been turned against them. And here they are in this community where their kids are still going to school and they want to provide stability [00:14:00] and they essentially have lost all of it. They've lost their close relationships. They've of course lost the marriage and they're just left alone. It can be a terribly isolating situation. How did you then finally decide to leave? I mean, you had this feeling like you can't catch him red-handed. You're not quite sure. You know, he says he has a problem. You feel so much compassion for him. And yeah, I did too. I felt a lot of compassion for mine. I felt really sorry for him. He had told me the kind of situation he had grown up in. It was awful. I saw it firsthand. I lived with his mom for eight months. She herself said I was not a good mom. I was a cruel mother. You know, you see, I feel sorry for—I mean, not that it's our job to rescue but—but I think a lot of women—

Ro: But it feels like it is.

Kerry: I know I was gonna say a lot of women feel like it is our job to rescue.

Ro: Yeah, it feels like we have to because we've put so much into it. I used to call it being pot committed. So my ex and I would play poker a lot, obviously he's a gambling addict, and this is what [00:15:00] we did, right? But even just home games, it was like a way for him to still be able to gamble without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars in a casino. So we would play a lot of poker and I learned all the terms. And I always used to say I'm pot committed. Like when you put a bet in, you have to see the bet through, right? You can't just fold your cards and walk away because you've put so much of your pot, your chips, in. And I felt like I put so much of my chips in. I felt like I put so much of myself that if I was just to walk away, I would lose all of that. So you ask, where did I get to the point where I finally was able to walk away? I felt like I couldn't lose anymore. You know, I already lost sense of self. I lost so many things about who I was. I used to sing. And I sing now, obviously. But I used to sing so much during the marriage before I met him. Near the end of that relationship, I stopped singing, I stopped wearing makeup, I stopped doing my hair, I stopped wearing clothes with any kind of color. I [00:16:00] lost who I was and it was when I started to lose myself that it didn't really matter if I was going to lose friends, if I was going to lose, you know, a financial position that kept me comfortable, if I was going to lose his family, if I was even going to lose respect of any kind of community. I just felt like losing myself was the last straw. And that's when I just kind of had to climb out of it. And who actually helped me leave was a therapist. And what's really funny about this is he told me, you need to get help. You need to go see somebody.

Kerry: Oh, so your partner told you that?

Ro: Yeah, my ex-husband said, you need help. Because, you know, you're on antidepressants, you're really depressed and you're making rash decisions. You're making choices that could affect your life and our life and our family. So you should talk to somebody and maybe we should talk to somebody together, and we did for a little bit. And then I ended up seeing her separately and she's the one who helped me with an exit strategy. She's the one who kind of let me see myself and see where I was and it was her help [00:17:00] and my own work as well. But it was really her that—he led me to a person that helped me leave, which I find hilarious. It's really ironic.

Kerry: Yeah, that's a delightful twist there. I felt like for me, I had to give up a part of some of my moral beliefs, you know, and even today, I do feel like I sit differently with them. I had to readjust my paradigm, my view of God and how he viewed marriage and the sanctity of marriage for me to come to the place where it felt okay for me to leave. I felt that deeply committed to that idea. And that me today, I feel that God does not ask us to sacrifice ourself, our safety, and our security in order to be in a relationship. But the me that I was before truly saw that as a higher, more noble thing. That we were called to live a sacrificial life. In fact, that philosophy lives very well in a lot of the Christian church. It really does. And there is something beautiful about sacrificing. Now, interestingly enough, we don't [00:18:00] ask ourselves about how much is the abusive person sacrificing. Obviously, they're sacrificing little, but we put a lot of weight on the one who's doing a lot of the giving and then trying to make it work and walking on eggshells. We put so much weight on that person being sacrificial that we don't consider it's not being very equitable. But I felt like I had to come to a new definition. And when you think that your relationship with God is contingent on the degree that you understand the concepts properly, and if you get that wrong, that means then you may be breaching that relationship as well. Right? That's a whole nother level of fear. Because you feel like you're not just losing this relationship that, yeah, we have a sunk cost fallacy going on. We've invested so much, we hate to lose all that investment, not realizing we're going to lose more investment if we stay. But we also, for me, it felt like, what if I'm losing my relationship with God over this too?

Ro: Yeah.

Kerry: Yeah. What if I walk out and I make a grave error and that God looks at me and says, I don't approve.

Ro: Yeah.

Kerry: And can I [00:19:00] bear the weight of that? And being on the outside of the one thing—the one thing in my entire life that has given me tremendous comfort is that connection, that spiritual connection—and I may be sacrificing that as well. So it made it a really hard, heavy decision. But I got to the place near the end where I knew that it was so bad, something was so wrong, this person really wasn't who I thought this person was. I was begging for God to open a door and just get me out. I just felt like I needed saving and I needed God on a white horse riding in like a knight to save the princess here, you know? So it got really, really desperate there at the end.

Ro: Yeah, he would never do that though, right? Like he would never put you in a situation where you felt like you've done him wrong, you know?

Kerry: I wouldn't know that though.

Ro: Yeah, and at the time, you wouldn't know that.

Kerry: I didn't know that.

Ro: Now though, do you know where maybe that shift was for you or you were able to lean into that and trust and make those distinctions a little different so that you could [00:20:00] see those signs and protect yourself?

Kerry: Yeah, it was hard because a lot of people like to what's called cherry pick the Bible. They'll pull verses out to basically support—you can find it to support anything you want, really. If you're not careful, yeah, really. But what it took for me was sort of standing back and looking at the whole of the Bible. The whole story of the story was about the love of one and being so important that Christ was willing to pay the cost of our sins to save us and that he ultimately viewed me as so valuable that I was worth that. And so why was I not seeing myself equally valuable, that I was worth saving too? That part of it had to be from my own autonomy. I had to step up and do the work of saving myself and that he really didn't want us to be disrespected. I mean, if you look at how even Jesus treated the Pharisees and the other people he came into conflict with, he didn't sacrifice himself. You know, he didn't chase people down and try to convince them that his way was the right way. He didn't wobble on his convictions. I mean, if somebody did something it was sort of out of line, he called them on it. I'm thinking of, for [00:21:00] example, there's a story in the Bible where Peter says to Jesus, you're not going to go to Jerusalem and die. That's not happening. And Jesus looks and this—Peter's not ill-meaning. He has good intentions here. And Jesus looks at Peter and says, get behind me, Satan. He called it out and said, listen, my mission is to do this. And whether you like it or not, this is what's going to happen. And you getting in the way of it, even though your heart's in the right place, you're still in a way, you're hurting my mission and I'm not going to sacrifice that. So if you look at those types of examples, you realize that he really held the integrity of himself. The integrity of his person. And even when people were abusing him, he didn't actively do more to increase the abuse. So it took me sort of seeing that perspective and realizing that that's an example for me. But it was hard because, like I said, when you've been indoctrinated—and I had been my entire life—what is a good picture of a woman? Well, you look at the pastor's wife. She's silent, she says nothing, she nods her head, she lets them take the lead, and you have no idea what's going on behind closed doors in that house. She knows her place. And I had [00:22:00] been raised to know my place. Yeah. What a topic. Yeah. It's hard. It's a hard one. So I'd love us to jump over to the podcast extra and let's talk about when you start to realize that maybe this is going wrong. What is your next step? What kind of maybe psychologically should you be saying and doing for yourself to help you get ready? Like, obviously, you just asked me what was the shift that I made? I had to make a psychological shift. You had to make a psychological shift too. You had to get ready to say, what if there's no validation? So let's talk about how we psychologically prepared ourselves for possibly going it alone. And we'll talk about that on the podcast extra. But thank you for joining me so much. These are always very rich conversations with you. I deeply appreciate it, Ro. Well, that's a wrap for this week's episode. Are you following me on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube? Find me at Kerry McEvoy, PhD. And whether you're in, considering leaving, or have left a narcissistic relationship, find community support at my Toxic [00:23:00] Free Relationship Club. You can learn about this resource as well as others at KerryMcEvoyPhD.com. And I'll see you back here next week.