Can a Strong Man Be Controlled by a Narcissist?
When people picture somebody being controlled by their husband or partner, they picture somebody small. No money of their own, no skills anybody would pay for, nowhere to go. That picture is the reason nobody looks for this in men who don’t fit it, and it’s the reason I didn’t see it in myself for about ten years. I’ve built businesses. I cleared a forest by hand and built my house on that land. I’m a big man, I’m educated, and I’ve never walked into a room worried about anybody in it. Ten years into my marriage my wife told me my kids would be better off if I was gone, and I believed her, and I came closer to acting on it than I like to think about. Every one of those things about me was true the whole time and not one of them helped. That’s worth saying plainly, because if strength is what men think protects them, then a lot of strong men are walking around with nothing protecting them at all and no idea.
Being strong only helps with one kind of problem
Being able to handle yourself solves one thing, which is somebody coming at you. It solves it well and that’s what it’s for. What happens in a marriage like this isn’t that and never comes near it. It doesn’t come at you. It lives with you. It has a key, it knows your week, and it knows what you’re scared of because you told it yourself back when you thought you were being close to somebody. There’s no amount of strong that helps when somebody is changing what you believe. Being able to lift things and being able to tell what’s true are two different parts of a man and they aren’t connected. Nearly everybody assumes they are, including the men it’s happening to, and that’s most of the problem. A man who’s never lost a fight has spent his whole life proving he can handle himself, so he takes that proof and applies it to something it has nothing to do with, and decides whatever’s wrong at home must be something else.
Having money made it harder to see, not easier to leave
The usual reason people give for staying is that they can’t afford to go. For a lot of people that’s true and it’s the whole story. For a man with his own income and his own trade and property in his name it isn’t true at all, which sounds like an advantage and works the other way round. Every test I knew how to run came back fine. I wasn’t broke, I wasn’t stuck out in the middle of nowhere, and I could have left on a Tuesday and been fine by the next week. So when things got bad I never once reached for the word control, because control was for people who couldn’t get out and I could get out. What I came up with instead were reasons for staying that sounded like commitment and character and being a man about it. I made all of them up myself, which is exactly why they held. Nobody can argue you out of a reason you invented.
It starts with your judgment, not with what you do
The thing I wish somebody had told me at year three is that this doesn’t start by taking away what you do. It starts by taking away your read on what happened. For years I still ran my business, still made decisions, still said what I thought. If you’d followed me around for a week you’d have seen nothing. What changed was quieter than that. I’d walk out of an argument certain I’d been wronged, and by the next morning I’d have talked myself into having overreacted, or misremembered, or into it being a fair point she just put badly. I did that on my own, with nobody in the room. Once you stop trusting your own read, what you do follows without anybody having to make you, because now you’re taking your answers from somebody else. That’s the whole thing. It isn’t a cage. It’s you slowly agreeing that her version is more reliable than yours, which is why it’s so hard to see and impossible to put a date on.
Why men don’t say anything
I didn’t talk about it and I know exactly why, and the reasons are working on other men right now. The first one is obvious. Say it out loud and listen to how it sounds. Grown man. Big man. Built things, employed people, paid for all of it. Controlled by his wife. There’s a joke sitting at the end of that sentence and everybody in the room knows it, including you, so you don’t finish the sentence. A systematic review of men seeking help for domestic abuse backs this up, describing fear of disbelief, challenges to masculinity, and men sometimes being treated as the perpetrator themselves. The second reason is worse because it’s yours. If you can’t handle your own house, what does that make you. That one isn’t coming from her. It runs on the same thing that makes you good at your job, and it’ll keep a capable man quiet for ten years while he gets better and better at carrying something he’s decided not to mention.
What would actually have helped
If the question is whether a strong man can be controlled by a narcissist, the answer is yes, and being strong doesn’t come into it either way. It doesn’t stop it and it doesn’t cause it. All it does is give you more reasons to believe it isn’t happening, which is worse than nothing. What she actually took from me was the ability to know what happened without checking it against her first. Everything else came from losing that. So the test isn’t what you’re allowed to do, because that comes back clean for years. The test is whose version wins when the two of you remember something differently, and how long it takes you to give in. If your account of your own life keeps losing, and you can’t name the argument where you started losing it, then that’s your answer, and it doesn’t matter what you can lift or what you built or who pays the mortgage. The next part is about how long it takes, because the timeline is the part nobody believes until they’ve lived one.
Continue Strong and Controlled: How Long Does It Take a Narcissist to Take Control?
