How Long Does It Take a Narcissist to Take Control?
Ten years, in my case, and that’s the right number to a question with the wrong shape. People ask how long it takes like there’s a clock running somewhere, and if you knew the number you could catch it in time. There’s no day it happened. I’ve been back over that decade more times than is good for me looking for the moment it turned and there isn’t one. That’s not my memory failing. It’s built that way. Something that needs you to agree at every step can’t afford a step big enough to argue about. If somebody laid out the whole deal at the start, nobody takes it. Not one person. So it never gets offered. It gets put together a piece at a time, and every piece is small enough that objecting to it would make you the unreasonable one. When you go looking for the moment you lost, you’re looking for something that was never there, and not finding it is what convinces most men nothing really happened to them.
The early years were good, and that’s the part that gets used
There’s a version of this where the good part was fake the whole time, a long setup for what came later. People reach for that afterward because it tidies the story up. I’m not telling it that way about my marriage. Some of those years were the best I’ve had, and turning them into a con would be a lie I’d have to keep telling. It also misses why they matter. You don’t hand your judgment to a stranger. You hand it, a bit at a time, to somebody you’ve got years of good with, and every time you hand over a piece you’ve got a decade of proof that it’s safe to do that with this person. The good years aren’t the setup. They’re what gets spent. The better they actually were, the more there is to spend, which is why this takes longer with people who had something real at the start.
Keeping the peace turns into staying out of trouble
It starts somewhere so ordinary you’d recognize it from marriages that are fine. You let things go because you’re being reasonable and not everything is worth a fight. That’s true, and it’s how two people live in one house. Then you notice certain things get a reaction way past what happened, so you stop bringing those up. Still reasonable. You know your wife, you go around what sets her off, anybody would. Then the list gets longer and you don’t notice, because every new thing went on the same way the first one did, one at a time, quietly, without a conversation about it. At some point I was checking before I said almost anything, and I couldn’t tell you what year that started. Nothing was ever demanded of me. I built that list myself and kept it myself, and at the time I’d have called it knowing my wife.
Then she doesn’t have to do anything
The list stops being about subjects and starts being about what you do. Where you go, who you see, how long you’re gone, what you spend, how you talk to your own mother on the phone. The important thing about this part is that nobody’s giving orders. If you’d asked me then how I was being controlled I’d have had nothing to show you, because there was nothing to point at, and the reason there was nothing to point at is that I’d taken the job over. I was doing it. I was better at it than she was, because I knew where every line was and she’d have had to guess. That’s where the word stops helping anybody. Nobody’s watching you. You’ve learned it, you’re running it yourself, and from the inside it doesn’t feel like giving in at all. It feels like being considerate. That’s why it lasts.
The last thing she takes is knowing what happened
Everything up to there is what you do, and what you do is something you could in theory stop on a bad enough day. The last thing to go is being able to know what took place. You have a fight. You know what was said and who said it. A day later there’s another version, and hers is the one left standing, and you agreed to it, and nobody made you. Do that enough times over small stuff and that’s just how a disagreement ends in your house. Once you’re there, there’s no bottom left, because anything can be turned around, including the biggest thing there is, which is where this series ends up. From outside a decade looks like ten thousand decisions to stay. From inside it isn’t decisions at all. It’s one long stretch with no edges, and the man in it is running a business and raising kids and building a house, and none of that leaves room to sit down and ask whether his wife now decides what’s true in his life.
What to measure instead of years
If you came here for a number I don’t have one that’ll help you, and I’d be careful with anybody who offers one. Here’s a better test, because the obvious one comes back clean for a long time. Don’t ask what you’re allowed to do. Ask whose version stands 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 fight where you started losing it, then how long it took doesn’t matter and neither does the fact that nobody ever forced you. The one useful thing about how this works is that it needs you at every step. That’s the worst part of it and it’s also the only way out. It can’t keep going without you, which means noticing it isn’t a small thing. It’s the only move you’ve got that the whole setup doesn’t already expect.
Continue Strong and Controlled: How a Narcissist Uses Your Strengths Against You
