It's one thing to get this intellectually, but to feel it and really be healed - it has to come to you. This happened to me. My goodness I'm grateful.

Me in the Mohammed Ali Castle Citadel in Cairo Egypt

This is how I feel today, kind of on top of the world with a keen sense of peace.

Victimization has been turned around to empowerment for me. What was or is done, isn't about me. It's between the perpetrator and the wall - and those who enable her.

I know that after turning this corner in recovery there are many other things I will accomplish - Some for more growth and self improvement and some for others.

My life was so packed with thoughts of all that has happened as a result of having a narcissistic mother that what I accomplished before was over and above all the negativity.

No wonder life was a grand challenge. Even the gifts of life while wonderful, presented challenges.

The challenge was to enjoy, fully, life and it's gifts without allowing the resounding negativity playing in the background to affect the here and now. Very difficult.

Life free of negativity - free of narcissists, free of borderlines, free of sadness, free of intrusive thoughts, and free of crutches has become actually living, a chance to begin anew without those impediments.

Now there is time to enjoy the things in life beginning with myself and family, and onto the wonders of nature and the gifts of animals, laughter, sunshine, and belonging.  You may wonder if you will ever feel this way. I know I did. But with the necessary steps in recovery and hard work - the real desire to achieve this freedom, it is very possible.

Funny, how when I got so far in recovery, instead of me presenting myself to the recovery, the recovery began presenting itself to me.  Just last week it came to me that this is it - it's finally over (the victim mentality) the prevailing attitude that was the last thing holding back my freedom.

I had gone no contact.  I had been in therapy.  I had done tons of writing and journaling. I did the forgiveness - I examined in minute detail the offenses - I even got the closure and won with the NM on the last day of contact, but I needed to drop the feeling of being her victim.  The feeling of knowing all of us were victims.... the feeling of total helplessness over what she did to our dad on his deathbed, withholding his morphine.  I had to let this go finally.

She isn't a mother. Never was a wife. Isn't really even a person.  So ALL she's done really doesn't matter. It can no longer affect me. It is a history which is her history, not mine.

Where I am concerned, her history and she herself, isn't real. Because if she isn't a real mother, I have no mother. If I have no mother, it wasn't my mother who perpetrated decades of crimes against me.  It's a monster that was once able to control my reactions - that's all. In doing so she used various forms of abusive behaviors which she enlisted others to accept - what they wouldn't accept, she lied about.

A monster. Not even a person.

It's not personal. What she did to me, she'll do to anyone - in fact she's got to be doing the very same things to someone else right now.  It has nothing to do with me, personally. It's just business.

Business as usual for sociopaths and narcs is just that.  Nothing personal. That's why they are so shocked when people don't just right off the bat get over their lies and manipulations against them..  It's just business.

Kind of like how the mob operates, the sociopath/narcissist has her victims, but so what.. life's supposed to go on. It's the victim's problem if they cannot move on, not the narcissists.

I stand here today overlooking the hear and now, and it looks promising.

It's one thing to get this intellectually, but to feel it and really be healed - it has to come to you. This happened to me.  My goodness I'm grateful.