Voldemort

When 'We Love You Both' Is the Injury.

Last night I sat in a hotel bar in a ski village I’ve known for more than a quarter century. I built a cabin here. I’ve skied these runs, soaked in these hot tubs, shared wine with these people through marriages, children, winters, spring thaws.

Dinner was easy. Laughter. Stories. Two old friends whose teenage sons now tower over the memory of their wedding. At some point my ex came up in conversation. I referred to him by a nickname I use privately. A dark, slightly theatrical shorthand.

Jennifer winced.

“Don’t call him that,” she said. “We love you both.”

It was said kindly. Generously. As if she were preserving balance in the universe.

But something inside me tightened.

The tension was not irrational. It came from history. From a pattern of calculated cruelty that did not begin with the breakup and did not end there.

Years ago, after our separation, he told people grotesque accusations about me.

Some mutual acquaintances, as well as a close family member, had relayed the painful nature of the defamation. It was nightmarishly absurd. Not hyperboles, complete fabrications. The poisonous patter of an afflicted personality. But once words like that are released into a small community, they do not evaporate. They drift.

I didn’t knew who might have heard them.

For a couple of seasons, even though I had every right to be there, I felt uneasy walking through the village. I imagined glances. Whispered assessments. A kind of social exile that may not have existed outside my own head, but lived vividly in my body.

That is the part most won’t understand about smear campaigns. The damage is not only reputational. It is physiological. Humans are wired for belonging. Threaten that, even hypothetically, and our nervous system engages fear, apprehension and jeopardy.

So when someone says, “We love you both,” what they might mean is: I do not want to choose. I value harmony. I refuse to triangulate.

What the survivor hears is: “Your injury, and his aggression, are morally equivalent.”

That may not be fair. It is clearly not accurate. But the feeling is real.

Recovery from narcissistic abuse goes beyond leaving the relationship. It includes surviving the narrative that follows. It is learning to tolerate the fact that some people will remain neutral. It is managing the body’s reaction when an old accusation echoes in a familiar place.

You can be healed and yet still flinch. You can have rebuilt your life and still feel a surge of shame when you walk into a room weighted with history. You can understand why friends refuse to choose, and yet still feel the sting of their neutrality.

So last night, after a few drinks, I felt the old tightening. The scanning. The question: who knows what? Who believes what?

It surprised me. I had thought I was past it.

Relief came later, slowly. In a quiet room, by myself. With reflection and meditation. Not from vindication. Not from public correction. From quietly reaffirming that those accusations happened, that they affected me, and that they were false.

Sometimes recovery is not about clearing your name. It is about finding people who see you clearly, and accepting that other might not.

If you have been through something similar, you are not irrational for feeling activated years later. You are not dramatic for struggling with community neutrality. Your nervous system is responding to a threat it once experienced as existential.

Healing does not mean amnesia.

It means you can sit in the same village, order a drink, feel the tightening, and know that it will pass.

There is something else worth adding.

Many people who find themselves in relationships like this are not naïve. They are not foolish. They are not weak.

They are often generous and patient. They will try to see the best in others and be slow to assume malice. They are willing to self-reflect and take responsibility for more than their share.

These attributes are strengths. They are certainly not flaws.

But in the presence of someone who exploits empathy, those strengths can be used against you. Your instinct to understand becomes an opening. Your tolerance becomes an opportunity. Your capacity for forgiveness becomes a tool.

It can be deeply disorienting to realize that your kindness was not reciprocated, and instead harvested.

Even people who appear competent, accomplished, or professionally authoritative are not immune. You can run a clinic, manage crises, hold complex medical knowledge in your head, and still be gradually destabilized inside an intimate relationship. Intelligence does not vaccinate against manipulation. Success does not confer immunity from psychological coercion.

Abuse of this kind does not select for incompetence. It selects for decency.

If you were drawn into something like this, it does not mean you lack discernment. It may mean you were operating from trust in a world where someone else was operating from control.

And when it ends, it is common to feel embarrassed. Ashamed. As though you should have known better.

You did know better. You just assumed the other person was playing by the same rules.

There is no disgrace in being kind.

There is no contradiction in being capable and having been harmed.

You can be both strong and injured. Both accomplished and misled. Both discerning and, for a time, deceived.

None of that diminishes you.

---