Red flags

Does anyone remember that feeling of shock as you made the connections watching the last 5 minutes of the movie The Sixth Sense? Piecing it together in disbelief, hand in hand with Bruce Willis’s character, seeing flashbacks in a whole new light. The shock of knowing that his character had been dead the entire time, the sadness of realizing with him that his life had been over and there was no way to change it.

I’ve thought of that feeling often as I’ve experienced a painful unfolding of insights into my marriage. After years of trying to fix and figure things out in my individual therapy and two rounds of marriage counseling together, much to my surprise, it was through social media I actually learned what had been happening.

Scrolling one day, I saw a video reel of a woman describing a relationship that sounded like mine. What she was describing sounded so familiar. It felt like someone was summarizing so many confusing thoughts and feelings I’d had for a long time. When I accidentally lost the page, I felt desperate to find it because I thought she may have had answers for me. I anxiously searched and searched until I found her again.

I rewatched her video and then several others she had made. Then I began receiving reels in my feed by numerous people on similar topics. I was stunned. Of course I’d heard terms like borderline personality disorder and narcissism before. But I’d never fully understood what they meant.

The term narcissist made me think of grandiose, arrogant, cocky people. Surely, my humble, self-depricating, kind, sensitive husband did not fit that mold. Then I saw the term “covert narcissist”. I watched video after video describing what it feels like to be partnered with someone with one of these personality disorders. I was as shocked as Bruce Willis’s character as it unveiled before me.

They were describing me, my experience. All the confusion, doubting my own sanity and sense of reality, my desperate need for his love and attention. Terms like gaslighting, weaponized incompetence, bread crumbing, supply, neglect, reactive abuse, and the dreaded “discard”. I couldn’t believe it could be true, and yet it was the first time things started to feel real, like they made sense.

The director of The Sixth Sense, M Night Shyamalyn, placed red items in the scenes you would later see in flashbacks when the hidden reality was revealed. Much like the concept of red flags, indicators of what was to come. Not seeing it the first time through, and then being unable to unsee it later.

For many years, I knew my partner had anxiety and depression, but I also often suspected there was something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Cluster B disorders had never even entered my mind, even though his sister was believed to have had borderline personality disorder.

As I continued watching and reading, any sort of relief I’d felt in being able to finally name it quickly dissipated as I learned more and began reading about outcomes, which were all very bleak. Lack of self-awareness, inability to accept accountability or responsibility, inability to sincerely apologize, “flipping the script” to blame those they hurt in order to see themselves as the hero or the victim. They often avoid therapy because it puts their masked persona at risk.

The outcome for our marriage was painfully clear. Once seen, they would sever any relationship that threatened the image they had created of who they wanted to appear to be. A chilling quote I’d read, “When they know that you know, it becomes a dangerous situation for you.”

Like a horror movie, that quote played itself out in my life for several months after I figured it out. He went for my throat. The cruelty, saying and doing egregious things I never thought he would ever be capable of. I kept saying, “But this is me, how can you do all this to me"?” Like many in my shoes, I learned, I had believed we had some deep, magical connection. We shared a special and rare love. We had so much we shared in common, I’d thought.

Googling prognosis was rough. Not much hope was offered. Still, I tried to get him into therapy. I tried to help him without being the one to name it for him, because clearly he would not hear it from me. As painful as it is for me personally, I still feel bursts of love and empathy for him. This is an awful diagnosis to live with. Part of me still wants to help him through it. But each time I held out my hand, he pushed me away.

Sadly, I would’ve stayed his wife. I would’ve stood by his side, held his hand through his diagnosis and treatment. I would’ve continued sacrificing many of my needs to help him through it and to live out our lives together, finding joy where we could make it. But when faced with having to face himself, to drop all the endless defenses he had built around himself, to allow himself to be vulnerable with me, he chose to walk away. He chose immediate self-gratifications as he had often throughout our marriage. He continued to choose isolation over engagement with his beautiful family of four.

Heartbreaking for me. Heartbreaking for our children.

You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to save themselves, they say. In retrospect, it is shocking to realize how much I carried for the near 30 years we were together, how many of my own needs I sacrificed. All the empathy I gave to someone who doesn’t appear to be capable of true empathy at this point in his life. My commitment, trust and loyalty unmet.

Like in the movie, I see snapshots of my life going backwards in time. There were no cinematic red flags in my scenes, and yet the signs were there. It all pieces together so clearly now, and yet I had no idea. Like the character in the movie, I go through shock, anger, sadness, and gradually into acceptance. I can jump from one emotion to the next at any time. It is a process much longer than the last 5 minutes of a movie of 1 hour and 47 minutes.

Did you feel cheated at the end of The Sixth Sense? Did you feel duped into caring for a character who was a ghost all along? Did you feel like you had been fooled for the length of the movie and now needed to rethink or rewatch the whole thing to make sense of it all? Was it worth the ride or do you wish you’d chosen a different movie?