My Ex - a Female Narcissist

I met my exgf at a support group that we both attend for recovery from alcoholism. At the time we began spending time together I had been sober for approx 2 years & she approx 4& 1/2 years.

The pretext for us spending time together was playing music together, her singing, me playing guitar. My exgf is a very attractive, provocative looking woman, tall, dark skin, latin. I had always been physically attracted to her but initially found her intimidating - she is very combative, haughty & arrogant in her style of relating and I am the more timid type. Over a period of months we got to know each other and then on one night I was in the process of writing a text to her to tell her I wanted more than friendship when I received one from her saying the same thing. I raced around to hers and we launched into a relationship. After two months I moved into her place (her flat was much nicer than mine). All was well until around 3 months in...I went on a holiday with my blood family...I returned with some small gifts that I had purchased for her...my gf made a face at the gifts I had given her and then started lecturing me because I hadn't brought any cigarettes back for her. I was confused and baffled as this was a new brazen side I hadn't seen before.

My ex then started in on how I was tight with money and this became the ongoing theme. I have never been huge on gifts or gestures so I thought perhaps my ex was right and that other men were much better than I - I also was only earning a small salary so carried an insecurity about this. But in the opening months of the relationship I had given my ex's brother a computer worth around 800 dollars, a guitar, and various other gifts so I was genuinely confused about the accusations. At this stage I trusted my ex though so assumed that perhaps she was right and I really needed to start looking at my behaviour so I started buying her flowers and clothes etc on a regular (at least fortnightly) basis. My ex however continued to insist I was tight with money.

The other manifestations around money were requesting expensive gifts (and controlling what gifts were bought, commenting on how much they should cost), making a statement that she wanted three holidays a year and implying that anything less would make me less than a man, monitoring and commenting on how I spent my money all the time... and the complaints continued and increased in frequency.

My ex insisted that we throw away all pictures of ex's (she threw hers away I threw away mine). She was still married to a foreign boyfriend (she had married her abusive egyptian ex and left him the next day never to return) and attempted to hand me full financial responsibility for organising her divorce from this man though I refused so that stalled. She also started trying to change what clothes I wore and said a few times that I represented her when I was out so I should look good. I recognised this sort of thing at the time as sick thinking but I didn't call her on it and I see now that I just tolerated a lot of behaviour that was well over the line because of my codependency and desire for the relationship to work - I also don't feel that a relationship has to be tick-all-the-boxes healthy so thought I would tolerate her idiosyncrasies.

The more painful things that started to happen were me gradually realising she had a complete lack of interest in me and felt I was there only to serve her...on a trip to London we were looking around The Tower of London and I suddenly became ill with what seemed like food poisoning...I started vomiting and getting diarrhoea. She just looked at me as though I was ruining her day and insisted on staying for another 45 minutes or so while I ran back & forth to the toilet throwing up etc. That evening she went in a mood with me because I was still too ill for us to go and see a musical we were planning on seeing. I realise now that she tried to make me feel that I was vomiting etc in order to get out of paying for tickets to the show. I started getting a lot of cognitive dissonance at this point - I was trying to reconcile the picture of who she was telling me I was with the person I knew myself actually to be. I knew that I was a decent, caring, honest, very giving man and I was being treated like a vile, penny-pinching abuser - I realise now this was a projection of her on to me but my self-esteem still plummeted dramatically through the relationship. She is a master at gaslighting.

It appeared earlier on in the relationship that my exgf tried to hide her exploitativeness and selfishness but that towards the end of the relationship she didn't try to hide it. She became utterly, utterly selfish...I started to leave the home we shared after rows and stay away for a night or so at my mother's. I was instinctively trying to get away from the insanity and abuse. My exgf then increased her badmouthing of my family...labelling them greedy and tight, selfish etc.

The relationship ended after several rows during which time I stated that she did not treat me like an equal and that I was her equal. She was always evasive during rows and just said that all of the problems were my fault and that she treated me badly because I was tight and wasn't her equal.
After I texted her one night telling her a few of her faults she packed up all my clothes and took them around to a mutual friend's. By this stage I was reading about narcissism and knew that she was trying to hold on to some of my belongings TV, jewellery so I asked for these back to be told I was a 'sad little man'.

She immediately surrounded her self with two new female friends (the type she can wow) for supply and booked a holiday to Egypt (to dangle the prospect of her returning to her ex in my face). She D&D'd me in all the usual ways, entirely blanking my existence, or through oblique put-downs. I have gone gradually NC, finding it very hard to withdraw from her mother & brother who I felt very close to. I am beginning to accept that she is a permanently damaged individual and that my only role in her eyes was ever to inflate her ego, puff her up, pay her bills, and to agree with absolutely everything she said. I feel most disgusted with her for the way a narcissist will literally destroy another person only to save their own image. My ex portrays herself to be a rough diamond, altruistic, no-nonsense protector of the weak but she is actually just a bully with no real loyalty. I think she probably has a rough road ahead of her as I think of narcissists as very nearly psychotic. I switch between rage, pity and longing when I think of her. And I feel overwhelmingly sad at times because of the loss of a future I thought we were going to have together.