On a Friday, I know…. This essay was written about three years ago.
Vertigo is what you feel when your brain fails to reconcile two different sets of sensory cues about your situation: say, when you’re reading a book in the car, and your eyes tell your brain you’re sitting still, but the swaying car tells it you’re moving. Or, when damage or pressure in your inner ear makes the proprioceptors there think you’re spinning around when you’re standing still.
I’ve experienced vertigo in two ways in my divorce: first, when I am going along through my day and then suddenly remember how my situation has changed. It feels like that old cliché, “a rug getting pulled out.” Suddenly, my stomach is rushing up into my brain like I’m going over a drop on a roller coaster. What? my brain screams at me, I’m not married anymore? My lover and best friend of 20 years is with another woman? This kind of vertigo comes from a sort of disconnect or mismatch between parts of myself, what I’ve come to think of as my three bodies: my intellectual body, my emotional body, and my physical body. Sometimes, all three of them are synced up—when I’m climbing, for instance, or in intense pain. But most of the time, they kind of range near each other like dogs in a pack. And for the last year, it’s mostly been the intellectual dog in the lead with the emotional and physical dogs trailing way behind.
Vertigo, at least this kind, happens when my emotional and physical bodies suddenly “get the memo” about something my intellectual body has known for a while: the dizziness and disorientation is a measure of the distance among the three parts of myself. This kind of vertigo has gotten less intense over the last year as my emotional and physical bodies gradually cottoned on to what was happening: I feel like 10 months was a significant marker in this respect. Before that, while my brain understood that my ex wasn’t my husband anymore, my emotional and physical selves didn’t: they still expected him to be there in my bed, coming through the garage door after work, next to me at a friend’s house or at a party, holding my hand in a movie theater…. Twenty years of habituation doesn’t wear off overnight. But at around 10 months, I noticed a reduction in the “rug pulled out” moments. That doesn’t mean I was magically over what had happened, but all three parts of me were at least up to date on it.
The second kind of vertigo is more serious, and I’m not sure it will ever go away. It’s the sense of dizziness and disorientation I get as I try to reconcile my experiences of my ex. On the one hand, he could be loving, giving, supportive, flattering, and helpful. He told me frequently how much he loved me, swore I was the most beautiful woman in the world, called me his “smart cookie,” and said how lucky he was to be with me. He bought me thoughtful gifts that showed he paid close attention to what I was interested in and enjoyed. He was in many ways my staunchest cheerleader, giving me the courage to try things I had always wanted to do but was afraid to—like alpine climbing or riding a motorcycle.
On the other hand, he was frequently cruel, selfish, competitive, demeaning, and demanding. He threatened to leave me once a year on average. He told me he “couldn’t stand me,” and that I was “obnoxious,” “impossible,” a “fucking bitch.” He didn’t say but insinuated that he wouldn’t be attracted to me anymore if I didn’t stay in shape. He took things of mine without asking, broke them, and never replaced them—then raged at me if I suggested he should. Naturally, I wasn’t allowed to touch his things. He criticized everything I did, undermining my confidence in my ability to do even basic stuff like driving or doing the laundry or grooming the dogs. And that’s not even getting into his deception, cheating, and abandonment at the end of our marriage….
Vertigo comes from trying to integrate these two sets of experiences. Was my ex cruel or kind? Did he love me or didn’t he? Was he the nice guy everyone thought he was, or a monster? It would simplify things to just believe one set of facts OR the other. But I can’t because they’re both there: right behind every happy memory, like its shadow, comes a dark memory. I see pictures of us in the crater at Haleakala, the sun shining down on the stark lunar landscape, and I remember how beautiful it was to hike with my husband and then go pick him up at the end of his trail run through the crater; and then, I remember that I was so miserable from him raging at me that morning as we drove up to the peak that I turned my face into the cold wind and cried in the dark…. It goes on and on like that, and the dizziness makes me feel ill.
One thing that has helped is simply stopping trying to reconcile the two sets of experiences into one, to say “yes and” rather than “yes but.” Yes, he was loving, and he was also mean. Yes, he supported my career, and he was also disrespectful and dismissive of my intelligence and expertise. Yes, he was highly competent and confident, and he was also so needy and clingy it was cringey sometimes.
When I realized that I was really married to two men and not one, the vertigo eased up. You’ll hear women in abusive relationships, particularly ones with narcissists, refer over and over again to the old trope of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it’s spot-on in my case. What’s more, my ex frequently transformed from one man into the other on a dime—sometimes seemingly in response to something I said or did, but more often mysteriously, or even capriciously. After a while, I caught on to the fact that the switches had nothing to do with me even though I didn’t understand the “why” of it until much later.
After a lot of therapy and reading reliable books on narcissistic discard, I learned that this second vertigo I had experienced came from my ex’s switching between his false self (Dr. Jekyll) and hidden self (Mr. Hyde). These two selves can’t be integrated because they were a specific adaptation to childhood trauma: the “splitting” of the self into one that is ideal, strong, and perfect and one that is wretched, weak, and shameful. When stressed or threatened with failure, the narcissist reinforces the false self and projects the hidden self onto their closest family member or intimate partner—whom they can then berate, ignore, beat up, or try to abandon. But no one can actually abandon themselves. Realizing this is finally what helped me get over my second vertigo, or at least make my peace with it. It’s a sign of a healthy self when you struggle to make a whole out of the good and bad of people; it means you’re integrated, you grew up. If you never have this sense of vertigo—if people are either all good or all bad to you—that’s when it’s time to worry. Like so many unpleasant sensations, vertigo is there as a warning sign to let us know something is off-kilter or precarious in our situation. I don’t love it, but it would dangerous—perhaps even deadly—to go through my life and my relationships without it.
The Rookery 