If you've ever tried to cook up a man or woman in your life, you're going to love Becky Ruff's colorful description of her multiple Cauldron Crashes. Today's excess of Internet "match" websites provides sizzling opportunities for relationships of every flavor. Like any women with a healthy appetite, Ruff decides to taste them all. She regales the reader with her unpredictable Kitchen Capers that keep manifesting the same fatal endings yet leave her feeling far from being a femme fatale. As she continues her pursuit, one day she discovers to her amazement that she has created a dish fit for a queen: herself. Her optimism and self-esteem fall in love with each other and the chemistry and timing prove to be perfect. Life has become a feast of inner wisdom. You will want to keep Becky Ruff's Cookbook by your bedside (or maybe even take it to bed with you). About the Author: Becky Ruff is a professional copywriter and editor as well as an entrepreneur who has founded and managed a variety of companies offering support services to busy professionals and parents. Her latest enterprise, www.ruffpersonalassistant, provides fee-for-service shipping, secretarial, Internet and administrative services. Ruff has two daughters, a son-in-law and two grandchildren, and resides in Montana.
Hindsight: life with a bipolar, narcissist -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggk81ISRjNo
www.reedpersonalassistant.bravehost.com
Romance Stew shows the woman I was before I boarded the barreling freight train of life with a narcissistic spouse. (I feel the music behind this segment of story should be from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's movie format, "So long, so long...and thanks for all the fish! which captures the sense of humor) This has been my personal journey of choice using reality therapy. It proved an amazingly swift roller coaster of emotional turmoil. As an optimist and fairly bright gal, my attempt in the last chapters describing my marriage and the menagerie of distressed family members along for the ride was to take the high road, and yet I seemed unable to evaluate that my questions of what I wanted in this reality of marriage could not mesh with those of my partner. Only after much time had passed did I believe the category to have been narcissism. He presented so very well.
In the second edition, I included my journey within a marriage where not only "he" became the only presence that mattered, but his family supplied additional overwhelm. In this writing, the precursor to my awareness of narcissism, I worked to "take the high road." The finale found me less optimistic and "settling" with an expectation that life within my chosen domain would improve. Horrific emotional turmoil had me feeling insane and totally out-of-sync with the me of my world. I had begun the journey with this alien presence full of hopeful expectation and my belief that I had found "Mr. Right." The addition of the "Alice in Wonderland" surprises that awaited me on the other side of "I do," even if frightening and "Twilight Zone" like in appearance, frightened, appalled, and shook my world of beliefs.
There exists a more prescient awareness of the changing direction of our society and culture today with the introduction of writings on relationship narcissism from Lisa E. Scott's It's All About Him, Sandra Brown's How to Spot a Dangerous Man, and Sam Vaknin's Malignant Self Love. To include the emotional impact of such encounters and resulting "dark night of the soul" for recipients of this psychological act, blog sites must be included such as that of Betty LaLuna and her Narc Raider on Facebook. Something insidious has altered life perspective across the world regarding a sense of detachment with no empathy.
The "trek through the bowels of the twilight zone" reaches well beyond emotional devastation to include financially decimating the recipient of the narcissist's actions and expunging her sense of defined self to encompass even the loss of trust in basic belief systems.
I wrote my pieces to show - to have the reader actually FEEL my sense of pain, shock, disbelief, and the topsy-turvy change in my life - my utter anguish, total despair, and depression in falling "down the rabbit hole" and landing in such a relationship. I could not fathom nor reconcile the super-glue attraction with the dissolving of me, the entity.
Therapists rarely "got" it and I detested being pigeon-holed as codependent. It seemed the world of professional health care psychologists as professionals had missed this segment of awareness and were in no hurry to accept new data.
The most excruciating anguish covered me with surprise as I was rapidly and unceremoniously discarded - not only by my spouse, but by the entire clan...as precisely as a surgeon would use his scalpel. I had believed in commitment and longevity to cruise the bumps of the union. I had honestly felt I had paid my dues. My usefulness as an ATM machine, care provider, family member, and wife was terminated with the rapid acceptance of another taking on the role. I had no idea auditions were being held.
I was left to pick up the pieces within the barrel of sheer heartache and to begin again. My finances were at a zero balance and my heart and soul screamed in agony as I arose from my numbed state. The process is ongoing.
