If you have a disability - did a narcissist use that against you?
One of the things I struggle with the most, is that my ex (who had bipolar disorder, but also was maybe a covert narcissist) made me feel SO crazy for any time I advocated for things relating to my disability. Basically when I would hold a line of something I needed he would act that I was selfish or overreacting. And when I asked or brought up anything additional (like anything a non-disabled person would need / want in a relationship), the underlying tone was that I was nitpicky / couldn't ever be happy / just randomly upset all the time. I use a wheelchair and my bones break easily, and things he did included:
- Once he got frustrated at me about a new place we were both at, and yelled at me that I needed to know where every curb cutout was before we went out. Even if I'd never been there before.
- 2 years into our relationship, he replaced his car with a much older one that didn't have certain safety features I look for to keep me safe, and when I said that made me feel excluded and not important to him he said "I didn't think we had the kind of relationship that allowed you to dictate the kind of car I get", and then said he thought it would be fine and I was probably worried for nothing. Our couples therapist at the time spent an hour with him trying to get him to understand.
- Never got a place I could easily access in the entire 4 years we were together. He had 3 apartments during that time, and when he got the last one I begged him to make sure it had an elevator and was accessible. When it wasn't, he gaslit me saying I could use a series of folding chairs to navigate the multiple instances of steps to get to his apartment, and then acted (although was careful not to say) like I was overreacting and being controlling.
- He would come over to my place (see above as to why) and then we would get into fights because he would do things to make my apartment literally inaccessible to me. Leave cutting boards where I couldn't reach them, put things in upper cabinets, move my shower head to where I could toggle it back to the handheld one, and when I was always upset and didn't want him in my place made me feel like I was too nitpicky.
- Right before the discard, we were in parts of Europe with lots of cobblestones. Before we left I told him I'd need a lot more help than in the US (I'd been abroad before, he hadn't) and he swore up and down it would be fine and he would keep a cool head. Multiple times he did reckless, dangerous things but the worst was when he grabbed my wheelchair suddenly, pulling me up a steep curb (after I'd asked him repeatedly to stop doing that) and almost dumped me into a bike lane. When I freaked out, lost it, and started yelling about why did you do that, he claimed he didn't know that counted as a curb, I needed to be clearer about my definition of a curb, and that I was just randomly "berating" him. I still beat myself up on if I was too harsh or not, even though I'd asked repeatedly and was terrified of breaking a bone while abroad.
All of this still makes me feel crazy and sometime wonder if I'm the narcissist, so just looking for other persepectives / experiences?