Surviving Narcissism Jesse Blayne writes about thriving after marriage to a narcissist.

There are the frazzled days when, for no apparent reason, you feel out of sorts.

Maybe you blame it on the full moon.

Perhaps you need to eat more protein and less carbs – or less protein and more carbs – I can never remember.  You may be dehydrated, or you slept poorly.

You sit quietly, coffee in hand, sifting through the thoughts mulling around in your head, trying to filter out the cause of the frazzle-ness.  You find several potentials -  emails that need answers, an over-baked tray of cookies, the need to run out to get milk, or a dwindling supply of firewood.  None of them amount to enough to cause the Frazzle.

The exercise of sorting through and examining the thoughts helps you see that what you are craving, though, is control.

This moment – right here, right now – demands a bit of control.

Not the heavy-handed I’ll tell you what we are having for dinner and you will eat it kind of control, but the kind of control that attempts to gently pull in fractured energies and encourage focus.

In an uncharacteristically desperate attempt at gaining control I make the bed – the same one that will go for days without being made.

The making of the bed starts a snowball effect. (If I made the bed every day, I wouldn’t have an obvious place to start the snowball effect. Isn’t rationalization handy?)  The snowball builds as I clean the cat box, take out the trash, sweep the front stoop, straighten the cushions on the couch and refold the blanket on the rocking chair.

The completion of each chore, starting with making the bed, allows me to pull in all those scattered energies, get some semblance of control and focus on what’s really important – figuring out what to make for dinner.