How narcissists love bombing affects our beliefs.
Narcissists often manipulate take control over our minds through the love bombing stage of the relationship. The narcissists love bombing is to manipulatively influence us into believing something that isn’t true by playing on our beliefs, our hopes, our dreams and our emotions.
Through the narcissists gaslighting, our beliefs get contradicted. Even their silence can get us to question ourselves. Our realities get mixed up from what we believe happened to what they lead us to believe happened, our hopes get raised to get dashed, we believe in their false promises and false apologies, as at that point we have no reason not to, or they gaslight the reason away, this can all keep us trapped in a place we shouldn’t be as these can cause cognitive dissonance within our minds.
Beliefs are thoughts in our minds that influence our own attitudes, actions and behaviours. The power of choosing what we do and do not want to believe, beliefs are often only thoughts and not real, and once we have more understanding on these, we then have the power to change them to work for us. If you grew up with two parents remaining together, so you believed that how it’s done, or your parents were separated, so you wanted to believe you could make it different for your children. There are religious or various other beliefs that come in. Whatever those beliefs are to you, your beliefs in relationships might be you that you stick together no matter what happens, that relationships are hard. You have to work at them, which, yes, relationships can go through rough patches, and people who can Communicate and compromise can work things out together. You can make it through together. When you’re with a toxic person, you need to change those beliefs and realise you don’t have to stay, you shouldn’t be treated that way, and you deserve better. Core Beliefs are formed in early childhood. These are beliefs that we hold to be absolute truths, about ourselves, about others and the world we live in. As these are our truths, they are hard but not impossible to change. These are also the beliefs we will defend most passionately. Beliefs are formed within our minds, through our own personal experience or what others tell us to be true. Why even if you have the same beliefs as another, the interpretation of those varies from person to person.
Values, ethical values in healthy relationships, so most people’s are honesty, loyalty, respect, understanding, forgiveness and self-discipline.
Narcissists often look for those beliefs and values in people either on a conscious or subconscious level, and at the start, they Mirror those back to you. That is not who they indeed are. They are showing you, yourself, they are showing you who you want them to be, so you believe in them, they are showing you your beliefs in how you’d like the relationship to be, then when their Envious face comes out, and they show themselves for who they are. It causes massive conflict within your beliefs, as it’s confusing to your beliefs and your thoughts. With their gaslighting, you begin to doubt your own judgment and thinking abilities.
When you meet them, you will most often be on the receiving end of the narcissist’s Idealisation stage. That love bombing which is when they manipulative influence you into believing something that isn’t true.
They Lavish you with gifts.
Love bombing is to draw you into their charming ways, by them buying you lots of gifts, over the top or expensive gifts, even buying you clothing to change how you dress without you even realising because you become obligated to be grateful, you wear those clothes and begin to fear hurting their feelings, or fear saying no as you don’t want to offend them, gifts can seem harmless enough as it’s one of the love languages, and some people do like to shower others with gifts, simply because they can. It makes them feel good, yet for a narcissist buying gifts is to manipulatively exploit you into believing in someone whose true intention is to exploit you, not love and care for you. If something feels off, speak up in the beginning, your feelings are trying to guide you. Listen to your feelings and not their response. If their response makes you feel unease or question more, it’s ok to part ways in those early days.
Flattery.
Compliment. A polite expression of praise or admiration.
Flattery. Giving excessive or insincere praise to meet one’s own purpose.
Words of affirmation is another love language, so when they are genuine compliments, all is well; however, a narcissist wants you to believe they are genuinely complimenting you when they are flattering you to get their needs met.
A narcissist will flatter you. Pay close attention. They don’t give you genuine compliments. They use flattery. They use this tactic to find out your needs, wants and desires, what feels like those sincere hearts to hearts. In the beginning, they are just gathering all information about you, first to mirror you, to hook you in, then to use your insecurities to exploit you. They will flatter you, give you constant attention, plan a Fake future with you, and they will love everything you do and hate everything you hate. This is to get you to feel obligated to compliment them in return.
As you offer genuine compliments, you find and focus on those things you love about them, which distracts you from those things about them that make you feel out of balance. Once you are hooked on their constant attention, they’ll take it away to make you work harder to get it again. To make you work harder to please them and get back to that person you first met. They will get you to tell them all your secrets and insecurities, so they can further manipulate by one day using those very secrets against you, any way they can. They will learn all your strengths, so they can use them against you to make you doubt your own capabilities. We all make mistakes in life. It’s all a part of the learning process. A narcissist will pick out any mistake, real or not, in the things you are great at to bring you down, to make you question yourself.
Being your hero.
Any personal problems or outside situations you are having, in the beginning, they will be there to help any way they can. They want you to think you’ve met the kindest person ever and admire them. Most will even drop hints subtle or evident of just how amazing they are for you.
Doing favours for you.
Acts of service is another one of the five love languages; it usually had that give and take. A narcissist, however, will only give in the beginning to hook you into believing they love you so that they can take further down the line.
When someone does favours for you, your perceptions of that person are good, you identify them as a kind person and your feelings are extremely favourable towards them. You will receive overwhelming adoration and attention from them, manipulating you to spend more and more time with them. And why wouldn’t you? You feel a great connection, truly understood and very loved.
Quick involvement.
Physical touch is another love language, and narcissist can push intimacy along to test your boundaries.
They often want to move things along very swiftly, creating all those future dreams to give you the false hope of something that was never meant to be. They gain your love and trust with flattery, attention, commitment, The Narcissists Future Faking. Of things like marriage, whatever your dreams are, they’ll promise them to you, the riddle of what can be broken without being touched? A promise. A narcissist can break you seemingly without doing anything to you. They’ll try to move the relationship on very quickly, things like “If I moved in, we’d see each other more, and I could really help you around the home, share bills.” Or. “If you move in with me, you can stop working, and I’ll take care of all the bills.”
Wanting to spend all their time with you.
Quality time is one of the five love languages. The narcissist doesn’t use this to spend time with you. They use this to pull you into believing they want to be with you, to distract you from isolation so they can further exploit you.
They lavish you with attention as they want the attention in return, through their flattery and at times, they can be your hero, so you feel obligated to spend time with them when you have plans. They try to arrange something wherein a healthy relationship. You could explain this. The other person might be disappointed they understand, a narcissist will often sulk, or try to guilt-trip you into cancelling your plans and doing what they want, you might feel bad for cancelling on friends or family, yet as they are more understanding, you find this easier, which is the start of the narcissist’s isolation of you, who will claim they don’t care about you as the narcissist claims to care about you.
You can be overwhelmed by their need to spend all their time with you or bombard you with messages and calls.
They can plaster your social media with decelerations of love, message as soon as they wake up, leave for work, on their breaks, calling you to find out all about you, this flattery can make you feel flattered and seem like they genuinely care, it can also make you feel somewhat uneasy.
This is all manipulation to confuse your mind, which causes cognitive dissonance and then induced Compliance. Cognitive dissonance is a state of mind when your own thoughts are conflicted, where there is conflicting beliefs, realities or opinions. Narcissists help you at the start to gain admiration from you, and they will then, at some point, use this against you to break down your boundaries. Gaslighting with words such as.” After all, I did for you.” Or words to that effect. With most narcissistic people, once you are hooked, they’ll actually no longer be doing anything for you, yet they’ll constantly remind you of things they have in the past.
You’re used to spending so much time around them, often dropping your hobbies as they so desperately wanted to be with you. They make you feel so good about yourself in the beginning, then they’ll just disappear on you, again manipulation of your mind, as you lived that life, that reality when they wanted to spend so much time with you. Then you are left believing it’s your fault. They’ll start putting you down, Invalidating you to manipulate your self-worth further and gain more control over your mind. All those first promises they suddenly change to, they’re not ready for marriage, they never said that, or you took it out of context. This is all a form of Gaslighting, which is an insidious form of mental abuse to get you to doubt your own reality.
To start, they did match all your beliefs and values. You lived the fairytale, and your mind believes it as it’s seen at that moment that exact reality. When they change into someone you don’t recognise, and they cause you pain and hurt you. You might have had enough and try to end it, and they’ll bring back all the charm they had in the beginning, causing cognitive dissonance. When they say things to you like. “Why do you have to make life so hard.” Or “if only you’d have done this.” Then threaten or Intimidate you, even Sulking or giving you the Silent Treatment, so you try really hard, begging with them, pleading with them, doing all you can to make it up to them. They give you the reinforcement of playing nice all the charm they had in the beginning. Your mind is getting trained by them to believe it’s all your doing for any problems or conflict within the relationship, that in actual fact there is nothing wrong with them and everything wrong with you, so you change your behaviour time and time again, Walking On Eggshells trying to please them, so they don’t throw massive tantrums which cause you pain. When your mind perceives something like pleasure, a good emotion, when you’ve been trained how to act and when you act precisely how they want, they will reward you, causing induced Compliance in your mind. When you don’t do exactly as they please, they punish you, through many manipulation tactics, causing induced Compliance as those punishments cause you great pain, so you do all you can to avoid that pain.
The ups and downs release cortisol from the stress and dopamine from the highs, these are highly addictive natural chemicals the body releases, and you do become addicted. Once addicted, it becomes increasingly harder to walk free. You will have, or you will reach that point where you break free, learn about what’s happened to you and never go back.
Cognitive dissonance within your mind has variables.
Belief disinformation.
When your beliefs are being contradicted, as the narcissist leads you to believe one story, then delivers another that contradicts the first belief, with intermittent reinforcement of the first story, causing psychological, mental stress within your mind, that stress releases cortisol which is addictive in itself. Yet to reduce the mental stress of the reality that’s so painful, your mind chooses to believe the less mentally stress full idea to relieve yourself of the painful thoughts leading you to downplay the abusive behaviour from the narcissist, which of course is helped by the narcissists carefully chosen Blame Shifting words of ”it wasn’t that bad, it was your fault, that never happened, it didn’t happen that way, you made me do it.” and the rest. As you seek moral support from the very person you don’t see is persuading you that your reality isn’t real, you don’t change your beliefs to the truth of the situation. Your mind unwittingly sticks to your original belief. Which gives you the brain fog, when you can see something yet you can not believe it to be true or really see it, and they further their control through fear, obligation and guilt.
Induced compliance of forced compliance.
After a narcissist performs dissonant behaviour towards you ( lying ), they find ways through manipulative words to get you to agree to their way of thinking, their reality and their truths, even though these are not factual, as the narcissist doesn’t want to accept responsibility for their own behaviour and is never accountable. They gaslight you psychological through words, actions and sometimes moving items for their own self-justification. So even when you know they said or did something, they will Twist it all around, leaving you getting more and more confused. They will tell you or show an example of when they treated you right. They will intimidate you. Threaten you, and they will use many manipulation tactics, so you are forced to comply with their ways of thinking, as your mind believes this will cause you less pain. Either from past hurtful actions or their behaviour towards you. Fear of reactions. Leading you to walk on eggshells around them, forcing you to behave how they want. All while you don’t see what’s truly happening to you.
Forbidden behaviour.
The severity of the threat on the Devaluation of the forbidden behaviour. With some narcissistic people, this can be down to when and where you sleep, who you go out with, where you go, if you work, what you wear, how long or the colour of your hair, when you have sex together when you answer your phone, so when you’ve been programmed to know you’ll get punishment from the sulks, the silent treatment, arguments, never-ending questions, threats, and all the other manipulation tactics they use to cause you mental pain and negative emotions. They get you to unwittingly conform to their way of living and their way of acting, behaving and thinking. It stops you from being true to who you indeed are and what you genuinely want to do for fear of the consequences to your actions of living a free life and how you should be able to live.
Free choice.
Changes in the desirability of your freedom of choice, this part is what makes it so difficult for people to walk free from narcissistic relationships. The free choice aspect of cognitive dissonance occurs when you are faced with a difficult decision when they always appear to be an aspect of rejection or discomfort to what you choose, so you might want to go out for you, yet you know the narcissist will make it difficult. They’ll cause arguments and upset, yet if you don’t go out, you’ll feel anger and frustration that you didn’t get to do what you’d like, yet know you’ll not get negative reactions from the narcissist. When you decide enough is enough, and you want out, yet if you stay, you believe you can help them and hope to get the good times back. However, you fear them and their negative behaviour towards you if you leave it’ll also cause pain, the fear of the breakdown of the relationship, pride and ego damaged as your own beliefs that you could make it work didn’t happen, feeling guilty for leaving them, or in fear of what they might do from threats of. “you’ll pay if you leave.” or “I’ll make you wish.” Then if the narcissist was the one to leave you, you’ve got the thoughts of freedom, yet those thoughts of no one else will love me, I’ll be alone, again mainly from the toxic words the narcissist drilled into your mind. You think you want them back to help comfort you from all this pain. Most often, they are with someone new, again this causes your thoughts to go into, what was wrong with me? What’s so special about the unknown? Social norms and judgment from others also play a part, worrying what others will think of you. When you don’t open up with the right people, you’re left with so many negative thoughts, the difficult choice between getting help and support and the effects it might have, or isolating yourself from the world.
These thoughts can be resolved by changing the challenged beliefs; getting out of the situation and away from the narcissist is an extremely difficult thing to do. Yet, the longer you are away from them, the clearer your own mind becomes, psychological dissonance slowly fades. Psychological consonance is restored, especially when you seek out moral support from those who’ve lived the same and at one point shared those same contradicted beliefs. Your reality becomes restored. Your future becomes so much clearer and brighter.
Music can also help classical music can be the best. Any music you personally enjoy will also help.
When you make a choice for no contact or limited contact if you can not go no contact due to having children together, the more you are away from them, the more your mind can start to think clearly, the trance they put you under slowly fades, the fog lifts. You can start to think and act for yourself again and do what’s right for you and what makes you happy. The more you connect with those that have lived it and understand it, the more you can put reality back into your own mind, the more you learn about narcissistic behaviour and the effects it has on you, the less you’ll ask, why are they doing this to me? Especially with Smear Campaigns and endless games of those narcissistic people, you just can not seem to shake off. The more you’ll see their pattern in behaviour, what they are doing, the more you’ll be able to laugh at how unbelievable yet believable their behaviour and true nature is, the less it’ll impact on your life and your emotions. The more you will come to realise you never even knew them to let alone loved them, it was all an Illusion, of mind trickery, and you can get control back of your mind, your thoughts and your feelings to reach the place of I’m in control of my own happiness and my own life now. You can, and you will.
The narcissist’s manipulation.
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Elizabeth Shaw is not a Doctor or a therapist. She is a mother of five, a blogger, a survivor of narcissistic abuse, and a life coach, She always recommends you get the support you feel comfortable and happy with. Finding the right support for you. Elizabeth has partnered with BetterHelp (Sponsored.) where you will be matched with a licensed councillor, who specialises in recovery from this kind of abuse.
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