What a narcissist wants.
When the narcissist comes back with all the false apologies promises of change due to the trauma bond, when they offer that intermittent idealisation stage and begin to play nice, because you have empathy and care for those in your life, you are a good-hearted person that forgives others and wants to help them change, a lot take back a narcissist in the hope of the original dreams becoming a reality, because the narcissist rewrites history on you, lays all the blame on you, you question reality, believing all the problems were down to you, then you might give them another chance, so here’s something to remind yourself of reality, yes it’s hard to start walking away from toxic people, however, if you feel like this around anyone in your life, it’s time to walk away, time to stop helping them. It’s time to start helping you.
Here is how most people find themselves in a relationship with a narcissist, why it’s just a traumatic, painful experience throughout.
A narcissist will stay around as long as you never expose them. They will keep coming back, weeks, months or years later while you let them when it suits a need of their own.
You must be able to provide them with constant praise, attention, caring, kindness, generous gifts and always support them emotionally, mentally, physically, sexually, spiritually, and financially.
You must be able to deny yourself of all of life’s pleasures and hand them all over to the narcissist happily, making their life as exciting, interesting and fulfilling as possible.
You must be able to live without true intimacy, communication, true love, honesty or trust.
You must be ok with being cheated on, lied to and manipulated constantly. You can live with the hope of improvement or change, this will only ever be temporarily, and you must get used to it no matter how hard you try. It always cycles back to them hurting you.
You must never have an opinion, desire, want, or need of your own. This is selfish behaviour and not acceptable or tolerated by the narcissist.
You must allow yourself to be devalued and discarded for being weak and not having the guts to stand up for yourself, or if you are strong and try to stand up for yourself, you must allow yourself to be devalued and discarded with a narcissist you will not win.
You will live without security, self-esteem, peace or comfort.
You will live with secrets, lies, betrayals, false truths, omissions, hypocrisies, slander or any other deceitful, manipulative action the narcissist chooses to impose on you.
You must live without boundaries, values or any other self-respecting goals or aspirations of your own. To the narcissist, these are a game to be broken down and become null and void.
You will end up living your life knowing that the person to who you are giving everything to, will never, ever be there for you mentally, physically, spiritually, sexually, or financially. If you are diagnosed with an illness or have an accident, you are on your own while the narcissist is living their best life, out enjoying praise, and attention from others, until you can attend to their needs again. Even then, they’ll be gaining attention from others.
You will also have to feel guilty and feel genuinely sorry that your illness or injury that has caused a massive inconvenience for the narcissist. How dare you not be available to serve them.
You will be treated as completely worthless. Also, you have to accept that you have caused all of this “drama”.
You will have your coworkers, friends, and family removed from your life until you are isolated from all your support.
You will have to be happy to agree to give up your career or your job should it ever interfere with your ability to be able to serve your narcissist’s desires.
You live without love, respect, affection or attention from your children because they also live to serve the narcissist. They see no value in you because you don’t see any value in yourself or because they have been conditioned by the narcissist to believe that you are worthless and not worthy of such things, with more manipulation and mind games.
You must be willing to wake up one day to discover that the narcissist has left you without understanding why they left, where they went, who they are with, or when they will be back until they return (days, weeks, months, years) later like nothing ever happened. And they will return!
When they return, you must be willing not to ask questions. Do not speak of your feelings. Do not try to engage them in any “serious” conversation at all. Simply resume your position of loving them, caring for them, and being kind to them, making sure that they feel wonderful about themselves, no matter how confused and hurt you feel.
You must be willing always to be wrong, take full blame, apologise and beg for forgiveness for everything the narcissist imagines that you did to hurt them. Whether you really did it or not is not relevant. Most often, it’s them who hurt you, but this is unacceptable for you to think this way. So, you must apologise for not stopping them from making the wrong decision. Their lousy choice is your fault.
You must also never offer advice or suggestions that might prevent the narcissist from making a wrong decision because this is criticism. You will be punished severely for any complaint. You will get the silent treatment, or you will be attacked on such a personal level. It cuts you to the core, belittled, called names and falsely accused of things you may or may not have ever done.
You must be willing when they come back to you to be perfect in every way. If you fail, you will be punished, so apologise. Apologise and apologise again, beg for forgiveness, beg for mercy, for everything they did to you, accept full responsibility for their actions. Yours, beg to be forgiven for everything they did to you; there are no exceptions. You must always take 100% responsibility for how they “feel”.
Do not cry. Do not show sadness. Do not show any emotion that might challenge the narcissist’s self-esteem. Do not express any emotion other than happiness that they came back to you. It doesn’t matter that the narcissist’s behaviour is killing you. Do not show it ever! That would be a huge mistake, as the narcissist might sense that you are unhappy in the relationship. This will force them to leave you again to go find someone who is more “positive” and “superior” to you. Someone who won’t ask questions, feel hurt or abandoned. Someone who will listen to their stories of how horrible you have treated them and be willing give them what you can’t or won’t.
You must be willing to be abandoned and left with no resources to take care of yourself or your children with no explanation.
You must be willing to put your entire life on pause at any given moment, without warning, and be prepared to wait patiently until the narcissist becomes bored with, or disenchanted by, their new person, or until that person displays feelings of “unhappiness” and becomes as worthless as you.
You must be willing to be patient and wait, do not feel sad, don’t cry, don’t react negatively, stay positive. They will come back to you when they feel like it.
You must be willing to allow this in and out behaviour to happen multiple times and never tire of it, and you must never see it as an issue. You must be willing to embrace the revolving door.
You must be willing to appreciate the uncertainties, anxieties and insecurities of them leaving you for something “better” any time they feel bored or anxious with themselves.
You must be grateful, thankful and appreciative that you are special enough to the narcissist for them to return to you, whenever they choose to eventually.
You must be satisfied with being weak enough to tolerate their abuse, yet strong enough to keep yourself from going completely insane, from all of the insanity of your day to day life with your beloved narcissist.
You must do as the narcissist says (no faking it), meetings all their expectations, even though you won’t fully know what the expectation is because they don’t communicate their wants or needs to you. It’s a fantasy made up in their own head, influenced by porn, the envy of a friend, their boss or family member, which changes weekly, daily or hourly, but you should know what it is. If you really love them, you will KNOW what they want and need at all times, without them having to tell you, and you should be more than willing to provide it to them, happily.
You need to be willing to live every day of your life with the truth, that the person who you love so unconditionally so profoundly, so intensely, is not capable of loving you, respecting you, or caring for you at all, not even with all of their expectations being met.
You need to be willing to accept the fact that the harder you try to please them, the more they despise you.
You should be willing to have your bank account emptied, your home and your car repossessed, resulting in you sleeping on the street while they are sleeping in someone else’s warm, comfortable bed.
You will end up becoming a shell of a human being, void of any feelings, emotions, identity or responses, other than to happily and joyfully serve the narcissist person’s needs, wants, and desires while completely denying yourself of all basic human needs.
When you get out, you will be smeared to all those around you, and they will tell those around you everything they did to you-you, you did to them.
When they see you truly happy again, they will come back, just to destroy you all over again.
It’s not easy breaking a relationship with a narcissist. However, it is possible retraining from how your subconscious thinks with your conscious will help you move on with your life.
Half of the time in your life, you are in default mode. After a narcissist, they might be in your head all of the time.
According to science, you have a default mode and a direct mode.
The default mode is when you’re on autopilot, going about your day to day business, doing what needs to be done, thoughts popping into you’re head, taking you all over.
The direct mode is when you consciously think about something on purpose make yourself get up and do something.
Resetting your thinking is a process. Because of those limiting beliefs and negative thoughts that have been built upon over a prolonged period, you have been running on a negative default mode. They have been coded into your brain over a long period, which you repeat. Just because someone in your past trained you to think this way, or they did so many bad things to you, your mind is now trained the mind to assume and predict the worst.
If you allow your default mindset to continue thinking. Why me? What else could go wrong? I’m not happy? Can I not do this? I’m a loser? I’m not worthy? I’ll never be good enough? No one will love me? Does no one care about me? I’m a failure? Life’s going to become harder and harder. The problem is these thoughts have gone into your default mode, and they shouldn’t be there. They are negative beliefs that hold you back. You can change this default mode of negative thoughts into positive ones.
Bad things will happen. That’s life. Life can be cruel, it can be draining, and it can be hard. I do not deny that you’ve experienced that, especially around narcissistic people. It’s a fact of life.
We do need a default mode for certain things we go about doing in our day to day lives. So we don’t have to think about the simple tasks, so we can just get on with them.
You know all too well, you need to make changes in your life. You want to make changes in your life, but then when you start to think about change. You stop and start worrying about all the things that could possibly go wrong and go back to default mode. So ask yourself now. How well is default mode working for me right now? Are things getting any better right now? So you can carry on how you are and change nothing, or you can change how you think, and you can change everything. You’ve just got to work at it and believe in yourself. When you change how you feel, you will make significant changes in your life.
Like when you learn to ride a bike, it takes time to learn to balance pedal and drive yourself forward. Until you just do it.
Learning to swim, thinking about the movements, the strokes. Going through that water and learning that technique takes time until one day, you just do it.
If you naturally kick a ball with your right foot, you go into autopilot to do so.
If your a natural right-handed, you automatically write with your right hand on autopilot.
Yet you can make yourself kick that ball with your left foot,
You can make yourself pick up that pen with your left hand and begin to write.
You have to deliberately direct your thoughts to kick that ball with the other foot, to lift that pen with the hand you don’t usually, then practice, practice, practice, you will feel uncomfortable, and it will feel unnatural, you will miss kick, it will not be as powerful as your usual foot, your writing will be sloppy, it will be messy, and it will be hard to read.
It’s exactly the same as making yourself think about things in a more positive way. It will feel strange and uncomfortable at times, and it will feel unnatural. You need to think optimistic, and you need to support your own thoughts, you need to think positive, you need to think it is possible, then you need to work on it.
It’s going to be a process that takes time, you will have setbacks along the way when you don’t see significant change, but you must keep going. Keep changing, keep learning and keep growing.
So you can choose to either carry on with your default, or you can deliberately choose what you want to think about.
Being a deliberate thinker is a skill, just like learning to swim, learning to ride a bike, kicking that ball, with the foot you don’t use, learning to write with the hand you don’t usually write with, it’s a skill, and you have to practice and keep on practising until you master it.
You can do it, and the autopilot is excellent on the right things. It is horrible on the wrong thoughts.
When you change how you think, you will change your life for the better.
Whatever it is that’s stopping you right now. Whatever is your limiting beliefs, you need to write them all down now.
However, that person made you feel.
Any of those setbacks you’ve had.
I’m not good enough?
I can not trust anyone?
It’s just too hard?
My hearts had enough?
I don’t know how to start rebuilding my life?
Whatever they are, whatever got programmed into your default mode, you need to see them all write them all down.
Now you need to ask yourself, what have these beliefs cost me in my past? Then write that down. What do they cost me today? Then write those down. If I don’t change, what are they going to cost me over the coming days, weeks, months and years? Write them all down.
Now you know how that default mindset is affecting your day today. You need to do a reset of your mindset. Every time old limiting beliefs come to your mind, catch that negative default mindset thought, take control back of your mind, then deliberately direct a good thought into your mind. You need to do a mindset reset. Take back control of your own mind and your own life.
You no longer have to live your life how your default mindset has been trained to do so. You are free to change that and live your life how you want to.
No more “ no one will ever love me.”
Now it’s “the right people will always love me.”
No more “I don’t even know where to start.”
Now it’s “I’m going to take small daily steps each and every day, slowly but surely turning my life around.”
No more “I’m not good enough.”
Now it’s “I’m good enough for me, and the right people will understand me.”
No more. “I don’t trust anyone.”
Now it’s. “I trust my instinct.”
“The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
Keep trying new things, keep going, you’ve got this.
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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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signs you’re dealing with a narcissist.
