Last week, in Part One, we explored the reasons why we fell for a narcissist and why it can be very difficult to leave and stay away.
And why, in this Community, we DO struggle to end it and break free, whereas other people just don’t … even if they were initially hoodwinked by a narcissist.
This week, in Part Two, I want to take a deep dive into the understanding of specificallywhy we were highly susceptible to narcissists, and may have felt (or still feel) it’s almost impossible to leave.
Because it is my fullest intention – if this is your battle – to help free you from that.
For the purposes of this article, Part 2, I am not going to be exploring the terrible enmeshments of co-parenting, finances, property and businesses (which many of us suffered, including myself) in the context of these conditions being insurmountable limitations making it impossible to leave.
Rather, this article is about the understanding that these enmeshments are all outpours and symptoms of what got us unconsciously aligned with a narcissist in the first place – and because they are so dire and serious they signal a greater call for doing what is necessary to evolve ourselves up and out of these enmeshments.
What I have seen time and time again within this Community, as well as experienced in my own personal life is this: when we do deal with and up-level our original wounding even the most horrendous of conditions with narcissists find a way to unravel, heal and become liveable and even resolved.
Life has this miraculous way of resetting to “well-being” when we take care of the well-being inside ourselves first.
One thing I believe with all of my heart is that all of Life and our Soul does not want us to be living under the conditions of abuse, because it is NOT a soul truth … there is a way out, regardless of how enmeshed and stuck we may presently feel.
This is what Part Two is all about, deeply unveiling the truths so that we can connect to and start generating our organic rights to a True Life.
Why We Tolerate
I remember years ago whilst on a walk complaining to a friend about N number 1 … she asked me, “Why do you tolerate it?”
I came straight back at her with, “I don’t tolerate it. I fight back. I have left him many times because of what he has done. I don’t just put up with it!”
She looked me straight in the eye and said, “You don’t get it. You are tolerating him, otherwise you would not still be with him. Why do you do it?”
Back in those days, before I had a functioning boundary, before I realised that trying to force someone to change only meant I would become more controlled by them, and before I realised that I had virtually no ability to be with myself and self-soothe without outer props or people … it was true I had NO idea what she really meant.
My version of “tolerate” at that stage meant to me that she was accusing me of being a “doormat” – which within this narcissistic relationship I generally wasn’t.
In stark contrast I was often lecturing, prescribing and trying to force him to “get it”.
Of course I DIDN’T tolerate his bad treatment!
Or did I? …
At that stage of this relationship, I wasn’t on the football field let alone near the goals – I still had a long way to go to realise the truth.
The truth was this … there were very REAL reasons why I was “tolerant” (staying with him) that I hadn’t realised yet, and having my focus fully on him was not granting me my answers.
It wasn’t until I turned inwards to myself, some years later, that I discovered the TRUE inner motivations for “tolerating”.
It wasn’t until finally, finally at the point of life and death – when I took my focus off what he was or wasn’t doing, and put it fully on repairing my relationship with myself – thateverything shifted and changed.
I find the same phenomenon happens consistently with others as well.
Because when we get our relationship right with ourselves, then people who are not “healthy relationship” lose their glitter.
They repel us, and no longer hold any appeal.
They also lose ALL power over us.
No longer do we replay the old wounds of powerlessness and feeling let down, agonised, dependent, and resentful that these people aren’t loving us the way they should be.
Which TRULY is the glue which was binding us to them.
Instead … we have stepped up and finally become that solid Source to ourselves – no longer reliant on False Broken Substitutes to try to grant us what our parent’s couldn’t and didn’t.
And, as a result, they have to take their abusive behaviour elsewhere.
What Are the Links Between Tolerating Abuse and Our Relationship With Ourselves
The relationship with ourselves was developed in our childhood.
Actually … in fact, it started even before that.
Epigenetics is now proving that children from a line of trauma survivors, even when born into environments now free of trauma, have fractures in their brain wiring akin to trauma victims.
Several generations down the line.
Have a look at the human condition – the fear, competition, abuse, brutalities and trauma histories.
I believe it is safe to say that there are very few civilizations and families who give birth to children not suffering from generational trauma damage.
Then, of course, it was common to be brought up with parents who had trauma cracks in their own wiring.
Meaning they struggled to connect healthily, and instead were more prone to parent in ways that created even more fractures to our Emotional Being.
The following are only some of the ways that we were not able to develop a solid (“full”, confident, able to self-partner and self-soothe) Inner Identity.
- If we were left in emotional distress unattended
- If we believed our lovability was based on performance
- If we were shamed and blamed
- If we were made to feel insignificant, unworthy and undeserving
- When our parents did not allow us to have our own needs develop or be acknowledged in healthy ways
- If we believed love depended on pleasing others, despite how much we were minimalised, abused or denied our own Identity.
All of this meant from an early age we never established inherent self-value and were detached from our own needs and wants, possibly not even having a clue what they were, and much less believing that we deserved them.
Another serious issue was our reliance on outside people to validate and emotionally support us … coupled with our own inability to emotional “be” with ourselves lovingly in times of need.
This created a deficiency as an adult to “fill ourselves up” with feelings of solidness, wellbeing, happiness and love – hence the requirement for something or someone else to give it to us.
We may think this is “normal”.
It isn’t … it is devastatingly abnormal.
It has just become our human “normal” because society has been intent on training us out of our organic connection and power within ourselves, in order to be reliant on and controlled by outside forces.
Being with self (self-partnering) is in fact our most natural state, and the only one that grants us true wholeness.
We never knew this, and we were never taught how to be with self healthily by role models who demonstrated it or nurtured that self-connection.
And this meant we were always looking to the outside world to grant us something or someone to take away the ever-existing anxiety and depression as a result of NOT being anchored within ourselves in healthy self-love and acceptance.
From this back the front perspective, we certainly couldn’t ask for and stand in our own rights and deservedness, and our lives became precariously balanced on what other people were or weren’t doing and how we could possible monitor, adjust or pander to that.
Hence is the life of the co-dependent – believing that our energy, sustenance and source of love, approval, survival and security has to come from someone outside of ourselves – whilst continuously forfeiting our own rights and handing our power away.
And discovering disastrously that the more we focus on others and try to be everything they want us to be in order to be loved – the more we come up empty and even suffer horrible abuse.
These terrible results show us that believing and playing out these false premises in order to be lovable and worthy are Wrong Town.
Yet, this was our normal.
This is what we saw our parents do (to varying degrees).
This is what we saw the whole world play out – guilt, obligation, and that it was holy to forgo self for others, and that society structures demanded we be attached and dependent on another (especially if we are a female), or we needed to stay and protect and provide for another (if we are a male) – and the list goes on and on.
So within this painful wiring of our “normal” we didn’t experience a life generated from the inside out.
We only knew Life as “the cart before the horse” – the outside in – that always rolled back and flattened us, no matter how much effort we applied trying to make our Life work.
Truly … being a co-dependent is exhausting.
Because we are not as yet authentic.
Authenticity is simply being ourselves rather than worrying about what other people are or aren’t doing.
It means we are filled up as a whole self and then radiating that out to others.
And as such:
We can give and love without conditions.
We can be present without agenda.
We are free to be ourselves without expectations or attachments to outcomes.
We can ask for what we need and receive healthily without guilt.
We can allow others to be whoever they wish to be and then make healthy choices as to whether or not that is a match for our own well-being.
And … we can step away and detach from unhealthy others without pain, neediness, regret or being traumatised.
In stark contrast … when we are NOT in the knowing, practice and ability to fill ourselves up and then radiate that outwards (without fear, expectation or need) … we are playing this out constantly:
What does she / he think about me now?
What is she / he going to do?
What can I do so that he / she doesn’t do that?
What on earth will I do if he / she does do that?
And we may not have realised it, our life has been like this for such a long time, because it is likely we were trained into this outside in focus all of our life.
Meaning we are not generating Life from within our own aligned power centre or values, and we are not yet knowing that Life and others are always meeting us at the level that our Inner Being is operating from.
And additionally, because we are not conscious yet, we haven’t realised that the people and situations we decide on are also in accordance with that.
When we do the 180 degree turn inwards and start healing and developing our self-partnered Life, then we realise another BIG truth …
(One that I had no idea about when I was on that walk with my friend years ago.)
The problems we hook into (the ones which get our attention and energy to) are a match for a trauma that already exists in our Inner Being.
If we did not have a corresponding wound we would just know the “stuff” that an abusive person does is not our truth, not our reality and there would be zero need to wrestle with it, argue with it or try to change it into anything different.
We would simply detach and avoid it altogether.
We would let go and move on … we would “distance” instead of “involve” ourselves.
As we explored in Part One, this is EXACTLY where the people, who didn’t get hooked past the narcissist’s mask falling, cut their losses and walked away.
They take the lesson and move on, knowing they have the inner resources within themselves to generate a great life.
For us, within this Community, the lesson was a much deeper one.
It was this:
Via you I am meeting an aspect of myself that is unhealed; a part of me that you are making conscious so that THIS time I can awaken and heal a generational or childhood wound that is presently alive within me.
And … when I DO that, I will not just be freed from you (lesson delivered) … more importantly I will be freed from myself.
At first this can be difficult to accept – that there was a purpose to this other than just the horrible seemingly random act of being abused.
But I want to help you understand more about this Thriver Orientation by granting you this simple example.
(An example which is much less brutal and impactful, yet operates under the exact same Quantum Law.)
Here it is …
Some people suffer from road rage.
The people who experience road rage have regular episodes of “other drivers are idiots” on the road.
But what if these Idiot Drivers had a healing purpose?
What if they were actually at a deeper level bringing already existing wounds that lie inside these people to conscious awareness, so that NOW these wounds could finally be healed?
Wounds such as the feelings of being violated, unsafe, and treated as invalid and worthless.
And, then WHAT IF those heavily triggered feelings, experienced by the person suffering from road rage, were targeted, up-levelled and then simply did NOT exist?
Then imagine this …
As a result, the next time an Idiot Driver turns up, the previous road rage driver experiences in real time a profound shift within them of TOTAL emotional neutrality …
No charge, no angst and even the experience of massive gratitude that they got to experience the freedom of no longer being affected.
(This is how we make the Quantum Leap of realising how Life is happening “for” us and not “to” us – showing us via triggers what we still need to heal, and via what used to trigger us, but no longer does, what we have now gloriously healed from.)
So …. do you think that Idiot Drivers now have to keep appearing in this person’s experience?
I promise you they don’t.
I promise you from this point onwards they JUST won’t.
Why?
Because the Soul Graduation was achieved.
This is how the Quantum World operates, and the Quantum World is driving everything we know as “Our Life”.
As Prema Chodren famously said:
“Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.”
Meaning anything painful that we “tolerate” (are still connected to or grant our attention to) is because of one thing.
Unfinished business.
And once we realise the reason and clean that up and are no longer emotionally triggered by it, then the event, illness or even abusive person’s behaviour has Quantum permission to leave your experience.
This is regardless of the battles you may be having with co-parenting and settlement battles or other traumatic narcissistic experiences.
I promise … because I see these “miracles” happen every day in this Community.
If It’s In Our Body It’s Ours
If you have come as far as to accept the information above … then there are two further understandings you need to lean into.
These …
1) Any trauma in our body is ours to deal with
This is empowering, because now FINALLY we can do something about it.
Within this understanding is the knowing that assigning blame is futile, as is expecting someone who put our trauma in there to heal it for us.
How on earth can someone who is carrying enough inner trauma to traumatise us (only hurt people hurt people) heal our trauma for us when they are nowhere near dealing with their own?
Unconscious people heal us NOT by doing the work for us.
The heal us by forcing us to do the work on ourselves.
Truly, there is NO human being apart from the very first ever earthling who can honestly say, “My original trauma was caused by myself”, because the natural human state is NOT fear and pain.
All original trauma was passed on as an “infection” from someone or something else outside of everyone’s Inner Being.
Trauma is a LITERAL psychic virus of all of humanity.
This is vital to understand:
Once we have trauma wedged inside us, we will never be free from it unless we take 100% personal responsibility to free ourselves from it.
Welcome to your True Life if you accept that mission, because I promise you nothing elsewill ever truly liberate or gratify you.
Because no-one else is coming to save you – ever.
Your desire and commitment to partner with your Inner Being to heal and re-emerge as your True Self is your only saviour.
We understand this better as a result of accepting point number 2 …
2) Monitoring, clinging to, trying to fix, force change or pandering to others as an attempt to heal ourselves is futile
This is a false premise that has NEVER worked.
Go back through your Life to really think about this.
If you do … all that you will come up with is the exhausting repeat patterns of people letting you down and hurting you, and never receiving what it is that allowed you to feel solid, safe, loved or approved of.
Because, as it took me four decades to realise, we can only EVER become that to ourselves and then we will have the ability to be in Life in authentic ways whereby we choose and generate more of that with other healthy people.
Also, certain people who we weren’t having authentic relationships with, may rise to be in healthy relationship with us, as a result of us leading the way if we have up-levelled and become authentic.
Yet, if they don’t, we can let go without the anguish, regret and pain, because of the fullness and up-level now that we feel without them – yet ironically would never have reached if it wasn’t for them.
When you become an Authentic Self, the thought of getting back in the ring with an abuser who is not willing to grow, be accountable and take responsibility for the healing of their own wounds … and throwing away our True Self in the process … feels incredibly abhorrent and is something we couldn’t ever consider doing.
Why would we when we are now generating a healthy relationship with ourselves?
How We Were Exactly Who a Narcissist Required
Narcissists need to be able to operate like narcissists within relationships.
Which requires people to stay connected to them, feeding their needs, regardless of how terrible their behaviour is.
Narcissists are like spoilt entitled children – I can do THIS to you, and how dare you not worship me! It’s your duty!
Who narcissists want is this – people who are NOT anchored into being a source for themselves.
People who make excuses for them, do not have a solid Inner Identity and will keep handing over resources, energy, and attention regardless of the abuse.
The narcissist’s terminal need for Narcissistic Supply requires personal relationships whereby the narcissist is fed significance (I affect other people intensely) whilst the abused stays attached as the punching bag for the narcissist’s disordered self.
The narcissist wants you to take the hits and stay in the ring.
The narcissist wants you to relinquish all power so that they can have whatever they want.
They create relationships with people who have childhood wounds – because these are the people who are replaying the traumas of feeling wrong, unworthy and unlovable unless complying with uncaring demands and diminished rights … as well as making excuses for the people who treat them poorly.
In relationship with a narcissist you are replaying the wounds of not being able to be your own person, express your individuality or know that you were worthy of love, approval and personal rights as yourself, instead of who other people demanded you to be.
Narcissists do not target and retain relationships with emotionally solid, mature, grown up adults.
Hence why we need to clean up our wounds – to not just avoid having more relationships with narcissists that tear us apart and leave us powerless, exploited and broken – but to also be free of the existing trauma from the relationships which have already taken us to the brink of near demise.
All of our emancipation – past, present and future – is in healing our original wounds and traumas.
When we DO that, then no longer is our previous relationship with a narcissist an ongoing trauma in our bodies.
Rather it becomes the creative grist of an incredible inner transformation and liberation within our Inner Being – which becomes the generative force of our entire REAL life.
None of This Is About Accepting the Blame
I will say it again … over and over … because this is THE message the Abuse Community needs to hear more than any other.
None of what I have written about in this article is about BLAMING ourselves!
This is about unravelling truths so that we CAN do something about this, take our power back and set ourselves free.
Rather than keeping our focus on the narcissist and feeding THAT energy whilst continuing to get torn apart.
Because when we are “not getting it” the lesson persists.
Again … as Prema said,
“Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.”
Guess what …
it’s not meant to.
And that’s why I make sure in my work that we get the focus deeply into the only place where we CAN generate power …
Within ourselves.
Let’s now have a look at the gaps and ways that narcissists target, hook and hurt you.
What Makes Us Susceptible
Please know the great news is these are ALL wounds that can be addressed and healed … and regularly are, in Quantum ways, within this Community.
1) A fractured, diminished or under-developed sense of self
If we were taught we didn’t deserve consideration whilst being made to comply to our parent’s demands … then we believed we were only lovable and acceptable when catering to others.
As a result of not receiving validation (knowing our own value) we had limited, if any, ability to self-partner and self-soothe.
This meant our only options for emotional relief were people pleasing and tolerating people’s poor behaviour in the need to retain connection, as well as attempts to self-medicate with the use of addictions.
All of these choices and actions caused us to hand our power away whilst clinging to people and habits that were further damaging us.
2) Previous abuse, fear of abuse and fear of asserting self
Coming from an abusive background where the trauma is still alive in your Inner Being is a formula for being highly susceptible when someone comes into your life appearing asbeing loving, caring and compassionate.
Narcissists initially, to hook you, present as someone who totally “gets’ you. There are copious amounts provided of whatever you need in order to feel understood, validated and accepted.
You feel like a person in a desert finding a waterhole.
This is how narcissists love bomb – they recognize what you didn’t receive as a child and start to pour it on.
Your gut is twisting with feelings of “this is too much too soon”, but when you are dying of thirst and have not yet discovered how to hydrate yourself, what else is there to do but dive right in?
When the mask starts to slide down and the monster appears, you replay what you learnt as a child to try to retain connection whilst surviving abuse … which was totally necessary for your emotional survival.
Don’t have rights. Don’t fight back. Don’t rock the boat.
You make excuses.
You try to keep the peace.
You say “Yes” when you should say ‘No”.
You accept blame when you shouldn’t.
And you stay when you should go.
When the bad behaviour is in full swing, your unhealed parts that felt devastated when you were young, are severely triggered again.
The following can be terrifying and so painful to play out …
When someone hurts you … you may cling to them, be unconsciously drawn in harder to them, and LOVE them even more.
This is the young unhealed child part within you regressing back to this childhood state …
If I can’t please you Mum or Dad right now I am going to be annihilated.
This means you may be extra loving when in the face of terrible behaviour.
You may take all the blame.
You may turn toward the abuse instead of away, doing whatever it takes to try to change who this person is being in order to survive them.
As a child you couldn’t get away.
If this terrible unconscious driver happens to you, it is because as a child you were stuck there and tried to do everything in your power to minimalize the danger.
As an adult you may not realise you are still unconsciously replaying that – even though there are other options now – or that you probably will continue to unconsciously do this until that original trauma is healed within you.
It’s so important to understand this … when you are hooked in (which means participating / tolerating), whether it is fighting back or trying to please and rectify, it is always about this:
This time Mum / Dad please STOP hurting me and making me feel powerless and please JUST love me the way you are meant to.
This is why despite all logic, sensibility and KNOWING that you should pull away, you can’t.
Because your Inner Being is fighting for so much more than just what is going on with the narcissist.
Your Inner Being is trying to re-write a devastating emotional love history.
3) Being Capable, Honest, Security Conscious and Intelligent
As a child who was set up to be co-dependent, you became very capable.
A lot was demanded from you and you become a high achiever in order to try to win approval.
In fact, the people who are the most capable in an intelligent, logical and practical sense, generally are as a result of over-compensating for not having a solid Inner Emotional Self.
Over-functioning (which is a common state for co-dependents) goes like this:
I try to frenetically succeed in my outside environment as an attempt to feel whole on the inside
As an adult, who has been abused by a narcissist, there were many things that you could make happen in your life.
You may have even been the “go to” person; the person who was a rock for others in need.
As the person who does the heavy lifting, forever proving your worthiness, you don’t ask for much from others.
In fact, you find it difficult to receive. You would much rather be a giver and a fixer than a receiver.
This suits a narcissist perfectly.
You also have a high sense of integrity and are dismayed if anyone thinks otherwise.
It was incredibly painful when your parents made insults to your character … such as telling you that you were lazy, or dishonest or selfish … in order to make you bend to their demands.
When the narcissist does it to you, you will hook in and try to change his or her mind about these accusations, and will try to prove your virtues by doing more and more for him or her.
Additionally, because of your honest hardworking character – always trying to “do the right thing” in order to win your parent’s love and approval – you will instinctively take responsibility for and mop up the narcissist’s messes.
You may care-take, pay his or her fines and keep the the fires burning and the roof over your heads no matter how irresponsible the narcissist is or how ridiculously his or her behaviour threatens your security.
There is so much more than just these three points … but I hope that an understanding of them allows you to start realising the truth.
That the freedom from narcissistic abuse, and the power to heal ALL lies within.
Healing For Real From Narcissistic Abuse
What happens in narcissistic/ co-dependent relationships is a symbiosis through woundedness.
The narcissist is emotionally stunted … being the demanding, entitled child who never grew up in order to process his or her wounds and stop holding other people hostage for them, and the co-dependent has not yet healed his or her childhood woundedness of having to cater to other person’s demands to try to retain his or her own emotional survival.
This is the glue that holds these devastating relationships together.
The person suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, living the terminal unconsciousness of I will never face and take responsibility for my wounds, is not going dissolve their half of the deadly glue.
But WE can.
When we heal our original traumas, we DO break free.
The pull and connection with the narcissist (no more glue keeping the symbiosis going) dissolves, and we become an authentic person gloriously experiencing a completely different human experience.
For the first time in our lives we let go, turn away and start generating healthy, solid, adult relationships instead.
As an authentic self we are inoculated against abuse; we easily identify and leave alone people who aren’t healthy for us.
In more incredible and fearless ways than we ever had access to before the abuse.
And this is NOT because we are now wary and know what to look out for in a narcissist. (I promise you that is NO defence at all.)
Rather, it is because we are now an up-levelled self who no longer has symbiotic wounds that make us susceptible to getting infiltrated and infected by them.
Narcissists are no longer our reality – and we would not “tolerate” (participate) with them for a millisecond.
The points above, regarding our susceptibilities in the previous section, are only three of the dozens of unconscious childhood and generational hooks that can keep us in the game with narcissists.
That is the work I LOVE to help people do inside their own Beings … because that is how we heal for REAL from narcissistic abuse.
In Quantum Leaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment