Divorcing a narcissist is arguably one of the most traumatic experiences anyone could go through. Surviving divorcing a narcissist, may seem near impossible, let alone winning against one.
If we were divorcing a person who did have a sense of morality, there wouldn’t be a necessity to try to win! Most of us would be happy to do what is right and fair for all concerned. Yet, people when divorcing a narcissist, discover just how HARD it is to do successfully. Narcissists are not the type of people to separate decently, sensibly or compassionately.
The reality is the narcissist will be out to take from you all that they can. You will discover that you’re not just in a divorce settlement, you are fighting for everything you care about.
This article, regarding how to divorce a narcissist and win, is important, because you need to know EXACTLY what you are dealing with, as well as HOW to deal.
Before we get started, I want to say a special thank you to the people on Facebook who responded to help me write this article – offering their wisdom, insight, and experiences to assist. I have so much gratitude, as I know you will have too, for the heart and soul of our amazing Community.
Bless you all!
Okay, let’s get started with the essential starting point – know thy enemy.
The Mindset of the Narcissist
There are people who can settle without solicitors whilst dealing with property, assets, and children, but that’s not a narcissist.
Narcissists want more than what they are entitled to, and love to use the legal system to their advantage. They feed off our fear and pain and are merciless. They will use all and any information against you and will even fabricate information to defeat you.
As far as a narcissist is concerned, he or she is the one who has been badly treated and deserves their versions of custody, property and asset settlement. There is zero care and compassion for you or your children – it truly is all about them.
Why are narcissists so bloody-minded and inflexible about this? For this reason: once you are no longer useful for feeding their existence and significance, you are an enemy who needs to be brought down and eliminated. The narcissist will try to squeeze out of you every last drop that he or she can get; you have become totally dispensable and irrelevant, for anything other than that. Also, in the narcissist’s mind, this is the vindication for how badly they believe, with their malfunctioning neuron wiring, that you treated them.
His or her inner traumas, paranoia and terror conclude “it’s me versus you.” The narcissist believes everyone thinks the way he or she does – that no-one is to be trusted and people are all out for themselves. It’s a “dog eat dog world” according to the narcissist – strike first before you get struck down. The narcissist is energised, all consumed and has gone into damage control, needing to make the moves to eliminate you before you can hurt him or her.
The narcissist hates losing the things that their False Self deems as important to sustaining itself – money, property, possessions, and status. Human partners are dispensable; they are merely a vehicle for these things. During divorce, money and property is what the narcissist will go for, as well as the children to save face, guarantee reduced child-support and to hurt you.
Many narcissists start setting up “their new life” long before divorce proceedings. It’s likely you are a good-natured, trusting person who wouldn’t consider doing the wrong thing. Yet the narcissist has no problem – for months or even years – siphoning money out of the marriage to put in other bank accounts, transferring things into other people’s names, start hiding income, enlisting minions against you and all sorts of other assorted sordid tricks that will blow your mind.
What may also horrify you is: he or she already has a new love-partner ready for them to move in with. How you can be dismissed, replaced and brutalised, when divorcing a narcissist, will leave you reeling. This is totally normal and to be expected.
The truth sets us free, and it saves our lives emotionally and even literally. I’m not telling you this stuff to scare you, I’m telling it to warn you and to be prepared. Because rule number 1 is: STOP expecting this person to be honest, fair, sentimental, or do the right thing.
As Dave said on Facebook:
“Remember that THEY don’t care about YOU. They will try to play upon every emotion to get all they can from you. They have zero sympathy for you. They are continuing to use you to get that last ounce of supply from you. They want to vanquish you. They do not love you like you love(d) them.”
Dave’s right … don’t even expect this person, who you shared your heart, bed, and life with, to act like a human being.
Trying to Battle a Narcissist With Ongoing Trauma
Some people, when divorcing a narcissist, are past the heartbreak and trauma of losing the person they believed was their soul mate. That wasn’t me and maybe that’s not you.
If we are still emotionally connected, we are in for a very hard time. We will cling to sentimentality and be triggered into intense devastation when the narcissist acts without a shred of love or kindness. We still may hope for reconciliation and we may be impervious to being manipulated into deals in the narcissist’s favour.
Even for those who are long past the feelings of longing and love, the shock is still intense that a person we once shared our life with has the capacity for deception, maliciousness and total indifference to our needs, feelings or ability to generate our future life.
During my settlement with narcissist number 1, I was terrorised, heartbroken and missed the man I thought I loved. I couldn’t accept his criminal, sociopathic, behaviour was really who he was and I kept trying to hang in there and change him. I did it all wrong. I got annihilated, and after that and healing myself, I learnt valuable lessons. I realised there is no point trying to force someone to love and look after you when they are a narcissist, and as long as I looked to him for my own “self” I wasn’t there for myself.
Since healing my broken inner child up to become the inner adult who looks after myself, there is no way now that someone could take me down like that again.
Today, I would have de-toxed myself from all deep emotional attachments to him. I would have emerged empowered, clean and clear and walked a very determined, straight line without fear. And I know the results would have been entirely different.
In fact, they have been. Since becoming my own Source, when anyone has tried to take me down, I show up as my authentic self, release all fear about that person or any persecution, and their influence and threats simply dissolve.
Yet back then, when I was going through my horrific divorce, I didn’t understand how we could release our trauma effectively, and anyone defeating a narcissist in a divorce settlement was virtually unheard of. What was the norm, was to flail around, be triggered, devastated, in shock and try to operate in a system that was completely unsupportive of that.
After having been intimately involved with so many people divorcing narcissists over the last 10 plus years, this I know – we have to get beyond the terrible traumatised feeling coursing within us, to have any hope of getting through this in one piece.
The bad new is, it is virtually impossible to just think differently when our entire nervous system is hijacked with terrible primal fears. The good news is, the NARP Program is incredibly powerful at releasing and replacing emotions that we simply can’t get past (integrate) in normal, logical ways.
Then we automatically think differently.
Emotion First
Thank goodness we no longer have to accept that the way we feel is something we’re stuck with. We can change it. If we embody Quantum Truths, we understand why this inner work is SO vital – to change how we emotionally feel FIRST – before trying to do anything to change our outer circumstances.
It’s the harnessing of the power of Quantum Law – so within, so without.
Just as in my own personal case, I have never heard of divorcing a narcissist, when people felt shattered and traumatised, turning out well for these people. Why? Because the Quantum Truth is this: no amount of Doingness will reverse a highly emotionally charged Beingness.
The outcome will always complete match the Beingness, because our entire lives are unfolding from within us, especially when we have a large emotional (Energy–In–Motion) charge on something. Nothing outside us is coming to rescue us from our inner terror and traumatisation unfolding. Rather, we personally have to become the Source of the Miracle, by becoming a different inner being composition in relation to what we are dealing with.
Our true power lies within, regardless of how much life and everything seems stacked up against us. Quantum Law is absolute, when you shift your inner being in relation to ANY topic in your Life, then Life MUST follow. This Law is as absolute as gravity.
There has been one consistent prelude to the Thrivers in this Community, who received unprecedented Court settlements against narcissists – they shifted their Inner Being first. They worked hard to become strong, calm and settled inside themselves, and as completely non-reactive (as possible) no matter what was thrown at them.
The trauma of heartbreak, betrayal, deception and brutalisation from someone you loved and trusted is devastating. To NOT be a lamb led to the slaughter these terrible traumas have to be cleaned up. I promise you, after doing the inner work you won’t suffer these feelings anymore. You will know this is not personal – it is simply about a narcissist being a narcissist.
I want you to imagine that you are a character in a computer game running around under seige, and your energy level is so low the warning is bleeping “critical!”. Your inner integrity needs to be supplemented and strengthened if you are going to make it through this level, as well as the ones to come.
Identifying and Removing the Narcissists Power Over You
So let’s get facts straight in preparation for your divorce. When a narcissist feels he or she has stuff to lose, the gloves are off and anything goes. This is not personal – this is survival. Don’t try to deal, bargain, reason, or appeal to a narcissist – forget it – you are going to have arm yourself against a highly toxic unreasonable, entitled person and know HOW to.
Your most powerful weapon is Anti-fear.
Why Anti-fear?
Narcissists can only get you through your fear …. your fear feeds them power. It is the figurative bullets that they load up in their gun to shoot you with.
When we are triggered by the fear of what the narcissist may do, we react and try to expose the narcissist and frantically appeal to others to help us. Yet, people don’t want to get involved. They shut doors in our face, don’t listen, don’t care, switch off, and even turn against us. And, you are shocked to see how the narcissist twists it all by making you out to be the wrong and crazy one. This can lead you to lose credibility, court settlements, and even your children.
What are the ways we hand power to the narcissist unknowingly? How do narcissists get under our skin and trigger us into horrifying pain and fear? By doing this … they hit our most vulnerable parts, namely the terrors of annihilation and loss. These are deep, primal terrors that hijack and threaten our entire being.
The terror of annihilation relates to the fear that we can’t go on and survive, we can’t make it on our own anymore. We believe that the things sustaining our survival may be under threat – where we will live and how we will be able to generate money. We feel in the throes of battles with narcissists, that all and everything could be ripped away from us, threatening our literal survival.
These are the deep wounds of humanity. Absolutely in our history when people were deserted, replaced, thrown out, or defeated by enemies, they went without shelter and starved. They were susceptible to enemies and death. Is it possible that our human systems, having experienced these primal fears epigenetically, in past lives and as young children, are triggered back into this literal survival terror again?
I believe so. I know when I went through my divorce, I felt like I was going to die, and I know many of you have felt these feelings too.
The terror of loss relates to the fear of things closest to our hearts. Absolutely in times of divorcing a narcissist these fears are activated. Fear for your loved ones, special possessions, your entire life as you knew it, and your literal identity. Naturally, the greatest terror of all is fearing the loss of your children, when the narcissist threatens to take them away from you.
Now, with Quantum Freedom Healing, we can track any and all of those fears to where they are wedged within us, load them up, release them and then live free from them. By doing so, even in the face of a terrible time (if we work hard enough at it) all these fears can become completely BENIGN in our body. That’s when everything will swing around for you.
You may be reading this thinking it is not possible, but I can assure you it totally is.
This is what Peggy had to say about this on Facebook:
“Battling a narcissist in court is one of the most challenging yet potentially rewarding and life-changing experiences one can have. I am one of the rare ones who emerged victorious on ALL fronts and came out the other side empowered, stronger and emotionally whole. Your teachings were critically important at that time and in moving forward in order to become fully self-partnered, whole and healed.
The process unfolded miraculously, including the experience of finishing up the divorce in less time than even uncontested divorces usually finalize…even though he had retained a team of attorneys and a fraudulent forensic accountant to go against me! I retained ALL of my assets, received medical compensation and everything I was owed, and he pled guilty in the criminal proceedings. I now see this whole experience as one of HUGE blessings, as it shined a light on all the inner wounds of childhood that had always been there, and gave me the opportunity to heal fully. The cycle of victim has been broken in my life forever, and I am so grateful!”
When we remove all the ways that a narcissist can get to us, that is when narcissists unravel. They will either up the ante trying to get you to react and feed them energy, where they overstep the mark and get exposed, or they will capitulate altogether and walk away leaving you with what you want.
This is what Brittany shared on Facebook:
“I promise you, going no contact in every way possible except what is necessary, will be the way you win. It drives the narc nuts and either they lose interest or their mask starts to crack in Court. They can’t help themselves. Heal yourself as soon as possible. If you focus on that, I promise they will back off.”
I have seen both outcomes happen regularly in this Community when people detoxed themselves of all and every negative emotion concerning the narcissist and proceedings and were able to show up simply stating calm rational facts. I have also seen people who initially were caught up in terrible divorce proceedings, do the inner work and de-tox the fear, and then the whole thing shifted and spun around in their favour.
Please understand that to release ourselves of our fear under narcissistic attack is no ordinary journey, it truly is a step up into the most courageous extraordinary accomplishment that we have ever achieved. After experiencing nothing else working for us, what choice do we have but to try to win this battle a DIFFERENT way?
It all starts with tending Emotion First and setting up Anti-Fear. That’s often only possible with doing the determined inner work.
Then we can apply ourselves really well to the necessary practicalities.
How To Manage Communication During Divorce
Use your solicitor for any correspondence with the narcissist, and use a communication portal for your children – such as Our Family Wizard.
The children’s communication portal is ONLY in regard to the day to day parallel parenting with your children. Don’t answer anything to do with settlements or custody other than through your solicitor.
If the narcissist attempts to harass you through other channels, document all contact attempts, and apply for an intervention order to have this ceased.
When choosing a lawyer ask the right questions to see if you feel this person has enough experience and fortitude to take on a high-conflict case. Ask them for their results in dealing with such divorce settlements, until you feel comfortable that they can handle your case for you.
Joanne’s wonderful suggestion on Facebook was this:
“(Choose) a good solicitor that is used to working with women’s refuges or similar as they know the type of battle and people they are dealing with. Have a clear contact order and never budge from being business-like. No entry to the house, no contact. Not being bullied, co-erced or manipulated…they soon find another victim and eventually leave you alone when they cannot get to you in ANY way. Dedicate your energy, thoughts, time and any assets you do have left to making the best life for yourself.”
Also, within this Community, Thrivers do talk about their successes with lawyers, and they may know of people who are in your area who can help you. It is well worth asking on my Facebook Page or in the NARP Forum if anyone has such recommendations.
Don’t Play a Narcissist’s Game
Don’t stoop to the narcissist’s level. Don’t get sucked into the drama and tactics. If the narcissist gets through information to you that is inflammatory and triggering, take those triggers to NARP modules and DON’T REACT. Do everything you can NOT to bite or respond, even if the narcissist is threatening you.
Don’t respond to threats, or try to cool the narcissist down or give the narcissist what he or she wants. Know your limits, trust and stick with them. Do not feel obliged to answer anything that is not reasonable.
Ignore, ignore, detach, detach and stick to facts, and don’t GIVE up ground. If you give one inch the narcissist will take ten miles.
Resist responding with your own tactics, or manipulations. Rather, play the straight, authentic game. Narcissists can’t continue to operate out in the open where truth is the powerful force.
The people who do try to play the narcissist at their own level usually come off second best, because the whole thing backfires on them. If you reduce yourself to using tactics, you have just handed the narcissist the ammunition to mow you down with. I don’t recommend fighting darkness (narcissism) with falsities. What tends to be so much more effective is being your most honest, within integrity, powerful self.
How to Defend Against the Dirty Tactics
Narcissists play dirty and try to chop you off at the knees so that you can’t stand up against them. If there is any sensitive information about you the narcissist will use it and may even make up whatever it takes to try to destroy your credibility. They also enlist others who have been turned against you, to do their bidding.
Be ready and unsurprised when it happens. Shed from deep within any fear, so that you can be anchored into “the truth stands always”. Don’t be shocked. Don’t react with counter dirt-throwing. Don’t diagnose what the narcissist is (a narcissist) and try to get people to realise it. (That’s actually a move that will go against you.)
Express your credibility calmly and rationally in a mature and adult way. With others, who are not a part of the legal proceedings, let go and know when the truth shines through, the people who are meant to be in your life will return to you knowing that truth.
This is Carmel’s fantastic advice:
“Stay calm and respond, don’t react. I am going through this now and have had all manner of accusations etc. thrown at me and have found the parenting wizard is a godsend for communication and proof. I have also found being clear and concise and non-emotional in court very helpful. I was actually complimented by the judge who said I was very articulate. I have had his agencies set on me and again stuck to the point and what’s important, the child, and being child-focused and I avoided saying “he did/she did” and have now been granted support for my family while trying to parent in the midst of this and support for my daughter.
If it gets too much, don’t be afraid to seek support from services and admit that its very difficult as there may be family support available for parents etc. who are trying to parent effectively in the midst of a storm. It’s not a mark against a parent, its a sign that you are the responsible parent and one that has any children’s best interests at heart and actually want to parent well. Do the NARP modules and self-care as well is important. Don’t be afraid to ask friends or family etc. for help and support and give up the notion that you are bothering people and have to do it alone. Bring supportive people to court with you for moral support.”
Document Everything!
When narcissists can’t trigger you or get narcissistic supply from you, and when they don’t know what is going on – their fragile, insecure egos usually lose control. Narcissists unravel under these circumstances and do stupid things.
When you stop bowing to their egoic threats, and are unperturbed and unresponsive, narcissists really don’t handle it well. Make sure any contact they do with you is exposed and accountable. When they won’t be able to help themselves, and you capture their outbursts on voice message, text, email, or Our Family Wizard you have valuable information for your case.
Have a running diary where you document the date and time of any incident – and state the facts without emotional evaluations.
I love Valerie’s suggestions that she posted on Facebook:
“Document everything! Avoid conversations and contact that can’t be documented. Screenshot texts, FB messages, Emails, etc. Record voice messages. Download the bSafe app from the playstore and use it. Download a good voice recorder. The bSafe app backs up the audio and video to their server so even if he breaks your phone you can request a copy if you need to give it to authorities.”
Further Resources
For added inspiration regarding How To Divorce A Narcissist And Win, I also suggest listening to these Thriver Shows which explain how NARP Members achieved unprecedented court results.
If you are currently battling your way through a divorce with a narcissist, I can’t suggest enough that you join me in one of my free webinars to sample what Quanta Freedom Healing (The NARP Program) can do for you, to help you gain yourself, your soul, your children and your life back.
I so hope this has helped you, and I look forward to your comments and questions on this topic.
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