Many of you are incredibly conscious and emotionally intelligent people – that’s why you love interacting in our wonderful Thriver Community!
I also know that many of you are aware, in many cases, that our childhoods are what sets us up for narcissistic abuse. This is not even necessarily about having a narcissistic parent – which of course is a contributor.
Rather, many of the childhood patterns I’m talking about today were all “normal” parenting, and our parents thought they were doing a great job. It wasn’t their fault – there has been very little emphasis or training in regard to conscious parenting.
One of my greatest desires with this article is that we can all learn from this and adjust our parenting, so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes of our forebears.
So, what are the 5 EXACT main patterns which have made us prone to narcissists?
Today I want to share with you the specific patterns that I believe have caused us to unconsciously be attracted and be attractive to narcissists. These patterns are also responsible for our enmeshment with narcissists, why we remain with them and why we keep obsessing about them – no matter how badly they treat us.
Okay – let’s dive in!
Number 1 – Trained To Distrust Our Intuition
Even the most wholesome of households can teach their children not to trust their intuition.
Imagine this, you know that Mum and Dad are fighting and you are disturbed and ask a parent “What’s happening, what’s wrong?” and they look you straight in the face and say, “Nothing’s wrong.”
This parent is your “God” they are your barometer of “truth”. So, you learn you must have it wrong and start to distrust what you are feeling. You are being trained to believe what other people say, rather than what your inner voice tells you.
Clearly, in toxic families there are many lies, deceptions and manipulations which take this to an even worse level. How can you know what is real and what isn’t? You want to believe the lies, because they are more comfortable than the truth. You start lying to yourself as a means of emotional protection.
If there is a parent that is modelling refusing to own up, be honest and take responsibility for their behaviour then this is an even greater “teaching” about how to disconnect and lie to oneself.
Parents may have believed they were protecting us, by lying about the truth, or they believed that they needed to be the authority and should never admit that they may have been “wrong”.
All of this takes us away from our internal GPS which is our God Protection System – the inner wise voice that is our true authority.
In narcissistic relationships we ignore our inner GPS, assign the narcissist as the authority and we doubt ourselves when we know things are “off” and that we are being lied to.
Then we lie to ourselves with applied cognitive dissonance to try to make the false and traumatising realities bearable.
By not connecting with our Inner Truth, facing it and making decisions based on it, we can’t pull away, stay away and look after ourselves.
Number 2 – Having Our Uniqueness Ignored
As a child if we tried to have a voice and assert what did or didn’t feel right for us, or wished to express our unique and individual personality, we may have been invalidated and just told to be someone else’s version of what they believed we should be.
This is your parent not seeing you as a developing flesh and blood autonomous being – rather more as an extension of themselves.
The message we received is that we are not valid, important and worthy of being “ourselves”. Rather, we have to go along to get along, agree with someone else’s version of who we are, and if we don’t, we are bad, unlovable and defective.
Of course, children need boundaries, routine, and limits, but when they aren’t allowed to be a child, express, explore, play, and dream in age-appropriate ways, and are encouraged to develop a unique self – the deeper internalised message is “I am unacceptable”. Then toxic shame accumulates in our Inner Being, meaning we subjugate our truths, dreams, inspirations, and visions for other people at our own expense.
Narcissists love this – they want people who are not self-defined, who don’t stand in their own dreams, visions and life directions, and who are always trying to establish their love, value and worth via others.
This way the narcissist can demand more and more and more from you – effectively exploiting you and emptying you out, whilst never recognising you as a flesh and blood autonomous being – but rather a tool to serve their insatiable demands.
Number 3 – Shutting Down Our Negative Feelings
This is possibly one of the most disastrous patterns – being told not to feel and express negative emotions.
We were taught, “Don’t be angry”, “Don’t cry”, “Go away, I don’t want to hear about it”, “I’m too busy to listen to you”, “I’m too damaged myself to care about your feelings”, “If you want to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about” and, “You’re hurt! Look how much you hurt me!”
Even the seemingly benign message of, “Don’t think about it, just go and do something that makes you happy” is also intensely damaging.
What this all amounts to is unresolved inner trauma.
These painful emotions had nowhere to go; they were not met, held and validated, which means you haven’t been able to let them go. They built up and toxically affected you with anxiety and depression, and nervous system and physical illnesses, and painful emotional triggers that kept going off causing you to maladapt to try to avoid being triggered or lashing out to try to diffuse these triggers in other ways.
One of the most powerful attractors of negative and traumatising people in our lives is having unresolved negative and painful traumas wedged in our Inner Being.
This doesn’t mean that you are a bad person, you could be a lovely individual with a really beautiful Soul and integrity, however if you have a lot of unresolved traumas within you because you didn’t receive the allowing and the validation of your negative emotions and weren’t taught how to self-sooth and let your traumatised feelings go, then you have not evolved beyond shaming and blaming yourself for your emotions.
Which means you disconnect from them, instead of supporting and loving yourself through them to completion, and you beat yourself up for having them.
This means you will have more people come into your life who blame and shame you, hurt you and invalidate your emotions. You will also struggle to accept people in your life who can see, acknowledge and support you emotionally – simply because you are not as yet doing this for yourself.
You can’t heal beyond your traumas and then continue to hold other people responsible for them. This is a total setup for victimhood without the shift to healing and breaking free from being victimised.
This is a major unconscious attraction force that occurs with narcissists and brings them into your life. They are the ultimate people to invalidate you, traumatise you and trigger you with negative emotions so that they can flip the script, vindicate themselves as “the good one” and accuse you of being the damaged, defective one.
Number 4 – Fear Of Abandonment
This is another biggie. It starts as a baby. Our much wiser tribal communities wrap up babies and swaddle them on their bodies continuously – allowing the child to disconnect and explore its own Life Force and environment, without the mother’s protection, when it’s emotionally ready to.
This creates an Inner Identity of safety, connection, wholeness and therefore confidence. The argument is that this makes the baby demanding and co-dependent on the mother.
Rather, it is a baby who is crying, left without support and contact and therefore intensely traumatised who establishes the powerful inner trauma programs of “No one is coming”, “I’m all alone” and, “Without someone else I may not survive.”
Then as we get older there are numerous ways the abandonment programs are increased.
Emotionally being invalidated. Not being heard and protected when something awful has happened to you. Not being believed regarding events and then not wanting to share trials and tribulations because you feel like you may be blamed for them – rather than be supported.
Or maybe as a child you were literally abandoned – left to fend for yourself because of having selfish, immature, sick or neglectful parents.
When we have unresolved abandonment traumas, we do not realise that we are still a broken, unsafe inner child trying to find a “parent” to do it differently this time.
This makes you naturally attracted to people who purport to see you, hold you and meet you intensely. People who you think won’t abandon you but are using your abandonment fears against you to bond quickly, enmesh with you and start extracting your Life Force and resources.
This is what narcissists do, and then they turn the tables and start punishing you with the terror of abandonment constantly – by threatening to leave you.
This rips these wounds horrifically open again – whilst we cling and try to force narcissists to stop doing it. We can’t pull away, stay away and look after ourselves because of our terror of disconnection from them.
Fear of abandonment is a deadly trauma bond with a narcissist. It makes you feel like without this person you may die. You can easily mistake this for love, but it isn’t.
It is fully ignited terror of unhealed abandonment wounds.
Number 5 – Destruction Of Boundaries
As a child if you were forced to eat everything on your plate and share your toys, and made to acquiesce regarding your space, property, or body, including what went into it, then your boundaries were violated.
Maybe your parents distrusted you and ransacked your bedroom. Did they read your diary?
These are simple examples. Naturally I could go on with much more. Many people in this community have had boundary violation at extreme levels personally, including sexually – from their parents, family members or other adults that they were told to trust.
There are many damaging patterns here – the first is to not grow up seeing yourself as a sovereign self-defined Being with rights. This can cause you to give away your personal autonomy and property easily, to anyone you see as an outside authority, against your will.
This plays directly into the hands of narcissists who are all about exploiting your Life Force and resources, and stripping you of your sovereign rights, for their gain.
Also, the violation of your Being, which boundary destruction is, causes intense inner trauma. This then makes you an energetic match for the familiarity of connecting with people who will disrespect your boundaries in the future – such as narcissists.
It also makes you fearful when trying to stand up for yourself and say “No”, risking disapproval from those who seek to exploit you – because as a child you were powerless to set strong and healthy boundaries, and suffered immensely when you tried to.
Narcissists are highly skilled at seeking out people with scanty, weak and non-existent boundaries, including people who have high levels of tolerance to boundary violating behaviour – because it is their childhood programming.
In Conclusion
Today I wanted to drill down into the 5 foundational childhood patterns which disconnect us from our TRUE Life Force and make us prone to FALSE Life Force (anti-life), which is narcissists.
These 5 traumatic childhood patterns create the fragmenting of the four foundational pillars of your Inner Identity – Love, Approval, Security and Survival.
What is your solution?
Healing yourself within … that’s the only solution.
But here is the big challenge with narcissistic abuse … we are so traumatised, incensed and devastated in our “proneness” that we remain hooked into narcissists. What I see, repeatedly (and I experienced this myself) is even if you get away, you can still suffer from unresolved obsession about the narcissist indefinitely.
It doesn’t allow the space or focus on yourself in order to heal within.
This is why I created a structured system for you to follow, to detach from the narcissist, turn your focus inwards and be supported to heal everything that I have talked about today, and so much more.
This is my Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP). It is the exact process that I used to quickly and powerfully heal these 5 childhood patterns (and many others).
You deserve a life without this trauma, so that like me and many other people in this community, you too can Thrive.
Let me know in your comments below …
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