Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)

I have taken this directly article from Kaleah's website having worked with her in the past.  Doing spiritual recovery alongside my life coaching work can be extremely empowering  and is essential for your healing especially if you have just come out of a particularly abusive relationship.

What is Narcissism?

Narcissism is a force that is infiltrating the people in our society in great numbers. It is a self-absorbed energy that takes control of people and robs them of their ability to love or care about anyone else.

Malignant Narcissism is found in people who have Narcissistic Personality Disorder! These people are destructive forces in our society. They are the energy vampires who take, take, take but never truly give!

When in the presence of these energy vampires we slowly feel our life-force energy draining away! We become tired, and often lose ourselves in a big way!

Narcissists are very manipulative, having mastered the art of manipulation. They know how to suck us into their distorted Web of reality and keep us there like prey, waiting to be consumed.

If we knew what was happening, we could escape and detach our life-force from the narcissist. But most of us have no idea what is happening. Our energy is taken ever so slowly and we are caught unaware!

In the end, it is often too late! We have already been sucked dry!

Have you heard the story of the frog and the pot of boiling water? If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out, however if you put a frog in a pot of cool water and slowly heat it to boiling it will die.

Being with a narcissist is the slow boil! We are not aware that the temperature is ever so slowly increasing and we build up a resistance to it.

The result is the feeling of having just been raped on a very deep level. It is a soul rape!

Like any person in an abusive relationship we develop coping mechanisms. We distort the truth just as the narcissist has. We believe what we want to believe! We believe what we need to believe for our own survival!

It is typical we blame ourselves, after all we are the ones going crazy! They seem unaffected by our deteriorating self-worth and depreciating energy levels. To them it is just another reason to condemn us for not being enough.

Eventually, however we do begin to get very angry at the narcissist! Our souls are rebelling! We know that something is wrong! We feel on some level they have taken something from us and we want it back!

If this story feels or sounds familiar to you, it is likely you have been involved in a relationship with a narcissist.

Someone with narcissistic personality disorder doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with them. They have been conditioned to believe the problem always lies outside of themselves and will always project their inner state of darkness upon those closest to them.

The worst kind of evil is the kind that comes with total lack of responsibility for ones actions and behavior! It is never their fault! Nothing is! Even if they hit you or do something horrible towards you, it was your fault! You caused it! It was your behavior that led them to the dirty deed!

Because you are human, and willing to consider your own responsibility you may start to own his behavior. You may start to believe it is your fault and try harder to please him.

However you will never win because there is no winning with a Narcissist. With a narcissist there is only win/lose, never win/win. They must always win at the expense of others.

Does a narcissist know what he/she is doing?

On the most part No! His reality is so distorted and dark that he cannot see his own actions and behavior as being anything out of the ordinary. He may realize he is different but that uniqueness is interpreted as “special”. He inflates his own sense of importance and worth to a point where he puts himself above others. He may appear as arrogant, aloof, distant, and anti-social.

Although he is often a loner, not really needing anyone else, he does need someone to mirror to him his own specialness. He has a need to be seen in a glorified light and will only give his attention to those who see him this way!

As long as you praise the Narcissist and focus only on all of his wonderful traits you will be in his good favor.

If anyone close to him calls him on his behavior or dares confront him on his less than caring or considerate treatment of them he will quickly put that person in his/her place, which is NOT WORTHY of his company.

It is often difficult for Victims of narcissistic abuse to understand what has happened to them. They believe that the narcissist loved them and cared for them so it is quite a shock to see how easily he devalues and discards them when they truly begin to question the reality of the relationship.

As long as the “victim” plays along and doesn’t make waves, everything is fine! However any confrontation or questioning is likely to set off something called narcissistic rage! Narcissistic rage is taken out on the victim in the form of cold silence, devaluing, discarding and other passive/aggressive forms of abuse meant to punish.

The punishment is often felt very deeply by the victim. He/she is often left believing she has done something wrong. It brings up her own repressed issues from childhood where she ashamed of herself. At one point perhaps a parent caused her to feel she was bad for something she did rather than simply having done a behavior that was inappropriate.

This core shame is re-enacted with the Narcissist. 

He knows how to play upon our core feelings of shame and inadequacy. This is what he uses to control and manipulate us.

When we begin getting clever to his ways this is when he will completely discard us as having no further value in his life!

When we find ourselves at this point there is no avenue for completion or closure. We are not allowed to share our feelings, and there are a lot of them! We are not allowed to talk things out or come to some sense of understanding as to what just happened! Instead we have been deemed worthless and thrown out completely!

Often this is done after we break up with the Narcissist. We may let them know we are leaving and their reaction might be “if you are leaving then you are worthless!”

Believing there was an actual loving relationship in place, we have a need to have some sense of completion with the person we were involved with. We want to talk things over and even have a sense that they care about the relationships ending!

But there is normally no completion! The narcissist will either ignore that you have ended the relationship and continue on as if nothing happened, or he will simply discard you and start a relationship with someone else, often from your circle of friends so you are sure to witness it!

The sad truth that you must eventually face is that there really was never a relationship! It was one sided! The narcissist never truly engaged on an emotional level with you! It may have seemed that he did. You may have memories of tears and emotional incidents around the relationship. That is because a narcissist will react emotionally to your actions and you take it as a sign of caring.

The truth of a narcissist is he is incapable of experiencing the very human qualities of compassion and empathy. This means he cannot imagine what you might be feeling or even care! It is all about him! He is hyper focused on what he is feeling and your feelings are of no importance to him!

He projects his repressed emotions onto you and holds you responsible. He will often accuse you of doing to him what he is doing to you! It can be very confusing for the victim.

Narcissism is a personality disorder that was formulated in childhood! We have a tendency to want to see a narcissist as “normal” but there is nothing normal about him. He is not operating in the same reality or anywhere near the same reality you are operating in.

Your need to put him in the same reality is where you get stuck. You want to see him as a normal person capable of loving you and caring about you. This is the illusion you bought into and the only way to break out of the illusion is to recognize the truth! He doesn’t and never did really care about you! It is a difficult truth to swallow!

We often feel very used! We come to recognize our roles in the narcissist’s life as nothing more than a source of fuel for the narcissistic fire. We are to him what blood is to a vampire! Our own sense of specialness is reduced to a complete sense of worthlessness.

How did we get to a point where we feel so worthless? Well, over the months, or years spent with a narcissist we slowly gave pieces of our soul away in attempt to stay in the good graces of the narcissist, which wasn’t an easy task. We were conditioned to ignore our own needs in favor of his. We gave and gave of ourselves until there was nothing more to give and at this point we began to ask for something in return or we ended the relationship.

By this time we had been depleted of our life-force energy. This is truly what the energy vampire feeds off of.

Like the frog in the pot of water we over compensate for the increasing heat by surrendering our own sense of reality to his distorted reality. We may say it’s getting hot in here and he convinces us it is really quite cool and asks us what is wrong with us.

Instead of honoring our own interpretation of reality we forfeit it in favor of his. “Oh, he thinks it’s cool so maybe I’m just having a hotflash!”

The narcissist is very skilled at helping us disassemble our own sense of reality. He rewards us with positive feedback for admitting fault or surrendering to his version of reality. Since we are human creatures we respond to positive reinforcement. Over time we are unconsciously conditioned to give up our reality in exchange for positive re-enforcement.

But underneath it all we are really angry with ourselves! We have given up our reality in favor of a distorted reality that truly makes no sense to us. We run around feeling hot, or angry, or confused and the narcissistic interpretation is that there is something wrong with us!

We don’t realize that the only thing wrong with us is that we are being brainwashed!

Once we do finally begin to wake up, the narcissist is usually well on his way to a new source of energy! We are left trying to unscramble the confused reality we are left with. We have to sort through all the pieces and figure out what is ours and what is his.

Our mind and our reality have been confused for so long it takes a lot of unscrambling to finally get a sense of ourselves once again.

After having gone through two relationships in a row with a narcissist I have finally learned how to unravel the confusion as quickly as possible and get my life back!

The reason I got involved with the second one is that I was still somewhat distorted and fragile in my sense of self-worth when I met the second one. This put me in a position of being ripe prey! I was very vulnerable and narcissists love innocence and vulnerability!

The second relationship was a long awakening process. I actually used the situation to regain myself before I ever left. I slowly came to the realization I was in another narcissistic relationship although I didn’t want to admit it!

But once I finally left I was armed with the one thing that helped me get myself back quickly ! Knowledge!

I knew the game and I knew what he was doing to punish me. I knew the rules of non-engagement and I had spiritual tools to help me reclaim my soul!

What Can You Do To Take Back Your Power? 

Visit Kaleah's Website Narcissism Free! Sign up for her newsletter and receive a free E-book

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