Category: Breaking Up With a Narcissist

Can I get real with you for a few minutes? Can we have a talk? Is your relationship with the narcissist ending, but then not really? Are you still breaking up and then getting back together with the narcissist? Does he or she come back around every so often? Do you stay in touch with him or her, or keep the lines of communication open in the hopes that he or she will reach out? Forget about the past for a minute, and how he or she used to treat you at the beginning of the relationship. Let’s ignore in...

Relationships with narcissists keep us in a walking sleep-state. They hold us captive, tethered to them by the competing emotions inside of us and the death grip they have on our hearts. And what does every resource tell us about that death grip and how to deal with a narcissist? The narcissist is not going to release it. There are many forces that keep us there that we probably aren’t going to be able to completely understand while we’re actually in it. We have to break it ourselves and go no contact. But what if you can’t?  I’ve written a...

We can’t leave a narcissist and begin our journey toward narcissistic abuse recovery until we go through five stages.  These stages embody the necessary psychological steps that will give us back our lives. I’ve written before about eleven things that can happen before a partner goes no-contact. These are things I experienced in response to what I was enduring in my past relationship. They included things such as epiphanies I had, unusual behaviors I exhibited, and inexplicable emotions I felt. I wrote this not long after I went no-contact as I thought back on the relationship and the psychological turmoil...

When you’re with a narcissist, you’re typically in limbo where either you leave and then they draw you back in once again, or they give you a silent treatment or discard you, leaving you baffled over what has just taken place, often only to return after a period of days or weeks to tell you that they can’t live without you. We need to be able to outsmart the narcissist in order to ever break out of this pattern that keeps us locked in invisible chains that weaken our ability to ever leave at all. There is a reason you...

If you’re swimming in the ocean and happen to get attacked by a shark, you’re lucky if you happen to escape. If the shark turns back around to bite into you again before you’re able to swim to shore, no one asks why you didn’t swim away fast enough or why you let the shark attack a second time. I left my abuser dozens of times before it was finally over. Long before then, there had been two of me: the one that prayed for it to end and the one that prayed it never would–the one that wished desperately...

When partners of narcissists try to implement “no contact,” the narcissists often try to entice them back into the relationship.  Going no contact with a narcissist is something we do only when we are fully aware of what we are dealing with and when we are ready to protect ourselves from further harm– an action taken with the best of intentions. Going no contact and meaning it, however, is something else entirely. Going no contact often fails at first if and when the narcissist uses an excuse for contacting us by hoovering us (or our defenses are weak and we...

Going no contact with a narcissist is one of the hardest and most painful things I’ve ever done in my life. The relationship itself was draining enough–I either felt like the queen of the world or I was suffering through nightmares that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. There was often no in-between. But then there was the aftermath. Once I was out of the psychological cage my ex-boyfriend had so carefully crafted for me, my brain did not catch up to that fact immediately. I was still infected and the poison drained out slowly. I felt rejected, broken,...