Category: Breaking Up With a Narcissist

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...

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,...

This is going to be the first personal post I’ve written in a long time. For those who have been reading for a while, you might have noticed that many of my posts for months have been more objective rather than subjective, although I often use my own experience as examples because I don’t want to violate anyone else’s privacy. There was a very good reason for that, I realize. My recovery has been happening in real time. In the earliest days after no-contact, I wrote articles about what it felt like to be in a relationship with a narcissist...

People who have never been in a relationship with a narcissist fail to understand why it takes so long to leave one. Even afterward, we are sometimes left beating ourselves up over why it took us so long. This is destructive and unhelpful. Others ask the question because they were not emotionally involved. It’s easier to look at the issues in the lives of others from an objective standpoint and make principled statements about what should be done when there are no attachments to be considered. We should know.  That’s exactly how narcissists and psychopaths make their decisions about what they...

All breakups are difficult. Breaking up and going no contact with a narcissist, however, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever dealt with in my life. It has led me to start asking the question, at exactly what point does a breakup with a narcissist occur? Breakups with narcissists, no matter how you define them, don’t end well. They end abruptly, usually with the two parties having completely different narratives for the same relationship. They result in multiple make-ups, a lot of damage, and no closure. For the narcissist, however, once you enter into the relationship, it never ends. They...

The one thing that people write to me about most frequently is how to get over a narcissist. Believe me, I understand. Getting over a narcissist is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It took me two and a half years–longer than the time we actually spent in our relationship–for me to truly get out. Even after I was out physically or when we were in one of those periods when we weren’t talking, there was a deep longing for him still. I once surveyed readers and asked them to describe what they had the hardest time explaining...

One of the most difficult things about trying to explain relationships with narcissists is explaining even to ourselves why we don’t leave sooner. What we often have not recognized fully and do not give ourselves enough credit for is that leaving them isn’t just physical. Learning how to deal with a narcissist at the end of a relationship means we must leave them in our minds as well. In addition to all of the difficult steps we often have to take to prepare our physical environments for a different life without them, our mentalities must be prepared for the loss....