Narcissists and Valentine’s Day can be a recipe for something bad to happen. Valentine’s Day is often a sensitive and dreaded day for many people, regardless of relationship status. Yet narcissists are notorious for ruining big days such as birthdays, anniversaries, and other holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. [Read How Narcissists Ruin Holidays] Valentine’s Day, however, is extra-special.  Everything about Valentine’s Day is tailor-made for them to wield it as a weapon to inflict maximum pain.  Valentine’s Day can be triggering for those coming out of abusive relationships with narcissists. It’s a day specifically dedicated to the very emotions the...

Idealization and devaluation. I understand everything now. They are two sides of the same coin, neither truth nor lie. They are only the distorted reflections of your sickness. It feels like a grenade just went off. The shrapnel falls, scattering. All the clues flood into the right cracks all at once, but too quickly for me to absorb each in isolation. I begged you for answers so many times. But how could I have expected you to give them to me when you did not understand any point of view other than your own? You could not find the disconnect...

The term “love bombing” may sound harmless on the surface. Who doesn’t want someone to bombard them with affection?  Yet narcissist love bombing is very sinister and dangerous. It disarms us and is the first step in an exploitative relationship. Love bombing almost always starts on day one in a relationship with a narcissist. It is part of the indoctrination that sets the stage for everything else that will occur during the rest of the relationship. Our emotions are used to trap us into the relationship and make it difficult to escape this narcissistic behavior. Then it can even spill...

Can a narcissist love us? It’s easy to become obsessed with that question.  Out of all the questions we have, isn’t that one of the critical questions about narcissists that we want to try to answer? [Read Do Narcissists Know They’re Narcissists? And Other Questions] There’s a kernel inside that question of whether narcissists can love that feels connected to almost every other question we have about the relationship.  If we could crack this question about narcissists and love, it seems as if everything else we don’t understand might fall into place. [Read Closure 7 Reasons Why Narcissists Won’t Give...

Narcissist lies are weapons. You may have asked the narcissist to account for their behavior. If you got answers at all, they likely didn’t make sense. There’s poison in their non-answers. It seeps into you a drop at a time until you’re sick with their self-loathing, and they’re drunk with their control of you. This non-reality is the very essence of narcissism. If you’ve interacted with narcissists enough, you’ll know that you can’t make them tell you the truth directly. However, sometimes they’ll tell you the truth indirectly if you pay close enough attention. So when can you tell when...

In the days after you have gone no-contact, recovery from narcissistic abuse feels like an out-of-reach fantasy.   Narcissists leave a part of themselves inside of us after they’re gone. No matter how much you wanted to go no-contact, once they’re gone, it feels as if the narcissist has unceremoniously ripped out a part of your own body. [See The Ultimate Narcissistic Abuse Dictionary to review unfamiliar terms] We’re left sitting in shock, bleeding, wondering how everything that just happened doesn’t affect them.  Yet, despite their absence, it’s as if somehow, they’re not gone at all. In our minds and bodies,...

If you’re in love with a narcissist, I’m sorry to say it, but you’re in a cult. How does it make you feel to read that?  Dismissive of words that sound alarmist?  Angry that I would put victims of narcissistic abuse and cult members in the same category?  Shocked that your experience of narcissistic abuse might have something in common with anything other than, well, others’ experience with narcissistic abuse?  If you feel dismissive of this idea, it may be because you have perceptions of cults that don’t seem relevant to your relationship.  For example, when you think of cults,...