Narcissism is a term used to describe an emotional dysfunction and personality type. I never knew what a narcissist was until I lived with one. What is so crazy about life with a narcissist is how they are able to operate for years undetected even by their victims. The narcissist is a consummate actor or actress. They don’t even seem to be acting, they appear to be completely convinced of the positions that they take. It is their apparently certainty that makes them hard to spot. They are highly functional people who hold positions often of power and control over other people. They can be leaders, authorities of some kind or another. For a narcissist to be successful there is one thing they need to make it all work: the victim. This isn’t just anyone. This person needs to be unable to understand how a narcissist could in fact be devoid of true feeling and proper emotional boundaries. To the victim the narcissist seems normal. In fact, the victim can often want to believe that the narcissist is a normal person. This can go on for years. I was married to a narcissist for 16 years and most of what she did to me and my children was carefully done behind the scenes, behind my back, so that I was left wondering what on earth was going on. I doubted my sanity, I felt like something was going on but I just didn’t know what. This ate at me, and it wasn’t until years later when family members began coming forward to fill me in on what she had been saying that the behavior all began to make sense.

My abuser was so successful because I was so unwilling to consider what it was she was doing was as bad as it was. No way she could be working against me. No way she could be trying to hurt me by using my children as pawns. I just could not imagine anyone doing that. I mean, who would do such a thing? After all, I had lived with this person and she showed no sign of being the kind of person who would do something like this. Get real, already!

This did happen, though. It was nothing short of a nightmare. After seven years of this kind of petty behavior that drew my children into an abusive spiral, my ex when confronted, refused to admit that she had done anything untoward or wrong. Standing outside my building which I had caught her breaking into, I asked her why she had said the things she did to my children. She looked me straight in the eye and said she had never said such things to my children. Ever. And if you didn’t know her very well, you might believe her, or want to. She sounded….wow, it was a great performance. I think people like this are missing something in their heads and hearts. They think what they are feeling is real but they just don’t know this level of real. it is like they have a reptile brain and they just go along and ape everyone else when it comes to the higher functions of being a mammal or a primate. I know that sounds hard, but after years of this I finally realized that people like this are fundamentally different from the rest of us….and most of us don’t even know that they are.

Years ago I had an old friend from high school who I remained friends with throughout my college years and into after I got out of graduate school. I noticed how she had a string of relationships that always started and ended the same way, over and over. I became her go-to shoulder to cry on when things went south. It wasn’t until years later that I figured it all out; she was having relationships with men in her life that were replays of her relationship with her father, which was strained to say the least. Because she was unable to get past her misgivings with him, she replayed that drama over and over in her relationships with other men in her life. Remember the saying “what you resist persists?” Well, it happened to my friend and later in my life it also happened to me. After I divorced my ex, almost exactly a year after we separated, I became involved with someone who was a carbon copy of my ex in many respects, but with a twist. In this case, this person actually tried to utilize my own kundalini to facilitate hr own awakening. This was something that was done in absentia, or through the etheric, but the result was very real. Strange, but real. A telepathic bond was created that was so strong I was unsure that I would ever be able to break it. My life with this person was an experience of their projecting most everything they suffered from being put onto me. The narcissist has no ability to truly self-reflect. But wait….didn’t she say how sorry she was? Didn’t she say how sorry she was, how horrible she had been only to tell me later how she had gotten better? Turns out this is another part of the abuse spectrum, which is saying how horrible they have been and then begging to be taken back or swearing how they will change even though the behavior never does change in any material way.

My second narcissist told me early on in my knowing her that she hadn’t stayed in any one place for very long. She said she only stayed about five or six years in one place at a time, a pattern that had been with her her whole life. Before knowing me, she had been married for about six years. Before that, she had also been married prior to that. She wound up staying about 5 years in the area before moving on. Publicly she sounded like she had a great life, but privately she expressed how much she disliked her work and how unhappy she was. I saw how she would say one thing to one group of people and say something different to another group. Sometimes, these stories would grow or shrink in scale depending on how stressed or upset she was. It is never about herself, it is always about another person or some other source that is causing the problem. What happens when you combine kundalini with narcissism? Is it even possible? We are all human and the realm of spirit can be nuanced and complex. There are also levels to it. We all go at our own pace and we often get in trouble when we try to define their experience through our own experiential lenses. Fundamentally, there is a dishonesty lying at the base somewhere, a dishonesty with ones own self that keeps a part of the self in a broken and delusional state where these types of people seem to believe that the problem is with the world, or with some person or some other shadowy threat “out there” when in truth, the threat comes from within. Trying to redeem them never works because all of this is an inside job. So the empath can get sucked into trying to help this type of person. Round and round they go until the empathic person finally realizes that the same pattern continues to repeat. It only seemed like they were gaining ground. It was all a show. And the only cure is to cut them free so they can go on and continue their behavior until the universe conspires to reveal to them when they are ready to see the fatal flaw within and then set about healing it. it might not happen in this life, who knows when it happens. It is an inside job. The empath learns a great lesson that it is not their job to save anyone, only themselves. This is the lesson for the empath that will lead them to their own healing, which will take them out of the orbit of people like this in the future. The one thing I had in common with a narcissist was me.

It’s easy to point fingers, harder still to do the work inwardly to look good and hard at your own flaws. And yes, needing to help so much that you are blinded by who the narcissist is is a flaw. It is the one flaw I am working to give up in total. Sometimes the greatest act of compassion is letting go. It doesn’t come easily, but within it lies the greatest of lessons. To be able to cease seeing yourself as a victim in this is the next step. If you were pulled into this type of dynamic, you played a part. It was a great cosmic set up meant to help to show you where the flaws exist on both sides if you are ready to see clearly enough. The most important thing one can do is to forgive yourself for putting yourself through that. I have found that when I do this first, forgiving them comes naturally. This isn’t the usual perfunctory “I forgive you” but is instead a much deeper and ore substantive forgiveness that has the power to shift the draw that we have with people like this. The lesson is learned and when it is, these people lose all their charge for us. This isn’t something you can fake, it has to be done in an authentic way. In some cases, just being away from it long enough can help to create the contrast necessary to see just how bad it all was and how you never want to go back to that kind of madness again.

I was once told that the universe is neutral….but the forces in the universe are not. Whether you are drawn to someone based on negative or positive karma, the draw can often feel very similar….but the difference is what lies beneath. Being able to get to that deeper substratum within the self is where the work lies. It seems the way forward is in being radically honest with yourself. The draw can seem supernatural but the past can be marked by strife and trauma from other lifetimes. All of this is healed with love and that just lets all those threads drop away.

I was actively doing this with my first narcissist years ago in a period of rapid cord removal. It was one of the blessings of kundalini; I just made myself available. What I found that bothered me a good bit at the time was that many of the cords I was dissolving were cords that were tied to my ex at the time. I could feel these taut cords let loose, often in quiet moments, and moments after it was gone I could feel her presence on the other end pulling them back into a taut position. By then, it was too late. But what was so interesting was how she would go into a meltdown within about 12 hours or so after the release. I counted nine times that a cord was released that was tied to her, followed up with her going into an emotional meltdown, upset for some reason or another. It was very instructive to me because it showed me the etheric effects and presence of these lines of influence that work behind the scenes in our lives. Instead of my ex accepting the healing, she went in the other direction completely. She got worse. She got more angry, more mean, and poor thing, she didn’t seem to even know why. All of this felt very dangerous to me because this I knew would lead to her lashing out at me and my children. She was never able to see or sense more deeply to understand what was at the root of her own behavior. It showed me that at least in this life she was not redeemable. She wasn’t about to heal, she was going to hold on for dear life, and that was that. I had married someone who didn’t have it in her to heal in any substantive way, at least not with me around. Narcissist 2.0 was much the same except with the added quality of saying how she was changing while she in fact had not changed. The stumbling block that I had sensed in her from day one remains to this day. Some day she might get around to healing it. I hope she does because it will add a little more peace to the world somewhere, but luckily, it wont be anywhere in my sphere of experience. When I am able to give up these things, the universe has a very efficient way of clearing these people from my life. Thank goodness.

Acceptance is the most adult and most compassionate thing that can be done in my estimation. Narcissists only respect the authority like judges and police, never their victims. Until they can see what it is they have done will they begin to change. Only they can do this work, and who knows how that will play out. It has been incredibly instructive, just as my inner voice had told me it would be, which would be one of my greatest of teachers. It just wasn’t the kind of teacher I thought it would be. But that is fine, because the universe is neutral and sometimes we take the light with the dark and do what we can as we can.

What is interesting is how everything can change when I decide to no longer be silent on the matter. In the case of my first narcissist, writing to one of my children who was affected by what his mother had done was one important outgrowth of this process. It is hard to explain how vulnerable a child can be when their mother is so willing to lie and obfuscate the truth to a young child. What is a child to do? Whom are they to believe? Families can be torn apart by this kind of behavior, something known and parental alienation syndrome. Whether that child can take what I write to heart isn’t what is important at the cosmic level because that child will do what that child’s freewill dictates. However, just by writing the letter some things have shifted for the better. And for my second narcissist, just by writing to that person and letting them know some of the inconvenient truths which I never spoke about (what was the point I wondered?), that alone has begun to bring rapid change in my life at a material level. New people are beginning to filter into my life all with a very different vibe than from before. When we signal we are ready, that signal can often be honored. I think for me, it was long over due.

How To Deal With A Narcissist

But before you deal with a narcissist you might need to figure out if they are a narcissist or not. One thing that is helpful to understand is that when identifying personality disorders, you don’t need to have all of the symptoms present. People exist along a spectrum in all aspects of life. You can easily have someone who has borderline personality disorder who only has half of the stated symptoms as stated in the DMS 5, a guide for health professionals in diagnosing and treating personality disorders. My first narcissist was hard to identify because she had so many behaviors that looked like she was selfless, kind, and caring. When the gloves came off, though, the truth was revealed to me: a lot of this was an act. When she got mad enough, she would start telling me exactly how she felt, and it wasn’t pretty at all. It was in moments of stress that the truth came out and that was when I was able to see for certain that this person said a lot that sounded like she was a kind compassionate person but that these outbursts would show how she really felt. Was she an undercover narcissist? Did she submerge a lot of her behavior that was narcissistic unless there was stress in her life? With narcissist #2, some behaviors were easier to identify right out of the gate. I suspected that this was a replay of my life with the first narcissist, so I think I was more able to watch and observe behavior. With narcissist #2 there was more apologies but with the result of pulling me back into the web of manipulation and chaos. Being able to identify these types can save you from a great deal of strife in the future. Luckily, narcissists are fearful of being found out and will go to great lengths to keep that from happening. In my situation, I was told by my attorney to make notes of my ex’s behavior and to save all texts and emails. This helped a lot in helping to dispel any notion that this was just in my head. The same was repeated for the second narcissist. I saved posts and emails and texts and they helped in creating a library that revealed how contradictory her statements were and how much of a liar she had been. Because she tends to crave others’ attention and approval, having someone who can call them out is not someone who will stick around you if they know that this is the case.

Identifying A Narcissist

Good luck, and take my advice: there is not real dealing with a narcissist. They alone must reach a point where they themselves are willing to change (or an authority imposes it on them). It is better to step away and ask yourself why it was you were drawn to them in the first place.

~Parker

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