Someone with a narcissistic personality disorder has an exaggerated sense of self-importance and no empathy for people around them. 

Symptoms and Traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder

• Excessive need for others to admire them
• Envious of others and think others are envious of them
• Cannot take criticism.
•  Can never be wrong. 
• Impatient and angry when not getting special treatment
• Take advantage of others to get what they want. 
• Monopolize conversations. 
• Belittle people and look down on them. 
• Cannot recognize the needs of others. 

The last trait is a really important one. If you’re in a relationship with a narcissist, they don’t understand or care about what you need. In the United States. 6% of women have narcissistic personality disorder, and 8% of men have narcissistic personality disorder. It’s usually deeply entrenched in a person starting in childhood. Research is starting to show that some genetic links may be involved with narcissistic personality disorder, meaning that it is transferred from one generation to the next in the same family lineage. 

Narcissistic abuse is hard to detect.

Often you don’t even realize you’re being abused. Love bombing is a part of the cycle of abuse. A narcissist will sometimes use this tool called love bombing to make the victim feel safe and loved. They shower the victim with attention, affection, gifts, and time. Then the victim puts the narcissist on a pedestal. Then, the slow, steady, systematic abuse begins; belittling, minimizing, condescending, being mean, and calling names. They’re abusive emotionally, mentally, and sometimes even physically. The abuser, the narcissist, makes the abused feel like it’s their fault. 

 The narcissist makes the victim feel like the victim does not understand what’s happening in reality. If you feel up is down and down is up, you are being gaslit.

Don’t argue with the narcissist.

You will never win, so there is no point in you arguing with a narcissist. You don’t want to tell them what to do because when you tell them what to do, they are super proud that they do not listen to anyone telling them what to do. There are ways that you can protect yourself from a narcissist and free yourself from narcissistic abuse. 

Stay emotionally and mentally neutral. 

It deescalates everything so that you’re safe until you can get out. When you’re finally ready to leave the abusive relationship, you must keep your boundaries clear, block their phone calls, and block them on social media. Anyone that knows them can tell them something about you, so be aware of these people. They will act like they’re your friend, get all the information, and then bring it back to the abuser so the abuser can keep abusing you.

Get your ‘no’ back. In that abusive relationship, you were not allowed to say no because no one says no to a narcissistic abuser. Now you’re away from them and no longer being abused. You have to get your no back by saying no to things you don’t want. It will be so good for your self-esteem and your power. This ‘no’ will help you get yourself back and reclaim your mind and body as your own. 

Healing

Mental pain, emotional pain and trauma land in the body.  Movement is essential to helping us heal. In spiritual terms, abuse victims’ souls leave their bodies; psychology calls this dissociation. We feel numb, spacey and not embodied.  Weight training is one path that may help you feel strong. As you build muscle, you’re reacquainting yourself to your body. Cardio not only helps us be more grounded in our bodies – but it also helps us to cultivate feel good hormones that affect  us positively mentally. Yoga also gets you back into your body with a mindfulness that has researched healing qualities. As you stretch with yoga, you release cellular trauma. Hands-on healing such as Reiki and sound baths can be powerful tools as well as prayer, meditation, and journaling. Meditation helps you to get rid of the trauma. Journaling helps us to process our experiences, feelings and thoughts through writing. And then we have the big one: therapy. 

Therapy will help you figure out why this happened in the first place and what in your life made you comfortable with this kind of behavior, and it’ll also help you realize what you ignored. It’s important to debrief and reflect so that this never happens again. Therapy can help you to forgive yourself so that you may hopefully skip the whole guilt, shame, self-abuse, and self-destructive behavior. Often when abuse victims leave their abuser, we carry on abusing ourselves. Learn to love yourself, and learn to forgive yourself. You do not have to beat yourself up because you got beat up. 

You can find a support group where not only can you tell your story, but you can hear other experiences of how people healed. Go from an abuse victim to being an abuse survivor. You’ll end up finding out that the person wasn’t so brilliant that there’s usually a textbook way of abusing someone. Once you have the details of what this consists of, you won’t ever let it happen again because you will see it coming. So why did the narcissist find you in the first place? It’s because you are loving, kind, gentle, sympathetic, compassionate, and full of goodness. Instead of giving it to them, a person who wants to destroy you with it, turn it on yourself because that’s what will rebuild you and heal you. 

Once you heal, you will never allow this again, and you deserve that. I’m so happy and honored to share this information with you. I hope you can dig deep and find the courage, strength, and self-love to stop your abuse and heal. You can watch more videos I made about narcissists on my Youtube.