It is over. You survived. You faced the Narcissist or Sociopathic predator in real life. You lived, you lost, now what did you learn?
Your brain, scarred by multiple instances of trauma with PTSD, is likely to still be fixated on processing the threat. Obsessing about abuse is normal and healthy — it’s how the body works through the process, grieves the loss of your intellectual innocence about whether or not real monsters in human bodies exist, and how you will eventually be able to use what you have learned to keep yourself safer.
A body that has been socially influenced by people using forms of social violence to upset it should be upset. If you were left unaffected by a person or peer group that treated you terribly, understand that you would likely be a stone-cold biological Sociopath physically unable to process complex emotion.
Before you get critical and all self-deprecating about why you “can’t let things go”, realize whoever told you that you should is not only profoundly not in your corner they are actually socially abusing a PTSD patient.
The mind forms scars related to abuse. The bigger the trauma exposure or the greater the volume of paper cut style slights, the more time the brain is likely to take you to heal.
How did you end up developing PTSD so extreme that it’s left you feeling frozen in time, physically unable to escape your abuser in life? It is because their toxic self has taken up a ghostly presence and formed a lingering resonance of the echo of things the did and said to physically harm your biopsychology.
The answer is simple and complex simultaneously.
First of all, if you know your Abuser personally — welcome to Narcissistic Abuse recovery.
If that person was a stranger and ran up to you on the street and did or said whatever hurt or traumatized you, would whatever they did or said upset you? If your answer is yes, each incident you remember of them acting poorly is a SEPARATE ABUSE INCIDENT that has left you mentally scarred.
Understand?
You have an injury called PTSD that has become so intense you cannot unfeel the feelings or unshake the notion that horrible things happened to you and that you were and remain physically powerless to stop it. That’s terrifying, right — even the concept that you cannot protect yourself from social or physical harm?
See the reason the mind might want to figure out a way to protect yourself from danger? Learn the less, avoid similar social predation in the future; miss the point of the experience, leave yourself open and vulnerable to inadvertently repeating the lesson in various forms until you bring figures out that you really can avoid abuse situations that are not random.
A person who understands not only what happened to them (as far as what abuse tactics were used to con, love bomb, dupe, defraud, or to harm) is miles ahead of where an undereducated abuse victim who has personalized abuse and fails to notice the pattern. The educated person understands not only how to observe social stimuli without feeling compelled to react but they understand the red flags when someone has an overt or covert socially egocentric and abusive personality type.
If you are deployed in the military to an overseas location and you witness or experience something terrible, no one tells you to “get over it” or to “let it go” in a way that implied you have a moral choice about whether or not PTSD triggering memories scarred the mind. Only abusive people who know nothing about medicine or basic psychiatry blurt such stupid, mean-spirited, and socially deplorable assertions as to condemn a soldier for carrying with them for like difficult memories from the war.
There’s no difference whatsoever between a soldier freaked out in a stressful, arguably profoundly toxic human environment and what an emotionally sensitive and native emotional intelligence capable child finding themselves being held hostage in a war zone at home. The mind notices the horror. Until it’s allowed to process the trauma exposure in a meaningful way and to physically be allowed to escape the profoundly anti-social and toxic environment, C-PTSD will increase — never abate.
That’s what domestic abuse and domestic violence victims suffer — the hopeless feeling, knowing as long as they physically stay in social communication with the people prone to mistreating, neglecting, and abusing their hospitality that life will never improve and abuse will never abate. If the person was groomed as a codependent person, Stockholm Syndrome thinking will lead them to return to their home and their family unit day after day, night after night, and vacation days or during holiday seasons like lemmings — never considering going low to no contact to end the family members’ or toxic person’s physical ability to access us socially or emotionally.
No one healthy tells you things like being socially competitive or socially violent towards yourself or others is, “Just the way the world works.” There’s nothing “just” or emotionally and socially intelligent about subjecting yourself to people who cause you medical PTSD.
Say that again — this time out loud to yourself.
There’s nothing just about remaining socially and emotionally or physically exposed to anyone who is likely to be Cluster B.
People with Cluster B personality disorders show up on a brain scan with a neural suppression or flatline related to empathy. They lack the neurological ability to process the world around them and social stimuli using native social and emotional intelligence.
Because they lack what’s known as EQ (Emotional Intelligence), the toxic thinker relies on their own neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and their IQ to navigate life and the social world around them. They don’t form PTSD the same way many of us do when exposed to things like graphic images or violent words because they lack the neurological ability in their physical brain to take in and to process the horrifying information.
In some ways, they are evolutionarily superior to other humans. If you need to have someone saw off your leg because you are a Confederate Soldier who was shot and profoundly wounded by the Yankees — you don’t want anyone squeamish about using a saw to be your doctor… or someone who is going to be timid holding you down while acting as their nurse so the person who is doing the unthinkably upsetting but life-or-death necessary social action to save your life.
You also don’t want someone standing there overseeing the horror telling you about how terrible it is while the event is happening to you. Or anyone around you talking smack about how awful and life-ending the damage to your personal body and social life is going to be.
Now think about this.
You have a terrible, should be relationship-ending fight with your spouse. They lied to and about you. They bullied you. They used gaslighting and name-calling to not only betray your trust in them as your social support person but to leave you psychologically, emotionally, and physically exhausted and emotionally brutalized.
Who do you tell and what do they say?
Mommy Dearest will tell you that your reaction to the abuse — not the abuse itself is the problem.
A pot-stirring friend who likes to watch other people as if they are watching a soap opera on television is likely to go on and on about, “Didn’t that hurt you? Weren’t you upset? Gosh — that’s so humiliating and embarrassing… what are you going to do now?”
Such people typically follow up making you feel worse about trauma with suggestions about how to intensify and to further enmesh yourself with the fight.
Daddy Issues are caused by men who role model to their sons and to their daughters that Alpha Predator behavior — not Alpha community leader — is something reflecting social and evolutionary success of a human. They groom boys to fail to self-educate about emotion while teaching their daughters that they are essentially sub-human and likely to fail in life unless they hook a codependent wagon to some brute like Gaston in the Disney film “Beauty and the Beast” as their trophy husband and star.
Grandparents who tell you that unconditional love is the equivalent of being trauma bonded and enslaved physically by a socially abusive hostage-taker conflate the term “Love” with the cycle of Narcissistic Abuse. Whether they mean to mislead us or not is not actually pertinent or relevant to this particular discussion of the issue.
Grandparents who were born by or before the Great Depression were exposed to trauma of a profound global variety. Grandparents who were born before the Great Depression and lived through the fall and subsequent rebuilding of the economy only to face WWII and their WWI generation family members aging lived a difficult life.
Trauma exposure causes things like PTSD in some and nurtured Sociopathy in others. People with ASPD who are nurtured to behave poorly in public and private (rather than taught how to blend in and to hide among neurotypicals) are the Psychopaths who everyone loves to invite to a party but who we dread spending too much time around in everyday life.
This is the problem. People who are told that in order to be good people who are well-liked by all and likely to get into heaven they must play the sycophant to a Nekkid Emperor at home, in their romantic relationship, related to religion or politics, and when dealing with other human beings at work are being medically misled about what healthy living actually is.
Healthy people avoid abuse. They avoid dishing it out and if someone or something is likely to traumatize them if and when they interact, the smartest among us are mindfully — rather than willfully negligent — avoidant.
Avoiding abuse is intelligent self-care socially, emotionally, and physically.
Would you consider it a smart decision to roll yourself down the side of a steep and rocky hillside over and over again because someone not being harmed by the fall announced that it was time to do it so they could watch you initiate self-harming and be taken by the force of physics once you go? In an emotionally and socially intelligent world, your answer would be no.
Why can’t you stop thinking about abuse incidents or about the Abuser or pack of Abusers themselves? Because there’s more academic insight for you to discover.
Once you really figure it out from a forensic psychology perspective who you are — as well as the pattern behavior and brainwashing tactics used by fiercely codependent, hospitality abusers — after a few years away from toxic people and their Flying Monkeys the mind, body, and heart tend to reset.
On average 18-24 months is the base time one needs to physically stop talking to and to stop reading material from someone who is Cluster B and from their social support network in order to have the Fight or Flight and or nurtured Freeze mechanisms disengage. We tell people to go low to no contact with their primary Abuser and with any of that person’s contacts — even if you knew their support people first — and recommend giving yourself 36 months of daily reading of Narcissistic Abuse material before making any decisions about how to feel about yourself after being traumatized socially or experiencing having been socially victimized.
Why do we make such a strange recommendation as to get away from toxic people and to give your body time to settle down and to heal?
Because the advice works. Don’t take our word for it — try it.
18-24 months let go of the addiction to socializing with toxic people.
36 months do a ruthless self-inventory that includes where you were emotionally and socially before you went low to no contact with problem people.
Chart your health and emotions as well as any experiences with hoovering you encounter during the mindful healing process. Realize that what you are essentially doing is grieving the loss of relationship with people who are still alive as if they all died.
That can be overwhelming if you know you need to nix your relationship with nearly everyone you know personally who is related to you and or with all the peers you self-selected when you were acting and thinking like a compulsively self-destructive and “willing to enable social abuse” type of person.
Hence… give yourself 18-24 months to withdraw your social attention from toxic peers. Start with the bullies and work your way down the list using sorting hat features — bye-bye to ASPD and groomed Narcissistic People first. Let go of the people suspected of BPD second. Then, make your decision about how to handle any social relationship with Histrionics.
Sort them like you are the Sorting Hat in the “Harry Potter” book series.
Physically violent? Out damn spot.
Socially violent? House of Slytherin.
Get them gone! But don’t just oust them and not bother to learn about how to spot early warning signs that someone you meet is socially competitive and likely to situationally harm or to mistreat other people in order to produce a deliberate impact or because they are used to acting anti-social on an emotional whim without social consequence.
If you needed someone to give you permission to eliminate contact with people who harm you or upset you on purpose or accidentally, consider it given.
Once you realize you have a choice who to spend time with or what types of social behavior from others you choose to enable, the hold your Abuser and their Narcissistic Harem is likely to have over your mind and biopsychology tends to automatically and without effort to lessen. That’s wonderful news for a brain and a body who would really like a respite from being compelled to fixate on someone else’s behavior.
If they are Cluster B, end the relationship.
If they support Cluster B people, limit or lower contact. Disengage emotionally and socially and watch that person for red flags of pattern behavior that suggests the person is hiding a covert personality disorder, knowing that if they are they are likely to escalate and to become more socially harmful to themselves and to others as the Beta social predator freezes their own neuroplasticity making anti-social and self-indulgent emotionally hedonistic decisions in life as they age.
If they have been tricked into believing gaslighting or they pretend that there are two sides to every story when one person is telling the truth and the other is lying… get them out of your inner circle of trust. Why? Because they are socially, intellectually, and emotionally untrustworthy and likely to behave in ways that are logically irrational and socially destabilizing to others on a whim or at random times when someone predatory twists their head by offering them access to shiny objects.
If they are not educated about what things like Cluster B are and they show hesitation or unwillingness to self-educate for the purpose of being able to functionally engage in academic conversation with you about things you are learning about Narcissistic Abuse — let them go! Doing so does not mean you need to be angry, upset, or to hate them; it does mean you show them respect for where they are today in their social and emotional development without feeling the need to force yourself to retard.
Making yourself and healing the top priority every day from this point forward for the rest of your life is the right way to eschew codependent habit patterns in NLP fast. You matter.
You mattering is the opposite of what Abusers and Enablers tell you directly and by implication when they try to minimize or diminish your subjective personal experiences.
They don’t have to be trying to harm you on purpose to do the hurting, the PTSD, and emotional intelligence shamers.
Shut the door when they come emotionally, physically, or intellectually knocking. Realize they are the Inner Critic role model — the Inner Critic being your inner Sock Monkey puppet therapists like Kris Godinez and Richard Grannon describe as the caustic voice that prattles terrible criticism and life-destroying advice.
Once we stop interacting with toxic people and those who are profoundly codependent due to undereducation and social grooming, our PTSD and the amount of time we physically are likely to spend thinking about our Abusers as though they are people simply seems to by default to lessen. Start there, with your own Narcissistic Abuse recovery education, to help the mind and body feel as if it has the social intelligence following abuse to keep you physically safer.
As a final insight and foreshadowing bit of advice…
Avoid Magical Thinking.
Narcissistic Abuse recovery is a process. If you fixate on the before and after like fixed endpoints, the line segment you create in your mind to get from Point A to Point B is likely to lull you into vertical thinking.
In order to keep your brain and body flowing in a harmonious grief and trauma exposure processing manner, fixate on physically experiencing the process. If you enjoy the process and enjoy observing your ebb and flow of everyday emotions while witnessing how you react to new trauma exposures that inevitably pop up in a social universe you will not only learn how to reconnect your own inner light to your DNA in such a way that eases PTSD but you may also realize that life — as in the process of living — is what matters most.
Not how things turned out based on expectation and socially competitive neurological processing of civic equation. And certainly not inviting your Abuser to be a part of your everyday and current lifestyle as if they are entities with the social power to hijack your time and emotions at will.
What your Abuser does, thinks, feels, or says matters only as much to you in life as you are willfully letting it. But if you read this while still in contact with your abuser and with toxic peer influences or without making the necessary Kierkegaardian leap of faith necessary to do the science experiment necessary to unfreeze hyperadrenalized conscience you are likely to immediately blurt and to errantly determine that what Survivors of abuse who go on to thrive are physically telling you about the recovery process.
And that’s perfectly fine.
Why?
Because we make no authoritarian appeal to anybody. Nor is it our job to convince people who are in need of social and emotional triage that they were gaslit into believing that Narcissistic Abuse recovery is a pipe dream — or something physically unattainable by someone who is merely a human mortal.
