Most of us know first-hand how difficult it is to go No-Contact with a narcissist. The agonizing pain of being without them can have us feeling powerless, out of control, and unable to resist the compulsion to contact them.
Even when we do ‘detox’ from them, we can find ourselves falling into other addictions to try to self-soothe. We may turn to alcohol, food, or cigarettes. Or we can push healthy activities to unhealthy levels, perhaps by over-exercising or numbing out with endless self-help techniques.
Today, I want to shatter some myths and show you how overcoming narcissistic abuse and overcoming addictions require the same process because they have the exact underlying root cause.
Whatever your compulsion or addiction, today’s Thriver TV episode explains how you can truly break free.
Video Transcript
Today, I want to talk about overcoming narcissistic abuse and overcoming addictions.
You may be shocked that these topics are closely related, so I’ve linked them today. We’re going to take a deep dive into what it is to be trauma-bonded to a narcissist, what addictions really are, and how to overcome them.
Is it true that you can only hope to manage your addictions and cannot honestly go free from them?
NO, it’s not!
Instead, you can truly free yourself so that you are no longer haunted and plagued by addictions that pull at your life force, your attention, and your power – running your life.
Today, I’m going to explain how and why. But before we get started, I’d like to remind you to please subscribe to my YouTube channel and share my work with others if it resonates with you. Let’s get the word out so that people know it is possible to not merely survive narcissistic abuse but to truly thrive after it.
Okay, so let’s start with this essential conversation piece.
What Are False Sources And What Do They Have To Do With Addictions?
A false source is a self-medication choice: a person, a substance, or a pastime that you use to try to get relief from internal trauma.
For example, if you were to get triggered into an anxiety attack or depression, you may choose to go for an alcoholic drink. Or maybe you ring a girlfriend and dump how you’re feeling all over her. Perhaps you reconnect to have sex with somebody, or you eat a cheese sandwich or smoke a cigarette. Or you may turn to social media, shopping, or taking a pill.
Any outer choice like this is an attempt to numb out what hurts. We’re trying to distract ourselves, fill an empty gaping hole with comfort, or maybe alter our consciousness so that we can’t think about (or feel) what hurts anymore.
Narcissists are one of these false sources because they pretend to be the solution to our fears and our unhealed trauma – the feelings we have of loss and inner emptiness.
Narcissists pretend to be gods, but they are really punishing overlords.
They don’t take the trauma away. Instead, they infiltrate your life, capture your attention and energy, and become the center of your universe. They add to your trauma as they suck your life force dry and destroy your life.
No different from other False Sources.
Things like drugs, smoking, shopping, gambling, and overeating are all ‘comfort’ choices that we use to try to save ourselves from trauma, but they actually damage and destroy us further. They add to our problems and our brokenness.
This is because, just like a narcissist, these things are False Sources.
How Do We Get Addicted to False Sources?
Firstly, we struggle to have an inner relationship with our soul or spirit – our Real Self. This relationship is the true core of ourselves where we can handle and work our fear, pain, anxieties, and depression through to completion.
Instead, we self-medicate with our drug of choice, whether it be food, drink, nicotine, obsessive behavior, or running towards a lousy person. We assign that drug as our means of self-soothing.
When we pick up the choice of self-medication, it seems to work initially. That person, food, drug, drink, or activity provides momentary relief. You get a hit of endorphins and a feel-good chemical. It’s a high because you momentarily escaped the CORE trauma, the Root of the issue. That’s what the high is, and it’s very addictive.
But the relief and the high do not last; when it fails, we end up doubling.
We get even more trauma bonded to this ‘thing’ or this person in an attempt to try to fix the escalating negative energy and powerlessness that we’re feeling inside of ourselves. We become powerless and out of control with our addiction to this thing or person.
Let’s say, as an example, the core root, the real cause of the trauma, is abandonment. It gets triggered in ‘the now’ because it’s always been lying within you from your past. It’s a part of your inner identity that you haven’t yet healed.
Because of that, you are locked into realities today that match that unhealed pre-existing trauma. You are connected to situations and people that will represent more abandonment in your life. People who will trigger and rip open this wound over and over again.
And when it happens, it’s horrible – it hurts. You reach for your addiction in an attempt to escape this terrible emotional pain, and this often means you’re running into the arms of the very person who abandoned you, promising to do anything to keep them.
If that person doesn’t accept you back, then maybe you will chase another to fill that hole, or you may take up drink, drugs, food, or pastimes to try to numb out.
Whatever your choice is, it distracts you from the unhealed, unresolved abandonment trauma. It puts a Band-Aid over the top of it.
Just like taking a sharp stone out of a shoe, the relief is enormous, and it feels soooo good now.
Yet it’s short-lived because your metaphoric shoe still has holes in it where more stones can get in. This is your unhealed trauma, which still exists. You only escaped it for a moment. So long as the holes are unsealed, the relief can never last.
The endorphins of that relief now are an addiction, which means that you’re addicted to your choice of self-medication. This False Source is only a Band-Aid – it’s not an actual solution.
What’s also interesting is that if we have unresolved trauma, our choice of False Sources will be in the vibrational level of the trauma – they’re lower-level, unhealthy choices.
Even healthy choices such as exercise, good food, or spiritual practices will become unhealthy if we use them as False Sources. We’ll get obsessive about them, following all-or-nothing diets, over-exercising, or following strict, rigid spiritual practices that are self-punishing rather than healing. These things are incredibly damaging to our inner being because we are trying to smash and bash ourselves into shape, which is not what our Inner Being needs at all.
The issue is that our unhealed trauma generates more triggering by people and situations that are more of the same. This is how the Quantum universe works—‘so within, so without’. We keep choosing and interacting within the bandwidth of the composition of our Inner Being. If it contains significant unhealed trauma, then we’re going to have toxic choices and people in our lives.
The more we are triggered because we haven’t healed yet, the more we double or triple down with our addiction to try to self-medicate the original trauma. We eat more, drink more, smoke more, shop more, social media binge more, have sex with bad people more, break No Contact with narcissists more, and obsess about these people more.
It’s a vicious cycle and a spiral into absolute destruction.
Reversing this has everything to do with narcissistic abuse recovery – and recovery from every addiction you have ever battled with.
The Addiction Is Not The Issue: The Core Trauma Is
Focussing on the addiction equals how to lose because the addiction is a symptom. This is why a lot of people give up one particular addiction and ‘switch the witch for the bitch’ – they take up another addiction in full gusto to try to self-medicate their still-unhealed trauma.
The actual issue is the unmet, unhealed internal trauma, the unfinished business that is hijacking your life with emotional triggers.
You may say that you just need to learn to manage your triggers, but that is precisely what has been getting you into trouble – trying to medicate or distract yourself away from them.
A much better choice would be to dissolve these internal traumas so there are no triggers, and you live free of them because they’re no longer wedged within you.
This is the power of Quanta Freedom Healing. It enables you to get free from needing to numb out the triggered, unhealed internal trauma with False Sources and people who were a toxic match for these unhealed traumas.
Detoxing Internal Traumas Takes Away All Urge Of Addiction
The truth is detoxing the internal traumas takes away all urges of addiction. I will give examples similar to those we hear about in our community.
Mary was missing Joe, the narcissist, and she couldn’t stop herself from breaking No Contact. Every time she felt like Joe was moving toward another woman, she would panic, reach out to him, go see him, have sex with him, and do anything to keep him in her life and stop him from moving on with someone else.
Mary hated herself for this. She felt like her self-respect was in the toilet, but she couldn’t stop doing it. After the initial relief, each time, she plunged further into devastation and powerlessness.
Every time she did this, she destroyed her Inner Being, integrity, and self-trust. She began to think of herself as love addicted in general and addicted to Joe in particular.
Mary’s actual problem was the unhealed trauma of “If a man replaces me, I can’t survive.” Many women have this. It’s collective, past life trauma, passed on genetically and energetically through the female line.
Like Mary, many may have experienced the trauma of an adulterous father or maybe one that abandoned his wife and children for someone else, putting extra survival, strain, and terror on the family – and on them as a young child.
Unless Mary addresses this inner fracture, she will continue to be trauma-bonded to Joe, probably until his cruel final discard. She then runs a considerable risk of continuing to play this unhealed trauma out with future narcissists.
I want you to realize that trauma bonds are responsible for addictions – and trauma bonds to people happen because of unhealed trauma that matches what that person is delivering you.
In the following example, Bob could not stop trying to please Marjorie, the narcissist. It didn’t matter what he bought or did for her or how much he told her he loved her. She was never happy, and nothing was ever good enough. He was addicted to trying to please her regardless of how terribly she treated him – including leaving him, going back to her exes, and then returning to Bob again.
Bob’s issues were also not about love addiction or addiction to a narcissist. The addiction was the symptom.
The true problem was the unhealed trauma of, “if I can’t please her, she’s never going to love and accept me”.
Bob had gone through this with his narcissistic mother, who shamed and blamed him for everything. She was sick, and he felt guilty that he couldn’t save her. So here he was in the exact same pattern again, feeling hopelessly addicted to Marjorie and trying to fix her. Until he healed his internal unfinished business, that addiction was going to continue.
Now, let’s look at my example. I was addicted to the narcissist through quite a few unhealed wounds that many in our community share: “I need a man to survive,” terrors of abandonment, a belief that I couldn’t survive on my own, and security and survival fears on many levels.
It wasn’t until I turned inwards with Quantum Healing tools – specifically Quanta Freedom Healing – that I was able to get free of him and have no addiction to him.
Ironically, I had tried to heal these known traumas cognitively for decades. I knew what they were, but they still existed inside of me because knowledge is not power. The wisdom of releasing yourself from inner programs grants you the power to live free of them.
Even after getting away from the narcissist, I still had more to go. I had a terrible nicotine addiction that felt unbreakable. I’d tried everything – hypnosis, patches, Champix, so many things to try to get free – and nothing worked.
I realized I would never get free until I went to the core root of this with Quanta Freedom Healing.
I turned inwards to load up and release what was really keeping me trauma bonded to cigarettes – which was a terror of “no one is coming. I’m all alone, and no one is coming”.
Cigarettes were a dummy for me. They were my way of holding onto something and getting some comfort when I felt despair, was alone, had any kind of significant pain, or even at times of heightened excitement.
Once I cleared that trauma out of my body, I had no connection to cigarettes – no addiction, no desire. It was gone, and it never returned, which was astonishing after an almost 40-year addiction that nearly destroyed my entire life.
In Conclusion
I hope that this makes sense to you and that you now realize what is really going on with your trauma bonds, aka addictions. They are being fueled and generated by unhealed trauma from within, and there are true solutions for you to get free of this.
If you are ready to be free of your addictions, please click on this link to the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program now. This is the Quanta Freedom Healing 10-step process, which will enable you to get free from your trauma bonds to a narcissist or any other addiction.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. And until the next one, keep smiling, keep healing, and keep thriving because there is nothing else to do. Lots of love.
Dear Melanie!
Darn! I don’t know what happened but I had just sent you a long comment about what I learned I learned from this amazing article of yours and I think it disappeared! 😔
I’ll try again!
I was really impressed with the content of this article and how a particular addiction that I have had and still do have needs to be addressed!
Since I was discarded I have spent too much time in the evenings on either Amazon or eBay, mostly browsing, but sometimes buying things that I thought would make me feel better about myself or make me happy!
Guess what? It didn’t help….
After listening to you and reading the article this “endeavor” was/ is simply illusory and quite frankly damaging.
I was spending money that I shouldn’t have because I don’t have a lot of money and I was buying things that were completely unnecessary.
I would order things and then in a few days items would arrive in the mail and I would open them up with excitement!
And then, so many times, I would ask myself “what the hell are you doing buying these things that you do absolutely not need”!
For instance, how many different types of sprouting seeds do I really need to make sprouts or how much incense do I really need, etc., etc.,
It became a cycle….
When I heard you talk about addictions I saw very clearly that this activity of mine was certainly addictive and completely unhealthy.
It didn’t make me feel any better and when the novelty of something new and shiny wore off I still had the same issues to deal with that temporally were nonexistent hiding somewhere in the illusory life I was creating in those moments….
I’m very glad that I got to listen to you and read this article today because now I see clearly that this is a major issue that I need to shift out of me or at least manage it with a semblance of balance.
The contents of your articles, continue to amaze me! Who’d think that addiction can be such a serious problem for people who are trying to manage trauma bond and narcissistic abuse?
Well, it’s true and now I have another thing, another challenge and another issue to work on and hopefully shift out of my life for once and for good…
Thank you so much for continuing to expose to this planet earth your wisdom, your life experience that you so graciously share with us and everything else, Melanie
I needed some inspiration today and this article inspired me!
Thank you so much!
Sending love and gratitude, as always, Melanie!
❤️🦋❤️
This video is resonating! My addiction is overeating. Not serious enough to be super wide but not healthy either. WHat a powerful observation. Another angle to work with!
Thanks as always! 💕🎶💕
Hi Valerie,
you are very welcome!
Mel 🙏💞🦋
Oh thank you for such a clear explanation Mel. That all makes perfect sense, and has certainly been true in my life. Overeating and destructive eating has been my most damaging addiction. I am succumbing to this less now. Thank heavens for your NARP and other programmes. Much love and appreciation to you. XXX
Hi Pietta,
thank you for your support!
Im thrilled this resonated with you and has helped.
Much love back to you!
Mel 🙏💞🦋
Okay, this is just incredible Melanie!
This could not have come at a better time for this girl here!
I have been really struggling – again – with getting sucked into going back to the Narc- like sinking in quicksand! Not able to pull myself away from that seemingly irresistible draw AGAIN!😔😖
Hearing from you that it is a false source, and it’s the trauma bonding, the chemical addiction, …. I will be doing the inner work, again, thanks to your oh so perfect timing thriver tv!
Just mind blowing how incredibly powerful these addictions are!
A million thanks Mel!
Whew! Help comes!
Healing comes!
Much love Mel! 🦋❤️🦋❤️🦋
Hi, Heart Fully Grateful,
(Love your name!)
Thank you for your gorgeous uplifting post and so happy that this hit the spot for you!
Lots of love and blessings!
Mel 🙏💞🦋
So very surprised and grateful how incredibly timely this message is and how helpful it is to relate to addiction as a ‘False Source’.
There are big breakthroughs with module 2 happening on this. It was a neglected module because it didn’t make sense, logically, to worry about the narc as being a source of fulfillment, approval and survival since her toxicity is so crystal clear and the desire to avoid her is so strong. Module 2, is so very helpful for addiction but also, or more specifically on how it helped, is that it helped to change my need to explain and justify my choices to others. That was about me needing understanding and approval from others for my own boundaries.
Addiction, for me, is a lack of focus and motivation to stay on track with healthy goals. It feels connected to the paralyzing fear of putting strategic energy (careful explaining) into confrontation to protect myself and my young daughter because of the horrible outcomes of the past where explaining, providing clarity and truth, just backfired repeatedly.
I have observed that truth and clear facts threaten those who rely on the entitlement to lie to proclaim power over others and they seem to unite in that cause when they are exposed. I am realizing that being clear with the facts and the truth can draw in more abuse because I desperately needed truth to protect me. Also I noticed I carry judgement and disdain for liars, those who are blindly bias and even fanatical delusional extremist. I am afraid of the power they have over my life and that fear manifest as anger, feeling of injustice.
I am gaining lots of strong solid clarity inside about shifting away from needing to explain and trusting in myself and true source more instead. I feel less angry towards deceivers and feel sorry for their predicament and less of a need to explain, correct and prescribe to those who have problems that are not mine.
I am, however, as usual, in the thick of it, and have several court hearings looming where I am not sure what to do. Also, there are big changes caused by me standing my ground. The people I have depended on have suddenly left. That actually feels good. It just happened cleanly and quickly, without a lot of verbosity and conflict, just me expressing boundary. A person with shining integrity quickly showed up and I am kind of excited about the changes.
Does any other specific advice come to mind that might help keep me on track with overcoming that tension related to hiding in unhealthy patterns to avoid confrontation?
So very grateful for you, my guiding star, and your whole team.