Leaving a narcissist is never easy…

To the outside world it would seem obvious that you should just ‘get out’…. but as we all know when it comes to the leaving part – and even after you go – you may really struggle with the decision.

When deciding to leave a narcissist you are likely experiencing a myriad of emotions. Fear, regret, guilt, ‘what if’s’, and ‘maybe he or she could change’.

You may still be holding on to the hope that this relationship could turn into everything you wish it was meant to be.

You know that if you leave this is a big statement, and unless you are willing to mean it and follow through, there could be dire consequences.

It is so hard to upset the dream of this perfect partner, or this incredible life you thought you were going to have with the narcissist, and truly once being hooked by a narcissist every part of your emotional addiction is trying to keep you hooked to the narcissist for many reasons (explained in detail in this article.)

The truth is virtually everyone, before empowering themselves (which means healing our unhealed parts) failed many times at leaving the narcissist.

They often stayed far too long in the relationship, and after leaving returned to the abuse time and time again.

For so many reasons, painful confusion and torment makes it nearly impossible to firmly believe and stick to: I have made the right decision to leave.

The Narcissist’s Tricks You if You Try to Leave

The narcissist is an expert at confusing you. He or she wants to retain you for narcissistic supply. And this means that narcissist will hit whichever emotional button causes you the most angst in order to affect you and keep you hooked.

You don’t have to still be in the relationship, or living under the same roof to be providing supply, as long as the narcissist keeps his or her hooks in to you.

If this is the case you will be still granting attention (which may simply be you obsessing), and you are still prey.

If being abandoned and discarded are your greatest fears (childhood programs of unavailable parents), the narcissist may act as if he or she doesn’t care when you’re leaving. This will cause you to fall into a heap “I can’t believe I mean nothing to you!”, start contacting the narcissist for some show of ‘care’, and thus go back for more abuse.

The narcissist still has control over you and knows it…

If the narcissist is jealous and controlling, and you have inner programs of despising feeling smothered, distrusted and controlled (parents who ran your life and violated your boundaries) the narcissist will try to make your life a living hell if you leave.

He or she will strip you of your assets, gain more control of your life and create so much angst, threats and trouble that it makes it very hard for you to leave, or once leaving you may feel ‘forced’ to come back to try to stop the onslaughts.

The narcissist will attempt to punish you horrifically. Understandably, if this is your dynamic it is very important to plan your departure mindfully without the narcissist knowing.

If your blind spot is ‘empathy and guilt’ (childhood programs of being conditioned to feel that you are only lovable when you are self-sacrificing yourself to what a parent wants you to do, or the inner childhood program of ‘If I help heal you I will be safer’) the narcissist may cry and plead and declare “I love you, I know I need help, please don’t desert me. If you love you won’t abandon me!” 

Leaving the Narcissist Triggers Our Greatest Fears

The truth is – the pain you are about to go through is a huge old Inner Identity wound exploding into your consciousness in full technicolour.

You are about to face extreme abandonment or punishment or guilt (or all three), and any of these painful emotions are the very opposite of the love you thought you had signed up for when you entered this relationship.

These are your old re-activated childhood wounds, and when we re-open old wounds (that are not yet healed), they hurt – horribly.

They feel like you are dying.

The narcissist is the master of targeting our old wounds and ripping them open.

This is the very method a narcissist employs to control us against all of our logic, and all of our better judgement.

Our old unresolved wounds, when heavily triggered by the narcissist, don’t make us run away they make us attach even more.

 And when we don’t take responsibility for these wounds, and don’t recognise, accept they exist or put our focus on healing them, they can be activated very easily, and the pain is horrific.

They scream at us, and in our panic, we make terrible decisions and we feel completely powerless.

These old unhealed wounds keep driving us back into the clutches of the narcissist if we try to leave – or they don’t allow us to leave.

The reason is: if we don’t take responsibility for these inner wounds we will do everything in our power to try to get the person who is bringing these wounds up for us (the narcissist) to fix these wounds for us so that the pain and panic can stop.

Through pleading, coercing, confronting, crying, raging, manipulating, retaliating, trying to force accountability, pleading helplessness – and every other method we can lay our hands on, we try to make the narcissist stop doing what he or she is doing – and we feel like we will disintegrate if we can’t make this happen.

What we forgot to understand is: these are our wounds, they were already present.

The narcissist just knew how to play on these wounds but they were always ours.

How our Mind and Emotions Behave When We Leave

When we have unhealed parts, that we are not fully focused on healing, our mind jumps in to try and stop the pain.

The problem with this is our mind does a terrible job of this…

Our mind tries to get solution from everywhere other than where the pain is really going on (inside us).

And when our mind believes that fixing or changing the outside is going to stop the pain, we lose focus and drift further away from the pain’s origin – where it really needs to be healed.

When our mind is in charge, rather than take responsibility for the healing of our unhealed parts to get true relief and healing and to stop our pattern of being narcissistically abused,  we second guess ourselves, or feel like we have ‘missed something’ .

Something feels incomplete…and…our deepest survival fears are triggered and we obsess into the fears and the stories of ‘How will I survive?” and ‘I may always be alone’ or ‘My life is finished’.

If we are not aware, we can easily hand our power over and stay, or cave in and go back to the narcissist.

In this broken state we can feel drawn to not taking responsibility and have the outside fix us.

Taking responsibility feels REALLY HARD at first. But the more you do it the easier it gets.

You aren’t going to get well by just leaving and try to get on with your life. You need to commit to you.

This is why it is imperative to commit to healing yourself as soon as you can, and realise this is not actually about what the narcissist is doing to you before or after you leave…

This is about healing YOUR unhealed parts that the narcissist is belting you with.

And when you do you will be able to leave healthily and powerful with greatly reduced levels of confusion and pain.

Because once you do heal these parts, the narcissist will have no hold over you again, he or she has nothing to belt you with, and you will not be a match for the same dynamic ever again.

It took me at least a dozen times of leaving the narcissist before I really understood these vital points.

I really hope this helps you leave your narcissist successfully and if it did I would love to hear your story in the comments.

If you have already left the narcissist, do you have any other important lessons that would help someone who is yet to leave? Please share them in the comments below and I will add the most helpful contributions along with your name into this blog post so new readers can benefit from your insight.

Thanks for reading.

How many times do we pick up that cigarette after 4 days of not smoking, or eat that whole slice of chocolate cake, and then two more when we promised ourself that we would only take a slither?

I know I have struggled with a number of addictions in my life; from alcohol, cigarettes and of course… relationships. I would continually repeat the behaviour that I knew was bad for me. And burn a lot of energy beating myself up in the process.

That was until I realised that this behaviour was a merely a program playing out in a cycle to cover up my feelings of emptiness in regards to love, support and purpose. When I reprogrammed this cycle and started providing myself with love, support and purpose something powerful happened..

The addictions were gone!

In this article I am going to show you how you can get rid of any addictions or self defeating behaviours that are holding you back by reprogramming yourself to provide love, support, purpose and fulfilment from within.

The Urge to Avoid Pain Creates the Cycle of Addiction

Perhaps you continually say “Yes” when you need to say “No”, and haven’t started doing this yet despite how much you are continually damaging yourself by saying ”Yes” to people, choices and actions that are destroying you.

Our emotions are powerful, and they are either neutral or experiencing pleasure or pain. As human beings we have been conditioned to avoid pain at all costs. The problem is avoiding pain without dealing with it leads to creating more pain.

Let me explain.

The craving for a cigarette, a piece of chocolate cake, or the neediness for love or approval from a specific person is felt as pain.

The craving creates an emotion whereby rather than being appreciative of ‘what you do have’ right here, right now – your focus is on ‘what you don’t have’ right here, right now.

The emptiness of ‘not having’ creates the feeling ‘if I have this thing that I am craving the pain will go away.’

The instinctual response is to ‘go for’ this thing or person that you have the craving for, and this intense urge takes control of your actions.

When you give into this urge you only feel short term relief, there is no real lasting peace or fulfilment, you still feel empty on the inside, and the craving will inevitably reproduce again and the cycle will continue.

This is the cycle of addiction.

It is important to understand that addictions are emotion based. It is your unfulfilled and ‘empty’ emotions that are writhing in pain, urging you to give into anything that will provide momentary relief.

We are all scared of pain, until we realise that pain is a perfect opportunity to apply mindfulness, heal and grow into a much more fulfilled and solid sense of self.

Pain can be Mindfully Embraced Rather Than Avoided

When we start embracing our pain and transforming it, a powerful change starts to take place in our brain, in the cells of our body, and we literally re-wire our emotions and our choices. We form and create new patterns that end up being effortless. Over time the struggle with the particular addiction simply no longer exists.

The only way we can create this process is by staying present with our emotions and working through them, rather than avoiding them.

How do we do that?

If you have had enough of repeating the actions that you know are not serving you, I’m going to give you a little exercise to do.

Merely reading this and being cognitively aware of it, won’t help you.

Making the commitment to apply it and to keep applying it will.

Five Steps to Releasing the Behaviour That isn’t Contributing to who You want to be

STEP ONE:

Choose the number #1 thing that if you stopped doing it – It would positively impact your life the most.

STEP TWO:

Now make the decision that you want to change this behaviour.

Write out a declaration to yourself.

“I (Your name) now declare that I am in the process of changing (the behaviour) as I am aware it is not contributing to who I want to be …(date)”

(Feel free to use your own language this is just an example)

STEP THREE:

Now write “I am aware that when I do (the behaviour) I am experiencing the following feelings of emptiness in regard to what I don’t believe I have in my life now.”

Now remember the feeling of the craving, take your awareness inside yourself and fully feel into and embrace the feelings of emptiness and ‘what I don’t have’ that is creating your craving…

Really feel into it. You can do this by bringing up a memory of the last time you felt ‘empty’, go into this feeling, literally drop into it and become ‘at one’ with it. Now what is it about?

These empty feelings will be to do with feeling a lack of love, support, fulfilment or purpose.

Write as much detail as you possibly can about these empty feelings.

Know that you can never get the relief of these feelings from your addiction. You need to be able to provide this for yourself. It has to come from within.

STEP FOUR:

Now write down “In order to fill myself and heal these feelings of ‘what I don’t have’ I can and will fill myself up with all of the appreciation of ‘what I do have’ right now.”

Okay, this is where you need to be creative. And with all ‘prepaving’…(manifestation term for creating an energy that you are going to flow into and become) you may literally have to make it up.

The great thing is, your emotional body knows no difference between what you are imagining, what you choose to tell yourself, and what is actually real.

In fact what ‘becomes real’ is always what you decide to think about, feel and believe NOW.

So examples of filling yourself up with what ‘you do have’ are:

Craving for Cigarettes

• The ability to exercise
• The joy of better health

Craving for Chocolate Cake

• Loving myself by preparing healthy food
• Enjoying feeling light, free and healthy

Craving to get love and approval from someone hurting me

• Knowing I have the ability to grant love and approval to myself
• Loving myself enough to say “No”
• Knowing I have real and supportive people who do supply genuine love
• Knowing I can create a real love partner one day who does supply genuine love
• There are many ways I can source out support to grant myself love and self-approval, which will then create ‘more of that’ in my life.

With your list brainstorm and write as many positives as you can in regard to ‘how you will fill yourself up’ when the next craving strikes.

You may have realised in Step Three that your craving is not only to do with reversing the literal craving, that it may also be to do with filling yourself up with positive feelings in regard to any area of your life, and absolutely needs to counteract the empty feelings you discovered in Step Three.

STEP FIVE:

When the craving strikes, either mentally tell yourself your new story of ‘what you do have’, or write it down again repetitively or play yourself a tape of your own voice speaking these points repetitively.

It is very important to focus on the positive feeling of these words.

Initially that may be tough, but it will get easier, and more and more powerful.

Keep doing this process until the pain of the craving stops.

Repeat it any time that the craving reappears.

Know that what you are doing is effectively reprogramming your neuron pathways and cellular body to become the new program. You will then have effectively filled the hole where the emptiness was, and because there is no emptiness, there will be no more craving.

Be aware that the addiction may be very powerful. The first few times that you go to break free from the addiction it will kick, scream and fight. It will throw a tantrum because it has been used to getting its own way…

The pain will hit you hard and come at you with intensity that may feel like literal panic or even dread.

What You Can Do If You Are Struggling

If you can’t keep your focus on creating the new program of ‘what you do have’, because the intensity of the craving is so bad, then just be with the pain. Lie down if you can, place your hands on your stomach, focus on feeling the pain and just breathe.

It’s very important to NOT THINK. Don’t add any stories to the pain, don’t give it power. Just fully feel it, be with (knowing it will pass, that you’re not avoiding it, and it won’t kill you) and focus on “A breath in, a breath out” (say this to yourself) and breathe in and out as slowly and as deeply as you can.

I promise you the pain will pass.

Do this the first few times the craving hits and don’t cave in to the craving, and when the pain feels less intense you can check in to see whether or not you are able to start focusing on and reprogramming yourself with the ‘what I do have’ information you are granting yourself, which will speed up your recovery even more.

Before you know it, if you keep this process up consistently and diligently the emptiness will go, and the cravings will subside, and you will be rid of your addiction, be aligned with ‘what you do have’ and start manifesting those things as solid reality into your life.

If you give in don’t beat yourself up… Continue to support yourself and tell yourself you will be stronger next time.

If you feel that you can’t change your focus and your ‘story’ yourself – that’s ok! All of us, at times need support and help and I would love to show you a way to start your healing journey by inviting you to sign up for my free 16 Day Recovery Course here.  It includes a set of ebooks and an invitation to a free Healing Workshop so you can experience a Quanta Freedom Healing for yourself.

Do you understand that the craving was granting you the pain to find your emptiness, rectify it and get aligned with creating and experiencing the life you were always born to create?

That’s the truth…