What Makes You A Target For Narcissistic Love Bombing

Love Bombing is probably the most common tactic narcissists use to reel you in.

If they’ve decided that you are a good target for narcissistic supply, they will start trying to find out where your ON button is from their very first conversation with you.

You won’t know it’s happening because they’ll seem very sincere and understanding.

I was hoodwinked in this very way … I believed he was truly interested in ME.

I know you get what I’m talking about. Everyone in this community has fallen for this. It’s how the story starts …

In today’s Thriver TV video I’ll clarify what can make you a target for a narcissist Love Bombing you. This is something you really need to confront within yourself and deeply heal to trust yourself and stop being scared of narcissists.

I never fell for this trap again and you won’t either!

 

 

Video Transcript

Today, I want to talk to you about Love Bombing and what can make you a target for a narcissist Love Bombing you. It’s really quite scary after you’ve been Love Bombed, and you’ve fallen in with a narcissist, and you get sucked in, decimated and destroyed. You know how traumatizing and devastating that is, and also how hard it is to recover.

For all of you who have gone through that, my heart goes out to you because that’s exactly what happened to me as well. Of course, moving forward, it can be really scary, because you think, “Well, it happened to me last time. What if it happens to me again? Could it happen to me again? Maybe I’m not going to be able to choose safely or wisely. I’m going to get hoodwinked again. How can I get out in life and not fall for this again?”

It’s a really important discussion because this is something that I had to learn. It was something I had to really confront within myself and it was something I had to deeply heal. When I did, and I really got this part of it right, I was able to move into life in a way that was safe. I did trust myself, and I wasn’t scared of narcissists or falling for one again.

Let me explain to you what all of that is about.

 

Why We Fall For A Narcissist’s Love Bombing

I’m going to start off by explaining to you the ways that I used to get hoodwinked and fell for narcissists’ Love Bombing.

One of the biggest things for me used to be that I didn’t feel seen and I didn’t feel understood, and I didn’t feel loved for myself. I honestly thought that I was only accepted and loved for my accomplishments, what I could achieve or what I could do or what things that I had to show for myself.

That was kind of my experience growing up with two parents that certainly weren’t narcissists, but they were busy, and they were very accomplishment-focused and very security-focused.

It was never about, “Well, how are you?” It was like, “Have you done this? Have you done that? Have you done the other?”

I grew up really feeling accepted, heard and loved if I’d got an A on my test, or if I had done this, or if I’d done that, or if I’d done the other, rather than just loved and accepted for me.

What happened to me in the narcissistic experience was when I met the narcissist, at first I had this creepy feeling of, “There’s something a bit off with him, and his energy is really dark.” I actually felt a repulsion. Then this crazy thing happened where the room got cleared because of an event, and it was just him and I, and he zoomed in on me. Then he was asking me things about myself.

What he was doing (I didn’t know it at the time) is identifying and working me out, because this is what narcissists do very, very quickly. Then they test the waters and they see if they’ve got it right.

If they’ve decided that you could be a target for narcissistic supply, they will start trying to find out where your ON button is. Your ON button is what you want to hear. It is that appreciation, that love, that approval, that thing that feels missing to you. That thing that you feel that you haven’t been receiving from people, that you crave.

It was really quite interesting because he found that an all of a sudden I felt seen and met and heard on such a deep level. I felt like a woman who was in a desert dying of thirst who just found her oasis.

That creates a very, very, very powerful bonding. Then when he asked me about my life, I felt like he’s somebody who’s not just interested in what I’ve done, he’s interested in ME.

So, I shared about my life, and he asked, what are the things that have disappointed you and hurt you? I shared those. Then he looked me straight in the eyes and said to me, “I would never do that to you. I’m not like that.”

I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’ve hit the jackpot. This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life. Here’s the other half of myself that’s going to give me the love, approval and the feelings of peace and safety and wholeness that I want.”

So, I was Love Bombed. I was absolutely Love Bombed.

Then we fell into a relationship very, very quickly, and I let him into my heart, my body, my home, my finances, my life, my Soul, very, very, very quickly.

Then of course, with narcissists, as the mask dropped and things started getting awful, I always wanted to return back to that man, back to that connection, back to, “This is my Soul Mate. This is my twin flame. This is my life.”

I made excuses and I kept trying. Then I tried to fix him and lecture and prescribe, and I made more excuses and I stayed attached. The rest is history. We know how it goes.

So, I was Love Bombed. This is just like Janey, one of my clients, she met a narcissist while she was dating, and he was very interested in her and he asked her about her life and her past. She shared how her husband had had affairs on her and even run off with one of her best friends.

He looked her straight in the eyes and he said to her, “I can’t even imagine how any man could do that to you. I completely believe in monogamy. I don’t get how anybody could ever cheat on anybody and lie about it and hide it. Surely, if you felt the relationship wasn’t working, you’d work on it, and then if it wasn’t working, you would leave before you even started seeing other people and you’d be honest. I don’t get it.”

She was like, “Oh my gosh, oh my God. A man who has those values.” Of course, he was attractive and charming, and he was everything she wanted. So they started a relationship, and she trusted him very quickly and introduced him to her kids.

He ended up moving in. A year down the track, here she was with a man who, again, betrayed her with affairs, who did the most horrible things, who abused her shockingly. Her kids had left and run for the hills – they abandoned their mother because they couldn’t stand what she was going through. She nearly lost everything.

Of course, she lost her health, and then she had to rebuild, and she had to heal all over again. This time, the right way. That’s when she found my work and started to heal.

She thought she’d healed from her ex-husband, she’d got away and she’d let go of the grief. She’d gone through the natural processes, and then she got the confidence to date again – and bang, it happened again.

She said this man was even more charming, and he was a much worse narcissist than what her husband had been. He was more charming and more beautiful and more believable, and he used to cook for her and do the groceries and he was just so beautiful. She got into a more abusive, infidelity relationship than she’d even had with her husband.

I know a lot of you – whether it was your first time around and you were Love Bombed or you’ve come out of painful relationships – that you’ve got into other relationships with a narcissist who seems so wonderful.

You thought you had met someone with so much integrity and so much love and care and honesty and commitment to you, and then you found out they were the devil in disguise. It’s shocking. It’s really shocking.

 

How Do We Take Our Power Back?

But how do we take our power back? How do we heal from this? How do we work out what on earth has been going on here? Was it just that I was unlucky? Was it just that other people are awful? Or do I actually have some power and choice in this moving forward so it never happens to me again?

I really want you to know that when you understand the deeper Thriver concepts and you heal the Thriver way, absolutely, I promise you that there is an unconscious reason inside of us that’s made us susceptible to this.

Let’s just go back through it.

In my own case, when I hadn’t yet released my traumas of not feeling enough and not being lovable, as well as those parts of myself that I was overcompensating with through being very capable and very hard working … and even though I achieved so many things in my life … I had this gnawing emptiness.

I knew that relationships were a painful experience for me in my life. I hadn’t healed that between me and Source. There was still that little girl inside of me who really believed that I’m only loved for my accomplishments and that I’m not lovable for myself.

So, as soon as I got involved with somebody who found that out (because this is what narcissists do) he was able to show up to be the savior of that in spades.

That’s the Love Bombing. I fell for it. Why did I fall for it? Because I hadn’t yet healed between myself and Source to be whole in that way. That’s why I was susceptible.

Let’s go back to Janey, who’s a Thriver now. She’s got an amazing man in her life, and no infidelity or any of those things. But she had that little girl inside of her that was still broken and unhealed with the belief that, “The people I love leave me for somebody else or betray me with other people.” That was the pattern that came from what her dad had done to her mom.

This was very wedged in her Inner Being, and it was unhealed. What happened was she ended up with exactly the match to her Love Code, “The people I love leave me and betray me with other people.”

What happened was the narcissist in her life decided, “You look like a good, juicy target, somebody that I can get narcissistic supply and a feed from.” She was beautiful, intelligent and capable, and she had resources. These are the goodies that narcissists want, so she was a target, and all he had to do was pretend that he was the savior of the stuff that were her gaps.

He played the part and made her believe … I would never do that to you. I’m going to look you straight in the eyes and tell you with full, dripping sincerity what you want to hear – that is completely good enough to be an academy award performance – and you’re going to fall for it. And she did.

 

How Do We Stop Being Susceptible To Love Bombing?

Now, we could say, of course, good people believe other people, but I want you to understand this … there’s two pieces to this that do not allow you to be susceptible to a narcissist’s Love Bombing anymore.

First of all, we’ve got to clean up our unfinished business, do the inner work as a single person to be able to heal up our traumas so that we’re a whole, solid adult in our body. This, and a host of other reasons, is why we don’t leave them when things get bad. But this one is a very powerful reason.

We have to heal up those parts within us that are a broken inner child that is attaching onto the same people, hoping that “mom or dad” will do it differently this time. Most of this is very, very unconscious. This is not a logical thing that you can just decide to get over. You have to do the inner work.

When you do the inner work the right way, you grow up to wholeness. Then when you’re dating a narcissist and they’re trying the Love Bombing, rather than feeling empty and hungry or thirsty, it actually feels off.

It’s so interesting, because in the relationship I have now, which is really whole, healthy, beautiful and so NOT narcissistic, I knew that I wanted romance and care in my life because they’re beautiful things, – and he was beautiful with the poetry, the romance and the way he treated me.

I had a girlfriend say to me, after I’d read her some of the poetry, “How do you know this is not Love Bombing?” I said to her, “I’ll tell you how I know, because if I’m busy – let’s say I’m doing a seminar or I’m traveling overseas or I have some kind of commitment, whether it be personal or work or whatever – if he was to message me and I don’t message him for hours, I don’t get eight text messages. I won’t even get another one. He’ll be respectful.”

I can spend time away from him. I have my life. If I can’t catch up with him and I say, “Look, Thursday night I can’t, but how about next Monday night?” he’s fine with that. He’s respectful. He’s mature. He’s solid in his body. He’s not needy.

When we were dating, he wasn’t telling me within five minutes that I’m the love of his life. Or that he saw me in a dream or a psychic told him that a woman with long dark brown hair and green eyes was going to walk into his life and that it was his missing Soul Mate.

That’s how I know. I don’t get guilted and shamed into not giving him enough attention.

This is the thing, because I’d healed myself up enough and I’d really worked on the mission of creating a life of feeling safe and whole in my body and loving my life and having a life, I was able to share a life and not be needy for a life. I did not let a Love Bomber come in, take me over, get me to connect immediately and give up everything.

If we have a scanty anything, what that really means is we don’t have a life, we’re just empty and needy and looking for a life with somebody – maybe we’re a workaholic and we’re really busy, but we’re kind of just… this was me. This was me. That was my old life. I was always busy and I was very capable and I was doing things, but I always felt an emptiness because I really didn’t love being in my body and being in life and feeling connected to life.

I was overcompensating because I didn’t have that. I used to think that a partner gives me that. So, somebody could just come into my life find out what was missing and present it in spades. I would just suck onto it because it was my everything, give up whatever I did have, and just fall in with them.

That’s exactly how a narcissist enmeshes you and takes you down for narcissistic supply. This means that you are now trauma bonded – you’re hooked.

If you don’t have a connection with Source and self, and a healed up, solid self, and you don’t have a life, well then you’re really not in a solid position to say, “Excuse me, these are my boundaries. These are my truths. These are my values. Either step up to meet me there, or we need to part, because this is not good enough for me. This is not a level of love where I’m loving myself.”

That was absolutely my life when I didn’t have boundaries.

 

In Conclusion

I hope I am really speaking to you today to deeply help you understand what’s going on in Love Bombing. I know it’s terrifying without the inner work and the wisdom and your evolution to understand how you can be a force to completely change your experience. But I promise you that is the case.

This is the work I do for myself every day. This is the work that I’ve helped thousands of people from all over the world do to be able to get out of their patterns. Especially really, really painful relationship and interpersonal programs.

You can also have the relationships that are your True Self and your True Life, that are your Soul and birthright to have. Relationships that are healthy, safe, and fulfilling, and able to grow into something really, really beautiful.

So, I want to talk to you about Thrive, because what we go through in Thrive in the 10 week process is all about this. It’s about getting your relationship with yourself and Source right by healing and cleaning up your unfinished business so that you can confidently start walking into life with boundaries.

And have the capacity, to not just up-level existing relationships into something much healthier, but be able to choose new relationships with due diligence, with consciousness, and with emotional intelligence so that you can be safe and healthy moving forward and get the relationships of your dreams.

By mating your own Soul in a powerful way, in a Quantum way, then you will get your Soul Mate, absolutely, 100%.

Not only this, Thrive is also very much about you letting go of the hurt. You can get free of the hurt and the symptoms – like PTSD, agoraphobia, anxiety, depression and obsessional thinking – that rollercoaster that can be such a thing with narcissistic abuse recovery. Some of you may be years down the track and are still feeling it, I promise you, when you know how to clean it up it can go really quickly – it’s so possible to get free, even in weeks. It’s that fast.

In Thrive, we do 10 incredibly powerful Quantum Freedom Healings as a group. These catapult your healing, your development, and your personal power.

I want you to go to melanietonievans.com/thrive to check out what that could do for you. The last group that we just got through a few weeks ago, had results that have been, humbly, phenomenal – better than we ever expected. So, I hope that today’s topic really spoke to you. Thank you for joining me in this video.