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Category: EMOTIONS
Why Do Cheaters Cheat?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
I remember many years ago, early in my career, a colleague I babysat for and who was very happily married referred to his and his brother’s chronic infidelity as “the family curse.” I found out about his betrayal when he approached me for medical advice about symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases. I was flabbergasted especially when he told me his wife and family were “the best” and most important thing in the world to him. I have been fascinated ever since by those who readily cheat and betray others and those who do not. So I started to explore during my own healing journey those qualities in people that would motivate them to betray a.k.a cheat and those that would prevent them from cheating a.k.a. be loyal. This is what I discovered about why cheaters cheat.
Betrayal is Dependent on the Ability to Be Loyal
Betrayal and loyalty are dependent on the level of character and personal power that impact the ability to obligate and commit to another. Anyone can cheat and very easily. Betrayal takes no effort at all except to plot and scheme perhaps. Now, this applies to all forms of betrayal of relational trust including abuse, abandonment, cheating, fraud, lying, conning, manipulating, addictions, exploiting and benefitting at the expense of someone else. It even includes betraying and abandoning our own selves after the betrayers betray us such as in codependent relationships. To not cheat, to be loyal and faithful takes personal power, integrity of character, healthy self-worth. Why? What is the big deal? Why should we care? Well, you should care a lot because your life, relationships, happiness, self-worth, and those of your children depend on it.
Are you a loyal, committed, honest, obligated, trustworthy person? Well, I hope so because being one takes personal resilience, wisdom, and strength of character to not have to succumb to what is easy and may be gratifying in the short term, to know it will not sustain us in the long run, and to have the compassion and conscience it takes not to break the trust of someone we vowed not to or who trusts us. And it takes hard work to learn the difference and which one we and the ones who trust us are more worthy of. So being loyal requires not only the ability to commit in word or thought (e.g. invalidated promise) but the ability to act on and demonstrate the commitment promised (e.g. validate the promise). A promise is hollow and valueless until we deliver on that promise.
We, assuming we are emotionally healthy, believe we are agreeing to something we know we can deliver and are able to deliver and understand we are worthy of the same in return. This is why we have codes of ethics and oaths and vows where we commit in good times and bad, in sickness and health when our ability to act on that commitment of loyalty are challenged the most. We trust the other’s word based on what they say and faith that it aligns with their thoughts and actions and abilities. Hopefully, that is based on them earning that trust. Ah? Or so we thought.
Why Do Loyal People Trust the Untrustworthy
The strength of character that enables us to be loyal doesn’t come for free or have anything to do with how much money you have, or your looks, formal education, title, prestige, level of privilege. It is worked for and earned. The problem is that usually the most faithful people and the most loyal are also the ones with the higher level of compassion and lower levels of self-worth that make them vulnerable to emotional predators and pathological liars who are not able to source their power internally. So we think others have the same good intentions as we do and they have worked as hard as we have to develop the character strength to be loyal friends, lovers, spouses, family members and co-workers when in reality they have not! We expect enemies to betray, to intentionally want to inflict pain, not those we love and trust. What happens, then, when we are betrayed by someone who we not only trust but are driven by our love and loyalty to believe and protect and stand by when things get rough? This is typically how our reaction plays out.
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
After the shock, disbelief, confusion as to why someone would do to me what “I would not do to them in a million years,” we typically blame ourselves. Sadly, the self-blame can turn into toxic shame. While we did nothing wrong except perhaps to rely on someone who is unreliable, we blame ourselves for the perpetrator’s lie(s), inability to commit, lack of compassion, unfaithfulness, treason, crimes, addictions.
Repetitive betrayals can cause trauma bonding and exaggerated fear of abandonment. We can stay too long in exploitive relationships and sabotage our own healing to avoid “betraying” even toxic people who are harming us. We can mistake trauma bonding caused by peptide addiction for love. We can even sabotage healthy relationships to avoid abandonment or betrayal that we fear more than the breakup. And for empaths whose lives have been filled with multiple losses and betrayals, healing challenges including learning the dynamics of healthy relationships can appear insurmountable when in reality they are not. Read more on the challenges of loss for empaths.
Learn more why and how people with too much compassion can be targeted by those with too little in Am I a Narcissist? – Being Narcissistic Versus Being a Narcissist
Why Do People Cheat When They Promise Not to
Cheating is an easy way to feel powerful, feed the ego of people who have nothing reliable in their tool kit of character traits, values, wisdom and coping and life skills to prevent them from cheating. Weakness in character, lack of moral compass, low self-worth, lower consciousness, lower resilience, lower levels of compassion, higher levels of narcissism and entitlement, and lower level of ability to delay gratification are the character traits that motivate a person to need more power, more immediate gratification and to seek out easy ways to achieve them at the expense of trust, family, vows, oaths to defend nations, society, lives, human rights, children, minorities, or whatever suits them. So weakness of character motivates a person to betray and facilitates the betrayal because they have no internal “brakes” to prevent them from cheating or exploiting. In essence, betrayers are wired for betraying.
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
Dr. George K. Simon, a preeminent expert on manipulative aggressive personalities and author of the best sellers In Sheep’s Clothing, Character Disturbance, and The Judas Syndrome confirms that those with covert aggressive personalities like pathological narcissists lack the capacity to love because they lack empathy and the warning signs of such empathy deficits are in part in the attitudes they display toward obligation. Narcissists simply detest putting out effort that might, even in part, benefit someone else.
Dr. Simon’s research confirms that narcissists can work very hard and can spend inordinate amounts time and energy working purely to get something they want such as another love interest that would benefit them. As many of us very well know, they can put in extraordinary efforts to groom and love bomb a potential mate or spouse or as we have seen in recent news, commit fraud to enter college or government. But putting the same amount of energy into a personal relationship, taking care of a sick family member, demonstrating the loyalty and consistency they promise are completely different matters and very unattractive enterprises to them. They want all the benefits of marriage, for example, without having to work for them or earn them! Dr. Simon emphasizes that narcissists resist working to become better human beings more than any other kind of work. So even when it comes to respect and love and admiration or even college admittance and educating themselves, they want to come by them in the same manner as everything else – without having to earn them. And guess what folks? How do we build integrity of character? Competence? Problem solving? You got it! By earning it through hard work to set goals, make a plan to achieve them, critically thinking, being successful, and learning lessons through mistakes we make along the way. If we don’t, we do not develop those human qualities that allow us to love, grow, and to integrate normally into society. We essentially remain stunted in our growth, rely parasitically on others, exploit resources, and spend our energy manipulating power and resources from others without returning the value.
Learn more why and how people with too much compassion can be targeted by those with too little in Am I a Narcissist? – Being Narcissistic Versus Being a Narcissist
Can the Betrayers and Those They Betray Heal
Can those who have been betrayed learn to heal, release the shame, grieve the loss, and improve the health of their relationships to benefit themselves? Of course. Remember? They are the ones with resilience and authentic power, the ones with the inner strength to be loyal and faithful, true to their commitment of trust, and have no need to cheat.
Can the betrayers heal? Not my call. No one knows. However, this I do know. Once a serial betrayer, forever a serial betrayer. And there is no cure for pathological narcissism. The more severe the betrayal and the more serious the level of weakness in character of the perpetrator, the more likely any promises and bit of perceived improvement will be faked, temporary, and unsustainable. Remember, the parts of their brains that plot and scheme and lie work perfectly fine. It is the parts that would prevent them from cheating, have remorse, and learn from their mistakes that don’t.
Am I a Narcissist? – Being Narcissistic Versus Being a Narcissist
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
No doubt that narcissism is a hot topic with we all being such a self-centered lot on top of the pandemic of pathological narcissists wreaking havoc in government and even those posing as healers on social media to support their parasitic need for adulation even from the victims they victimized. So we not only have lots of them we deal with daily but experience the damage they cause as well.
Terrorism, Politics, and the Pandemic of World-Wide Narcissism
This inundation of life across the globe by both has led to much confusion that I see in the 1000’s of blogs and threads I read weekly! One of the most frequent and popular questions I see and receive is from victims of narcissistic abuse asking if they are the narcissist! I have tons of articles in the Blog and 1000’s of posts at Yourlifelifter that break this subject down. I will summarize them here for those needing clarity and for newbies searching for answers on the differences between being narcissistic and being a Pathological Narcissist.
Being Narcissistic is a Human Trait
Narcissism like compassion is a normal human characteristic that falls on a spectrum however, like most things, too much or too little of either can cause issues. We see the consequences of both more so in our vested relationships with ourselves and others and in our own degree and comfort with self-worth and self-care. Since our relationships are core to our self-worth and our happiness, the degree of our narcissism and compassion can seriously impact both. Too much or too little compassion can imbalance power in relationships, hinder management of personal boundaries, and put healthy mutually respectful interactions at risk.
What Impacts Does Too Much Compassion Have
Caring too much can motivate us to rescue others we believe need help even those who don’t need or want rescuing. It can cause us to give too much, become a people pleaser and to neglect our needs over the needs of others where we put greater value than our own worth. We become vulnerable to anyone or anything that triggers that overabundance of compassion and need for validation of our worth. We are vulnerable to codependency we learn from being exploited as children. Having too much compassion (that we commonly see in empaths) can make us vulnerable to those who will intentionally exploit our compassion with no intention of returning the benefit. Giving too much and not being validated for that effort can lead to emotional fatigue and depression and even trauma.
Codependency Does Not Cause Abuse
People, with too much compassion, however, as Dr. Kristin Neff demonstrates in her studies, can learn self-care and how to use their compassion responsibly and to treat themselves mindfully with more kindness especially when they are in pain. They can heal the wounds that caused these faulty beliefs and unhealthy behaviors. They can learn internal boundaries that allow them to monitor and show compassion in ways that will promote their emotional health and self-worth.
Too little compassion, on the other hand, that we see in highly narcissistic people, and worse, in many personality disorders, makes us dependent on others as well but for totally different and more nefarious reasons. Healing for some is not possible.
What Impacts Does Too Little Compassion Have
Like in those with too much compassion, we see the biggest impacts from low levels of compassion on the health of relationships. The narcissistically disordered with very low to non-existent compassion have no internal brakes that would motivate them to respect other’s needs or wishes or boundaries and that would prevent them from mooching and using others to service their needs at their expense. They also have little to no motivation to return the favor. Other people become essentially their “prey.” They become masters at identifying emotions in others and how to trigger them to direct other’s power for their personal benefit but are not able with compassion to recognize those same emotions in themselves. They, in fact, as the McGregor studies show, target empaths with too much compassion who they have learned are the most vulnerable to their manipulation tactics. Interestingly enough, narcissists themselves are very easily manipulated and can target other narcissists.
Do Narcissists Target Other Narcissists?
They also use others with lower levels of compassion (but not pathologically low) who Dr. Jane McGregor refers as “apaths” to help them in their attacks. We in the narcissistic abuse recovery community refer to them as “flying monkeys.” These apaths have enough compassion to prevent them from an all out premeditated stealthy attack on another, but not enough to put another’s safety or needs ahead of their own especially when doing so would disturb them or upset them, cost them, or make them appear less acceptable to the audience, group, family, job, etc. Apaths have brakes, just faulty selective ones.
Understanding Why Narcissists Targeted You is Fundamental to Healing
What Causes Us to Have Too Little or Too Much Compassion
As discussed earlier, empaths with too much compassion learn to give it away freely in exploitive childhoods where their emotional needs were not met in healthy ways. While the brains of those with too much compassion and moderate levels can rewire and they can learn to fix their skewed beliefs and use their compassion more responsibly to improve their emotional and relational health, those with pathologically low levels cannot.
Empathy: Is It a Gift or a Curse?
Experts believe the roots of pathological narcissism, the clinically disordered are genetic and triggered by events in early childhood that permanently arrest development and cannot be reversed. In short, pathological narcissists, essentially remain dependent on other people to survive and cannot ever fend for themselves. They know what they do and simply do not care, because they are not able to. There is no cure. Some refer to it as “living hell.” Read more in the articles below:
What is Pathological Narcissism?
Narcissists Exposed – How Narcissists Create Illusions to Fool Us
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
“Narcissists bomb us with lies and irrational beliefs to skew our perceptions of our own (male or female) and others’ personal power and worth. They frequently surround themselves with a posse of low-character ‘flying monkeys’ who support them in the ‘lie bombing.’ They target the primary beliefs that trigger our fears and shame related to our self-esteem, personal power, and safety. In short, these are the primary beliefs that support our personal joy, health, power, and happiness.”
Disparities in character and emotional fitness can cause power imbalance in any abusive family, organization, government, political party, employer, relationship where the members use their authority to exploit the rights of the vulnerable to benefit themselves. These abusers, then, stealthily interfere with our rights to life, liberty, and happiness by intentionally exploiting resources and opportunities that allow us to act on those rights. Governments, for example, use political authority to get our support or votes; in employment, job status and authority to keep us sub-servant; and in families, love and acceptance to abuse us. All test and demonstrate the value added from integrity of character and the level of emotional fitness of all participating members, givers and takers alike. We all have the same human needs and no one, not ever, is entitled to have their needs met over ours. It is this fundamental belief at the core of our worthiness that people and especially, narcissists, abusers, psychopaths, and demagogues use to manipulate and over power us.
What is Power and What It’s Not
Would you let the hospital janitor perform your heart surgery? Would you let a nurse perform your heart surgery? I hope not. Well, the same principles apply to anyone in a position of authority whose decisions and competence level can have life or death impacts on others.
This is also why education, qualifications, emotional fitness, credibility, reliability, loyalty, criminal history, communications, experience, and character traits like compassion and conscientiousness and loyalty are so important to effectively completing any high risk/ high consequence job. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to maintain this high level of competency in support of our service to the public are very well aware of this. We are clear on personal power, competence and worth and have worked our back ends off to achieve a level of excellence our work and the public deserve. We do not abuse our positions of authority to benefit from others at their expense. We have no need to and our consciences and compassion prevent us from abusing our authority and betraying those we are committed to in trust.
Let’s be clear here.
- Authority is not power.
- Aggression is not power.
- Triggering pain and fear is not power.
- Exploitation is not power.
- Money is not power.
- Being born into privilege does not make us powerful.
- Entitlement is not power.
Then why do so many of us believe this?
Most of us have been conditioned to believe personal power is associated with external image exemplified in title, stature, privilege, personal strength, size, sex, beauty, brains, status quo, prestige, instant gratification, the level of attention we command and with those we fear either on a conscious or unconscious level. Nothing could be farther from reality. While all these things may look good on the outside and be appealing and even scary, anything that appears too good to be true usually is. Beware of glitter folks. This is all B.S. we have been brainwashed to believe in our youth and that is reinforced in all aspects of our adult lives that have a profound affect on our core beliefs impacting our survival.
“We can perceive those with authentic power (who have no need to demonstrate it or glitter it up) who can actually help us as threats because they challenge our pain-based ego-driven beliefs that while faulty we are comfortable with and settled for. We unknowingly become vulnerable to emotional vampires and do not live to our true potential.”
We then live and create in life what we believe to be true or valuable based on lies and false fears. As a result, we routinely give up our power or witness others giving up their power to good actors who use aggression, manipulation, money or privilege overtly or covertly to trigger our fears and powerlessness. We then believe falsely that anything that relieves our pain or triggers our envy is value-adding. And more significantly, we can perceive those with authentic power (who have no need to demonstrate it or glitter it up) who can actually help us as threats because they challenge our pain-based ego-driven beliefs that while faulty we are comfortable with and settled for. We unknowingly become vulnerable to emotional vampires and do not live to our true potential.
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
Read more here on how emotional manipulators use your fears to con you to steal your power.
So, is acting powerful? Are lies powerful? Is manipulation powerful? Are nice things powerful? They may gratify you temporarily if you pay to be entertained by them or they feed your ego. They may even be impactful in the short run if they trigger fears you believe you are powerless and defenseless to and only the manipulator can alleviate. That, folks, is not power. It is abusive exploitation of power from the vulnerable, the wounded. Is a thief even, if a good one, worthy of what they steal? Does the theft entitle them to unearned benefits and provide them with some hidden magical power? I think not.
Read more here on what makes narcissists self-righteous and manipulative
“Anyone truly powerful does not have to act, lie, manipulate, steal, or exploit. Why? It has no need to.”
What Is Authentic Personal Power
Anyone truly powerful does not have to act, lie, manipulate, steal, or exploit. Why? They have no need to. They have integrity of character, authenticity, and competence they can rely on to benefit not only themselves but also others.
We all have to work to be able to create value in spite of adversity to not only live but also to become who we uniquely are. No one based on their level of privilege, label, title, authority, sex, or role is exempt from this basic rule of humanity. There is no other way. The level of our integrity of character including our empathy and moral compass help us create authentic value and resilience that earns us the right to reap the benefits from the value we create not steal value others work for to benefit ourselves. It simply doesn’t work that way. It is irrational to think otherwise.
Read more here on the Five Pillars of Personal Worth, Power and Authenticity
We, nevertheless, are social beings and cannot accomplish this in a vacuum. So normal functioning people work to use their experiences to develop the lessons, knowledge, skills, resilience, competence they use to create value in their lives, relationships, work, community, and in the world. This is real personal power that we project out to others to benefit them so they, too, build personal power and find meaning in their lives. This is how we all become humans of excellence and accomplish goals we are worthy of. We earn them! And we openly share that value at will with others we choose to share it with and they with us.
Read more here on the Five Pillars of Personal Worth, Power and Authenticity
Compassionate and loyal people, use their personal power to protect the vulnerable, the sick, and anyone in need, not exploit them for their personal gain. They would use their authority and their earned skills, knowledge, abilities and unbiased judgment to ensure all benefitted equally and fairly with due regard for the law. They can readily source their own power internally to think critically and make risk-informed decisions and thought and course corrections and improvements that result in value-adding and sustainable results. They possess emotional maturity that allows them to identify when they need assistance to make reliable decisions and to get the help they need from reliable competent sources. This is the basis for a chaos free society where we all are free to act on our free will to pursue life, liberty, and happiness unhindered.
If you are not aware of this, then immediately please bring this into your level of consciousness and belief system. Because if you do not, you will remain vulnerable to pathological narcissists, con artists, psychopaths, bullies, and abusers who prey on those with the lack of knowledge of their real worth and power and personal authority.
Read more here on how narcissists target and exploit empaths.
Read more here on the tactics of toxic people and what to watch out for.
How Narcissists Imbalance Power to Con You
We must not forget that all humans have basic needs for survival regardless of our level of privilege, status, and title. These include, food, love, shelter and safety, self-esteem, and self-actualization (achieving your potential, happiness, finding meaning). To meet these needs, sometimes we give and sometimes we take because our living conditions change. Bad things happen to good people, right? Nothing is ever static. So “mooching” clearly is part of the human condition and part of all relationships and our existence as individuals and as a society since we exist as a nation (and no longer live in tribes and a feudal system).
No one is immune, poor or rich, privileged or not from “mooching.” Some of us because of disabilities or hardships may have to legitimately mooch more than others because we are not able to create, generate or return the resources we need to support our basic needs. Others may mooch, however, simply because they believe they are entitled to.
Narcissists do not mooch legitimately. They are intentional moochers who want us to forget that those in a civil ordered ethically-based compassionate society take care of each other and that we have laws that protect our rights and the rights of the vulnerable to help us maintain order from chaos. We also have our own personal standards, ethics and morals we live by they want us to forget. They, instead, deliberately divide us and create chaos to imbalance power so they can more easily steal our power from us.
Read more here on how narcissists target and exploit empaths.
Narcissists covertly or overtly yet aggressively con others to ignore their basic instincts, core beliefs, and sense of reason and decency. They routinely engage in “crazy making” to distract you from the facts and invalidate your “authentic emotions” so you will forget that in a democratic republic, we all, regardless of our differences, have a right to achieve life, liberty, happiness and to our own opinions regardless of our beliefs, state of our emotional health or level of comfort in the state of affairs. Of course, no one likes rules or laws or regulations but we know they exist to provide limits that, in the short or long term, protect us from harm and prevent chaos and keep us all on the up and up.
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
Narcissists who permanently lack normal functioning abilities that motivate humans to work and earn these benefits literally con and steal these from anyone vulnerable to their manipulation tactics. This is why they despise laws, courts, accountability, scrutiny, regulations, oversight and literally anything or anyone that will prevent them from exploiting the vulnerable which is just part of their disordered character or that expose them for who they really are, the weakest humans with lowest of integrity of character. They are disordered individuals who have become human parasites who prey on the benefits others work for and have earned. They are forever unable to fend for themselves or sustain their own happiness.
Narcissists Exposed – How Narcissists Create Illusions to Fool Us
Narcissists Have Infiltrated Government
Kathy Krajco, a formidable pioneer in educating the world on narcissism and narcissistic abuse, warns us in What Makes Narcissists Tick about the serious problem narcissism poses in the public sector and private nonprofit institutions that use the do-gooder and moral elitist facade to cloak their true self-righteous intentions to not do good but to be “seen as doing good” and “show how good they are by pointing at someone else and telling them how bad they are.” Politics, she points out, “is an ideal arena for narcissists…the list of them who have conned whole nations to become dictators is breathtaking.”
Why are So Many Politicians Pathological Narcissists and What Can We Do About it?
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
Weakness of character motivates a person to betray and facilitates the betrayal because they have no internal “brakes” to prevent them from cheating or exploiting. In essence, betrayers are wired for betraying. Dr. George K. Simon, a preeminent expert on manipulative aggressive personalities and author of the best sellers In Sheep’s Clothing, Character Disturbance, and The Judas Syndrome confirms that those with covert aggressive personalities like pathological narcissists lack empathy and the warning signs of such empathy deficits are in part in the attitudes they display toward obligation. Narcissists simply detest putting out effort that might, even in part, benefit someone else.
Read more here on the Five Pillars of Personal Worth, Power and Authenticity
“We cannot ever take for granted what it takes to support order or forget the importance of the balance of power and integrity of character in ensuring not only our personal health and happiness but also peace and harmony in our families, communities, states, and society. And we must never forget that acquiring these takes plain hard work.”
Read more here on what makes a narcissists self-righteous and manipulative.
There is immense accuracy to the old adage that “the devil comes cloaked as everything you ever wanted.” The truly evil members of the human race know what makes people of character work. They learn to read their emotional responses and manipulate their conscientiousness, compassion, and fears to direct their time, energy, and money to them. Now, criminals, parasites, and predators cannot announce to their targeted hosts and prey their true intent can they? What do they, like all predatory and parasitic animals, do? They use camouflage and manipulation to fool their prey. Narcissists in government are no different. They use two primary tactics to manipulate those they target.
- They play on and trigger their fears and
- They diminish the value of other humans.
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
Narcissistic politicians try to stealthily convince you that people including yourself in legitimate need are “moochers.” They want us to forget the vulnerable among us like the sick, those prejudiced against, abuse victims, minorities, and the elderly need our help and by law, earn and merit that help. These are conditions, remember, that all humans face that can prevent us from acting on our basic rights and meeting our basic needs. Narcissists, in fact, loathe anyone in need who cannot directly benefit them.
“Why,” you may think, “would anyone do these horrible things?” The answer is simple. They want to direct our time, energy, money, and power to them. To do this effectively, they must get us to feel shame for our needs and not care for other folks and to fear or hate them instead. You may now think, “how can someone get another person to not care for themselves and others and to fear and hate them?”
Read more here on how to identify people in legitimate need versus real moochers.
Well, sadly, lots easier than you may think if they get you to believe that the person you care about is an undeserving moocher, a threat to you, and convince you through lies, false threats, and character assassination that all of you are not worthy of compassion. More so, they get you to believe only they can save you from these fake threats and alleviate your fears and only they are worthy of your attention and adulation. How do they do this? Again the answer is pretty simple. They lie.
Narcissists, bullies, psychopaths and demagogues are pathological liars. (As a side note, I would love to see their pants actually catch fire). Why? The answer again is simple! They have to be and want to be. It is just part of their parasitic nature.
Learn more here about the natural but parasitic nature of narcissists.
Read more here on the tactics of toxic people and what to watch out for.
“Narcissists, bullies, psychopaths and demagogues are pathological liars. (As a side note, I do wish their pants would catch fire). Why? The answer again is simple! They have to be and want to be. It is just a part of their natural and parasitic nature.”
Narcissists naturally and intentionally bomb us with lies and irrational beliefs to skew our perceptions of our own (male or female) and others’ personal power and worth. They frequently surround themselves with a posse of low-character “flying monkeys” who support them in the “lie bombing.” They target the primary beliefs that trigger our fears and shame related to our self-esteem, personal power, and safety. In short, these are the primary beliefs that support our personal joy, health, power, and happiness. So they lie pathologically to create doubt, confusion, uncertainty, and chaos so they can manipulate us more effectively. They are emotional moochers. This tactic like the old bait and switch is as old as the hills, but nevertheless, is very effective.
Convincing you that you or others in need are weak, of less value, or are a danger, a threat, makes you seem less believable, weak, and unworthy and therefore less human. And ultimately by getting you to believe the lies, they can more easily get you to abandon your natural desire to care for, empathize and help yourself and others. They manipulate you to believe that you and the vulnerable are not worthy of your basic rights to life, liberty, and happiness because you are “moochers” who are stealing from those more worthy when they, in reality, are the “moochers.” Remember The Wizard of Oz, nothing but smoke and mirrors controlled by a wizard you were instructed not to pay attention to? Well, while anecdotal, it is based in reality.
“Narcissists bomb us with lies and irrational beliefs to skew our perceptions of our own (male or female) and others’ personal power and worth. The frequently surround themselves with a posse of low-character “flying monkeys” who support them in the “lie bombing.” They target the primary beliefs that trigger our fears and shame related to our our self-esteem, personal power, and safety. In short, these are the primary beliefs that support our personal joy, health, power, and happiness.”
Read more here on how to distinguish people in legitimate need from the real moochers.
There is a vital lesson for us to all learn here!
We cannot ever take for granted what it takes to support order or forget the importance of the balance of power and integrity of character needed in key decision makers in government to ensure not only our personal health and happiness but also peace and harmony in our families, communities, states, and society. And we must never forget that acquiring these takes plain hard work and authentic personal power that is earned not stolen.
What Can We Do as a Person, a People, a Nation
Well, there is lots we can do and lots we shouldn’t do. At the top of the “do not” list is to hunker down in shame or fear. At the top of the “do” list is to take actions and resist so we can take our power back and maximize the positive impact of the truly good and emotionally healthy people with integrity of character, intellect, and compassion and to stop promoting the evil component of society. So now more than ever it is critical to be intelligent in our choices and to not not let our fears and lack of information and state of our emotional health drive them. We must be vigilant and informed in all our choices and especially in whom we choose to love, associate with, trust, and choose as our lawmakers, senators, the head of state! We can work on improving our own emotional health. As we heal, our children will heal through us. The onus is on the United States government and on us as citizens to ensure we can confidently answer this question as it applies to all personnel running for key elected decision-making roles in government and especially those at the highest levels of government:
“Are these candidates competent and emotionally fit for duty and running an honest campaign from the heart, with authentic loyalty, integrity and duty to the greater good or are they knowingly and intentionally lying and making false promises to their constituents and exploiting their fears to win in order to abuse the authority of the position to benefit themselves?”
How do we achieve this? First, we must heal and educate ourselves on narcissism. As we heal, our children will heal through us. They will develop the empathy, self-worth, self-reliance, and emotional intelligence required to succeed in life, work, and relationships and maximize their power to themselves and to the world. I provide tons of healing information, tools and resources in this Blog, the Yourlifelifter website and Facebook page, and in my book Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors.
Read more here on how we can heal the world by healing ourselves.
Second, we must learn what authentic power really is and how it applies to all humans regardless of their sex, privilege, or appearance, the tactics emotional manipulators use to con our power from us to benefit them, and what makes us vulnerable to them.
Read more here on what personal power is and what it is not.
Third, we can stand up to and also stop voting diagnosed pathological narcissists into key political offices. We can be mindful and wise in our choices of those with the integrity of character and other qualities, skills, knowledge and abilities they have worked for and earned that support them being an effective world leader who are competent to make informed decisions based on what is best for others, the country, the world and not just themselves, profoundly weak people who cannot generate their own power and steal that of others.
Educating ourselves about narcissism will allow us easier to recognize them and assess the state of our own emotional health that makes us vulnerable to their manipulation. In this way, we can expose and defuse them. The U. S. government can also start screening the mental and emotional health, along with the financial and character integrity of anyone who is hired into a critical political position no different than what all high risk industries are, by law or ethics, required to do.
This is how we collectively heal and take our power back as people and as a nation and get us back on track to allow us equally and unhindered to act freely on our divine rights we collectively work for, deserve, and pay for to pursue life, liberty, and happiness
Read more here on the tactics of toxic people and what to watch out for.
Don’t Be Fooled by Glitter
I as a victim of abuse for a large part of my life searched for decades for truth my soul was starving for. And now I share that truth with others. One of the hardest lessons I learned is that truly evil and toxic people do exist and that they prey on the truly good people and in fact, they target them in all aspects of life.
Read more here on how narcissists target empaths.
I also learned that exploitation and power imbalanced situations can come in many forms because “toxic humans” can come in many forms camouflaged as many things. So even after we recover from abuse, like with any addiction (and abuse victims do suffer from “pain addiction”), we can be targeted and triggered when we least expect it. We can have a single abusive or toxic mate, lover, co-worker, spouse or we can be exposed to toxicity and power imbalance in toxic “groups” that also come in all forms – families, work groups, religious groups, political groups, or what I experienced recently, a branch of a world-wide fundraising organization that is over 100 years old.
So to effectively heal after narcissistic abuse and not be vulnerable to narcissists, I’d like to remind you, “All that glitters is not gold.” This is why.
Pathological Narcissism is a Pandemic
Narcissism is now a world-wide pandemic. It has infiltrated all aspects or our lives and is rampant in “good deed” communities like politics, the medical community, churches, and even fundraising organizations where many emotional manipulators can exist for years going unnoticed, providing illusions of generosity and “goodness” and feeding off the unlimited supply of power and energy of innocent members of the community while hiding true intentions of superiority and self-righteousness. Gary Bell, a valued community member at Yourlifelifter describes it perfectly, “Service organizations frequently come to be fraternal organizations with a bit of charity work to make it seem legit – fraternity and sorority houses for ‘grownups.'”
Narcissists are even posing as healers on Facebook. What better people to target than the vulnerable wounded ones they harmed who admittedly need help and whom they continue to abuse and exploit “by proxy” by posing as a healers? What a novel idea, right? Well, it is not so novel. It may be pretty new to Facebook but narcissists infiltrated the medical and psychological professions a long long time ago like pedophiles infiltrated the priesthood.
Read more here on narcissists posing as healers.
Kathy Krajco, a formidable pioneer in educating the world on narcissism and narcissistic abuse, describes in What Makes Narcissists Tick how the “helping professions” that supply an abundance of vulnerable prey attract pathological narcissists. Kathy cautions us to “think not only of vulnerable children in the case of teachers but also vulnerable children or grieving and hurt adults in the case of priests and ministers. Think of the vulnerable patients supplied to psychiatrists.” She also warns us about the serious problem narcissism poses in the public sector and private nonprofit institutions that use the do-gooder and moral elitist facade to cloak their true self-righteous intentions to not do good but to be “seen as doing good” and “show how good they are by pointing at someone else and telling them how bad they are.” Politics, she points out, “is an ideal arena for narcissists…the list of them who have conned whole nations to become dictators is breathtaking.”
What Can We Do to Protect Ourselves
We can educate ourselves on narcissism and how to protect ourselves from toxic people and learn to rely more confidently on our emotional intelligence. So, if your gut instinct tells you there is something fishy going on, then trust it, don’t ignore your inner voice or second guess yourself, be cautious, and if the not so good feelings in your gut start to outnumber the truly rewarding ones, then run for the hills.
Read more here on what we can do as a person, a people, and a nation.
Do “do good” organizations do good for the community? Possibly but beware the true intent of their members! Is it to simply give back to and benefit the community which was my sole personal objective or are there “hidden” underlying objectives? Look closely at their actions and do not assume their intentions, like yours, are good ones. Fact check! The more important question to answer is to determine why the members are really there? Does their objective for being there and donating their time align with yours? Look how they routinely treat all members. Do they play favorites? Are there cliques that seem to manipulate all the decisions in the organization to favor themselves and those in the clique at the expense of others? Do they portray in their home lives the ethics and moral codes of the organization? Do their actions contradict their thoughts and words and vice versa?
Read more here to learn how to identify emotional vampires in your life.
The point is this. Anyone can provide an illusion of doing good by hiding in a “do good” organization or even places of worship that are really filled with manipulative covert aggressive self-righteous people who are exploiting others and are languishing in their superiority over the “needy” they profess to help and are providing a very toxic and emotionally unhealthy environment for its innocent and truly compassionate members who simply are there just to “do good.” Wolves can be cloaked in many versions of sheep’s clothing and snakes can be cloaked in many colors of suits. So it doesn’t matter how appealing it “looks” or “sounds” even if there is a handsome “shiny as a new penny” person at the helm or is a rich Presidential candidate in a $2000 suit…..if it looks like, if it smells like, it is. And if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Read more here on what we can do as a person, a people, and a nation.
So even after we heal, we must remain vigilant and confident in our personal power. And never forget that truth is truth and never again let anyone manipulate you into compromising yours even if they appear as glittered “do gooders.”
You cannot polish a turd, folks, but you can roll it in glitter and nevertheless it will remain a turd and the smell lingers. Don’t be fooled by the glitter. It is all an unsustainable illusion. Truth, on the other hand IS like gold. It can tarnish but will never lose its brilliance or value.
Why Protecting Personal Boundaries is Critical in Healing
Abusers, narcissists, manipulators, and bullies find us. We do not find them. Why? Because they are powerless and weak and so they prey on people who are vulnerable to their covert aggressive tactics and who will give up their power to them.
Abusers and exploiters and bullies and especially narcissists are masters at pushing pain buttons, making people feel powerless, and getting people to let down their boundaries and getting them to give up their power to them. In fact, they enjoy doing it. They use charm and love as their camouflage. We become unknowingly complicit in our own abuse and exploitation. We innocently expose ourselves to some of the worst abuse and harm imaginable.
Part of healing for those who were victims and continue to be susceptible to their attacks, then, is learning effectively how not to be vulnerable to emotional predators.
Read more here on how to identify emotional vampires in your life.
Unfortunately, there is no electronic monitor like a home protection system you can purchase to warn you of impending “emotional” predators and attacks. However, you can strengthen your own internal monitors and learn new self-care and self-compassion skills including honing your narcissist radar otherwise known as “NADAR” and honoring and “feeling” for and caring for your own wants and needs with compassion and defending your personal rights and authorities. These include assertively expressing what your rights, authorities, needs, and feelings are and recognizing and regulating your own emotions especially your pain-based ones and learning when they are triggered and who routinely triggers them. Just as important, then, is knowing WHAT makes you happy.
These are normal adaptive habits supporting our emotional health and self-worth and self-assuredness we should have learned in our youth. However, we are not encouraged to and are even ignored and punished for merely taking care of our basic needs in abusive and exploitive childhoods, relationships, and environments. If this is true and continues in your life, then you are in one of the most toxic environments rather than a mutually healthy and respectful one that supports your emotional health. If this is the case, take protective actions immediately. The good news?
Healing and taking your power back will allow you to embrace the new authentic you with love, compassion, caring and a whole new set of “life” and “self-loving” skills. These include assertively expressing your wants, needs, disappointments, viewpoints, and simply saying no. Saying no is a complete sentence and requires no additional explanation. Remember, too, that boundaries control flow in both directions. So be careful not only to protect your boundaries from others but also maintain them steady and not readily share too much information with others that can leave you vulnerable to emotional attackers as well. Read more here.
When in doubt, simply trust your gut instinct, don’t second guess it, recognize your discomfort with the situation, recognize this person as a potential threat, and walk away. Say nothing or if you feel compelled, say something neutral like “I never heard that put that way before,” or “I will have to think about that,” and then remove yourself from the toxic situation as soon as you can.
Remember the TDS rule!
- Minimize your TIME with them;
- Maximize the DISTANCE between you and them; and
- Put SHIELDING or a barrier between you and them.
Assertively saying no and walking away to a safe place allow you to do all three, easily and effectively.
For more information on how to deal with toxic people read this article.
Another, very important and not so obvious lesson relates to the challenges of managing boundaries faced by those with codependent tendencies, heavily reliant on others for self-worth.
Case in point. An abuse survivor with admitted over dependence on others for validation, goes to her sister to let her know how her non-traditional therapy went and was bashed by her sister for the decision she made.
Case in point. An abuse survivor who is far into her healing journey is called daily by a life-long friend who is a serious codependent and people pleaser who uses her friend’s power to sustain herself but does not work on building her own self-assuredness to help her through her personal issues.
What can we learn from these interrelationships on managing personal boundaries?
First, people with codependent tendencies and empaths in particular, should focus to avoid telling “good news” or for that matter any news to toxic people whose truth does not align with theirs and who do not have their best interests at heart regardless if those persons are related or not. Just because someone is related and should care about you in emotionally healthy respectful ways and should have your best interests at heart does not guarantee they do and entitle them to disrespect you and not honor your personal rights or wishes.Let’s take a closer look at the first example here, a person going to another for validation and solace. Now, an emotionally healthy individual whose ego is intact, would have merely been concerned that it worked for you and how it met your healing goals and asked you how the therapy went. My concern would have been you. Point being is that by learning not to tell your “sister,” who in this example represents anyone who is toxic and learning instead to focus on relying on those who do have your back and will reliably validate you, you learn self-reliance, to rely more comfortably on yourself and less on others. You can also learn to limit your group of friends to just a key few you can periodically check for assurance with but not overly rely on for acceptance or approval.
There is another very important and not so obvious lesson here related to personal boundaries: Boundaries control energy flow inward and outward.
Empaths can be so trusting of people they readily tell others everything! Readily sharing too much information with others can leave us vulnerable to emotional attackers as well. Read more here. Releasing too much information too fast is a signal to boundary violators and energy vampires that you are at their disposal to target and prey on. It is also dishonorable to your own self and your life. Trusting others before you have evaluated whether they are “on your side” or not is simply not a wise thing to do. Would you let your money hang out of your wallet while you walked down the street? I think not. Well, the same applies to your own personal emotional health and well-being that hold much more value to you than money!
Abuse survivors can become notorious boundary violators themselves. People who are heavily dependent on others for self-worth particularly may have a hard time sourcing their own power and learning self-reliance.
These “codependent” people have learned to routinely not only let others violate their boundaries but also to violate other people’s boundaries to source from them what they need to define their worth. At a minimun, it is not fair and totally disrespectful to legitimate and emotionally healthy friends to overly burden them with too much information about their problems, issues, and journey. Innocently, you become, at a minimum, annoying and in the worse case, exploitive, dishonoring, and toxic to them. So, the best of people in a maladaptive wounded state who have the best of intentions must not forget the importance of honoring OTHER people’s personal rights while they are learning to manage their own.
Learning boundary management by re-learning what personal rights are and where healthy authorities and boundaries start and finish will help us make great strides in our healing, replace maladaptive thoughts, beliefs and actions with healthy ones and support and sustain emotionally healthy and mutually respectful loving relationships.
I explore these issues and provide many more healing lessons, tips and tools in my book Take Your Power Back. You can get your copy and read more here.
Why Are People Evil?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Now, I am not preaching or discussing my religious beliefs however religion, anecdotes, truth, and evil are are my mind today. And this is why.
I have always been fascinated with what makes people evil.
Frankly, I could never relate and still have a hard time understanding the lack of compassion and empathy in evil rotten broken people, specifically pathological narcissists and psychopaths. But since most religions address good and evil, it was natural for me to use them as sources of information.
This is what I found:
- Pretty much all religions are founded on reconciliation of good and evil and the search for truth or enlightenment.
- They use anecdotes, short accounts of a real incident or person not supported by scientific data, to make a point.
- All discuss the consequences of committing evil deeds or violation of moral or ethical codes more commonly referred to as “sins.”…
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Can Malignant Narcissism Be Cured?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Here’s the simple answer: “No!”
Therapy can help narcissists put on the brakes if they go to therapy and the therapists are skilled in their covert aggressive personalities and know how to deal with their perverted thinking including their manipulation, lack of compassion, aggression, combativeness and need to win. However, based on my decades of research and the collective opinions of real experts on character disturbances who have treated thousands of narcs and their victims, I believe there is no cure. Read more at http://drgeorgesimon.com.
Can they have redeeming character traits? Intelligence?
Of course they can.
But they permanently lack the qualities we as humans need to build and sustain integrity of character and building meaningful healthy relationships.
Let’s explore this.
Our characters are built through life experiences and mistakes and successes and are chiseled permanently like sculpture. Our characters, whether they be characters of integrity just like disturbed…
View original post 770 more words
On Functional Medicine, Truth, and Healing from Abuse
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” ~ Albert Einstein
Let’s look at traditional medicine and ask the same question that Doctor Phil frequently asks:
“Is it working for you.”
Well, it is very obviously not working for the patients who continue to suffer but a lot of people are benefitting from treating symptoms of disease, autoimmune illnesses (hugely on the rise), emotional fatigue and trauma, or whatever.
The functional approach is a long overdue new direction in medicine that focuses on root causes to disease and ailments and promotes our bodies’ natural defense mechanisms to prevent and heal illness and disease related to our physical and emotional health.
However, functional medicine is not based on a new concept – not in the least. I have used this for over 35 years and it is pretty basic. It goes like this:
“It is impossible to heal and prevent a problem if you do not address what causes it…pure and simple.”
It is impossible to effectively heal a problem and sustain healing if you label it with something after going through a checklist of SYMPTOMS and do not investigate to identify and then address the root causes. Addressing what happened does not address why it happened or the events or series of events leading up to the mishap.
Albert Einstein said it eloquently in his statement (and my favorite quote):
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
The same applies to illness or sadness or whatever we know “needs fixing.”
We also need to acknowledge it needs fixing because if we don’t, our human nature as creatures of habit takes over and we revert back to what we are comfortable doing even if is doing us harm or brings us angst. Why? Because, if we were abused, neglected, invalidated as children, we can have so many fears we are accustomed to living with that we choose the one or ones we are most comfortable with and deny the others.
Let’s see…should I stay with the abuser because my fear of abandonment overrides my fear of emotional pain or should I select abandonment over shame? Sound silly? Maybe. But this is exactly how the human mind reacts, how it copes after it has been overly taxed, traumatized. The brain is capable of so much but it is not capable of spontaneous healing.
Now these beliefs and immature coping mechanisms may have served us in the short term when we were defenseless to our heartless uncompassionate caregivers and caretakers, but they do not and will not serve us in the long term because they are just bandaiding symptoms. They will sustain your happiness because pain and the sources of pain DO NOT EVER GO AWAY. Just because you cannot access them does not mean they do not exist. Believe me. They are there ready to raise their heads when you least expect it and most likely when you are emotionally challenged such as during an illness, death, divorce, or after some major loss.
This example demonstrates the damage that is done to our belief systems and to our mechanisms for self-regulating our pain-based emotions. So abuse survivors’ emotions become toxic to themselves.
This is why traditional therapies frequently do not work for narcissistic abuse survivors and this is why millions of people worldwide are on Facebook and the Internet looking for answers. They are in emotional pain. They are emotionally fatigued. Their souls need emotional nourishment. They need truth.
You cannot treat trauma from abuse by prescribing a pill and treating symptoms and not accessing the trauma back to its source – childhood. It is as simple as that.
Gregg Zaffuto told me that reach at his groundbreaking healing page on Facebook, “After Narcissistic Abuse” reached over one million people worldwide last week and that is just one of many legitimate and credible healing pages.
Yes, folks there are millions of us looking for answers, millions of us whose souls are unnourished and starving for truth.
What? You say you were never physically abused? Well, emotional abuse, covert aggression, invalidation, coddling are all forms of abuse so no one is immune.
HEALING IS ALL ABOUT YOU. IT IS NOT ABOUT THE ABUSERS.
Healing is all about truth! This is why I focus on the truth and your healing. This is what I am committed to share with you at Yourlifelifter and what I documented in Take Your Power Back along with a step-by-step program and the tools to help you in your healing journeys.
Take Your Power Back is the product of my decades long search for truth into the root causes of pain addictions in abuse victims.
I wrote it to help you find yours, stop believing lies, break your pain addictions, become the joy-based people you were all put on this earth to be and THRIVE!
May your spiritual source guide and protect you in your search for truth!
Together we heal! Together we thrive!
Five Major Fundamental Healing Truths
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Excerpted from Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors. Purchase a copy here.
As discussed in detail in Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors, victims of abuse have been conditioned to think like victims. It is this thinking that hinders recovery. Victims can get so accustomed to living cyclical patterns of seeking and avoiding pain that they do not understand the real extent of their unhappiness and level of dependence on harmful power imbalanced relationships.
You may live and work in environments where these dysfunctions continue, the boundaries of personal respect are habitually violated, and personal rights are not honored. Your self-esteem suffers, and you live to avoid pain rather than pursue and seek joy. Perhaps you do not even know what brings you joy. The distorted thinking and skewed beliefs that create invisible barriers to your happiness can also create barriers to your healing.
So, here are five fundamental truths to help you challenge what I believe are the biggest falsehoods in your thinking that have hindered and will continue to create obstacles in your healing journey.
TRUTH #1
Believing lies does not make them true and not believing the truth does not make it a lie. Truth IS truth. Lies are lies. This is indisputable!
TRUTH #2
We manifest in life what we believe to be true!
We live to provide the evidence that our beliefs are true – even if in reality they are not!
Read this again!
We manifest in life what we believe to be true (even if our beliefs are really lies).
TRUTH #3
The human brain cannot process two opposing thoughts.
Let’s break this down a bit more.
If we believe we are the source of our pain, must suffer to be lovable, deserve pain rather than joy and we are powerless to the pain (all lies we were taught to believe in childhood), then when we become adults, we create the lies we believe and become attracted to relationships and people that continue to bring us pain.
This is how and why abuse spreads from our caretakers to us and from us to our children and is perpetuated from generation to generation. Yes, the broken ones before us taught us to believe their lies; we became pain-based inauthentic versions of ourselves who teach the same lies to our children. We attract those who prey on vulnerabilities we developed because we did not and do not live authentic lives based on our personal truth and divinely provided human design.
Read “What You Don’t Know About Dysfunctional Families and Intergenerational Abuse” here to learn more.
In addition, emotional vampires like narcissists and psychopaths who cannot generate their own power, bank on our vulnerabilities and the false beliefs that we are deserving of pain and are powerless to those who trigger it.
TRUTH #4
Abusers find us. We do not find them!!
Sorry to disappoint you, but abusers do not have some magical power over us and no, we are not the source of our pain and we do not deserve to be in relationships with weak, spineless, aggressive, uncompassionate, lazy people who steal our energy from us and who want all the benefits we can provide without any of the work.
Listen and learn more on the “Toxic Tango of Empaths and Narcissists” here.
They are aggressive but the truly weak ones who cannot generate their own power so they steal ours from us. Aggression is not power, folks. Abusers hunt for and prey for those with our vulnerabilities, the false beliefs and fears we were taught in childhood. In fact, they bank on our vulnerabilities so they can feed off of our compassion and benefit from us, like a parasite feeds off of its host, for a very long time. Read more here on the differences between harm, fear and real danger.
TRUTH #5
We can heal. Our abusers cannot.
The good, and really not so surprising news, is that with hard work, self-compassion, and self-care, our brains can rewire. Absolutely they can. We have the divine ability to release the pain and replace these false beliefs (the lies we were taught to believe) with truth, build our self-worth back up to their true levels, take our power back, and then find others whose truth aligns with ours in power balanced mutually respectful relationships we truly are deserving of.
This is how we heal! This is how we thrive! This is how we become the deserving joy-based authentic versions of ourselves we were put on this earth to be!
I explore these truths and share many more lessons, tips, and tools that will facilitate your healing in Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can read more about the book and purchase a copy here.
May your spiritual source guide and protect you in your healing and in your search for truth!
Take Your Power Back is Now Available for Purchase
Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors is for sale!
You can read an excerpt and purchase a copy of this groundbreaking book here!
Thanks to Dr. Patrick Gannon, PhD, Co-Founder of the ASCA (Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse) Self-Help Recovery Program for this great review!!
Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors is a practical and inspirational guide that focuses on key issues faced by adult survivors. Evelyn Ryan’s words of support and encouragement will be a source of emotional nourishment for adult survivors as they go through recovery. The book gets inside the emotional consequences of abuse. In particular, it shows how abuse impacts self-esteem and how survivors are inclined to unconsciously seek power-imbalanced relationships with narcissistic partners. The 7 Healing Lessons are cogently described dynamics tied to one’s past and the corrective thinking that is necessary for recovery. The focus on the ASCA Self-Help Program (Adult Survivors of Child Abuse) in the chapter on the Healing and Recovery Journey dovetails perfectly with the central message of this inspirational book: you can recover your authentic self by committing to make specific changes that are essential to life success but it will take hard work, persistence and most importantly, a COMMITMENT TO YOURSELF. I can see that survivors will want to read and re-read sections of this book for on-going support and inspiration – THE WORDS ARE THAT POWERFUL! Full of helpful lists, psychological insights and practical suggestions on how to take charge of one’s inner life to facilitate recovery, this book is an undiscovered gem!
Patrick Gannon, PhD
Co-Founder
ASCA Self-Help Recovery Program
Can Malignant Narcissism Be Cured?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Here’s the simple answer:
No!
Can narcissists have redeeming character traits? Intelligence? Of course they can. But they permanently lack the qualities we as humans need to build and sustain integrity of character and meaningful healthy relationships.
Therapy can help narcissists put on the brakes if they go to therapy and the therapists are skilled in their covert aggressive personalities and know how to deal with their perverted thinking including their manipulation, lack of compassion, aggression, combativeness and need to win. However, as summarized below, based on research and the collective opinions of the “real experts” on character disturbances who have studied and treated thousands of narcs and their victims, there is no cure.
Read more at http://drgeorgesimon.com and listen to Dr. James Fallon in “Crime Talk.”
How Do Our Characters Develop?
Our characters incrementally build through our life experiences, hard work, mistakes and successes and are chiseled permanently like sculpture into our being. Our characters that develop as we age, whether ones of integrity or disturbed manipulative ones, cannot be undone.
We all have to work to build self-worth, self-esteem, self-assuredness, and self-reliance, the qualities, skills and abilities that motivate and sustain us through life. However, this process goes haywire in narcissists (and some other disordered individuals) who lose these abilities as well as the ability to self-soothe. Instead, they learn to manipulate power or whatever they want or need to sustain themselves from others. They remain like small children, always dependent on others for survival. Their characters do not develop and predictably remain “childlike.” They forever remain human “parasites.”
Their thinking, as they grow into adults, distorts and they believe they are entitled (like any small child) to all the benefits of humanity and of life without working for them. They permanently view their adult hosts as a small child views its mother. A child cannot care for itself, right? And does not know it is dependent on its mother and does not care if the mother is generous or self-sacrificing or not. A small child does not even understand it is a separate being from its mother and has no empathy for its mother. It just gets and takes from its mother what it wants as well as needs and, as a child, is validly entitled to. And if it does not, well, it then rages, cries, and has tantrums.
Sound familiar? It should because arrested development causes the characters of narcissists to remain forever in a helpless child like state and not develop the elements needed as they age to adapt, improve, self-soothe, regulate their own emotions, love unconditionally and to work for what they need to sustain their own happiness. They permanently lose the ability to become a normal functioning human being similar to a feral child raised in the wild who loses many of the human cognitive and emotional abilities if not developed by a certain age.
Narcissists permanently lack the human capabilities to ensure our normal emotional development and that allow us to integrate and interact in emotionally healthy ways with other humans. They have lost those functions because their brains have lost the functions that allow them to do so. Their thinking and beliefs are skewed. They are sort of like mutants who look normal on the outside but in reality are not. I refer to them as “The Lacks” because they are permanently missing the key elements we need to function “normally.” They are forever stuck in a “less than as adult humans were designed” state. And, so, their characters and thinking become disturbed, disordered, broken. They are forever unable to act on their “free will.” They have learned instead to maladapt by filling these gaps with energy parasitically sourced from and manipulated from others.
Let’s explore these “gaps” further.
The Roles of Compassion and Empathy in Human Existence
Having compassion and learning to use it responsibly are critical to our individual and collective existence. It allows us to function in relationships with others and as a society. Compassion is critical to our emotional health and our character development and personal relationships.
We need compassion to care about and for ourselves and others and they for us. It enables us as we mature to learn emotional empathy, the ability to actually put ourselves in other’s shoes and feel what others are feeling. Empathy is a potential ability those with compassion can learn and matures as the brain develops and as our characters develop. That ability to “mirror” ourselves emotionally in others allows us to love and to be loved reciprocally. Compassion allows us to value ourselves and others and motivates us to care for ourselves and others and strive to end our own and other’s suffering and pain. Compassion allows us to tolerate and adapt to change and other’s differences and to coexist in peace and harmony. It prevents a total chaotic society.
The levels of compassion and empathy vary from person to person. Unfortunately, some of us can be born with too much (e.g. empaths) and some of us are not born with enough (e.g. narcissists and psychopaths).
What are a Narcissist’s Major “Character” Gaps?
Well, at the top of the list is the lack of compassion. They lack empathy and the ability to love. They have exaggerated fear of shame. These are the most significant gaps in their disturbed characters that prevent their self-worth and self-reliance from developing and that cause them to become emotional parasites and prey on others and not have effective healthy relationships with others of their own kind. So, doesn’t it make sense that empaths who have too much compassion would be targets of narcissists who lack compassion?
READ MORE ON WHAT MAKES US VULNERABLE TO NARCISSISTS.
Preeminent neuroscientist, Dr. James Fallon reports in “Crime Talk” that narcissists and psychopaths are genetically predisposed to aggression, violence and lacking compassion and emotional empathy and for psychopaths, lacking conscience. They do, however, possess cognitive empathy, the ability to recognize emotions in others. The pleasure centers of their brains are also affected so narcissists and psychopaths do not get pleasure like normal folks would get such as from reading a book.
What I find most interesting is Dr. Fallon’s description of how their “evil genes” are “turned on” by abuse (including coddling) in childhood. Psychopaths and narcissists, however, use the functioning parts of their brains and those that support reasoning and planning to con you and manipulate you. Their brains, according to Dr. Fallon, create a work around in order for them to survive and abuse and con from you what they want and need and they do not care what impact that has on you.
“Why would I work for anything to achieve a goal that I do not know I am worthy of achieving and I am not confident I can achieve when I am entitled to do minimal work and use others’ successes to make me look good and provide an illusion that I am successful?”
As depraved as this sounds, this is a realistic example of the skewed thinking of what Dr. George K. Simon, a preeminent expert on manipulative aggressive personalities and author of the best sellers In Sheep’s Clothing, Character Disturbance, and The Judas Syndrom refers to as the “covert aggressive personalities” that include the pathological narcissists and psychopaths. Dr. Simon confirms that narcissistic personalities lack the capacity to love because they lack empathy and the warning signs of such empathy deficits are always in the attitudes they display toward accepting work and obligation. Narcissists simply detest putting out effort that might, even in part, benefit someone else.
READ MORE ON NARCISSISTS AND CHARACTER, WORK AND OBLIGATION HERE.
Dr. Simon also verifies that narcissists can work very hard and can spend inordinate amounts of time and energy to get something they want. As most of us very well know, they can put in extraordinary efforts to groom and love bomb a potential mate or spouse. But putting the same amount of energy into finding or keeping a legitimate job or a personal relationship, taking care of a sick family member, demonstrating the loyalty and consistency necessary to be considered for advancement, or making the investment in personal self-development to merit consideration for more advanced positions are completely different matters and very unattractive enterprises to them. They want all the benefits of marriage, for example, without having to work for them or earn them!
Dr. Simon emphasizes that narcissists resist working to become better human beings more than any other kind of work. So even when it comes to respect and love and admiration, they want to come by them in the same manner as everything else – without having to earn them. And guess what folks? How do we build integrity of character? You got it …by working hard to set goals, make a plan to achieve them, being successful, and learning lessons through mistakes we make along the way. The normal human desire to work for those things to improve themselves are lacking in the disordered. And as a result, the characters of the narcissists do not mature or develop. They remain “deficient” humans with questionable to poor characters and even criminal ones who manipulate from the truly good people what they need to sustain themselves. So in essence, they are and remain human parasites, man and woman “babies” who are dependent on others for emotional sustenance.
Malignant Narcissism, Cures, and Change
Narcissists rarely, if ever, seek professional care or ever want to change because they like themselves just the way they are and loathe working on self-improvement. Very few psychology professionals are even trained or equipped to deal with them. So, if they choose to change (which the probability for is close to zero), very few professionals will be able to treat them competently anyway. And even if they are treated by a competent therapist who teaches them to become aware of their depravity and how to temper it, they will still lack compassion and empathy, and they will continue to fake the new “behaviors” to con you and others to serve none other than themselves. They will remain unable to love and sustain the behaviors that support reciprocal emotionally healthy relationships. They will still think like and be narcissists.
So, you cannot “love” a narcissist to change or teach them to be compassionate. Narcissists have a conscience and know exactly what they are doing. They simply do not care and no one can make them care. It would be like telling you to stop caring about others or to stop having compassion or to tell a leopard to change its spots. These are the skewed and permanent parts of a pathological narcissist’s thinking and emotional development that cause the irreparable damage to their “lacking” characters.
Can Narcissists Learn to Change Bad Behaviors?
Of course, they can. They are master manipulators and while they lack emotional empathy, they do not lack cognitive empathy. So they readily can identify emotions in others and learn and plan to manipulate them. They conned you into “liking” them or loving them and they learned to charm you. Didn’t they? They also turned on you on a dime when their pathological envy and sick needs to destroy you and manipulate from you what they believe in their evil minds they are entitled to take without any of the work kicked in. This is because the disorder, like Dr. Fallon reports above, does not impact parts of the brain where they plan and scheme and strategize.
Can Narcissists Be Cured?
Can you cure a vampire? A parasite?
Our characters, as discussed above, are permanently chiseled into our being. Disorders by definition are permanent character flaws. Disorders are not bad habits that we can break and replace with newer and healthier ones. Can the disordered “behaviors” be diagnosed and perhaps treated? Of course. But changing a behavior (which is close to impossible in narcissists who love themselves just the way they are) will not “cure” the “permanent” gaps in their characters or distorted thinking and the ability to change a behavior does not make a disordered person now “normal” or “healed.” And, in fact, for a narcissist, changing a harmful behavior by learning to “put on the brakes” masks the disorder and actually, in my opinion, makes them more dangerous since it adds to their portfolio of combat tactics and better enables them to change their outward demeanor like a chameleon changes its colors to match the “environment.” Most importantly, remember, they can never regain compassion and emotional empathy, the key emotion and character trait, respectively, that humans need to sustain not only themselves but also normal emotionally healthy relationships and that are needed to build integrity of character.
Accepting this along with learning how not to be vulnerable to them and in some cases, protecting your children are huge in healing for narcissistic abuse survivors. Dr. Fallon, who is a self-diagnosed narcissist himself, believes that if we as parents see the signs of pathological narcissism in our children early enough (assuming we are knowledgeable in the signs and are healed ourselves), we can try to get them competent care which may increase the likelihood that they do not turn out that bad, however there are no guarantees. In the best case, they will still be narcissists, however, they will fall at the lower end of the severity spectrum of harm they can inflict. Read more here on what parents can do.
However, there is one fundamental difference between narcissists and the people they target. The brains of the abused can rewire and heal the skewed beliefs that cause their susceptibility to power imbalanced relationships. The damage can be addressed and reversed. The brains of narcissists whose skewed thinking is caused by arrested development lose their ability to rewire and, therefore, narcissists, as Dr. Fallon confirms, cannot heal and cannot be cured. The damage is permanent.
What You Don’t Know About Dysfunctional Families, Pain-Based Thinking, and Intergenerational Abuse
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Bringing clarity to the root causes and sources of the family dysfunction will significantly help alleviate the self-blame and shame that abuse survivors experience and clear a path to healing and recovery.
Dysfunctional abusive families are fueled by unhealed pain-based maladaptive thinking that has been passed on from generation to generation to generation. Most recently, epigenetic studies are exploring the factors that embed trauma in our cellular genetic memories and the resilience to deal with it effectively.
So the abuse that you and I and everyone are experiencing today, at this very moment, along with our emotional pain, was never ours to begin with. They, however, can be traced to unhealed emotional wounds, faulty thinking, and pain from your great great great great great grandfathers and grandmothers.
The Roots of Pain and Abuse in Families
My 89 year old father still shares stories told to him by the elders in the village and in 400 year old songs of attacks from the Turks who took 20,000 men from his island to sell as slaves in Constantinople and Egypt. They ran into the hills to protect themselves! So what did those who survived and who witnessed these vicious attacks along with experiencing the starvation and extreme poverty caused 200 years later by the Greek civil war and Nazis who rampaged the villages do to alleviate the legacy of emotional pain, repressed trauma, and feelings of powerlessness? What about the ones who survived their slavery and torture? On a recent trip to Greece, my guide and esteemed historian Maria, described how her family were refugees from Smyrna after it was burned to the ground by the Turks during the Greek-Armenian genocide in the early 1900’s.
Oh, how they must have suffered and oh, how traumatized they must have been! Could they go to the local clinic for counseling? Or on Facebook for self-help or read a book on healing? I think not! So the trauma became embedded in their cellular memories and repressed in their physical ones. So to survive, they had to become innovative in their methods to alleviate their pain and trauma.
Pain-Filled Families Learn to Prey on Their Own
Monetary or material privilege does not provide genetic entitlement or immunity from abuse, emotional pain, or disease for that matter or guarantee strength or integrity of one’s personal character. Noone is immune to pain, folks, or the damage it causes no matter how far families have come or how “privileged” they are. Psychology did not exist back then in the villages and tribes where all our ancestral roots lie. And repressed pain does not stay repressed forever. What did they do? What could they do? This is how, I profess, it more accurately played out.
The ones with character and kind hearts, compassion, emotional intelligence, and consciences and who were born empaths (and most likely inherited the pain coded in their genetics) went on to become the abused and scapegoats and the ones with the evil cold hearts became the abusers, bullies, golden children and narcissists. Now, abuse did not
always manifest in physical or sexual violence, because the abusers creatively figured out that could play favorites and neglect, ignore, criticize, diminish, denigrate and invalidate their other children and even learn to live vicariously through their successes that they could brag about in the villages. Of course! They figured out a way they could benefit without doing any of the work of actually being a good parent and sacrificing for their children’s benefit! But they could provide an illusion of power and goodness to their small world with the small vision and faulty belief system that they did.
So these dysfunctional pain-addicted families starved not only for nutritional but also emotional sustenance and preyed off of each other’s energy like blood thirsty vampires, recruited other flying monkeys in their dirty dealings and used their own helpless children and siblings as hosts, free fodder for the taking. The abusers could not generate their own energy and needed some way to alleviate their deep-seated and now genetically programmed emotional pain. The pain and trauma that were locked in the family’s genetic code and repressed memories were now free to “express themselves” in abuse and exploitation of their own flesh and blood. Essentially they became “brood parasites,” if you will.
Read more here on the natural parasitic nature of narcissists here.
What better or more
convenient way to self-soothe than to shadow their repressed emotional pain on their own defenseless children and especially the female ones who were less able to defend themselves and the “village idiots” who they could bully and make fun of unhindered with no accountability! The emotionally starved “brood parasites” emotionally cannibalized their own to serve none other than themselves. God forbid that the abused should tell the truth or rebel! Those who did were threatened with abandonment or banishment from the village and even death! This became a key component of the dysfunctional unhealthy unwritten and unchallenged cultural “belief code” of the village reflected in the abusive and exploitive dynamics in what we now call “dysfunctional families.”
Leaving the Village “Takes a Village”
Epigenetic studies related to inheriting pain are providing credence to the adage, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Our genetics, thankfully, do not only make us vulnerable to pain, they also predispose us to psychological resilience that was most certainly needed by those who chose to move and live elsewhere or perhaps to merely act on their right to pursue happiness.
People who chose to leave the village had daunting emotional challenges that required much more than packing up and moving. Not only did they have to heal from inherited pain as well as the pain inflicted from the abuse and scapegoating, they also had to deal with the unwritten tribal belief systems and the accompanying rejection and aggression and even fear of death. Can you imagine the reaction when someone actually acted upon and used their free will and chose to leave the tribe simply because they were unfulfilled and their souls were starving or they were pursuing their heart’s desire? How dare they! How could they? We all can see the extreme impact of culture in the honor killings of children and siblings whose lives are believed to be of lesser importance than the “shame” brought about by their merely acting on their free will. It is very easy to see the impact of those who lack compassion has on their inability to self-sacrifice for their children’s welfare.
Using free will including self-care and self-compassion were frowned upon and severely punished because not only did they threaten the livelihood of the “family” and challenge the village’s and family’s cultural belief system and power balance but they also made the person less available to others to shadow their pain on and threatened their emotional food supply. If those folks became successful? Well, then the abusers could, on a whim and based on how the ego-driven winds were blowing that day, either brag about their accomplishments back in the village or pretend they never happened or simply just lie about them and continue to scapegoat them. So the truly brave and emotionally resilient ones simply left voluntarily knowing that it was all a bunch of glittered crap and nothing but a huge carefully planned illusion created by extremely weak, powerless, uncompassionate, conforming, and evil-hearted people. What about the ones who stayed?
The Vulnerable Ones Stay
Well, the ones, for whatever reasons, who stayed continued to suffer and pass the pain-based wounded thinking, distorted beliefs, and trauma coded genetics to their unknowingly vulnerable children. Perhaps, overcome by fatigue and depression, they committed suicide (like two of my relatives did) and were never spoken of again. The truly evil “broken” ones passed their evil genes and character weaknesses including the inability to self-soothe and create their own energy to the golden children they conceived and coddled who reminded them of their own selves. As adults, they wanted all the benefits of humanity without doing any of the work and learned to create an illusion of normalcy to groom other kind yet wounded people, pretend to love them, marry them, continue to abuse them, and suck their power and energy and souls from them. Or if the marriages were arranged, then matching an abuser to a scapegoat they could overpower was likely.
This is how the cycle of abuse is perpetuated by the legacy of unhealed wounded thinking that is at the root of dysfunctional and abusive families today and the millions of suffering people seeking alleviation of their chronic emotional pain and nourishment for their starving souls! This is the same legacy of unhealed wounded thinking that has contributed significantly to the pandemic of disturbed characters comprising terrorists, bullies, dictators, narcissists, Presidents, and criminals across the world today – the scourge of humanity!
Read more here on terrorism and world-wide pandemic of narcissism.
Abuse Survivors Can Heal and Break the Cycle
What I find very very interesting and what is most important to understand and grasp is that abuse survivors do have the propensity and the strength of character needed to heal from the damage this crazy making causes! In addition, as we heal, our children heal through us. This is how we break the cycle of abuse.
Let’s explore this.
First, we are all born with the inalienable human rights to pursue life, liberty and happiness. No one was born with the right or entitlement to prevent us from using our free will to act on these rights and become our authentic selves just as our founding fathers agreed to in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and its amendments. And so while abusers can try to sabotage our lives and manipulate our power from us, they can never take away our right to freely pursue life, liberty and happiness. There is also now a collective movement in world-wide healing that supports this vehemently. Read more on Facebook and the power of healing.
However, other more “interpersonal” rights we earn as we mature and grow. For example, respect is earned through our experiences and the knowledge and abilities we acquire and our successes and mistakes that cause us to think about, change, and develop our internal beliefs, turn pain into wisdom, and strengthen our character. Credibility and trust are also earned. We are not born credible or trustworthy. The rights to be believed and trusted we work for by demonstrating our trustworthiness to others and they to us.
Learn more on how we build integrity of character, authenticity, and personal strength.
This is how we develop integrity of character. Abusers can temporarily try to interfere with our lives but they cannot prevent us from creating our own unique personal truth and character or make us become someone we are not “designed” to be. They cannot take away our emotional resilience and our drive which are key components to developing integrity of character. Notably, after abuse and trauma, the brain can rewire and heal. Abuse survivors, can unlearn faulty pain-based thinking and replace it with joy-based thinking they come to learn they are worthy of and have the complete right and authority to pursue.
Read more on Facebook and the power of healing.
In regards to families, we all create and become part of “families” separate from our birth family all the time. The rules of emotional health apply to all families and all relationships. A family of birth is not exempt from these rules because they are genetically related. Invisible genetics do not entitle people to abuse, ignore, neglect, degrade, denigrate, betray, abandon, and crap on others. A position in a loving family is a role of honor that is earned by showing the members love, honor and respect in the same way we do them. That is what emotionally healthy mutually beneficial relationships are. That is what love is. And we ALL deserve that – every darn single one of us! That is a universal right as a human being that we are all born with.
Read more on what a family is here.
Narcissistic Abusers Cannot Heal
The abusers, interestingly enough, can heal no sooner than they can change the color of their skin. You cannot teach someone with a disturbed or disordered character how to have compassion, a conscience, and a heart. That is impossible. You either have them or you don’t. So while we are all born with the potential to develop a good character, those with disturbed characters lack the ability to develop one and feel entitled to take what they want rather than earn it through hard work like the rest of us. We can see the biggest differences between narcissists and authentically “good” people when it comes to work, commitment, and obligation. Read more on these differences here.
In addition, developing a virtuous character and maintaining healthy relationships require having compassion and a conscience, traits that are lacking and that do not develop in disturbed characters.
Read more here on what causes malignant narcissism.
Read more here on why there is no cure.
Narcissists will, simply, always be disturbed, covert aggressive emotional frauds and thieves, “human parasites.” They may want all the benefits of what conscientious and virtuous people work for and earn, but they will always lack the integrity, strength, power, and authenticity to truly become good people.
And as the truly good people with integrity of character heal their emotional wounds and come to understand their true self-worth, their children will heal through them. And when they do, not only will they and their children live authentic joy-filled lives, they will thrive. This is how we break the cycles of intergenerational abuse rooted in our genetics and our ancestors’ unhealed emotional pain. This is how we heal ourselves and our children. This is how we take our power and free will back and become the authentic versions of ourselves we were put on this earth to be. I cover these issues including a “how to” healing and recovery plan in much more detail in my book, Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can purchase and read a sneak peek and review of the book here.
Control and Personal Power in Power Imbalanced Relationships
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
“If we live in fear of anything, we give it the power to overcome us.”
~ Michele O’Donnell, Healer, Minister, Author, and Counselor
I have been researching personal power and how it relates to personal success and happiness for decades. Sadly, this is what I discovered. That we have been misinformed about the relationship between abuse and an abuser’s need to control. This does not accurately describe the causes of power imbalance in abusive relationships and actually can hinder an abuse victim’s healing. Let’s break this down.
WHAT IS REAL PERSONAL POWER?
People with real power do not covertly or overtly aggressively go after others’ power because, simply, they do not have to. People with real power work for it. They use their free will to set goals and do the work including getting the education and building the relationships and the integrity of character to achieve them. When they hit a wall, they take further action to course correct or thought correct. They become proficient at creating value for themselves and others. They have what my cousin Alexandra calls “skin in the game.” They tap into themselves to generate the energy and use it freely and willingly to create value that benefits themselves and others that they know they deserve and are worthy of. They use their own energy to nourish their souls and fuel their spirit and self-esteem. They share their power with others, who voluntarily of their own free will, share theirs back.
What is Personal Power and What It’s Not?
Life and relationships, in particular, require a balance of work, commitment, and obligation. It is when this balance of give and take becomes “tipped” that things can become unhealthy fast. The more tipped the balance, the more unhealthy the situation can become. Think about this. Isn’t it always when someone is giving too much and putting in the extraordinary effort or someone is taking too much and not putting in the work (and especially over a long period of time) that things get crazy, stressful, exploitive, abusive, unpleasant, or just plain suck?
Why?
Because, we are not benefitting from the investment of our time, energy, pain, love, effort, education we are expending commensurate with the level of effort we are putting in. Our efforts and our value are never validated. What we believe to be true about ourselves is not validated and what we aspire to never happens so our personal truth and personal worth are never “proved.” We are stuck in a give and give and give (and “no take”) dooloop of unfulfillment and emotional exhaustion.
Read more here on the The Five Pillars of Personal Worth, Power, and Authenticity.
WHERE DO NARCISSISTS AND OTHER EMOTIONAL VAMPIRES FIT IN?
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
There are huge differences between real authentically powerful people who have integrity of character and people who are inherently weak and pretend to have power and integrity of character. The latter are what preeminent psychologist Dr. George K. Simon refers to in his best seller, Character Disturbance: The Phenomenon of Our Age as the character disturbed with covert aggressive personalities. These are the ones who want all the benefits of life without earning them because they believe they are entitled, because they believe in their disordered brains that the rules of life, law, love and personal honor and respect do not apply to them.
Read more on narcissists, work and obligation here.
These are the energy thieves, the narcissists, psychopaths, abusers, con artists, criminals, and manipulators who aggressively and offensively go after others’ power because they cannot generate their own and because they do not want to work for it. These human parasites want all the benefits of life, marriage, friendship, a successful career without any of the hard work. Now, mind you, I am not claiming that they these folks do not have potential power or perhaps even redeeming personal traits or talents, skills and abilities. Of course they do. But they will use those talents, skills and abilities to serve themselves and to manipulate you and your children and not to better themselves. They abuse their power and use it to manipulate others’ power. In fact, their greatest aversion is working to better themselves. They will have no interaction with you unless they in some way benefit and you in some way are giving up your power to them. They have to win always. They are in constant combat. This is just how these predictable and annoying characters tick.
Read more on narcissists, work and obligation here.
We cannot survive without emotional sustenance, folks, so these energy vampires, like the blood-sucking vampires, will shrivel and die if they do not steal attention, adulation, love, winning, coming out ahead, or whatever they need by creating illusions of normalcy by grooming you, telling you they love you, conning you, putting you on the defensive, and preying on your vulnerabilities. So they have no problem working for what they want and what will serve them and aggressively and covertly go after the power they want and need and target the most vulnerable and easy to manipulate and who do you think the best to feed off are. Other narcissists? Other character disturbed people? Others of their own kind are very very unpalatable but no one is immune to their attacks not even other narcissists. But the most tasty and yummy to feed their emotional gaps are none other than the survivors of abuse and, in particular, empaths, people with high emotional intelligence and compassion.
Yes, the evil of society, the emotional and energy vampires prey on the wounded, the ones who unknowingly give up their power to those who trigger their repressed legacy pain. These are the ones discussed in the Bible that “call evil good and good evil and put darkness for light and light for darkness.” They will cease at nothing in order to get not only what they need but what they want and believe they are entitled to take.
The wolves, by the way, are continuing to pose as sheep and are becoming more creative in their combat tactics. Narcissists are now even posing at healers and are starting healing Facebook Pages and websites in the guise of having compassion and wanting to help the exact people they victimized and traumatized and people are falling for it. So they have figured out a way to continue even to feed off the healing energy of their suffering victims that should be reserved for themselves and their survival.
BELIEVING ABUSERS NEED TO “CONTROL” US IS MISLEADING
Be wary folks. Reading that abusers “need to control others” is very very misleading. This, in my opinion, can significantly prevent healing and actually keep people in abusive
relationships by causing us to focus too much on the abusers and falsely leading us to think they can be healed and feeding our toxic shame by communicating the untruth that somehow we are the weak faulty ones and the abusers are the strong ones with some magical power over us. In fact, it is totally the opposite. Abusers are covertly or overtly aggressive but they are very very weak individuals with extremely low self-worth who cannot freely generate their own personal power.
Let’s examine this further.
We (not others) are the only ones who are able to use our free will to nurture our souls and our self-esteem and self-assurance that serve our personal needs and sustain our emotional health. This is the human design. This is authentic legitimate personal power. Abusers, on the other hand, are character disturbed and believe in their distorted minds that aggression and manipulation and taking from others (what they have worked for) is power. The last time I looked, that was called theft, exploitation, weakness, character disturbance, covert aggression, bribery, burglary, abuse, and evil.
So contrary to what we are taught, 
abusers don’t need to “control” you. More accurately, they use aggression to create an illusion of power that intimidates you and triggers your fears and makes you feel powerless so they can manipulate your power from you because they lack real ability and desire to generate the power needed to sustain themselves. This is why they move from victim to victim to victim. The level of aggression and their combat tools vary but abuse in any form is abuse be it physical, violent, emotional, invalidation, or neglect and criminal activity is criminal activity. This is why we have laws to protect us, right? Whatever the case, it is all aggressive offensive combat and they use love and grooming and other tactics to play on our vulnerabilities including our overly developed consciences and compassion and insecurities to trap us. They want all the benefits of what we can provide them without the work. They are weak powerless predictable parasites in human form. They are, simply, depraved and broken.
Read more on narcissists, work and obligation here.
THE DIFFERENCES IN AGGRESSION, POWER, HARM AND CONTROL
Now, let’s look a bit more at abusers’ aggressive combat tactics and how they impact personal power and control. There is a huge difference between aggression, power, harm and control. Abusers use aggression to create an illusion of power. They use their covert aggressive skills to manipulate you to believe you have no power and they are the “All Powerful Oz” who, remember, was actually a great creator of smoke and mirrors that was discovered by Toto a very small scruffy dog. In between the abuse, abusers groom you. So the cycles of abuse and makeup sessions create peptide addictions in the brain. We end up mistaking the chemical trauma bonding for love. We were conditioned to believe we must suffer to be lovable and that we are defenseless and powerless to emotional pain. We are conditioned to believe that only the abusers can relieve the pain. As healer, minister, author, and counselor Michele O’Donnell states, “If we live in fear of anything, we give it the power to overcome us.”
This is not love, this is not power, and this is not the basis of emotionally healthy relationships. This is, however, the basis of power imbalanced abusive relationships and what causes us to unknowingly give up our power to abusers, become complicit in our own abuse, and perpetuate the cycle of intergenerational abuse.
Abuse, folks, is not about control. Abuse just like healing and recovery is not about the abusers. Abuse and healing are all about us, fixing our skewed beliefs and taking OUR power back. I explore these issues in much more detail in Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can read a sneak peek and review of the book and purchase a copy here.
How Abusive Childhoods Cause Us to Sabotage Our Health and Happiness
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
“We all have inalienable rights to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Absolutely we do. However, if we are prevented from pursuing them because we have damaged the only vessel that we have to travel in that journey, we are sabotaging not only our own health and happiness but also our children’s by teaching them the same maladaptive unhealthy thinking patterns and beliefs. And, frankly, we and our children all deserve so much better.”
The article, “The Damaging Effects of Living An Inauthentic Life and How to Change It,” by Tracey Crossley provides probably the most important lesson to adult survivors of childhood abuse on the damaging effects of childhood abuse.
This is why.
Because abuse survivors were punished in youth whenever their authentic selves emerged to protect and care for themselves and they were rewarded for being who their abusers wanted them to be to serve none other than the abusers.
We learned, as a result, at that moment in time when we were defenseless dependent children and our brains were in critical stages of development, to become inauthentic versions of ourselves in order to cope and respond to pain. We disconnected rather than integrated with ourselves emotionally, did not learn self-care and self-compassion, and learned to maladapt and rely on others who cause the pain (we think we deserve) to soothe the pain. As we took in too much pain and trauma, our bodies defensively repressed it, temporarily stored it away in our memory banks until we were more mature and better equipped to handle it.
As is described so eloquently in Tracy Crossley’s article, as we go out into the world and live our lives and develop relationships, go to school, and pursue our passions, we make decisions based on false perceptions and beliefs about the world and ourselves along with our unhealed trauma wounds. In the process, we never learn what the real things are that nurture OUR souls and OUR self-worth and that make US happy and how to pursue them. We end up neglecting our own needs and become overly dependent on other people to tell us what we are doing is worthy and we use, by default, their happiness to bring us happiness rather than sourcing that from within our own selves.
Let’s explore this not so obvious point a bit more.
Living Lies Cannot Sustain Us
Living lies just like physically abusing or neglecting our bodies cannot sustain us because our bodies were not designed to work that way. We are fighting nature by fooling ourselves and what will nature do? It will rebel and when it does, the consequences can be severe and for some irreversible. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So when you do not supply the body what it needs to function properly, it will attempt to take from somewhere else.
So if you do not provide the body the proper nourishment it needs to survive and sustain itself or you take in too many toxic substances or stress your body above what it was designed to do, the body cannot develop normally and visually, you look bad and physically and emotionally, you feel bad. You become physically and emotionally unfit.
Now for a while, the liver or body systems that are being taxed will filter out the crap and your natural defenses will take over until..wham! You have overtaxed them and they no longer are able to filter out the garbage faster than it is coming in or you have strained that vertebrae or ligament or muscle as far as it can be stretched. You experience emotional and physical pain. These are the cues that what you have been putting in the body is not sufficient to nourish and sustain it and you need to stop doing what you are doing and course correct.
So you could take an aspirin or an antacid or put on makeup or get false teeth or take high blood pressure medicine or cholesterol medicine that will mask the damage and temporarily relieve and sustain yourself, nevertheless until you provide your body the proper nutrition to care for it and ensure its works as it was designed, something will continue to give and you will continue to risk being at some level of pain and suffering.
How Overtaxing the Mind Starves Us of Emotional Nourishment
Equally, when you do not provide the mind what it needs to flourish or you overtax it and take in too much emotional toxicity or pain, the spirit will starve for nourishment and you will exceed the pain threshold your brain was designed to handle. Read more on nourishing our souls. The brain has remarkable plasticity but it is not good at spontaneous healing. The mind and spirit will become traumatized and malnourished and you will become emotionally fatigued, exhausted, stressed, or depressed. Sustained emotional stress also results in more physical damage to the body because the human body is comprised of integrated systems. Stress hormone levels rise for longer periods than the body is designed for leading to inflammation. The body responds with recognizing the inflammation as disease that the body’s immune system attacks. The neurological system is connected and interrelated to all the body’s systems, hence, healthy body, healthy mind and vice versa.
In essence, when you mess with nature, you mess with your own divine AUTHENTIC and integrated design. To be happy we have to learn and embrace a healthy life style that includes not only our emotional fitness but also our fitness related to our achievements and relationships and our physical health. Read more here.
Masking Pain Will Not Address It
And like an aspirin that provides temporary relief from physical pain, we can bandaid our emotional pain. Absolutely, we can. Doctors can label us with this condition or that and prescribe antidepressants or mood elevators or we can self-medicate with alcohol or illegal drugs or food or people and find many other creative ways to mask the pain and continue to be someone we are not and look to others, even abusers and manipulators, or things to define our worth and for instant relief and gratification. We can even deny it. The body when the trauma is too much for the mind to bear, even represses it. However, wounds that cannot be accessed cannot be healed. Some of us may even believe this works for us. That is until we get older and our liver or kidneys or heart or soul become stressed to capacity or until we face some major emotional catastrophe that tests our self-reliance, self-assurance, and coping skills. Then and for some, only then, do they experience the perfect storm and are faced with reality and like Dr. Phil says learn in the hardest and worst way that what they have done has not worked for them and has resulted in immeasurable and, for some, irreparable damage.
We all have inalienable rights to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Absolutely we do. However, if we are prevented from pursuing them because we have damaged the only vessel that we have to travel in that journey, we are sabotaging not only our own health and happiness but also our children’s by teaching them the same maladaptive unhealthy thinking patterns and beliefs. And, frankly, we and our children all deserve so much better.
How Abuse Makes Our Emotions Toxic
Let’s now look at abuse and how it impacts our abilities to regulate our emotions and engage in healthy relationships. Everyone who is abused is most likely not able to recognize the “good” in a healthy relationship because they never learned to relate good treatment to love and to defining their worthiness. The belief filters in abuse survivors become skewed. The magnitude of the damage depends on what “fears” are driving you as well. Read more in “Why Did I Get Involved with a Jerk and What Can I Do About It.”
Part of healing and building self-worth is learning what self-love is and what healthy loving relationships of reciprocity are. We are all born lovable however loving relationships are not an entitlement. They are worked for and earned based on honoring each other’s wants and needs in sickness and health and in good times and bad in a respectful manner beneficial to both parties. Emotionally intelligent and healthy individuals know this and live it. They are clear on their personal worth and lovability and the rules of healthy respectful human interactions.
When we are abused, our pain-based emotions become faulty and lose their intended design functions of being reliable protective safety measures and providing depth and color to our lives. They go haywire and rather than protect us, do us and our children more harm as we teach the same distorted thinking patterns to them as well. We and our children become vulnerable targets of energy and power vampires. Read more in How Emotions Go Haywire in Abuse Survivors.
Abuse victims can develop an exaggerated anger response due to suppressed emotions from routine invalidation and learned emotional helplessness. This can trigger a knee jerk aggressive anger response that can do us and others immense harm and cause us to sabotage our own recovery as we blame others for the discomfort we experience from our uncontrolled emotions. The response can be covertly or overtly aggressive rather than constructive. this does not mean we suppress our anger or our feelings. To the contrary, it means we can learn to recognize the emotional root causes that trigger the discomfort and the steps proactively and effectively communicate our discomfort, problem solve a solution to address it, and benefit from the experience rather than repetitively continue to harm ourselves and others and sabotage our recovery.
Don’t forget that in life, we move in the direction of, create in reality, and do what we believe to be true even if it is a lie and even if it does not serve us and harms us. That is what makes us get involved with abusers and not leave them on the spot. Our filters for screening out narcissistic jerks were damaged in childhood and most likely many other abusive power imbalanced relationships we have had in our lives.
The problem is that if we meet someone who is authentically a good person and who is NOT inflicting emotional pain on us and NOT pushing our fear and pain buttons, we are at risk of feeling unloved, unfulfilled and unworthy and then proceed to sabotage the “good” relationship to keep ourselves in our comfortable and familiar state of shame that, of course, while painful, we nevertheless “believe” we can handle better, say, than our fear of being betrayed and abandoned and do not believe we are worthy of anything better.
This is an excellent example of how abusive childhoods cause pain addictions and skewed beliefs in personal power that rule our lives that become “pain-seeking” and “pain-avoiding” rather than “joy-seeking” and “joy-filled” (e.g. joyful). While we do this unconsciously and not deliberately, these vulnerabilities make us susceptible to attacks from emotional predators and for a life of chronic unhappiness, unfulfilment, and emotional pain and fatigue.
“The problem is that if we meet someone who is authentically a good person and who is NOT inflicting emotional pain on us and NOT pushing our fear and pain buttons, we are at risk of feeling unloved, unfulfilled and unworthy and then proceed to sabotage the ‘good’ relationship to keep ourselves in our comfortable state of shame that, of course, while painful, we nevertheless ‘believe’ we can handle better than, say, our fear of being betrayed and abandoned and do not believe we are worthy of anything better.”
Let’s break this down a bit further as it applies to relationships. Do relationships with jerks bring you pain? Absolutely, however, it is pain that you associate with being lovable and a good person and believe you are powerless to and you do not believe you deserve better. You also in your childhood most likely developed codependency tendencies and learned to self-sacrifice for other people. Perhaps you are an empath with too much compassion and believe you must fix other’s problems before you take care of your own needs? Perhaps you never learned you are worthy of being happy and were rewarded only for taking care of other’s needs?
This maladaptive thinking is what keeps us vulnerable to abusers and how abuse makes our emotions become toxic to our own selves. We learn to maladapt and confuse self-worth with avoidance of pain rather than pursuing goals and relationships that bring us real joy. Our decisions become heavily based on our learned pain tolerances and perceived weaknesses rather than our personal value and power and worthiness of joy. We become attracted to power imbalanced relationships because we believe we should suffer to be lovable and can “handle” the shame and emotional pain from abuse better than our fear of abandonment from being alone. So a relationship with a “good” person would not be appealing to abuse survivors who would not relate being treating well to being lovable or worthy and would not be able to “see” the good in it and therefore, would perceive no value in it.
Here’s the good news!
We are only born with two fears: fear of falling and fear of loud noises. All others fears, pains, apprehensions, anxieties, phobia, bad habits? Well, those we learned. And just like we learned them, we can UNLEARN them.
I am committed here at Yourlifelifter and wrote Take Your Power Back to help you do exactly that and show you where to look to discover the real truth, facilitate your healing, and live as the joy-based authentic person you were put on this earth to be.
On Free Will, Character, and Tolerance
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
If you do not provide the body the proper nourishment it needs to survive and sustain itself or you take in too many toxic substances or stress your body above what it was designed to do, the body cannot develop normally and visually, you look bad and physically and emotionally, you feel bad. You become physically and emotionally “unfit.” Read more here.
Nourishment, we must remember, includes emotional nourishment. We cannot sustain ourselves emotionally if we are not allowed or are prevented from acting on our inalienable rights to pursue happiness, to find meaning in our lives, to become who we individually are. So we need to use our personal power to act on our free will to survive and to support our emotional health and overall well-being. In fact, our human bodies were divinely designed to use our free will to search for and pursue “truth” and build the resilience needed to sustain our happiness. Let’s examine this further.
No one has the right to prevent us from becoming our authentic selves including manipulating our power from us to redirect it to serve themselves. In fact, this is just plain dangerous and in many cases, illegal. No one was born with that right or is entitled to that right just as our founding fathers agreed to in our Bill of Rights and the Constitution and its amendments. Our authority is limited to solely, if we choose, inform others we don’t agree and why or this is what we believe and why. That is about it! You can’t debate the “correctness” of beliefs or conclude that mine are wrong and yours are right. What we believe is what we believe even if we believe lies and think those of others are skewed and way off base. We cannot turn personal beliefs into laws and expect them to hold steadfast and true. Self-righteousness is not righteous.
We do have laws founded in morality and righteousness that mandate the boundaries of our actions to ensure a peaceful society, prevent abuse of authority, and support the principle that we are all different and have a common right to act on our free will, choose our paths in life, and develop the abilities to do so. These laws have evolved and proved their effectiveness over time. However, laws cannot tell us how to think or what to pursue or what not to pursue or motivate us to do so. That we must figure out on our own. That is the beauty of law. To strive for a chaos free society, knowing that perfection will never be achieved because we are all different and fallible, even law. When the laws become self-righteous or exploitive, however, and prevent folks from acting on their free will (assuming people are capable of making decisions that do not do them harm), people start making their own rules and rebelling. Why? Because directing, manipulating, or restricting that what innately makes us human and what we as humans are uniquely designed for and what drives our passions and our unalienable rights to pursue happiness and use our own free will to pursue it, in short, create chaos. They go against the laws of nature, conflict with our life’s purpose, and prevent us from being who we were put on this earth to be and to live harmoniously with others.
We can’t tell people how to think or manipulate their thinking and what to do even if we do not believe or agree with what they think or what they do. We can try, however, this is self-serving, exploitive, fraudulent, immoral, disrespectful, dishonorable, and abusive. This is also invalidating and is attempting to take away a person’s divine right to free will as well as equal access to resources and opportunities to sustain their health and well-being and to act on their inalienable rights. As stated earlier, when we attempt to do so, chaos ensues.
How does free will relate to our personal rights and relationships? As discussed, we are all born with the inalienable rights to pursue life, liberty and happiness and find meaning in our lives. We are also innately born lovable. However, other more interpersonal “rights” such as the rights to be believed or to be trusted or respected are earned and learned. We work for these rights by gaining the skills, knowledge, and abilities and, more so, demonstrate our worthiness through our actions and words that stem from beliefs we validate through our life experiences and our personal interactions. This is how our characters develop and become chiseled permanently into our being. This is how we develop personal power and relational health. Read more here.
Let’s look at my business and Facebook ownership, for example. This ownership provides me authority but gives me no special entitlement. Being an abuse survivor or having the ability to manage a Facebook page and business provide me no special rights or divine authority to be believed or the exploit those who are seeking healing solutions. It simply doesn’t work that way. And to think otherwise is irrational and ludicrous.
I could, like any unethical, weak, exploitive, or self-serving person just tell you all a bunch of lies or what you “need” to hear to manipulate your power from you and continue to exploit you. I assure you that is not the case. To the contrary, I, like other legitimate healers, earned this position and the respect that comes with it through my hard work, education, authenticity, professional certifications, actions, validation from others including experts, other credible Facebook owners, and my community members and customers who through reliability of my service, have learned to trust me. I work everyday to become better to better serve those who rely on my credibility to do so because I and they deserve that level of quality.
So no one has the right to judge others, dictate how others behave or how or what they choose because, simply, they have not earned that right and it is not their “divine” purpose to do so. Those who think they do, are the ones who have maladapted and instead of becoming of working to become self-reliant, resilient, and self-sustaining people, learned to parasitically source their emotional nourishment from someone or something else. They have become dangerous to society, the punks, thugs, con artist, fakes, and frauds. They are the ones who as described in the Bible, turn darkness into light and light into darkness.
Read more on why people are evil.
In reality, if we want to legitimately change the behaviors of others, we can only influence them to use their free will to change through our words and actions proven credible, effective, and trustworthy over time. Bringing value to others is the only power we have in relationships. That is about it. The rest is left to others to decide. Accepting this and others without judgment is the key to tolerance and compassion that are what drive mankind’s survivability and sustainability and our own ability to adapt to that we know we have no power to change and using our free will to change that which we do.
And when we find others who reflect our truth back to us?
Well, that is when the magic starts and that is what life is all about.
Why Healing From Abuse Is Never About The Abuser
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Excerpted from Evelyn Ryan’s book, Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors. Read a review of the book here.
The only person you are here to serve is your authentic self. When you serve your authentic self, your decisions and actions fulfill your legitimate emotional needs. All of life’s pieces fall into place, since the core of your being is truth-based and authentically you. You know you can rely on yourself for your safety. You feel safe in your own body.
What happens to us when we are abused, betrayed by those we intimately trust? Betrayal is one of the most painful human experiences. The victim’s response is shame, internal pain, self-loathing, trauma, and fear. We translate that into the false belief that something is wrong with us. But there is nothing wrong with us! There never was. We did not do anything wrong. Being who we are is not wrong. Our love was real. Our trust was real. Theirs was not. We were innocent defenseless victims.
GET TIPS FOR DEALING WITH THE SHAME FROM BETRAYAL.
Our attackers are character-flawed, disordered. We were betrayed because we trusted and depended on unhealed abusers, manipulators, and untrustworthy broken people. They betrayed us. We were betrayed because that is what betrayers do. It was not personal in that sense. Our attackers targeted us because they are experts on homing in on people with our vulnerabilities.
They need people with our vulnerabilities so that their manipulation tactics will be
successful, so that they will win the challenge and the ultimate prize: our energy, attention, and adulation. Before you and me, there were many, and after us, there will be many more. We were betrayed because we were vulnerable. We did not ask to be victimized, but we played a role in the abuse that we need to understand and accept.
Many of us are empaths—highly sensitive natural healers, compassionate people with
high emotional intelligence. We did not learn to use our compassion and trust responsibly; we depended on untrustworthy people to define our self-worth. Our emotional vulnerabilities make us complicit in our own abuse by keeping us susceptible to abusers who preyed on us and kept us addicted to pain. This truth can be very painful, and yet it’s life-changing. It will change your life forever and for the better. When we know better and that we are worthy of the knowledge, we do better.
Anger, resentment, and revenge will not heal us. Self-avoidance will not heal us. Focusing on our abusers will not heal us. Taking responsibility and accepting without judgment will. In healing, we learn to become our authentic selves—and to stop seeking approval of our worth from others. Healing is a learning process. Through asking the right questions and seeking and finding truthful answers in a safe and trusting environment, we learn to turn our compassion and courage inward to support shifts in our thinking that lead to long-term emotional health and happiness.
We learn to befriend ourselves (who we long ago abandoned) by accepting our powerlessness, committing to our healing, challenging our thoughts, releasing our fear and shame, and incrementally taking our power back as we lift up our thinking and discover and honor our real selves and our personal divinity.
Do we need to understand our abusers to heal? Yes. But minimally and only in order to understand what they are missing and what they exploited in us and what faulty beliefs make us vulnerable to them. In fact, focusing too much on them will prevent you from healing.
Read more here on how much do we need to know about narcissism to heal.
Narcissistic abuse recovery expert, Melanie Tonia Evans, cautions us frequently that focusing too much on our abusers and our fear of them rather than on our healing and the role we play in our abuse can keep us trapped and prevent our recovery. I can relate.
One of the most difficult lessons I learned was that I was vulnerable to attacks by manipulators and bullies. I felt threatened by them and believed I was not safe. I became fearful and resentful. My fear drove me to overestimate the harm from them and underestimate my ability to deal with them. I felt defenseless. I became hyper-vigilant in my attempts to avoid shame and pain as I waited for their attacks. I became hyper-reactive to attacks that I was sure would come and did come. I became intolerant, which did not serve me.
In the process, I gave up my power to emotional vampires who continued to target me. Trying to avoid perceived threats kept me emotionally trapped to the people and events that triggered my fears and caused me continued pain. So, I remained a victim of the emotional vampires because I thought like a victim. I was held captive by my own fears. I became emotionally fatigued. Focusing on them rather than myself kept me from healing. I learned and accepted that my fear was giving my abusers the power to overcome me.
So I put on my big-girl britches and, little by little, took on and challenged my fears and
my false sense of powerlessness, replacing them with courage and self-assurance. I took my power back as I came into my own truth and accepted what I could change as well as what I could not. I accepted what happened to me, took responsibility for the role I played, and shifted my thinking from that of a victim to one who wanted to take her power back, detach from and defuse the abusers, and thrive. I took action!
I adapted by turning the irrational fear and hypervigilance into compassion and tolerance. I turned that wasted fear-driven energy to the source of that fear within myself and not only challenged and released it but replaced it with self-compassion, self-knowledge, self-power, self-respect, and self-love. I honed my ability to identify and cope with evil people. Instead of focusing my energy on them, I shifted my attention to me and my self-worth and abilities. I protected my personal boundaries because I know and believe I am worth it.
In the process of healing and witnessing my own healing, my fear of aggressors became pity for the powerless annoyances they are. In the process, my self-esteem and self-respect and self-assuredness soared, and I took my power back. I chose not to give my power to powerless emotional vampires and to protect my personal boundaries and honor my personal rights and authority because I know I deserve respect. I taught my daughter the same. In the process, my daughter healed through me and thrived. It is never about the other person, folks. My dear friend Jim Upshaw told me that years ago, and I never forgot the message. Now I know the true meaning. Now I never forget the lesson: When you serve your authentic self, your decisions and actions fulfill your legitimate emotional needs. You know you can rely on yourself for your safety. All of life’s pieces fall into place, since the core of your being is truth-based and authentically you.
In the healing process, we regain our self-trust, self-power, self-respect, and self-esteem. We learn what our true value is to ourselves. We learn to rely on and trust internal emotional cues that have been recalibrated with our personal truth and core beliefs. Oh, of course, we must get cues from our environment and from others who have our best interests at heart. We also become better able to recognize those who do not. But we now can readily use those cues to gauge where we are and to tweak our internal truth-seeking filters based on our choices and their outcomes.
In healing, we learn who we really are and to love ourselves. We become fully integrated people of integrity whose thoughts, actions, and beliefs align. Our healing allows us to be the best version of ourselves. It is the best demonstration of self-love we could give ourselves. And in that newfound truth, we thrive.
Power Imbalance in Abusive Relationships – Part 2
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
This is Part 2 in a two part series on power imbalance in abusive relationships.
Part 1 discusses misperceptions on the relationship between abusers and their victims and describes the predatory aspects of abuse and the not so obvious causes of power imbalance in abusive relationships.
Part 2 discusses further the differences between aggression, power, and control in abusive relationships and how healing allows us to access and rely on our own personal power.
No matter what you think or what you read about the abusers’ need to control, people who abuse or exploit others have no superhuman magical powers to inflict pain and also alleviate it. To the contrary, they are much more simple and “weak” than that. Abusers are, in reality, aggressive fearful parasitic spineless cruel individuals who lack compassion and the ability to generate their own power and energy.
People who abuse “simply” are aggressive character deficient hunters who easily betray trust and do not and cannot follow the rules of respect, honor and decency. Aggression and control, however, are not synonymous with power or danger.
Abusers may be overtly or covertly aggressive but they abuse because they lack power no different than the creeps we see on world-wide news who lure and track a defenseless creature, kill it, skin it, behead it, and put its head over the mantel to ogle at and think in their depraved minds that now he or she is more powerful than the truly powerful and majestic creature whose life they selfishly took because they “simply” “wanted to” because it made them “feel” better. What is the difference between these “big game” hunters and narcissistic emotional vampires. Well, not much.
They target us, because our pain addictions and false beliefs of powerlessness we brought with us from wounded childhoods make us vulnerable to their attacks and they WANT AND NEED our power to feel better. They target you, like the hunters “simply,” because they can and YOU are beneficial to THEM and they are character or personality disordered and aggressively go after and take anything they want! They believe they are entitled and that the rules of normal respectful human engagement or honoring life do not apply to them. They make their own rules that serve them. They have distorted views on work and obligation. They “simply” are depraved and have become human predators.
Read more on narcissists, work and obligation here.
However, because we were powerless to our abusers in childhood, we believe falsely based on our unhealed wounded thinking that we are defenseless to these limited individuals who inflict pain on us and they are the only ones who have the power to take away the pain they inflict. Folks, we do not have to suffer or self-sacrifice to be lovable! And we are not powerless to these creeps. THEY are the powerless ones! And frankly, you DESERVE SO MUCH BETTER.
Read this again!
Healing requires major shifts in our thinking so they are based on truthful and adaptive beliefs that serve our authentic needs NOT the needs of parasitic energy vampires who like the big game hunters need the power of trophy wives or husbands to feed off of and hang over their “ego” mantels. Healing requires us to take our power back, regulate our emotions and not rely on soul suckers and weak spineless people who would sell their own mothers and children for a nickel if it serves them.
Do you have neuroses, compulsions, fears, anxieties, phobias? Most of us do and this is why. In childhood, our abusive or neglectful or invalidating caretakers caused our pain emotions to become toxic and did not, as they should have, validate our emotions and teach us how to functionally and effectively control our emotions and self-soothe. We all have those capacities. They just never developed because we were neglected and were never taught how to use and mature them to benefit our own selves.
Pain-based emotions are here to protect us and not do us harm. We are born with only two fears: fear of falling and fear of loud noises. Every other pain, phobia, and maladaptive emotion-based neurosis we have, we learned. We become reactive to our emotions that control us rather than using them as cues to willfully course or thought correct. Read more here. When we are emotionally starved and fatigued, guess what? We get depressed. And guess what? When we are emotionally fatigued and depressed, we cannot set and achieve goals to support our self-esteem and self-worth that sustain our happiness and emotional health.
Read this again and again. This is no secret.
Real power is willfully and confidently choosing to do what we want to do and when, taking actions sourced from our own power, our own free will to authentically serve our own selves! This is how the human body was designed to function. And as we live our lives, through our experiences and interactions with others and our successes and our mistakes, we incrementally build wisdom and our characters.
Read more on living an authentic life here.
Learn more about building personal power and worth.
This functional capability goes haywire from the trauma from abuse including neglect and emotional invalidation. Rather than developing and maturing these abilities, we, maladapt, and learn to rely on other unreliable people, things, and substances to cope and for emotional sustenance and to define our self-worth. So instead of willfully controlling our lives and making independent decisions that serve our goals and nurture our souls, we become pain addicted and dependent on weak abusive exploitive people who do not have our best interests at heart and who trigger our fears and feed off of our power and use “love” to manipulate it from us. They become our conscious source of the pain and the unconscious source of relief to the pain no different than addictive substances, drugs, alcohol.
Folks, the source of our joy is none other than us and the only ones who can rescue and relieve our pain are our own selves. Fortunately, we can heal! However, we cannot heal at the same level of thinking that creates our pain. Healing requires fully understanding why we love people who inflict pain on us and why we tolerate it.
Healing requires us to take our power back and learning to protect and honor our own divinity, reach our highest potential, be our authentic joy-seeking selves, and thrive.
Read more on living an authentic life here.
I cover these topics and more in much more detail in my book, Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can read an exclusive sneak peek and review of the book and purchase a copy here.
Heal Your Children Through Yourself
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Our children will be exposed to narcissists, nasty teachers, bulies, selfish room mates as well as kind generous authentic people every day. Healthy boundaries go in both directions and we can only teach our children how to protect and love and honor themselves and to make wise choices. Why, then, should it be any worse or more dramatic because they have a narcissistic parent? Why do we, the parents, feel we are responsible for putting our children through this? Why are we so hugely emotionally vested and fearful?
Healing Takes Deliberate Planned Action
As a parent and a survivor of narcissistic abuse, I was beside myself with worry every day that not only would narcissists harm my child but that I was powerless to stop it. I learned through my healing that this was faulty learned thinking that I risked transferring to my child if I left it uncorrected. Along with it, I carried profound guilt, shame and trauma and believed falsely that I was an ineffective parent. This was my inner critic’s guilt and shame I carried with me from childhood that was projected onto me by my abusers! I came to learn that the pain I was carrying was not even mine and was unhealed pain that had been transferred to me generationally.
Read more here on dysfunctional families and intergenerational abuse.
I realized soon that focusing on my guilt, shame, pain, angst, and fear and protecting my daughter from harm was just keeping me from healing and preventing my daughter from acquiring the full benefit of my genuine love for her because I was not emotionally healthy and functioning authentically at one hundred per cent. Why should your children and my daughter and our relationships with them suffer because we did? Let’s explore this.
In order for my daughter to thrive (and she is), I and no one else had to own my pain and understand that I was worthy of healing and being pain-free and to honestly express that ownership and my responsibility for healing with my daughter. She and I both deserved better as do you and your children, right? So I focused on my health and wellness, made a plan, and took action. I put on my big girl britches and apologized to her for my poor choices and told her the root causes and what I was doing to course and thought correct. It was not her problem to correct or take on as her own. It was mine! I can only be her mother and she had the right to an emotionally healthy and honest one and to be raised in an emotionally healthy home. Not only did I heal, I thrived and when I thrived, guess what? So did my daughter.
Did I make mistakes when I felt helpless and overwhelmed and lost? Of course. Did that make me a bad mother? Of course not. To the contrary, it made me an awesome one, a powerful one. Did my daughter drive me crazy through her teenage years? Of course. Did that make her a bad child? Of course not. But once again, I took on the guilt of “ruining her.” In times of stress, we go back to what we are comfortable with though it may not be effective. Thank goodness for the National Geographic edition on the teenage brain that explained the teenage years are a sort of “retarded” stage humans have to go through for normal development. What relief I had when the burden of shame was replaced with truth and empowerment.
Do Not Normalize the Abuse
Abuse victims are frequently unnecessarily conflicted about alienating the child against the other parent. Don’t ever think your children are too young to learn the truth about being victimized or exploited or that you are “saying something bad about the other parent.” This is a lie that results in nothing more than normalizing the abuse, teaching falsehoods on healthy relationships and love, shaming the victim and adding to their pain. There is a big difference between speaking crap about a person and speaking truth about a crappy person. Always speak truth because it does set us free.
Healing is your right to act on your free will and to live as you were designed. Healing is all about you, not your husband or wife or partner and a child is never too young to learn about good and evil and what healthy relationships, love, and boundaries are. Love that is unrequited is not love, right? The challenge is teach our children how to relate to all people including relatives without sacrificing self-respect and honor for themselves.
Empowering Life Skills – Critical Thinking, Healthy Reciprocity, and Emotional Intelligence
We, to be effective parents or mentors, must teach our children or proteges life skills that support their emotional and relational health. Brian D. Johnson, Ph.D. and Laurie Berdahl, M.D. report in “Childhood Roots of Narcissistic Personality Disorder” that critical thinking skills help us tell lies from truths and determine when someone is manipulating to take advantage of or scam us. Critical thinking also allows us to reliably distinguish emotionally healthy from emotionally unhealthy behaviors, identify narcissists and anyone toxic, hang tough in our own truth and manage the boundaries with all toxic people even the ones we are related to who we are “supposed to love.”
We can easily teach these empowering life skills by being mindful of unhealthy and healthy interactions and behaviors we observe and pointing these out to our children. Of course, we must walk the talk and fess up to and apologize for our own less than optimal behaviors and reinforce positive behaviors and mirror healthy behaviors and personal accountability as well.
Part of healing and building self-worth is learning what self-love is and what healthy loving relationships of reciprocity are. We are all born lovable however loving relationships are not an entitlement. They are worked for and earned based on honoring each other’s wants and needs in sickness and health and in good times and bad in a respectful manner beneficial to both parties. Emotionally intelligent and healthy individuals know this and live it. They are clear on their personal worth and lovability and the rules of healthy respectful human interactions.
Dr. Travis Bradberry, a renowned expert on emotional intelligence in ourselves and others notes that while all people experience emotions, only 36% of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions for ourselves and in our relationships. People with high emotional intelligence master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive vocabulary of feelings to do so. While many people might describe themselves as simply feeling ‘bad,’ emotionally intelligent people can pinpoint whether they feel ‘irritable,’ ‘frustrated,’ ‘downtrodden,’ or ‘anxious.’ The more specific our word choice, the better equipped we will be on not only what we are feeling and what caused it but also what we can and should do about it.
Learn more on the importance of validating children’s emotions in our emotional health.
Teaching emotional intelligence to our children can be as simple as repeating to them in words what they are feeling especially if pain- or discomfort-based. Then we can help them learn to reliably embrace and sooth their emotions to build sustainable self-reliance rather than fear them and believe falsely they are deserving of the painful feelings and are powerless to them. Again, the best way to teach our children is to support these behaviors consistently in our words, thoughts, and actions and in validating our children’s and other’s emotions and being honest about our own.
Use Stories to Teach
If we are in abusive relationships and have young children, we can easily use stories to teach these lessons in a healthy constructive manner that will hold the abuser responsible for their actions and us accountable to our healing goals.
Take this as as example.
Why not present the situation as a child would understand such as in a fairy tale about good and evil and put yourself in the story. Be creative. The brain is growing and processing and your child is mirroring, seeing herself in you. You are your child’s reflection and you are teaching her how to become as she is divinely intended and to respect herself and to understand her personal worth. You are teaching her to become the best version of herself, to become self-reliant, resilient. You are teaching her to have compassion for her mother, the person who gave her life and for herself and others. You are facilitating your child to become a participant and compassionate witness in your healing and rebirth in the same way you participated and witnessed hers. Your actions validate the lessons you teach and she is witnessing and benefitting from your love that she projects back to you. This is how we live authentically and learn healthy lessons on our lovability, compassion, self-reliance, and personal worth. All support our personal and relational health
Fortunately, tons of children’s books written by competent abuse and trauma therapists like Dr. Lynne Namka now exist to help us reinforce these lessons.
What if My Child is a Narcissist
If we have children with narcissists, sadly we run the risk of having narcissistic children. You did nothing wrong. Nature did and you cannot fix it. Compassion including too much and too little are both inherited and hopefully if our narcissist children are at the lower end of the spectrum we can have some semblance of a relationship with them.
Learn more on what causes narcissism.
That, nevertheless, may not be possible if their toxicity level, combat tactics, and manipulation tactics are severe. Accepting that our children can not love us in healthy ways is extremely painful, but acceptance is empowering. Your safety and that of your other children always come first. If you let them, narcissists will, without a doubt, consume every single bit of narcissistic supply you give them at the expense of your other children, joy, happiness, energy, life, bank account, reputation and whatever else they can exploit from you. We also, remember, run the risk of having empathetic children who are vulnerable to their attacks as well. So we also need to protect our children and teach them to recognize narcissists, manage boundaries, and protect their vulnerabilities. Frequently, empathetic children can have too much compassion so we must focus on teaching them the same lessons and how to use their compassion responsibly and not become overly reliant on others for validation of their worth that makes them vulnerable to narcissistic predators.
The best any parent can do for narcissistic children is guide them with love, compassion, moral-based teaching, and consistency and perhaps they will end up falling at the lower end of the spectrum of less harmful character traits but there are no guarantees. Managing them takes very finely honed skills that very few therapists are even equipped with and are capable of handling. If you notice lack of compassion and serious self-centeredness in them and the failure to thrive, have healthy relationships or self-soothe, and engaging in bullying, get them into competent counseling right away.
In adulthood, the best option may be to follow the TDS (Time – Distance -Shielding) Rule and minimize your time, maximize the distance with them and put shielding between you and learn how to maintain your self-preservation when around them. The rest is in divine hands.
Read more here on how to maintain your self-preservation when daling with narcissists
Learn how to use the TDS rule to manage boundaries with toxic people.
Your Children Will Heal Through You
Years ago, in the midst of an unhappy period in my life, my dear friend, Jim, told me, “Evelyn, It is never about the other person.” I, at the time, did not know what he meant but I never forgot that advice. Now I never forget the lesson. Here it is:
Until you own your own pain and shame and get rid of it and stop blaming others for it, you will not heal and you will continue to think like a victim and transfer this angst to your children. Your children will then needlessly suffer collateral damage and abuse will be perpetuated. This was not your pain to begin with.
Learn how abuse is perpetuated generationally in dysfunctional families.
Heed more Melanie Tonia Evans’ healing words of wisdom.
“The true remedy for getting out of this emotional charge is know who you are and have no need to defend it to anyone – especially your children. The truth of the matter is, however, that the more we get emotionally charged, the more we fight back, and the more we try to defend ourself against the narcissist, the atrocities escalate even more, and the more the atrocities work in the narcissist’s favor…There is nothing that an individual’s soul does not co-create that isn’t right for the purpose of the opportunity to create evolution and healing….heal your children through yourself.”
Read more on healing your children from Melanie Tonia Evans here.
Codependency Does Not Cause Abuse
I’d like to clarify what I think is a huge misperception on codependency, healing, victimhood, and sources of emotional pain.
Abusers find us. We do not find them and we do not deserve disrespectful, abusive, damaging treatment. There is not something wrong with us that makes us deserving of abuse or pain. Abusers abuse us because we think like victims and unknowingly give up our power to them.
Codependency tendencies do not cause abuse. Codependency is a consequence of abuse because abuse mucks with our self-esteem and feelings of self-power. We learn to not trust our own selves for validation of our worth and instead turn externally to others to define us and decide what is acceptable in us. Codependency is a learned maladaptive coping mechanism that replaces what should be internal motivating behavioral controls and emotions we rely on and trust to keep us safe.
As codependency expert Darlene Lancer explains, “codependency almost always starts in a childhood that’s unsafe to express your feelings, thoughts, and needs or they were ignored. That damages self-esteem and turns us outward to another person, substance, or process. We lose touch with our true self and become dependent on and reactive to others. This process is addictive, because we can never be fulfilled from the outside when we don’t know or value our true self.”
We develop codependency in power imbalanced dysfunctional families where we learn to be dependent on others (we perceive as more powerful but who are not) rather than our own selves to define our self-worth and to validate us and as a coping mechanism to not being loved unconditionally. This has profound consequences on our emotional development! We can become notorious boundary violators ourselves! We were taught to maladapt, to adapt in the wrong way. We develop skewed beliefs about our lovability and our self-worth and where to source them from.
And as we get older, we become vulnerable to abusers or narcissists or psychopaths or bullies who are experts on homing in on our vulnerabilities and who target us! They find us and target us because this is just what they do. It is what they need to do to cope and survive. They are wired to aggressively go after others’ power because they cannot generate their own energy because they are disordered! So we become dependent on these creeps who manipulate us and do not have our best interests at heart and stay with them and feel defenseless to them because we are pain addicted and suffer from traumatic stress and chronic shame and feelings of powerlessness. We falsely believe that abusers and emotional manipulators have more power than we do to control our pain.
LEARN MORE ON HOW ABUSE SURVIVORS CAN BECOME NOTORIOUS BOUNDARY VIOLATORS!
As narcissistic abuse recovery expert Kim Saeed tells us, someone with codependency tendencies can lose sight of their own lives in the commotion of tending to someone else’s, which makes them prime targets for narcissists. In abusive relationships, they can end up loving someone who is unrestrained and they find themselves being more accountable for the actions of that person than the person is taking for themselves.
So we are not the cause of our abuse because we are emotionally dependent on others. If you believe this, get this out of your heads. If you believe this, shift your thinking now because this will cause you needlessly to take on extra blame and shame that will keep you from healing. You were victimized and preyed on by emotional vampires who hunted for you and targeted you because you are vulnerable, plain and simple and they feed off of your energy. You did not ask for, are not responsible for, and do not deserve abuse or emotional pain!
An emotionally healthy loving partner would remind you of your value and worth, support your self-assuredness, and not want you to be dependent on them. Emotional manipulators, on the other hand, victimize us. Once we deal with our vulnerabilities and heal our wounds and do self-esteem work we can make huge strides towards no longer being targets and no longer feeling powerless to these creeps and not being dependent on anyone except our own selves to define our self-worth.
There is another very important and not so obvious lesson here related to codependency and personal boundaries. Codependents can become boundary violators themselves to source from others what they need to define their worth. Read more on the importance of protecting personal boundaries here.
Kim Saeed cautions that our biggest challenge is learning to use our compassion responsibly and learning to care and help others without falling into codependent behaviors where we use others to define us, self-sooth, and cover our own dysfunctions and, in the process, enable theirs. We disempower ourselves and the person when we try to fix, solve, or make the consequences go away. We discredit and diminish our own selves when we redirect our personal power from ourselves to rescue others who do not have our best interests at heart.
The challenge is to support people along their journey without getting emotionally vested and entangled in “fixing” or “solving” their problems for them, or covering up for them. When you do, you will have acted with true compassion for yourself and others while honoring your own and other’s personal rights, authorities, and divinity.
How Emotions Go Haywire in Abuse Survivors
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
“…our pain-based emotions become faulty and lose their intended design functions of being reliable protective safety measures and providing depth and color to our lives. They go haywire and rather than protect us, do us more harm and our children more harm as we teach the same distorted thinking patterns to them as well. We and our children become vulnerable targets of energy and power vampires.”
We are not the source of our pain. No one is. We are the source of our joy. Read this again…and again…and again.
Our pain-based emotions exist to protect us. They exist as cues, as lessons for us to put on the brakes, stop, think, course correct or thought correct to heal from wounds and to keep ourselves safe from danger and further harm.
We are not born with pain and we are not born deserving of pain. There are no “chosen people” better than us who are genetically predisposed to deserve joy more than we do. If you believe this, your thinking is not rational and needs correcting.
We are born with only two fears – fear of falling and fear of loud noises. All, yes, all of our pain-based emotions (and the list is long) like shame, guilt, anxiety, grief, phobias, compulsions are learned, every darn last one of them. Some we developed in order to cope with or avoid another greater fear or pain. Our caregivers in our youth should have taught us how to take cues from our pain-based emotions, as well as our joy-based ones and showed us to self-regulate and modulate them with healthy self-coping and self-soothing mechanisms. They should have taught us to accept, use, and rely on our emotions in order to develop our divine miraculous abilities to care for ourselves and nourish our souls and mature these abilities throughout our lives to become the best joy-seeking versions of ourselves we were put on this earth to be.
Instead they taught us to believe the lies they were taught to believe that caused them and us to maladapt. Toxic pain-based thinking in our families today originated generations ago from our great great great great great grandfathers or grandmothers who suffered some traumatic experience and who never healed and shadowed their pain on and taught their wounded thinking to their descendants. Read more on this subject here.
The truth is that we are all born and designed for happiness and to feel safe, secure, and lovable. When we are abused and betrayed in our youth when we are growing at such a rapid pace, our pain-based emotions, through overuse, become toxic and our beliefs about our self-worth and deserving peace, solace and joy become skewed. We are taught and conditioned, instead, to believe that in loving relationships, we deserve pain, we are the source of our pain, we are powerless to the pain, and only those who inflict pain on us have the power and authority to relieve the pain. We may not be able to see the “good” in normal healthy relationships and sabotage them because we were not taught to relate anything positive in a relationship to love or our worthiness.
When we are abused, our pain-based emotions become faulty and lose their intended design functions of being reliable protective safety measures and providing depth and color to our lives. They go haywire and rather than protect us, do us and our children more harm as we teach the same distorted thinking patterns to them as well. We and our children become vulnerable targets of energy and power vampires.
We can replace this distorted thinking with emotionally adaptive and healthy thinking and learn to modulate and control our own emotions and bring our self-esteem and self-worth to healthy levels. We can change our pain-seeking/pain-avoiding lives to joy-seeking/joy-filled lives, achieve emotional sobriety, and thrive. As we heal, our children will heal through us. This is how we break the cycles of intergenerational abuse.
I am committed at Yourlifelifter to teach you how to heal and recover.
I explore these topics in much more detail in my book, Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can purchase and read a free sneak peek and review of the book here.
What Makes Being Liked, Loved, Desired, and Valued Possible?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
All humans naturally seek connections to other human beings. This is reflected in our needs to be liked, loved, desired, and valued. Ultimately, we at one time or another would expect to aspire to and, hopefully, achieve all four.
But is this realistic or possible in a world where we all are different people with different tastes, experiences, personalities, hang-ups, disorders, neuroses, levels of compassion, likes and dislikes, beliefs, opinions, goals, and changing needs?
How Self-Esteem Impacts Relational Health
While we are seeking and building relationships in our lives, we are also building self-esteem, our personal confidence and belief in our own personal worth and abilities to achieve joy and to keep ourselves safe. Our need for self-esteem drives our self-worth and self-respect and self-reliance and sets the stage for us to create and achieve goals that bring us love and joy, find meaning in our lives, and help us adapt to adversity and change.
Our self-esteem fuels everything we do and directs how we perceive events and people and how we respond to positive and negative emotions. If our self-esteem is healthy (which should be our goal), we are clear on our self-worth. This means we rely on ourselves and our emotions confidently for validation of our personal value because we know what we are capable of accomplishing, know we are worthy of joy, and set goals to bring us joy that we know we can achieve. We work hard to turn painful experiences into knowledge we know we can comfortably rely on in the future. We are also resilient and bounce back quickly from misfortunes we face and mistakes we make. When we do not achieve our goals or are unhappy or in pain, we do not hunker down in shame and rely on others to soothe our disappointments. Rather we take action and thought correct or course correct or get the advice or assistance to achieve our goals that, in short, make us feel good about ourselves, safer, wiser, stronger. We do not take no for an answer when it comes to achieving our goals which sustain our joy, success, and our emotional, physical, and relational health.
So the role of other people is not to merely validate us and soothe our pain we do not think we can reliably handle independently. Their role is to complement us and to mutually share our joy, vulnerabilities, and personal power with us. We are self-sufficient, however, we comfortably seek connection or help from others when we want or need to. It is the honest but vulnerable connection with others whose truth aligns with ours that attracts and ignites us! We choose to love or be with others because their self-esteem, their truths, align with ours, we are committed in trust, and we have each other’s best interests at heart.
Alignment of Our Truths Attracts Us
Alignment of truth including common values, goals, and levels of integrity is what makes a person desirable, likable, lovable and valued to a person with high self-esteem. And our self-esteem, reliant on our self-worth and personal integrity, is what makes us lovable to ourselves. Healthy self–esteem not only makes being liked, loved, valued and desired possible by ourselves and others, it also helps to sustain our emotional, physical, and relational health and resilience.
People with high self-esteem are clear on their lovability and the level of respect and honor they deserve and expect in any relationship, be it personal, family, or work. People with low self-esteem, on the other hand, cannot readily look internally for resilence and validation of their personal worth and typically are pain addicted due to abuse or trauma or possibly even suffering from something worse. They may believe human connectedness relates to pain and suffering including physical and emotional abuse and betrayal and go so far as to sabotage healthy relationships they they feel unworthy of and unloved it.
How Abusive Childhoods Cause Us to Sabotage Our Health and Happiness
Interestingly enough, victims of abuse and the abusers themselves both use other people to soothe and ease their chronic pain. The main difference is that the narcissists and psychopaths do it offensively (knowingly with intent to harm and no remorse) and abuse victims do it innocently (unknowingly with no intent to harm). So being in a relationship with an abuser is not a relationship of alignment of truths, it is an alignment of short term alleviation of pains and gratification of needs. It is a relationship between a predator and its prey, a parasite and its host where one benefits at the other’s expense.
“Alignment of truth including common values, goals, and levels of integrity is what makes a person desirable, likable, lovable and valued to a person with high self-esteem. And our self-esteem, reliant on our self-worth and personal integrity, is what makes us lovable to ourselves. Healthy self–esteem not only makes being liked, loved, valued and desired possible, it also helps to sustain our emotional health.”
Relying on other people to define your self-worth or to soothe your internal pain is not self-esteem, is not mutually beneficial, and will lead to emotional fatigue, chronic pain, sadness, and depression. It also stunts your emotional growth and keeps you vulnerable to the narcissists and psychopaths, the emotional vampires who need your power and energy to survive.
The point here, folks, is that in terms of being liked, being loved, being desired, and being valued, IT IS NEVER ABOUT THE OTHER PERSON defining your acceptability and your worth. It is about you developing your own self-esteem, your own truth, gauging it’s worth accurately, upholding and honoring that truth and finding others whose truth aligns with yours and together, connected in trust, journey through life together fueled by the love and belonging that connects you.
Read more here on how learning to enjoy living alone can build emotional health.
How Emotionally Fit Are You?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Our sustained happiness is a sign of 
emotional fitness just like our blood panel, cholesterol, and blood pressure are signs of our physical fitness.
When we are happy, our emotional needs are met and motivate us to set and achieve goals. So our feelings are indicators of our emotional well being and what we need to work on. Conversely, not meeting our emotional needs and being unhappy or anxious for prolonged periods of time can lead to emotional fatigue and exhaustion and for some, depression and even trauma.
Our happiness is a product of and dependent on the state of our self-esteem. Self-esteem is an implicit judgment that every person has of his or her ability to face life’s challenges and solve problems and of their right to achieve happiness and be given respect. Self-esteem is a conscious decision we make and reflects confidence in our abilities to take risks, love and be loved, protect ourselves and achieve goals that bring us joy and that we know we deserve.
Healthy self-esteem allows us to rely on ourselves for validation of our self-worth because we know what we are capable of doing, know we are worthy of joy, and set goals to bring us joy that we are confident we can achieve. When we do not achieve our goals, we do not hunker down in shame but rather we course correct or get advice or assistance to achieve our goals. The role of other people is not to validate us or rescue us. Their role is to complement us and to share our joy with. We do not routinely depend on others because we rely on ourselves and cues from our internal gauges to define who we are and our level of happiness.
People with low self-esteem, on the other hand, cannot look internally for validation of their self-worth and typically are pain addicted due to abuse or trauma or possibly more severe psychological issues. They also have high tendencies towards codependency. Other people become sources or solutions to their pain.
Here are some characteristics of those with high self-esteem. Which ones do you possess? Which ones do you feel you need to work on to achieve emotional “fitness?”
People with a healthy level of self-esteem:
- Are self-reliant on themselves to define their self-worth and for affirmation of their thoughts and ideas.
- Can use their compassion responsibly without routinely self-sacrificing their personal needs, rights and authorities for others.
- Set joy-seeking goals they know they deserve and are confident in their abilities to achieve them.
- Understand well what their personal boundaries and authorities are and understand their right to have theirs honored and respected.
- Practice self-care, kindness, and nurturance including self-compassion when they are in emotional pain or are distressed.
- Can assertively defend their personal boundaries and respect others’ personal boundaries.
- Firmly believe in certain values and principles, and are ready to defend them even when finding opposition, feeling secure enough to modify them in light of experience.
- Are able to act according to what they think to be the best choice, trusting their own judgment, and not feeling guilty when others do not like their choice.
- Do not lose time worrying excessively about what happened in the past, nor about what could happen in the future. They learn from the past and plan for the future, but live in the present intensely.
- Fully trust in their capacity to solve problems, not hesitating after failures and difficulties. They ask others for help when they need it.
- Consider themselves equal in dignity to others, rather than inferior or superior, while accepting differences in certain talents, personal prestige or financial standing.
- Understand how they are an interesting and valuable person for others, at least for those with whom they have a friendship.
- Routinely set and achieve goals to fulfill their spiritual, financial, career, community, relationship, and health needs.
- Identify and resist manipulation, collaborate with others only if it seems appropriate and convenient.
- Admit and accept different internal feelings and drives, either positive or negative, revealing those drives to others only when they choose.
- Are able to enjoy a great variety of activities.
- Are sensitive to feelings and needs of others; respect generally accepted social rules, and claim no right or desire to prosper at others’ expense.
- Use their compassion responsibly to their and others’ benefit.
- Can work toward finding solutions and voice discontent without belittling themselves or others when challenges arise.
- Are tolerant of other people’s differences including differences of opinion.
Answering these questions can help you gauge your level of emotional fitness and where you need to focus and set some milestones and goals.
Register here for a free 14-page report of self-esteem building tips and exercises that can help you build your self-esteem, become emotionally fit, and improve your overall wellness and happiness.
How Do We Nourish Our Own Souls
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
“We cannot see our souls or what we call our self-esteem. However, we know that our souls need to be nourished consistently to sustain our joy.”
Truth is again on my mind like usual or more accurately “the search for truth” and its role in nurturing our souls. Here are my thoughts:
We cannot see our souls or what we call our self-esteem. However, we know that our souls need to be nourished consistently to sustain our joy. We are designed for happiness, however we are also designed with built in mechanisms to protect us from harm. Our emotions even our pain-based ones like shame and sadness exist as gauges to guide and protect us and to keep us safe. When they function properly and our filters are intact, we confidently take cues from them to either course correct or thought correct and take actions that remove us from harm’s way and teach us to avoid that “bad” thing again in the future. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are cues that our actions and thoughts are serving us well.
Once our souls are nourished, we feel complete – happy – content – valued. We know how being liked, loved and desired makes us feel. We set and achieve goals because we know how achieving them makes us feel and that we are worthy of the outcomes. And when our souls are not nourished or are depleted such as from abuse, overwork, and invalidation, we feel trapped, inadequate, and become unhappy, emotionally fatigued, depressed, sad and, even worse, traumatized.
When our souls are routinely starved, we also run the risk of 3 things:
- Believing falsely we are the source of the ensuing pain and discomfort; and/or
- Blaming something or someone else for them; and/or
- Feeling unsafe in our own bodies.
All harm us more because they cause us to feel more pain and stop us from taking action that we need to learn from and that nurture us and sustain our joy.
We, folks, are NOT the source of our pain. We are the source of our joy. And we own and are responsible for regulating our emotions including our pain. Other things or people can only trigger them. However, our emotions become overly taxed and go haywire after extreme emotional neglect and pain that can make us feel unsafe in our own bodies. Our lives becomes a cycle of creating pain and
trying to alleviate pain we believe falsely we are powerless to. We become victims and reactive to life relying on others who do not have our best interests at heart rather than ourselves for answers and to define our self-worth.
This is no secret as what some want us to believe. As a matter of fact, this cognitive based school of thought was founded by Christian Larsen in the very early 1900’s over 100 years ago and now most of his books are free to the public!!
And, yes, our parents or caregivers should have taught us this. In their defense, If they did not, then they were also not taught how to as were their parents ad infinitum.
Well, then, how do we nurture our souls?
The answer is pretty simple and is no secret. Here it is!
- Unlearning the thinking that makes us addicted to pain;
- Surrounding ourselves with others who reflect back to us the nurturing TRUTH our souls need to flourish;
- Honoring the value of that truth through self-compassion and self-care;
- Learning we are worthy of the effort;
- Learning we are worthy of the happiness; and
- Reflecting our authentic nurturing truth back to others with love, kindness, and compassion to help them nourish their souls.
- Repeating 2 though 6 above.
This is how love and life are supposed to work…this is also what abuse, narcissists, emotional vampires, and poor parenting ruin for us. The world is currently in crisis because we have a pandemic of starving souls.
I am committed here at Yourlifelifter to show you how to achieve these objectives and nurture your souls! And as you heal, your children will heal through you.
Be sure to sign up for my FREE self-esteem building tips and tools that can help you make huge strides in your recoveries.
You are all worthy of the effort.
I am honored to support you in your journeys!
Why are Narcissists Self-Righteous and Manipulative?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Have you noticed that the most toxic people have the biggest and the most fragile egos?
Ever wondered why?
They are part of the facade, the illusion of smoke and mirrors masking a core of deep-seated shame and self-loathing and powerlessness. They are crude covertly aggressive parasitic attempts at taking others’ power for selfish self-serving purposes by those who cannot and do not want to generate their own. Oh, they may try to pass it off as power, however aggressiveness and the needs to control and charm and be self-righteousness and manipulate are not power.
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
Truly powerful and influentially people do not manipulate others and are not self-righteous because, simply, they do not have to. However, generating our own power takes hard work including putting our egos aside for not only our own good but for others’ as well. And what key character qualities does this require? You got it – selflessness, conscientiousness, commitment, compassion and empathy: qualities these broken personality disordered people lack and have replaced with self-righteousness and manipulation and a sick desire to make others lose.
Read more here on narcissists, character, work and obligation.
Now they cannot show their true colors to the world. Can they? How would they survive? How would they get others to give up the energy they starve for and need for emotional sustenance, for glue to mend their cracked psyches?
Of course! Why not portray a false image (e.g. ego) of charm and aggression (covert or overt) they need the world to see and prey on the vulnerable? Why not defend and perpetuate the false spineless weak persons they really are by judging others to prove their own power to themselves and to others and use whatever or whomever they can including religion to do so? Why not recruit personal assistants, “flying monkeys,” to help them 
create the magical illusion of power and grandeur and create their own “Land of Oz?” Why not commit the worst of “sins” in the name of God, America, or Buddha or Muhammed or for whatever reason or lie they can muster to justify what is really pure depravity and evil? Why not worship false idols – their own selves!
They want all the benefits we the virtuous folks work for and that the narcissists feel entitled to such as love and marriage and children and recognition without any of the work! In fact, they hate self-improvement! This is why they flock to and frequent churches and religious communities and politics and even companies and “do good” fund raising organizations that are driven by unethical “group think” cultures.
Why are So Many Politicians Pathological Narcissists and What Can We Do About it?
Read more here on narcissists, character, work and obligation.
Now, evil lies on a long spectrum, however evil is evil. It is like being pregnant. You are or you aren’t and being a little bit is irrelevant to the greater purpose. So rather than work to become virtuous people of integrity and character and develop grace, tolerance, kindness, and generosity (which they loathe doing, by the way), these depraved people mask their weaknesses and prey on the vulnerabilities of others who truly are people of virtue.
Read more here on why people are evil.
This is why they target the most vulnerable people like empaths and trauma wounded victims of childhood abuse, and the elderly, handicapped, children (whom they loathe by the way since they cannot benefit them) who they can denigrate, exploit, and play like a fiddle. Folks, it is no coincidence that all the adult victims of narcissistic abuse were also victims of childhood abuse and have low self-worth. In fact, they target and bank on the kindness and compassion of the conscientious ones to provide the energy they need to keep their depravity going because they have no desire to change. They like themselves just the way they are.
Narcissists Exposed; How Narcissists Create Illusions to Fool Us
Read more here to understand who narcissists target.
Read more here on what causes malignant narcissism.
They con us to believe their lies, shadow their pain on us, and parasitically feed off of our energy and our compassion and empathy. And yes, they leave us trauma ridden, emotionally starved, emotionally fatigued and depressed and believing we are defenseless and powerless to them and that we are the source of our pain and they are the source of our joy. They try to turn us into them and them into us!!
Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do
This is the core to victimhood from narcissistic abuse. The same principles apply to bullies! However, we can heal and recover. We can repent our “sins” and self-correct and course correct, break the pain addictions, and take our power back.
They cannot.
We can learn to release our repressed pain and trauma and resolve our false feelings of defenselessness to them and build our self-esteem and learn to hang tough in our truth and modulate our triggered pain and regulate our fear based emotions.
They cannot.
We can come into truth.
They cannot.
They will then no longer target us and we will no longer fear them and give up our power to them or rely on them to validate our self-worth. This is how we take our power back. This is how we thrive. This is how good wins over evil! You can learn and read more on this Blog and in my book Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors.
Empathy: Is It a Gift or a Curse?
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Here is a message to empaths referring to their abilities as a curse: “Tsk tsk tsk!” Your abilities truly are gifts but can falsely appear as burdens if you were taught to look at them as oddities, vulnerabilities, weaknesses or reasons to let others use them for their benefit.
Cognitive dissonance causes people to believe and to be emotionally comfortable with only what “makes them right” and with what does not challenge their beliefs or ego or trigger their fears. It also makes people intolerant of people’s differences that, well, make them feel uncomfortable. Cognitive dissonance in others is what makes them uncomfortable with empaths’ differences.
Similarly, empaths can be uncomfortable with and intolerant of their own unique qualities. While our emotional intelligence and sensitivities cause us naturally to challenge our beliefs and temper our egos which are healthy, we also have to learn to accept, trust, honor and comfortably rely on them and not fear them (as our childhood caretakers should have taught us).
So while being an empath can be demanding, we can learn with self-focused effort and care to manage our natural and divine abilities and acknowledge their value, power, and strength rather than succumb to them. These are gifts and abilities that we need to not only use responsibly but also honor and protect.
Being an Empath is Rewarding and Challenging
To be born an empath is a gift because you were born with the ability to see truth and beauty in others! However, it can come with challenges. We are natural energy receivers and have high emotional intelligence so we also can feel others’ distresses and insecurities and can have an innate desire to relieve them or expose them (whether we want to or not) even when it may not be in our best interest to do so. We are born with an overabundance of compassion and energy. We can also become very vulnerable to abusers and have a high tendency towards codependency. Read more here.
We are born with natural resilience, will power, and wisdom that some people are not capable of ever learning.
Empaths also have a natural ability to see and absorb truth that can be discomforting to them and others especially when they are around inauthentic and toxic people. Diane Kathrine points out in her enlightening article that empaths can easily see and reveal the sides of people’s personalities they are trying to hide. Empaths can wear other people’s truth like the mask they hide behind; even if they are consciously unaware that they are doing it. They can readily know when others are not being authentic and even when they are lying. Unaware empaths may mistake others’ mirrored insecurities as their own and believe falsely that others’ pain is theirs. They also may have no idea that what they feel, they can then project and reflect back. This ability can bring up intense feelings in others and also cause them to dislike empaths.
Case in point. Even as an adult, my father told me that I was crazy when I told him that the priest at the local Greek Orthodox church I frequented made my skin crawl. I became physically sick in his presence and he would avoid all eye contact with me. Many others told me I “should not feel that way.” This priest made his own rules and, for example, would not allow me to take communion since I was married by a non-orthodox minister. My father told me to ignore him until several years later my father read in the national news that Father Pappas was defrocked for allegedly having sex with men and women (he was Greek Orthodox and married by the way) and claimed in his letter to the bishop (that I read very carefully) that his “zeal for perfection” made him do it.
Empaths Need Focused Self-Care and Self-Compassion
Empaths need to be very mindful of their unique needs and abilities and develop and hone their self-care and self-compassion skills lots more than the average person. Empaths can become emotionally fatigued from taking in too much energy and from giving up too much. Some can even become rattled by sleeping in the same bed with another person. We need more down time and alone time to decompress and to recharge our “emotional batteries.” We also have to deal with the challenge of advanced wisdom and learning quicker than others because we intuitively pick up on energy cues others miss.
“No one can change the ungrateful but empaths can work on their self-esteem and learn to use their compassion more responsibly and focus it on those worthy of and who value your help, compassion, and generosity. When you do, the number of ungrateful people you help goes down immensely and the number of grateful ones increases.”
Helping others can pose challenges to empaths who typically have an overabundance of compassion and strong tendencies towards codependencies learned in childhood. Helping others can frequently facilitate exploitation if they are not careful to whom and where they focus their help and assess their real motives for doing so. Are you caregiving and helping someone in legitimate need or are you caretaking to serve a personal need to rescue others who may not want or need help or to make things that are broken right again to validate your worth?
Learn more on how to identify and deal with emotional moochers.
No one can change the ungrateful but empaths can work on their self-esteem and learn to use their compassion more responsibly and focus it on those worthy of and who value your help, compassion, wisdom, and generosity. When you do, the number of ungrateful exploitive people, e.g. moochers, you help goes down immensely and the number of grateful ones increases. So empaths can benefit tremendously with self-esteem work and assertiveness classes that will help them to use their compassion more responsibly, manage personal boundaries, moderate their compassion, and rely more comfortably on their own selves rather than others for validation of their self-worth.
Sign up here for free self-esteem building tips.
Empaths dealing with codependency issues may also fear being alone that triggers their fear of abandonment. There is a big difference between being single and living alone and being lonely. You can be with someone who invalidates and neglects you and disrespects you and never feel lonelier. So empaths must learn to embrace solitude. Living alone also can support development of a self-compassionate and resilient mindset tailored to your unique needs.
Learn more how living alone can support emotional healing and health.
We are prone to anxiety from emotional fatigue so we must be mindful of our sensitivities, consciously work to minimize toxicity, modulate our need to fix and rescue, and simply rest. Something as simple as hugs or touches or love from animals or the beauty of a painting can help empaths feel safe and assured in their own bodies again. I, for example, have learned to not sit in the middle of movie theaters or restaurants. Doing so brings me angst. I do not defend my position or wants. I will wait for a table or go early to the theatre or book my seats way in advance. I have learned to shut down my energy, sort of like hibernating with my eyes open, in the presence of energy vampires and inauthentic people or simply leave the room rather than like in the past, feeling overwhelmed and powerless and defenseless to them. I no longer fear them. They are like annoying mosquitoes to me so I administer psychological insect repellent. I accept the value of my advanced wisdom and have learned to only share it mindfully with those worthy of its value.
Learn more here on how to deal with toxic people.
We must learn to trust and rely on rather than be reactive to our emotions. We can do this by not rushing to judgment when our emotions are triggered and learn to patiently process them. I, for example, learned to put in extra effort to moderate my overabundance of compassion and empathy. I pay extra attention to my natural drive to fix others and rather than reacting impulsively when I see people or things that are “broken,” I take rational actions by stopping, thinking, and evaluating my options that include “doing nothing.” I focus most of my attention on ensuring I am not making others’ problems my own and help only when someone truly is lost and needs help rather than not being accountable to his or her own responsibilities or goals.
Reading more here on how to protect yourself from being used.
I learned how to say no and not defend it and own it and follow through when I say yes. Whatever I decide is final and I do not second guess it or criticize myself for my decision or wait for someone to validate it. I simply trained myself not to because I learned to rely and trust on my emotions and my judgment that I have honed over time and which history has dictated are pretty much spot on.
I have also learned to use this simple tool to not be impacted or to feel overwhelmed around toxic and inauthentic people and energy vampire: The Time – Distance – Shielding rule:
- Minimize your time with them.
- Maximize the distance between you and them.
- And put a shield between you and them.
Learn more here on how to deal with toxic people.
Dealing with Loss of Loved Ones Poses Unique Challenges to Empaths During Healing
Overcoming love losses can pose unique challenges to empaths who are natural rescuers, emotionally sensitive, prone to codependency, and have an overabundance of compassion. As a result, focusing on acceptance and truth is especially paramount to healing for empaths. Effectively healing requires a clear understanding of our personal power and worth that will facilitate reconciliation and a recalibration of our wounded thinking and conflicting beliefs as they relate to loss, forgiveness, unrequited love, our lovability, and our pain and suffering. I cover this topic in more detail in The Unique Challenges of Healing and Loss for Empaths.
Your Empathy is a Gift – Embrace it!
Being empaths is who we are and we can’t change it, but we can accept ourselves without judgment and learn how to use our compassion more responsibly as well as tolerance for our own wonderfully unique and beautiful differences and learning how to use them effectively and protect them. There has never been and will never be another person like you in the history of the universe. We have been blessed and need to nourish, respect, honor and embrace our special gifts that not only add to our individual divinity but bring compassion, kindness, meaning, and caring to so many others who authentically deserve and need them. They are part of your authenticity and beauty and your unique divine design. So, hang tough in your truth and own, honor, care for, and protect these magnificent gifts you are uniquely worthy to possess!
Self-Compassion and Self-Care Are Fundamental to Emotional Health
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Most victims of childhood abuse (includes neglect and emotional invalidation) suffer into adulthood and become adult victims of adult abuse. Our self-esteem and personal identity and understanding of our self-worth suffer. We may have been punished for even attempting to care for ourselves. Consequently, we can feel shame for even taking care of our basic human needs. This vulnerability can be exaggerated in empaths who are predisposed to caring for and feeling responsible for others’ happiness.
We do not learn how to use our compassion responsibly and overcompensate by giving of ourselves too much and letting others who do not have our best interests at heart violate our personal boundaries and dishonor us. We allow them to control our emotions rather than we regulating our own. We bring this skewed thinking learned in childhood into adulthood and learn to neglect our own needs.
Self-care and self-compassion are needed for healing because they “neutralize” the toxic emotions and empower ourselves to learn how to regulate our emotions again. These are good “habits” that relieve the pain and help us assimilate and reconnect with ourselves again. So, in effect self-care and self-compassion allow us an opportunity to witness our healing. They allow us to actively participate in our own healing and regain trust in ourselves and feel safe and secure in our own bodies. Self-care and self-compassion allow us to nourish our souls and are also critical to building self-worth, self-assurance and self-reliance and feel like “ourselves” again, not the pain addicted wounded versions who rely on abusers and manipulators who do not have our best interests at heart to alleviate our discomfort.
We CAN learn how to replace these old “harmful” habits with those that are self-serving to our emotional health and personal joy. We can learn to use our compassion responsibly and learn to focus our compassion and self-care more on ourselves.
“What?” You may ask. “How am I supposed to learn how to do that? I have trouble even saying no.”
Well…like anything, by learning how to and by practicing.
Here are some helpful tips that can help to get you on the right track. And remember PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. Use the tips that work for YOU!!!
- Pay attention to your own needs and wants. Get out of your head and learn to listen to and heed your bodily cues and emotions that exist to protect you.
Listen to what your body, your mind, and your heart are telling you. For instance, if your body is telling you that you have been sitting down too long, stand up and stretch. If your heart is longing to spend more time with a special friend, do it. If your mind is telling you to clean up your basement, listen to your favorite music, or stop thinking bad thoughts about yourself, take those thoughts seriously.
- Take very good care of yourself…..ALWAYS!!!!
As you were growing up you may not have learned how to take good care of yourself. In fact, much of your attention may have been on taking care of others, on just getting by, or on “behaving well.” Perhaps you were even punished for thinking about and caring for yourself.
Begin today to take good care of yourself. Treat yourself as a wonderful parent would treat a small child or as a very best friend might treat another. If you work at taking good care of yourself, you will find that you feel better about yourself and you will learn you are deserving of your own self-care and learn self-reliance that will feed your self-esteem and self-worth.
Here are some suggestions:
- Eat healthy foods and avoid junk foods (foods containing a lot of sugar, salt, or fat). A healthy daily diet is usually: five or six servings of vegetables and fruit, six servings of whole grain foods like bread, pasta, cereal, and rice, two servings of protein foods like beef, chicken, fish, cheese, cottage cheese, or yogurt.
- Exercise. Moving your body helps you to feel better and improves your self-esteem. Arrange a time every day or as often as possible when you can get some exercise, preferably outdoors. You can do many different things. Taking a walk is the most common. You could run, ride a bicycle, play a sport, climb up and down stairs several times, put on a tape, or play the radio and dance to the music–anything that feels good to you. If you have a health problem that may restrict your ability to exercise, check with your doctor before beginning or changing your exercise habits.
- Do special personal hygiene tasks to pamper and make you feel better about yourself such as a bubble bath, special hair conditioning or styling, manicures and pedicures, and teeth whitening.
- Have a physical examination every year to make sure you are in good health.
- Plan fun activities for yourself. Learn new things every day.
- Take time to do things you enjoy. You may be so busy, or feel so badly about yourself, that you spend little or no time doing things you enjoy such as playing a musical instrument, doing a craft project, flying a kite, or going fishing. Make a list of things you enjoy doing. Then do something from that list every day. Add to the list anything new that you discover you enjoy doing.
- Get something done that you have been putting off. Clean out that drawer. Wash that window. Write that letter. Pay that bill.
- Do things that make use of your own special talents and abilities. For instance, if you are good with your hands, then make things for yourself, family, and friends. If you like animals, consider having a pet or at least playing with friends’ pets.
- Dress in clothes that make you feel good about yourself. If you have little money to spend on new clothes, check out thrift stores in your area.
- Give yourself rewards for being a great person such as listening to your favorite music or reading your favorite books or taking a trip to a museum.
- Spend time with people who treat you well and make you feel good about yourself. Avoid people who treat you badly.
- Make your living space a place that honors the person you are. Whether you live in a single room, a small apartment, or a large home, make that space comfortable and attractive for you. If you share your living space with others, have some space that is just for you, your own personal “slice of heaven” where you can keep your things and know that they will not be disturbed and that you can decorate any way you choose.
- Display items that you find attractive or that remind you of your achievements or of special times or people in your life. If cost is a factor, use your creativity to think of inexpensive or free ways that you can add to the comfort and enjoyment of your space.
- Make your meals a special time. Turn off the television, radio, and stereo. Set the table, even if you are eating alone. Light a candle or put some flowers or an attractive object in the center of the table. Arrange your food in an attractive way on your plate. If you eat with others, encourage discussion of pleasant topics. Avoid discussing difficult issues at meals.
- Take advantage of opportunities to learn something new or improve your skills. Take a class or go to a seminar. Many adult education programs are free or very inexpensive. For those that are more costly, ask about a possible scholarship or fee reduction.
- Begin doing those things that you know will make you feel better about yourself like going on a diet, beginning an exercise program or keeping your living space clean.
- Do something nice for another person. Smile at someone who looks sad. Say a few kind words to the checkout cashier. Help your spouse with an unpleasant chore. Take a meal to a friend who is sick. Send a card to an acquaintance. Volunteer for a worthy organization.
Make it a point to treat your self well every day. Before you go to bed each night, write about how you treated yourself well during the day and how you will treat your self tomorrow.
- Learn how to manage boundaries.
Abusers and exploiters and bullies and especially narcissists are masters at pushing pain buttons, making people feel powerless, and getting people to let down their boundaries and getting them to give up their power to them. In fact, they enjoy doing it. They use charm and love as their camouflage. We become unknowingly complicit in our own abuse and exploitation. We innocently expose ourselves to some of the worst abuse and harm imaginable.
Part of healing for those who were victims and continue to be susceptible to their attacks, then, is learning to maintain and protect your personal boundaries so you are not vulnerable to emotional predators.
Unfortunately, there is no electronic monitor like a home protection system you can purchase to warn you of impending “emotional” predators and attacks. However, you can strengthen your own internal monitors and learn new skills including honing your narcissist radar otherwise known as “NADAR” and honoring and “feeling” for and caring for your own wants and needs with compassion and defending your personal rights and authorities. These include assertively expressing what your rights, authorities, needs, and feelings are and recognizing and regulating your own emotions especially your pain-based ones and learning when they are triggered and who routinely triggers them. Just as important, then, is knowing WHAT makes you happy.
Read more on managing personal boundaries here.
Abuse survivors can also become notorious boundary violators themselves. We in healing must learn not only to manage our boundaries but also to respect other’s as well. People who are heavily dependent on others for self-worth particularly may have a hard time sourcing their own power and learning self-reliance. Codependents have learned to routinely not only let others violate their boundaries but also to violate other’s boundaries to source from them what they need to define their worth.
Learning boundary management by re-learning what personal rights are and where healthy authorities and boundaries start and finish will help you replace maladaptive thoughts, beliefs, and actions with healthy ones and help you make great strides in your healing.
- Learn assertiveness skills including how to say “no.”
Learning assertiveness skills will not only protect your personal rights that support your self-esteem and self-care but will also help you keep your cool and prevent you from being manipulated and abused by those who push your pain and shame buttons. These skills can help immensely in boundary management that support and sustain your emotional health and mutually respectful and loving relationships.
- Learn how to set and achieve goals.
Once you do be sure to develop your personal action and accountability plan, your life’s road map to achieving your goals and getting where you want to go and getting back on course when you “get lost.” Remember that your character, people skills, personal limitations, emotional makeup, and motivation level will impact achievement of goals. Mentors and coaches can help you generate your action plan, monitor your progress, hold you accountable, and develop alternate courses of actions when you hit roadblocks.
You Shouldn’t Feel That Way
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Ever heard “you shouldn’t feel that way” or “don’t feel that way” or my favorite, “get over it.” This is the single most damaging thing anyone could say to another human being. And this is why.
Our feelings and emotions and even our pain-based ones are here to protect us! Our feelings are our internal cues we need to gauge the external world we live in including those who respect and honor us and our personal boundaries and those you don’t.
Our pain-based emotions like guilt, shame, fear, and sadness exist to protect us from harm by causing us to “put on the brakes,” stop, think, and course correct and choose a “safer” path. How do blind and deaf people dream? Of course, in emotions because it is in feeling that we become who we are and dreams are where we “practice.” So our dreams are not all pleasant ones but they reflect our unconscious maturing of our emotional capabilities.
It is the role of parents or caregivers to teach children to trust and rely on their emotions – to become emotionally healthy integrated human beings. When they do not such as when we are neglected and abused, we are taught to betray our own selves and NOT rely and trust our own selves. Our pain-based emotions become toxic rather than serving their protective functions. We are conditioned to not source our personal power and to believe falsely we deserve the pain and are powerless to it.
This is the core to the damaging consequences of all abuse and in particular, emotional invalidation.
READ MORE HERE ON HOW EMOTIONS BECOME TOXIC IN ABUSE SURVIVORS.
Not having our emotions validated is called “invalidation.” It is the worst of abuse and the core of narcissistic abuse! If we grow up without having our emotions and feelings acknowledged regardless if we have the best of everything or not, we learn to suppress rather than trust and rely on our emotions. We learn to distrust rather than trust our internal protective mechanisms. We develop chronic uncertainty rather than confidence in our abilities that prevents us from reaching our true potential. We become reactive to situations and people and become dependent on others rather than ourselves to define our worth and soothe our discomfort. We become shame addicted and suffer from exaggerated self-loathing, self-hate, and self-sabotage. We believe falsely that we are the source and cause of our pain and believe we are powerless to alleviate it. This is all a lie!
We are feeling defective pain-based emotions resulting from the pain and shame that our abusers projected onto us when we were defenseless and dependent on them for safety and security and validation. The consequences?
We abandon our own selves! We bring thinking that served to protect us when we were children into adulthood where the thinking no longer serves us but, rather, harms us. We believe falsely that only those who cause the pain have the power to alleviate it. Again, this is all a lie.
We cannot heal at the same level of thinking that causes and sustains our emotional pain! We become self-critical people pleasers with chronic low self-esteem and victim mentality. We not only let others routinely violate our personal boundaries but also ourselves become notorious boundary violators. We become clueless to where our and other’s personal rights start and finish.
Without healthy functioning emotions we have no reliable internal cues to gauge our self-worth. We end up reliant on others who do not have our best interests at heart to gauge our personal value, our personal worth. We become emotionally starved. We become rescuers and do not learn to use our compassion responsibly. We become vulnerable to emotional predators including narcissists, bullies, incompetent politicians, and con artists who know how to play on our vulnerabilities like a fiddle!
This is a primary root cause of emotional exhaustion, anxiety, panic attacks, trauma addictions, codependencies, chemical addictions, low self-esteem, low self-worth, phobias, fears, pain addictions, intergenerational abuse, illnesses, personality disorders, depression and even many health and autoimmune disorders.
If you are suffering from any of these or are just emotionally fatigued or just plain unhappy and think you had a great upbringing, think again. You are fooling yourself and are in denial. It is time to tap into the root causes of your suppressed pain, release it, learn what triggers it, and learn new coping mechanisms to handle your emotions and extreme emotional dependence on others before the pain escalates. It is time to break your pain addictions! It is time to take your power back.
I explore these issues in much more detail in my book Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors.
It provides a step-by-step “go at your own pace” recovery plan including lessons, tips, tools, and workbooks to help your recover from your pain addictions and your false beliefs of powerlessness and defenselessness. It will teach you how to take your power back and thrive. You can read a free sneak peek and review of the book and purchase a copy here.
The answers lie within! I am here to help you in your search! It is an honor to do so.
Yourlifelifter Launches New Website
Alexandra Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Yourlifelifter, a web-based life-coaching and information center that supports emotional health and well-being is happy to announce the launch of its new website at https://yourlifelifter.wordpress.com to complement its growing Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/yourlifelifter.
Yourlifelifter is successfully helping tens of thousands of people from across the globe address life, career, self-esteem, and emotional health issues.
Included on the website is the Yourlifelifter Blog and a new and growing product line that includes life coaching and career coaching services, Sevenpoint2 and Earth’s Living Clay nutritional health supplements, essential oils, and Melanie Tonia Evans’ Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program.
Evelyn Ryan, the Founder of Yourlifelifter, is the author of Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors that is scheduled to be released for international distribution in Summer 2015.
Welcome to the Yourlifelifter Community!
Thank you for your continued support.
Together we heal! Together we thrive!
Tips for Dealing with the Shame of Betrayal
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
The primary pain that we experience from abuse is shame. Abuse is betrayal of intimate trust. Abuse is abandonment. Unlike guilt, which is the result of feeling bad about what you do in the external world, shame reflects feelings of failure inside, as a person.
Shame is experienced as self-blame. You perceive yourself as flawed, inferior, contemptible, no good. Shame is a normal unconscious human emotion that helps us “put on the brakes” by taking cues from our external environment.
The problem is that you may have too much of it which is the case for victims of abuse.
Shame can become a normal feeling for victims of abuse. We also give up most of our personal power and abandon our own selves.
Shame is the part of you that you can’t face because it is so intolerable. In the words of John Bradshaw, “toxic shame” is an “emotion that gets internalized as a state of being.”
Toxic shame becomes part of a what I refer to as the “Shame Triad” of self-blame, self-loathing, and self-sabotaging behaviors.
Too much shame can make us targets of toxic manipulators and keep us powerless to them and trigger anger at inappropriate times.
Shame can keep us trauma addicted to our abusers.
Tips for Dealing with Shame
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- Turn your compassion and tolerance towards yourself to accept yourself, warts and all, as a valuable person.
- Forgive yourself first. Acknowledge your fallibility as a person and that you were a victim. This will help you release the self-blame and empower yourself to stop thinking falsely that you are weak, powerless, and defenseless.
- Be consistent and fair with sharing your compassion and tolerance with yourself as well as with others.
- Go first with your compassion! Learn to be tolerant of yourself first. Know when to quit, rest, say you’ve had enough, and to put yourself first. This is not selfish. This is self preservation and what emotionally healthy people do.
- Respect your OWN personal boundaries and protect your vulnerabilities. Demonstrate kindness and acceptance to yourself. Do not violate your own personal wishes, body, trust, time, privacy, feelings, and property.
- Do not let other people violate your personal boundaries. This includes learning how to not say yes when you mean no. It also includes not letting your boundaries down by sharing too much of your personal information with others too soon.
- Do not violate other people’s boundaries.
- Stop defending your feelings, preferences, trust, time and choices to
abusers. Abusers use this as an opportunity to abuse and exploit you more and expose you to more trauma and shame. If you must respond to their sneaky insults or criticisms, just say, “That’s interesting. Let me think about it.” Then ignore them and turn them into a non-issue. - Focus on gratitude for what you have. My mother told me if you have food, a roof over your head, your health and people who love you, you have everything. She was right.
- Avoid black and white thinking that focuses only on “good” or “bad” outcomes for yourself. Look at your track record.
- Refrain from complaining about what you disagree with or do not like in yourself. If you have nothing nice to say or think about yourself, don’t say or think it.
- Welcome and view disagreements from trusted individuals or differences not as criticism but as motivations for you to learn more, for you to become a person of integrity.
- Give yourself a break. Be careful to understand the difference between rejecting the “sin” and rejecting the “sinner.” Learn to say “who cares?” more.
- Do not judge a book by its cover. Do not rush to judgment. Refrain from developing an opinion, before you get all the facts. If in doubt, ask a wise trusted friend.
- Refrain from making yourself the brunt of jokes or laughter.
- Do not always stand in the back of the line. Allow yourself to go first sometimes.
- Educate yourself on shame and its debilitating effects.
- Learn to identify the feeling of shame as it occurs in your daily life and write in a journal about situations and relationships that trigger shame.
- Challenge your emotions. Ask yourself which ones result from lack of compassion and tolerance for yourself. Check the list above.
- Work on these areas as trigger points of shame and do what you can to avoid them or minimize their harmful effects.
- Get rid of toxic friends who habitually violate your trust.
- Take anger management classes. Shame triggers anger.
- Look at your track record from youth. Recall the people in your childhood who had something good to say about you…those who were kind to you. Teachers, clergy, neighbors, a surrogate parent or relative perhaps. What words did they use to describe your best qualities? How did you feel when you were around them? Revive these important people from your past by writing about them in a journal and exploring what their support meant to you, then and now.
- If you are religious or spiritual, turn to your Higher Power or Source to cleanse yourself of the shame and unworthiness that you feel so deeply. Religion and spiritual practice can be tremendous sources of inner sustenance and can provide an ideal vision to replace the negative role models and scenarios of the past.
- Get honest constructive unbiased feedback. Share your struggles with working this step on support blogs, meetings, a trusted wise friend, and Websites and Facebook pages like Yourlifelifter.
- Seek professional therapy if you are not progressing in your healing and recovery. You most likely are trauma addicted. Trauma bonding occurs when you rely on your abuser for your safety, happiness, or security. Here are a few examples:
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- You long for and miss your abusers.
- You make excuses for them.
- You replay painful interactions with your abusers over and over again trying to figure out what you did wrong.
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- Turn your compassion and tolerance towards yourself to accept yourself, warts and all, as a valuable person.
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In addition, in order to resolve shame addictions, an ongoing reparative relationship with a qualified therapist can help you challenge your internal voice of shame and replace it with a healthier dialogue. A skilled therapist can be an important ally in helping you to transform the shame into self-acceptance.
Talk about your shame with him/her and share how you experienced shame in your childhood and in your life including in your therapy sessions. With your therapist’s help, identify the ways in which you keep yourself from feeling your shame by adopting a role or “false self” that you portray to others based on what you think is acceptable to them rather than yourself. Share this “false self” with your therapist and try to understand what the role gives you that you feel you lack inside. This can help home in on the shame triggers that you can work to acknowledge, challenge, and release and replace with new rational beliefs and emotions that support your emotional health and well being.
Yourlifelifter is Now Offering Life Coaching and Career Coaching
Emotionally fatigued? Scared? Stuck in your job or career?
Need direction?
Has therapy not worked for you?
Get PERSONALIZED coaching from Certified Professional Life Coach, Career Coach, and Abuse (including narcissistic abuse) Recovery Expert, Evelyn Ryan.
Evelyn tailors coaching to YOUR individual needs and goals!
Life Coaching packages include:
1. FREE self assessment.
2. FREE half hour session with Evelyn to review results.
3. Unlimited emails.
4. Compassionate accountability to healing goals from someone who has been where you are and who has successfully healed.
5. Unique recovery approach with a 20 year success in addressing hidden traumas.
6. Flexible packages and schedules to meet your needs
7. Worldwide correspondence how you choose by telephone and/or Skype.
For more information on life coaching packages and to request self assessment questionnaire, click here.
For more information on career coaching packages, click here.
Understanding Why Narcissists Targeted You is Fundamental to Healing
Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Are you compassionate? Empathetic?
Well, if you are, you are one of 40% of the population who are a prime target for scapegoaters, bullies, narcissists, con-artists, and sociopaths who comprise a subset of the remaining 60% of the population. So being a “nice” person is your double-edged sword and most likely why you are reading this.
According to Dr. Jane McGregor, empaths are ordinary people who are highly perceptive
and insightful and belong to the 40% of human beings who sense when something’s not right, who respond to their gut instinct, and who take action and speak up. They frequently like the child in the The Emperor’s New Clothes, will tell the truth and expose lies and wrong doing and are targets of scapegoaters, bullies, narcissists, and sociopaths who are driven by exaggerated envy and fear of shame, lack of compassion, and the inability to self sooth.
LISTEN TO THIS PROVOCATIVE DISCUSSION ON “THE TOXIC TANGO OF EMPATHS AND NARCISSISTS.”
In the 1990s, researchers suggested that there was a positive relationship between empathy and emotional intelligence. Since then, that term has been used interchangeably with emotional literacy. What this means in practice is that empaths have the ability to understand their own emotions, to listen to other people and empathize with their emotions, to express emotions productively and to handle their emotions in such a way as to improve their personal power.
Dr. McGregor describes that people are often attracted to empaths because of their compassionate nature. A particular attribute is that they are sensitive to the emotional distress of others. Conversely, they have trouble comprehending a closed mind and lack of compassion in others. This is a limitation that empathetic “nice” people have and that you need to bring into your level of awareness and glue into your memory banks.
This inability to see the “bad” in others also significantly enhances their vulnerability to attacks from emotional vampires throughout their lives. As a result, empaths can be targeted easily by energy vampires such as scapegoaters, bullies, narcissists, and sociopaths who enlist other uncompassionate and apathetic people in their wrong-doing. So in actuality, abused children and adults in the world are some of the “nicest” people in the world. This is crazy making, folks, and is the heart of scapegoating and abuse in families and in my opinion, one of the main causes of evil in society today. The number one reason people seek counseling is because they were scapegoated as a child and suffer post traumatic distress. This is psychological trauma! Read on.
Empaths use their ability to boost their and others’ well being and safety. Dr. McGregor found it interesting how often people see empaths in problematical terms. Dr. McGregor in her research found that most people, the 60% majority, prefer the easy life. She explains that some of us admire people who make a bold stand, while others feel uneasy about them.
Problems escalate for empaths, however, when apaths are in the vicinity. Empaths can be brought down, distressed and forced into the position of the lone fighter by the inaction of more apathetic types round them. This is also how school and work group bullying and scapegoating works. The bullies enlist the apathetic, fearful, and defenseless ones who are the ones most likely to go with the flow, to agree that the emperor/empress is wearing new clothes. Apaths behave defenselessly because they want to avoid unpleasant or harmful circumstances [including the bully turning on them]. Apathy is an avoidance strategy that contributes to abuse…by proxy!
Listen and learn more on “The Toxic Tango of Empaths and Narcissists.“
Kim Saeed, a narcissistic abuse recovery expert, says that narcissists prey on empaths and highly sensitive people. Empaths operate predominately from love, humility, and giving. They have a natural capacity for healing and teaching others. However, until they learn how to responsibly use those gifts, they are often taken advantage of…not only by romantic partners, but people in general. Further, empaths have a track record of developing codependent behaviors in childhood to deal with the overwhelming unfairness in the world and to please others, which they usually carry into their adult relationships. It is easy to see, then, how empaths who were abused as children can develop exaggerated codependency issues and dependence on others to define their worth.
Kim further explains that when the empath and narcissist enter into a relationship together, it becomes hyper toxic. It creates a magnetic, yet vibrationally dysfunctional union. The empath’s sole purpose is to facilitate healing in others. Narcissists are insatiable and incurable. The empath gives to the point of complete and utter exhaustion. Because of these natural tendencies, the unaware empath often finds themselves not only being targeted by a narcissist but staying in a relationship with a toxic personality for too long and the damage to them is compounded.
So, all you empathetic and empathic people who suffered and are recovering from abuse as a child, childhood bullying, adult bullying and went on to marry a narcissist or more than one narcissist, bring this into your level of awareness during your healing. Educate yourself, your children and others on their inability to see the “bad” in others, the wolves in sheep’s clothing. This significantly increases your vulnerability to 60% of people, who not only comprise narcissists, bullies, and psychopaths but also the weak ones who join these abusers or harm you further by doing nothing (inaction) because they lack the heart or courage (that you have) to just do the right thing.
I hope you find this useful in your recovery and search for truth!
Yourlifelifter 