Three Ways to Maintain Your Self-Preservation When Dealing With a Narcissist

08/16/201511/03/201710 Comments

The damage from narcissistic abuse is insipid and insidious and the emotional harm from it can be traumatizing. However, do not think for one second that you are defenseless or powerless to narcissists.

Narcissists are energy vampires. They cannot generate their own power or energy. In fact, they in themselves are powerless.

We fear them because we believe we are powerless and defenseless to them. However, what we fear in reality is not really dangerous. Our perception of danger has been skewed in large part from past harmful or traumatic experiences. We fear narcissists because of what abusers did to us as children when we were vulnerable to them and felt powerless to them. We learned to readily give up our personal power and energy to narcissists and other abusers who trigger our pain and the accompanying false belief of powerlessness.

WHY UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HARM, FEAR AND REAL DANGER ARE FUNDAMENTAL TO OUR HEALING AND WELL-BEING

Narcissists, in reality, however, while aggressive and revengeful, are weak and predictable. This works to your favor since this makes them vulnerable. In fact, they are very easy to manipulate.

CAN NARCISSISM BE CURED?

“Really,” you may be thinking, “how can that be?”

Because in reality, narcissists push the same pain buttons our abusers did when we were children when we were powerless to them. We bring these same fears and beliefs into adulthood. As adults, we overestimate the danger and underestimate our ability to deal with it when, if we were able to look at it rationally, we would see very clearly that we are no longer powerless to these annoying creeps. Read more here.

So our fear of them is really false? The answer is an unequivocal, “Yes!”

We can learn, with practice, to deal with narcissists easily and effectively and not be vulnerable to them or fear them. Once you are able to see them and understand them for who they really are and break through the dysfunctional illusion and heal, you will see they are really more like annoying buzzing insects or whining man and woman babies – bothersome, boring, and predictable.

Here are 3 tips to maintain your self-preservation when dealing with them:

Become a “Gray Rock.” Do not give them any attention, positive or negative. Like this meme states, gray rocks do not attract attention and blend in with the scenery and you can do the same to make yourself less appealing to a narcissist.

If you do not give them your energy, they will go away. They need narcissistic supply to survive. Without it, they cannot live. Practice not reacting to anything they say or do or even thinking about them.

Say to yourself over and over and practice:

I am authentic and powerful in my silence.
I am indestructable.
I show no emotion.
I cannot be triggered.
I offer no supply.
I am invincible.
I am not powerless to anything that triggers me.
I am not defenseless to anything that triggers me.
I am silent.
I am not angry.
I am boring.
I give no clue as to what is going on with me.

Turn the fear triggers into annoyance triggers.

Watch them and map out what you expect them to do and when. You may find it useful to write down each action and how they make you feel. Plan what you will do when the narcissist responds as you predicted. This will help to remove the severity and seriousness from the situation by showing how weak and predictable, yet annoying, they really are, like mosquitoes. It will also make you more mindful and aware of your real power. Taking action (including saying “no”) will help you reset your internal fear threshold and provide you the self power (e.g. narc repellent) to regulate your emotions before they escalate and the confidence in your ability to protect your personal boundaries. Your confidence, self-esteem, and self-confidence will soar!

For reasons of self-preservation (not revenge), learning to manipulate them may be your best option.

Now, I DO NOT recommend this at all to anyone who is in early stages of healing. In addition, it takes time and energy and practice, and frankly, good acting skills to learn how to do this.

So when you are ready and have a legitimate need to benefit, you can learn pretty easily to manipulate them by giving the appearance you are giving up your energy. You can make them think they are manipulating you. Again, I am not promoting deceit for revenge. Rather, I am promoting self-preservation.

I, very far along in my healing, deal with narcissists and other boundary violators like manipulators and covert aggressors and passive aggressive people all the time. I do not fear them because I know how they tick and I no longer believe I am defenseless to them. I no longer fear them because I took my power back and healed and I know how to manage them. For example, I choose to voluntarily interact with them only if I benefit. I always make sure I benefit in some way because I know that they always are using me for something. It is just who they are and it is just what they do. I view it neutrally and not with any fear or emotional investment. If I do not benefit, I do not interact with them or I give up no energy. I just shut down and say nothing. I bank on the fact that they will come back again to “win” just like they bank on others’ vulnerabilities. If and when they come back, I just follow the same rule. If I do not benefit, I do not interact and give up no energy to the interaction.

Narcissists are aggressive and potentially dangerous and can only harm you if you fear them and allow them to do harm to you. In reality, they cannot generate their own power and need yours to survive. This is why they aggressively pursue you. This is behavior they learned in their dysfunctional families. They bank on our weaknesses and only target the emotionally vulnerable, kind, empathetic, generous, conscientious, and trusting people. You can use this information to your benefit and work the interaction with them to your favor.

But make no mistake and do not let your guard down. A narcissist always uses another person for something they need. They are aggressive parasites. Every interaction with them is parasitic. Accept that. It is not because they like you or love you or even hate you. They need you for narcissistic supply and actively go after it. They are predictable and weak and can be managed. They, however, cannot be cured.

How Emotions Go Haywire in Abuse Survivors

08/11/201509/07/201712 Comments

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.”

th-8 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.

13166007_822039794617518_5597762351778431864_n 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.

11825868_789154231210160_5369177878722907305_n-1 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 Causes Malignant Narcissism?

07/19/201510/07/20188 Comments

Well, the experts are not exactly sure and frequently argue the causes between nature and nurture. Some say genetic disposition. Some say abuse, specifically invalidation including neglect and coddling, the same things in actuality that damage children who go on to become abused adults and targets of narcissists.

One thing for sure is that both the narcissists and their targets suffer from deep seated pain and the environmental causes may be the same, however, one child become a narcissistic, a predator, and the other becomes a target, a victim, neurotic. Another fundamental difference is that the neurotic can heal and the narcissist cannot.

Preeminent neuroscientist, Dr. James Fallon reports in “Crime Talk” that we are genetically predisposed to narcissism, empathy and psychopathy. His research discovered that narcissists and psychopaths are genetically predisposed to aggression, violence and lacking compassion and for psychopaths, lacking conscience. 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 very interesting is how Dr. Fallon describes how their “evil genes” are “turned on” by abuse in childhood. Psychopaths and narcissists, however, use the functioning parts of the brain 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. Read more in the article, “Can Malignant Narcissism Be Cured?”

So narcissists and other covert aggressors feed off of the vulnerabilities of neurotics because narcissists cannot generate their own energy to feed their false disordered persona that lacks compassion. They cannot self-soothe. They deliberately target and actively prey on ONLY certain people like empaths who they can manipulate long lasting narcissistic supply from. They also can target other narcissists. 1098228_1187695837924727_3159249499669189930_n

How and where did they learn this?

Of course, where all our fears and phobias and emotional pains are rooted: in our families and in our childhood. They learned their manipulative grooming and combat tactics in the same dysfunctional abusive families where the abused children acquired their wounds. A child learns how to become an effective narcissist by practicing on his related victims who are frequently the empaths and “normal ones” they make the family black sheep and scapegoats. They recruit others in the family to participate with them in their evil dealings. The narcissists learn these aggressively manipulative behaviors in the same environment the abused are conditioned to think like victims and become dependent on others for self-worth.

What makes one neurotic and have low self-worth and the other personality disordered? What makes people evil? What makes us empaths? Only God knows.

This I know for sure.

Narcissism runs rampant in my family: aunts, uncles, cousins and so does mental illness. My aunts married narcissists. One aunt committed suicide as a result of indescribable physical and psychological narcissistic abuse that I witnessed until her death. Decades later they still do not acknowledge the epidemic level of family mental illness after two suicides and serious depressions and addictions. So obviously, families are somehow genetically predisposed and provide the environmental conditions to breed narcissists.

LEARN MORE ON DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES AND INTERGENERATIONAL ABUSE.

I, fortunately, very young was able to see the evilness and depravity and wanted no part in it whatsoever. I was talented, bright, empathetic, ethical and bold and so I openly called them on the depravity and the mental illness. And, of course, the role of the normal ones was to bail the others out when they screwed up in addition to feeding their egos. I provided excellent food and narcissistic supply for the herd of narcissists as did the ones with the most serious mental illnesses who they could scapegoat to their hearts’ content.

imgres-2 There are not many left now back in the “village” and the herd is thin so the narcissists who are left are starving and now make some of the ones they scapegoated their golden children and feed off of each other and lay in wait for someone to die so they can con their money from them. How convenient? Is that love? Is that family? I think the answer is obvious. I refer to it as “narcissistic sodomization.”

You cannot polish a turd, folks, but you can roll it in glitter and you CAN remove yourself from the toxicity and come into your own truth and achieve emotional freedom. Absolutely you can and you deserve to. And as you heal, your children will heal through you!

I am proof of that and it is now my life’s work to help you do the same. We cannot cure narcissists and we cannot solve all the problems in the world but we can make it better one person at a time and I am personally committed to do that.

Why Understanding the Differences Between Harm, Fear, and Real Danger is Fundamental to Your Healing and Well-Being

07/14/201502/17/20198 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

images-2 I write frequently about the differences between aggression and power. I’d like to expand on this topic as it relates to harm, fear and danger a bit more because understanding this is critical to your healing

We Believe Falsely that We are Defenseless

After we are repeatedly harmed, our fear and other pain-based responses can malfunction and go into overdrive because we have been traumatized and our perception of our personal power falsely and temporarily squelched by years of abuse. Consequently, our coping and defense mechanisms that define and nourish our personal power never develop and the trauma and pain becomes chemically programmed into our brain cells. We become trauma addicted. We become heavily dependent on others rather than ourselves to define our worthiness, lovability, and personal power. This is not adaptive and does not support our emotional health or healthy relationships! Rather, we stay subconsciously trapped to irrational pain and fears (our neuroses) which keep us vulnerable to narcissists and other covert aggressors who hunt for and feed off of our vulnerabilities.

Emotional vampires are experts on identifying targets with these neuroses-based vulnerabilities. In addition, once we are in relationships with narcissistic abusers, we can end up grossly overestimating danger based on past harm and grossly underestimating our ability to deal with it. What we perceive as “dangers” can really be “triggers” that are pushing our childhood trauma buttons and our childhood feelings of pain and powerlessness! Read this again. Our fears can be false! In reality, our desire for our abuser is an addiction to the trauma they create. Now this does not mean that a narcissist cannot ever pose a real threat to you or your children or even your pets and can never harm you. If you ever feel you are in real danger, leave and call 911 or your local authorities immediately. However, what it does mean, on the other hand, is that:

You can falsely fear them because you think they are more powerful than they are and
You can falsely think you are defenseless when in reality you are not.

Small mosquito So that big bad wolf narcissist, that vampire whom you think will suck your life’s blood dry is in actually just a weak manipulative annoyance, an aggressive mosquito that has learned to push the right buttons just like the weak coward behind the curtain pretending to be the all powerful Oz by creating an illusion of smoke and mirrors. Aggression, abusing authority, and exploiting vulnerabilities are not synonymous with power, strength, love, or danger, folks! The result?

We can think we are weak, unworthy, unlovable, and defenseless and panic ourselves unnecessarily when in reality, we are safe. We are fearing a powerless being who cannot generate their own energy and who learned to exploit power from other humans. We can remain trauma addicted and mistake it for love for our abusers! Our neuroses and low self-esteem allow us to become complicit in our own abuse and in the abuse of our children! We remain victims of abuse because we were conditioned to think like victims in our childhood. We end up with skewed perceptions of what harm, fear, and love really are and falsely think we are unable to deal with them. We can even go so far as to choose staying with an abuser that we fear less than, for example, being single because we relate that to abandonment that we fear more!

Our Irrational Fears Can Perpetuate Abuse

if-you-dont-heal-your-pain It is this irrational thinking that allows us unknowingly to let abusers who cannot generate their own energy target and exploit us and is the origin of how abuse is perpetuated from generation to generation as we teach our children to think the same way. Understanding this is necessary for your healing so read this carefully and process this and bring it into the forefront of your thinking. Until we are able to deal with these false beliefs, we can stay emotionally connected to the abusers even if we have no contact and this is why.

Energy vampires feed on our responses not only fueled by ego-driven need for revenge and justice but also our personal fears. We end up keeping the narcissistic supply going and keeping ourselves connected to them and they continue being our and our children’s emotional puppet masters. When we fear someone or something, we give them the power to control us!

“When you can shift the pain and fear out of your cells of what the narcissist is doing, or may do, you stop feeding his or her energy.” ~Melanie Tonia Evans

We Need to Take Our Power Back

imgres Remember that the ex-girlfriend, boyfriend, sister, father, mother, co-worker are nothing more than weak bullies, nothing but simple predictable energy vampires. Without you and your attention and energy, they shrivel up and die like the Wicked Witch of the West on the Wizard of Oz. A bucket of water destroyed her. The “Great and Powerful Oz” was a weak coward presenting an illusion of greatness and power. Dorothy and her entourage had the brains, heart, courage, and answers all the time. And so do you!

But in order to take your power back, you need to acknowledge and release the pain, shame, and fear first – those deep seated pains from repressed childhood wounds that raise their ugly heads when our trauma buttons are pushed. In addition, our own egos can keep us trapped in this pain. Is your personal pride and fear of shame keeping you from admitting the truth? Those of you who are reading this (who do not have personality disorders), and you know who you are, who claim that they were not abused in childhood are lying to yourselves. Abuse and aggression can be covert or overt. Passive and covert aggressors do just as much psychological damage as overt abusers. Neglect is abuse. Invalidation is abuse. So stop fooling yourselves so you can move forward to uncover your past to recover your future. The point is this, folks.

Narcissistic abusers have aggressive manipulative personalities. They are born wired that way. They search for and find victims who they are able to manipulate to get what they need because that is just what they do. They are human predators, human parasites. Abusers are everywhere! They find us. We do not find them. In addition, aggression is not synonymous with strength or danger. Remember, however, they do not prey on emotionally fit people because emotionally fit people do not have the vulnerabilities abusers know their victims need in order for their manipulation efforts to be successful. But we have the power and option not to let them. That is once we embrace and release our pain and take ourselves and our power back. Once we learn narcissists are aggressive but weak and we are not powerless or defenseless to them, once we stop thinking like victims, once we learn to regulate our own pain, we no longer become victims not only to narcissists but also to our own thinking. The narcissists, I promise you, disappear like the wind. So stop feeding the beasts and take your power back. Your children will heal through you! This is how we break the cycle of intergenerational abuse. This is how we heal. This is how we thrive.

You Shouldn’t Feel That Way

07/13/201505/20/20182 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

screen-shot-2016-12-20-at-3-08-31-pm 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.

12715486_1200094996686586_3855673423186007016_n

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.

20245415_1521798901175880_7119720137647714483_n 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.

Cannot heal at same level as pain 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.

Are You Struggling with Figuring Out What You Really Want?

07/11/201502/12/20192 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

Reposted from April 2014. Excerpted from I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was by Barbara Sher as modified by Evelyn Ryan.

To love a life that is exciting and fulfilling, you can’t do what’s “right,” you have to do what’s right for you. ~ Barbara Sher

Are you personally struggling with figuring out what it is you really want? Are you “stuck in the muck?”

I am.

I have no emergencies in my life to address and no “fires” to put out.

My only daughter and child will be graduating soon and will be off to college.

Everything in my life has changed unexpectedly and I do not know what to with myself now.

Can you relate?

If you can, how do we get “unstuck from the muck” and deal with this dilemma?

Don’t panic.

You are fine, I am fine. We are fine. The answers are inside us.

th-32 They are just blocked and we need to unblock them.

Simple. So do not judge yourself and accept that you DO have the answers. Do not let this blur your vision and make you bitter or sad.

This is NOT A TEST that we pass or fail. You, we just have to be curious and search for the answers with positivity, humility, patience and kindness for ourselves in the same manner as we would guide a child. We need to identify the inner conflicts, that inner voice, those invisible limiting beliefs that prevent us from making a change and pursuing what we really love.

Do not let inner conflicts, shame or fears cloud your judgment and lead to despair. Do not “what if” yourself to death or catastrophize which can scare you to death or lead to depression.

So what could be blocking us from creating a clear vision?

Is it fear such as fear of lost income, fear of success, fear of failure, fear of change, fear of being trapped, fear of uncertainty?

Do you feel you’ve done it all or are too young or too old to pursue that goal? Is that goal too big for you?

Or perhaps your life has changed, like mine and you don’t have the first idea how to redesign your life? Or perhaps this is the first time you have had to focus on yourself?

Well, I am personally struggling with creating direction and goals. Everything is going pretty well in my life and I do not really need anything. I am also pretty well adjusted and don’t need any internal “fixing.” My challenge is that everything in my life has changed and I have to start a new one at 56 years old!

So the real question we seek to answer is this.

What would our life be and look and feel like if we had no obstacles?

So as I seek the answers, I shall continue to share the lessons I learn with you.

And together, let us find the answers that work best for us individually and help us on a path to figure out what we love and pursue our goals, achieve inner peace and contentment and be the best that we can be.

“The universe is not going to see someone like you again in the entire history of creation.” Vartan Gregorian

Understanding Why Narcissists Targeted You is Fundamental to Healing

07/11/201502/23/201750 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

1098228_1187695837924727_3159249499669189930_n 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 imgres-6 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.

imgres-2 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.

Listen to and learn more on this compelling and provocative topic discussed with Evelyn Ryan on Mental Health News Radio here.

images-3 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.“

images-2 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!