Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Narcissism is now a world-wide pandemic. Narcissists have infiltrated society for one primary reason. Their emotional food supply is abundant. And like any predatory animal, when the food supply is plentiful, the population of predators rise. And the world, I am sad to report, has accepted that it is perfectly fine for members of our species to prey on our own children and on our own kind to serve the depraved. Impersonal relationships facilitated by social media appear, at least in small part, to have fueled the fire.
Read more here on how traumatized children are now a public health crisis.
Being a parent, a politician, a psychologist, a President, a boss, a doctor, a surgeon or whatever does not exempt a person from being evil or having malintent. In fact, narcissism is now rampant in “good deed” communities like politics, the medical community, churches, and even fundraising organizations where many emotional manipulators can exist cloaked for years going unnoticed, while they abuse their authority and provide illusions of generosity and “goodness” and feed off the unlimited supply of power and energy of innocent but vulnerable members of the community while hiding true intentions of superiority, entitlement, domination, and self-righteousness.
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 and 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.” This is also what makes Democracies vulnerable to tyranny, traitors, demagogues who exploit the emotional weaknesses of the public to feed their depraved need for power.
Narcissists are even posing as healers on social media. 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.
“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 meeting even our basic needs, and acting on our human rights, 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 you are vulnerable to lies and 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 better. More so, they get you to believe only they can save you from these fake threats, only they decide who is worthy of resources, only they can 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 Lie to Steal Power
Narcissists, bullies, psychopaths 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 natural and parasitic nature. They are just naturally wired for cheating, lying, exploiting, and betraying. They are what I refer to as “The Lacks.” They lack all it takes to be loyal, committed, honest, mutually respectful, influential, and caring that drive the health of all relationships and our peaceful co-existence with others. They also lack the compassion and ability to obligate in trust to other humans who, instead, in their disordered minds they believe they are entitled to exploit.
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.
People lie to achieve a goal: “We lie if honesty won’t work,” says researcher Tim Levine. Well, lying is a very effective defense mechanism we humans use to, in a nutshell, get others to believe what we want and need them to believe to benefit ourselves. We all have different needs and compete for resources and must be creative on how we acquire what we need and want and, for pathological narcissists, what they believe they are entitled to.
“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 intentionally and chronically lie for three primary reasons: to attract, distract, and manipulate power from their prey. They bomb us with lies and irrational beliefs to skew our perceptions of their power and worth and 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, ability to delay personal gratification, lovability, 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, are effective tactics to make you appear 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.
Who are most Vulnerable to Narcissists’ Lies
The people most vulnerable to believing lies are the ones who have not learned:
- To separate truth from lies. Instead they essentially were taught to believe everything someone who looks like and who acts like them says and thinks.
- To critically think and research and even how to ask questions, probe and inquire.
- To act on their curiosity, to explore and seek for answers and engage in probing dialogue internally with themselves or with others.
- To source power internally and are dependent on others and not themselves to tell them what they think and do are true and worthy.
- To delay gratification.
- To use newfound knowledge and meaning to benefit themselves.
Refuting lies with data does not diminish their believability to these folks because they assess the evidence presented to them through a framework of preexisting tribal knowledge of beliefs and prejudices and fears they have been taught and rewarded not to question and perhaps punished for questioning. They live comfortably believing what they think is true with little tolerance and adaptability to challenges to those beliefs. They choose instead to live their lives pain- and fear-based, reactive, and vulnerable to anything that triggers or alleviates their discomfort. So if presented with proven documented information that doesn’t fit comfortably within their inflexible limits of tolerance, they will continue to accept and defend their belief and even aggressively attack the facts presented or their messenger if the facts are threatening enough. In essence, their fear overrides the motivation to use the new information to improve their beliefs and thinking that can help them override the fear and reliably make their lives better.
What Can We All Learn from This
There is a vital lesson for us to all learn.
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 and futures of our families, communities, states, society, and world. And we must never forget that acquiring these takes plain hard work and authentic personal power that is earned not stolen. If you lack the ethics, integrity, resilience, compassion, beliefs and maturity of thought and consciousness on which Democracies are founded, the laws that enforce them will have no meaning to you but their power will. And if you study the history of Democracy, you well understand why all authoritarian narcissists are able to come into power. I explore this in much more detail in Terrorism, Politics, and the Pandemic of World-Wide Narcissism. You can also read more here on Plato’s views on tyranny and what threatens a Democracy.
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.
Read more here on the Five Pillars of Personal Worth, Power and Authenticity
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.
Albert Einstein said it eloquently in his statement (and my favorite quote):
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.
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 
Take Your Power Back
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.
You will take your power back and thrive. I explore these topics in much more depth in my book, 
The Roman Catholic Church recognized the Seven Capital Virtues as opposites to the Seven Deadly Sins. According to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the sins have an order of greatness, and the virtues a respective order of greatness as well.
This is what I profess, that in all religions, at a point in history when the level of man’s thinking was less mature, when psychology did not exist and we relied on the heavens for answers, folks were describing narcissists and psychopaths. Compassionate loving empathic virtuous people from every corner of the world who were being targeted and scapegoated by narcissists and psychopaths (Jesus being the most famous of scapegoats) were desperate for answers in their common searches for truth. And they wrote their answers in their scriptures and described them in anecdotes to educate and warn us of the evil among us and the impending doom. This is what preempted “psychology” before its birth and we could put a name to these disordered humans. And they were pretty much spot on.
And those evil ones, the narcissists and psychopaths, when they pass, people will rejoice and forget them and no one will share memories of them or miss them. They cannot be cured. They are evil unrepentant sinners who cannot create their own energy and leave no memories to sustain those who remain. Their spirits and insatiable souls are gone forever. This, I profess is eternal damnation commonly known as “hell.”
with a narcissist or were raised by or among one or more, you have been traumatized by and suffered what I believe is the worst psychological and emotional abuse imaginable. The harm is immeasurable and can go on for years.
Oh, the narcissist will make all attempts to take something from you, no doubt. They need to in order to survive. It is their given purpose like it is a mosquito’s purpose to buzz around and annoy you. So the goal here is to minimize the harm to you and your children using psychological narc repellant.
Narcissists are aggressive but very predictable and you can use this to develop offensive strategies to achieve your goals and minimize harm from them. Your choice of divorce or to stop providing narcissistic supply will instill his or her wrath and they will fight to the death to win and defend their fear of shame from you exposing the truth about who they really are to those who know them and even those who do not in the courtroom. So he or she will not hesitate to destroy you and your reputation and lie about you and recruit his flying monkeys to lie about you in court. Expect this and be prepared. Stay calm and focused on long-term emotional freedom and your children’s well-being, not short term self-satisfaction and retaliation.
Give something up periodically to provide an illusion that the narcissist won rather
Have you noticed that the most toxic people have the biggest and the most fragile egos?
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?
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!
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.
We can also mistake 
Healing provides us a divine opportunity to become the authentic persons we were put on this earth to be and thrive. It is at this point that our painful pasts will no longer matter because we have broken our pain addictions and learned to provide our own selves the love and self-respect and self-assurance and self-care that we need to sustain us and thrive and the new found belief that we are worth the effort. We have learned to use our compassion responsibly and we can reliably decide what serves our hearts and souls even in our choices of paying respects when our attackers who we love or once loved have are dying or have died. Even if they are dying, their toxicity is not diminished, just their capacity to act on it. So their “death” or pending death sadly or fortunately (depends on how you choose to view it) essentially forces us into “No Contact” that supports our emotional healing and removes us from the harm from their toxicity.
“Forgiveness is part of healing. It is not a prerequisite to healing. It is a point we reach when we understand and accept the truth about what happened to us from a position of emotional neutrality without the pain, blame and shame that our abusers shadowed on us.” 
One attack, you may think, takes place in the conscious physical world – the other, in the metaphysical, the metacognitive world where we feel and think. However, the pain and shame and anger and fear and trauma we experience from a brutal physical or emotional brutal attack are the same. They inflict the same wounds and frequently open old ones. In addition, there are major differences to how we heal from the wounds. This is why.
beliefs and convictions. I agree with renowned author and therapist Dr. Alice Miller and others that we do not have to forgive and that forgiving our abusers is a personal choice. We can add a huge amount of emotional burden to an already painful situation by being told if we do not forgive, we punish ourselves twice..blah blah blah. This can leave us conflicted and feeling added guilt and even shame when we really do not want to forgive.
Healing, folks, has nothing to do with our abusers. Healing is, however, all about the victims. We are left to heal invisible wounds that were caused by our active but unaware participation in a very harming situation. Abuse survivors must work to turn their compassion and care inward and release the pain, trauma, shame, anger and fear that were projected onto them and inflicted on them by the emotional and conscienceless criminals, vampires, and thieves who also stole their identities. We, to heal, must not only release the pain and anger from the attack but also the shame from betrayal and of our unconscious complicity in the crime and our perceived foolery. This is why self-forgiveness and self-compassion are so important in healing. As Emily R., a community member at Yourlifelifter so eloquently stated, “forgiving a conscienceless person has absolutely zero meaning, thus, the real issue is learning to forgive oneself for not trusting oneself over their manipulative ploys of false promises and fake emoting.”
It is a point we reach when we understand and accept the truth about what happened
Healing is a process of self-discovery, self-analysis into the root causes of why we were victimized, addressing how our beliefs contributed to that, correcting our skewed beliefs, mourning our losses, building our self-worth as well as healing our trauma wounds. I personally believe, it is close to impossible to fully accept what happened to us and forgive ourselves for the part we played unless we first heal and recover from the trauma and then stop our faulty victim thinking. This requires fully understanding why we love people who inflict pain on us and why we are attracted to power imbalanced relationships.
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.”
them great fear and pain.
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
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 
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!
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.
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 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 
How do we remove them from our lives?
It is called the Time – Distance – Shielding (TDS) rule and it is used to control hazards in industries world-wide. It works just as effectively with people.
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.
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!
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.
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