To Repel Your Narcissist, You Must Raise the Bar

Think about when you first met your narcissist. What was going on in your life back then? Were you coming out of a bad relationship with someone else? Were you young and vulnerable, trying to escape a traumatic childhood? Perhaps you were needing someone to save you and just make everything better.

If you answered yes to any of these, then you were ripe for a narcissist to sweep you off your feet. Narcissists love to be that knight in shining armor -- in their minds, they like to create a fairy tale and they look for characters to be a part of their play.

And those characters must come with a certain criteria: they must be overly giving of themselves, put themselves second, be willing to adore their knight, and above all, they love to be saved because they can't save themselves.

If they meet anyone outside this criteria -- someone who is selfish or demands she receive and not just give -- the narcissist will not be interested.

You may be asking yourself, "How in the hell did I get here? How did this happen to me?"

Because one day you were minding your own business, and suddenly this person came into your life and turned it upside down.

But here's how it happened:

Somewhere in your childhood you may have had a narcissistic or codependent parent that only loved you on certain conditions, not unconditionally. You were taught that if you put your needs aside to make that parent happy, you were rewarded with conditional love. And as a child, any love felt good so you took what you could get.

So you learned early on that if you are overly giving, and made someone else a priority over you, you would receive love, even though it was minimal at best.

And by the time you began forming adult relationships and looking for a romantic partner, your bar was already set very low. You knew how to be the ultimate caregiver, but never knew how to demand things for yourself.

You also knew that should you actually raise the bar for yourself and demand more, you may just get punished. This form of punishment might have been rejection, neglect, degradation, criticism or isolation by your narcissistic or codependent parent.

So no, you weren't ever going to rock the boat. You knew to keep your mouth shut and never demand anything from anyone. You will give, and give, and give -- because that's what you do best.

And that is why you were a perfect match for your narcissist.

But now you are truly stuck. In your heart you know you deserve better, but because you have spent YEARS pushing your needs aside (and getting punished for when you try differently), how on EARTH would you ever have the strength to break free? How can you possibly be expected to raise the bar for yourself after years of being taught that it's wrong?

I am here to tell you, you are allowed to RAISE THE BAR. It's okay to do so. You will still be loved.

Nothing bad will happen if you do. In fact, only good things will eventually come.

But it won't feel like that in the beginning. No, it will feel REALLY AWFUL.

Everyone around you is so used to you not having boundaries -- especially your narcissist. So by you raising the bar, you're gonna piss off a lot of people.

Yep -- be prepared to not only piss off your narcissist, but your mother, your father, that coworker who walks all over you, even your children! Your kids may be the most pissed off -- because they want things exactly they way they are, and God forbid you don't take care of them like you used to! Nobody wants someone who says "no" to them.

Actually, no UNHEALTHY person wants you to say "no."

But lots and lots of healthy people want you to say "no." Healthy people respect healthy boundaries.

Boundaries are sexy. Raising the bar means you are a badass.

People will crave more of you when you aren't such a giver all the time.

What would happen if you were to walk into Wal-Mart and they were just giving stuff away? That stuff would kind of lose its value, right?

Free stuff is good, but we tend to throw it away quicker, and we often get bored with it.

But valuable stuff -- the stuff we work hard for, the expensive stuff -- we hold onto that! We are proud to have something that wasn't given to us for free!

The same goes for someone who doesn't give away their self-respect and all of their love without requiring people to earn it. If you don't give that away, then those who've earned it will find it immensely valuable!

Everyone in your life -- especially your romantic partner -- must EARN your love every day. Don't give it away. Raise the bar.

Source:- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lindsey-ellison/to-repel-your-narcissist-you-must-raise-the-bar_b_6335456.html

Love Bombing – When It’s Too Good To Be True

When a narcissist comes into your life it is like being hit by a freight train.

One day you were going about your everyday life, and within a very short amount of time, before you could even catch your breath you were swept up into an entirely differently reality.

Gary Zukav makes reference to a Hindu poem “Destruction never appears weapon in hand. It comes slyly on tiptoe, making you see bad in good, and good in bad”.

Narcissists come in hard, they come in fast, and once a narcissist has decided that you are a target, he or she doesn’t waste time.

The process almost all narcissists know how to use very well is known as ‘love-bombing’. It is a powerful tool.

Wikipedia describes ‘love bombing’ as this:

Love bombing is an attempt to influence a person by lavish demonstrations of attention and affection. The phrase can be used in different ways. Members of the Unification Church (who reportedly coined the expression) use or have used it themselves to mean a genuine expression of friendship, fellowship, interest, or concern. Critics of cults use the phrase with the implication that the “love” is feigned and the practice is manipulative. It has also been used to refer to abusers in romantic relationships showering their victims with praise, gifts, and affection in the early stages of a relationship.

In this article I will explain how narcissists use love bombing throughout a relationship (especially in the early stages) in order to hook you, as well as how to CLEARLY identify the signs of love bombing and RUN AWAY before it’s too late.

The Narcissist’s Reality Before You Came Into the Picture

Let’s start with the background of where the narcissist has come from before he or she begins to plot how to get you into their world.

The narcissist is likely to have had narcissistic supply dry up, or is in the process of devaluing and discarding a former source of narcissistic supply. This means that the narcissist is looking to build new sources of supply.

Narcissists have no True Self – their inner self has been completely engulfed by the False Self. Therefore any reverence for life – love, compassion, empathy, integrity and genuine connection is null and void.

Because of the narcissist’s barren and internal emptiness he or she needs mirroring to survive. His or her flagging and erratic self-worth and self-value is precariously balanced on the need for outside attention.

To be without narcissistic supply (attention) is the difference between emotional life and death for a narcissist. The narcissist’s internalised wounds often resulting from the unhealed wounds sustained from the mother (or sometimes the father or other authority figures) are relentless. These are the ‘voices’ that continually tell the narcissist ‘you are no good’, ‘you are worthless’, ‘you are a total failure in life’, ‘you don’t deserve to exist’.

The narcissist does not have the resources to deal with, process or heal this inner terminal self-degradation, because he or she dismissed the True Self and created a False Self in its place.

This False Self is pathological – it is false. And through this faux self which requires constant stimulation and reinforcement of the narcissist’s grandiose version of himself (to escape inner constant torment) people are needed to feed this fake construction.

Normal life disappointments can be processed by people who are non-narcissists with relative ease. A narcissist does not have the inner mechanics to deal with ‘disappointments’ ‘set backs’ or the confronting of his or her ‘reality’ – that he or she is in fact imperfect and not the grandiose false version that is presented to the world.

Constant narcissistic supply is necessary to avoid him or herself, as a bottomless and never-ending quest to escape dealing with the emotional annihilation of what the narcissist really feels about him or herself.

A narcissist low on narcissistic supply needs to secure narcissistic supply as soon as possible. This will be his or her all-consuming focus.

And this is where love bombing comes into play…

The Difference Between Neediness and Pathological Narcissism

You must understand that the narcissistic emotional ‘love’ model is not the normal human one we know. Narcissists are insatiably needy. We know there are ‘needy’ people in the world – but the normal human version of ‘needy’ bares very little resemblance to a narcissist’s neediness.

Needy people are needy people, and have low self-esteem and deficient self-emotional resources, but they are not the pathological, relentless and lethal version of ‘neediness’ that the narcissist is.

Needy people are often very unskilled at the art of persuasion and romance, and may be very off-putting in their advances. It has often been said neediness is the worst cologne – and this is very true. ‘Normal’ needy people often don’t secure love relationships quickly because people are repelled by their shaky advances.

The narcissist is a completely different ball game. He or she is the most needy of all the needy people (requiring narcissistic supply like a heroin addict requires heroin), and his or her literal emotional survival has depended on acquiring narcissistic supply.

Therefore the narcissist has been able to intricately learn and perfect the craft of how to secure narcissistic supply – quickly, flawlessly and expertly. Narcissists appear to be very confident, and very much ‘in their power’ when romancing and wooing you.