Narcissistic abuse and recovery explored and explained through a true first-person narrative.
| What is a Trauma Bond? | Becoming Addicted to one’s Abuser | What is a trauma bond? This article examines how love-bombing, triangulation, intermittent reinforcement, ghosting and hoovering create a powerful addiction to one’s abuser Narcissists (and other emotional abusers) rely on manipulation of primal emotions, love and fear to hook their victims. A rudimentary study of psychology introduces
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| How to tell if Someone is a Narcissist: Symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder | Updated | Victims of narcissistic abuse generally know for themselves once they learn about narcissistic personality disorder, but diagnosing NPD isn’t something that can be done with a website. There are common “tells” that could indicate you might be dealing with a narcissist, though. Narcissism
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| Narcissists and Daddy Issues / Mommy Issues | Although narcissists ultimately want all the power, the relationship dynamic they seek and foster puts them in the position of a child to the adult, the parenting role to be assumed by their partner. They don’t seem to have adult-to-adult relationships with those who are close to them. I distinctly recall
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| Healing from Narcissistic Abuse – How I Engaged in Recovery | Updated 3/24/21 | Healing from narcissistic abuse is no small matter. For the first couple months after I left my abusive relationship, all I could really do was survive. I was having a moral and spiritual crisis and I was viewing the world with new cynical and suspicious
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Mirroring is one of the first things a narcissist does when hooking a new source of narcissistic supply. It’s part of the love bombing stage. I’d hazard a wager that one of the earliest “mirrors” in a budding relationship with a narcissist is a shared taste in music. Close runners-up would probably be liking the same kinds of movies and
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Michael Sunset’s book, A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Manipulate is a raw memoir relating how he was systematically manipulated by his ex-wife, her father and his own mother and sister to believe he had a mental illness. It’s a classic tale of gaslighting, reminiscent of the namesake film Gas Light that spawned the psychological term. His ex-wife deftly
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| Narcissists Split Personalities – When the Mask Slips | Life with Tina was so confusing, disorienting and confounding. It could seem like there were two Tinas or that she was in a kind-of Shrodinger’s quantum reality where she could exist in two contradictory states at once. She loved me and at the same time, she didn’t. She was somehow
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It was just a week after “Nategate,” I was barely moved in to the apartment and even though I was still committed to making things work, Tina and I were not really on solid ground. I was working on setting up counseling for us, but Tina had made plans with Amber months in advance to go to Rock Fest –
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Unstable, on-again, off-again relationships are a hallmark of Cluster B disorders, like borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. On-again, off-again relationships can be terribly damaging and often, they can be the result of a prolonged, repeated pattern of narcissistic abuse. Narcissists tend to target very empathetic and conscientious people, because they can mistreat them longer, with less chance of them leaving.
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For over a year, I maintained a storage locker in Farmington. It wasn’t a convenient location for any more than a month. It had made sense at the time Tina and I decided to rent it, since I’d just sold my Mom’s house and was moving in with Tina as a stepping stone towards getting a new home together. After
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