The Ten Narcissistic Commandments
1. I am right. You are wrong.
Everything I say and do is founded in the logic of my world and it follows that is has to be right. It equally follows therefore that whatever you say and do is wrong. I cannot ever allow you to be seen to be right because that means I am ceding control to somebody whom I regard as inferior. This undermines my sense of superiority. Maintaining this state of me being right and you being wrong requires various manipulative techniques including blame-shifting, projection, denial and deflection. Of course I am relying on your need to be understood and your desire to change me that you will always approach this stance of mine head on. My position will seem illogical to you and you will react to it and keep doing so.
2. There is no you and me. There is only me.
You are purely an extension of myself. I want to subsume everything about you into me. This is part of the reason why I seduce you with such totality. I am unable to discern where you begin and where I end. I regard you as an appliance that is to be plugged into me and is there to do my bidding, providing me with fuel, looking after me and responding to everything that I command. I forbid you to act independently of me, have interests beyond me and to interact with others. I am what is important. You must focus on me and only me. Your needs become secondary to my needs.
3. Do as I say, not as I do.
Do not question me. Who are you to question someone as brilliant as me? Know your place. Submit to me and carry out my whims. Accede to my commands. I am entitled to do as I please and therefore any contradiction in my behaviour is a mistaken belief on your part. You may regard what I say and do as hypocrisy but you are wrong once again. This is pragmatism on my part and that is why I succeed whilst you fail.
4. One is never enough
Such is my might that one of you is not enough to sustain me. It is my right to gain fuel from all those that I interact with. This means I will be unfaithful but my infidelity is purely a means to an end. By all means react to my affairs and indiscretions, for it is all excellent fuel for me, but you will not stop me from taking another. Expect to be triangulated with other people and objects, for my appetite is so vast I must have many supply lines of fuel and this means you will become a cog inside a vast machine, as wheels turn within wheels.
5. Your pain is my gain
I cannot exist without drawing negative fuel from you at some point. It is retribution for your failings. There is no hope for an alternative. Your devaluation will happen as it has with many before you and those who are yet to come. It is a process and your agony, hurt and distress is purely part of the necessary equation to sustain me. It is drawn from you through many machinations, some you may see and others you will not.
6. You are worthless yet I will never leave you alone
You are inferior to me and that inferiority infuriates me since I am reminded that I must depend on someone weak and pathetic. This in turn generates hatred and despising of this chained situation I find myself in. I will cast you to one side once you have served your purpose and my disgust for you can no longer be tolerated. This is not the end however because I will always return to exhibit my power to draw you back once again and suck further fuel from you.
7. I am everywhere. I am everything
I am omnipotent and omniscient. I have my spies and errand boys all around as they feed me information about you which I can then use against you and to further my agendas. I have my Lieutenants carrying out my orders without question. I instil myself in every aspect of your life, making you see me, hear me and smell me, even after I am no longer physically near you. I imbue my essence into so much that my toxic memory pervades you for years after you have been cast aside, allowing me to return triumphant, as if nothing ever happened, to draw you into my false world once more.
8. The games are always being played.
The quest for fuel is unending. To achieve this I must engage in repeated and sustained manipulations and machinations. You and others are but pawns on my giant chessboard as I move you hither and thither in order to achieve my aims. I plot, plan and scheme before I organise, arrange and orchestrate. Each and every day I must engage in these nefarious games in order to secure my existence and as my chosen primary appliance you will be caught in this malicious web, right in the centre. My game-playing means nothing is as it seems, that truth is a stranger to me and lies flow from my mouth as easily as expelled breath.
9. I will never change
I will issue false promises of changing, empty protestations that I shall seek help and perfidious declarations of knowing I need to alter my behaviour but I never shall. I deny what I am, although for the most part I know full well what I am. I see no reason to change. Why should I when this how I have been created? Why should I when this is all I know? Why should I when it is all your fault anyway?
10. Fuel is the rule.
Fuel is at the centre of everything that I do. My actions and decisions are based on acquiring the precious resource. My interaction with strangers, minions, acquaintances and friends is all hinged on the gathering of fuel. The way in which I deal with colleagues and family is always based on the greatest potential for the collection of fuel. My thoughts are invaded with the need to gain fuel, my actions are dictated by the requirement to garner fuel. Fuel is the reason you were chosen. Fuel is the reason you were seduced, debased and discarded. Fuel is why I came back. Again and again.
Fuel is everything.
50 thoughts on “The Ten Narcissistic Commandments”
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A snake is symbolic of wisdom. I know we have a stereotype of a snake but that is not what it is. I say that because analytical psychologists who have studied dreams along side the psychology of their patients have the evidence.
So that was the wisdom of the unconscious, that knew what the Narcs were, and was telling You. Your wise unconscious.
HG,
Look your world don’t exist.
This fuel you believe you require is BS!
You say you use manipulation as a power to extract fuel… If you was real and had some honest game in ya you would have no need for manipulation.
Truthfully I look down on you and others like you as cowards and snakes that need this “fuel” to feed your fantasy world that you trick yourself to believe exists. The energy released to maintain this ILLUSION of your EGO sickens me. Your vampiric feeding off people also sickens me.
I far surpass your lies and deciet. My energy exchanges never need me to manipulate or deceive.
Me simply entering a area among good hearted, strong spirited and soul aware people. They give all I could ever need or use. No need for physical contact or hypnotic terminology. Power recognizes something more powerful.
when I came back from visiting the narc, I had a whole lot of dreams of snakes. And yes, he was a coward. All mine had for me was his manipulations and a whole lot of hot air. Just hot, empty air
Number 3 is the most frustrating for me. So many times he complains to the courts that I don’t “communicate enough” about the kids. He says I should tell him about anything that involves the kids. Example: He gripes because I didn’t tell him exactly what time our son had a cavity filled, but he fails to tell me that he kicked our son out of his house!! He takes our son to the doctor to get a prescription and then complains when I have the prescription filled because I didn’t discuss it with him!! But he has put my son on meds before without telling me at all. My attourney was about to pull his hair out today😂! He finally gets it. There is no pleasing my ex narc. He made the comment today that he hopes this is almost over with now that we have been in a court battle for a year. I told him that every psychologist I have talked to has said that it will not be over with until the kids are all 18.
I was treated like this by 2 people. First my mother, emotionally betraying me. Always singing the praises of my friend, my cousin, a stranger, my ex boyfriend and his wife, saying she wished she had a daughter like them!! Then at the same time telling me I had not met her standards, never being interested in me, not even knowing what my job is, but devaluing me in every way to everyone.
The other is my husband, always having a harem of women around him, coyly flirting with them, ignoring me. Blaming me etc. pure evil. Seperated now. No contact with mother which has estranged me from all my extended family who believe what she has said. So cruel!!
Both of my parents, my son’s father and an ex male flatmate are false, cruel and will suck up to each other for anything. Especially attention concerning the flat mate
Exactly MANIPULATION ALL LIES! Mine went so far as to tell me he truly believes we are “soul mates” (we have been divorced a yr now) but like in true fashion of a narc the truth always comes out as he truly feels that the 15yrs we were together meant nothing to him. I have gotten into his email before and seen the lies he tells to other women its truly sickening. He makes me sick. I just cant wait for the day he is no longer even a thought in my head!
What do you make of one that claims to still care about you because you are the mother of his children?
Manipulation.
HG you talk a lot about ” your world”
i only understand it in part.
what do you really mean?
Because it seems that this ” your world” it is determined by your interaction with your victims..
what is then your ” real own world” ?
Also i wanted to ask you something else:
what other narcissists think about you coming in the ” limelight ” ?
My world is where I am in control and it accords with my rules.
I don’t care what other narcissists think about me coming into the limelight.
But my ex did change. He doesn’t hurt me anymore. He tries really hard. However, we don’t have too much contact these days so it’s probably easier for him to be kind. Also, i have zero demands now that he’s my ex.
It is the zero demands part. The games are often a tactic to avoid any expectations, any true meeting of mind and heart and body.
It is a no win situation. Lots of demands is interpreted as you’re bitchy and high maintenance and zero demands means you’re boring and not challenging enough. I’ve been both demanding and completely accommodating. The end result is always the same. Though I’ve learned my demanding side fairs better. It does not walk away empty-handed.
Hg. I keep reading stuff about narcs being unfaithful. Can you explain why this doesn’t happen to me? It really doesn’t. I don’t worry about them looking at others at all. I’m a little confused as to the narcs that have latched into me have not gone for other women? I’d appreciate it if u reply as each time I put a message u don’t reply. I’m sure your just busy. Tia x
1. How do you know for sure they are not unfaithful?
2. You consider infidelity in a sexual sense – sex is just one way of gaining fuel, he may be using another method to gain fuel from those people, just not sex.
Goodness yes it’s not always sexual. What I found from my ex of 25 years (I married him twice in that time btw) is that he was always emotionally cheating and often right in front of me. He would brag on a woman and her tiny physique, as I am 5″8 and an inch taller than her though I’m not heavy. He would talk to women in a way I never got in private. That is cheating!!!! It’s also a form of covert abuse. Then in he way home would talk about how wonderful these others were and how funny they thought he was or talented.
I was rejected in every way by this human for 25 years the. Reeled back in over and over and over. The 15 year age difference was the biggest culprit Oma’s I met him at 17 and he 32. I became almost addicted to the cycle. I’ve been out for over 2 years. Only after the death of our 16 year old did u gather the wear withal to leave. He was spirally and losing control of the facade and I took advantage of it. Without a child custody battle he had nothing to legally fight for.
Being divorced from a narc with children is more difficult than staying married to them it’s why I remarried him.
This time though I havnt seen him since the day I walked out of our home. It’s been such a journey of finding my own thoughts and feelings. At 44 I’m seeing the world and feeling it through my own mind since I was a child
His
Thank you Heather, I appreciate you providing an experience which exhibits how infidelity occurs in ways distinct from the sexual.
Yes. He and I were never an item. I wanted to be once. But even as someone sidelined, he ‘cheated’ on me in all those ways Heather described. Amazing how he created this sense of cheating on me when we weren’t ever together. It was so… gross, that I started talking to him as if we were an item. And all. rcause of this false illusion he created. Then he told me to stop talking as if we were an item. So, point is, that must be what he did to everyone he ever really dated. And it was all talking about how kthers live him, constantly talking abiut being out with friends, constantly busy, constantly creating this feeling that he was in such demand. If we had been together and had an agreement, had some commitment, it would have been horrific to experience all that. It was bad enough he fabricated this feeling that there was something between us. So if this was his MO with me, no one to him, then I can only imagine what it would be like ramped up on steroids and to be dating and his primary source. Hell. Pire hell.
I am a little confused. If a person tells you that we are not in a relationship, how can he/she be accused of cheating?
Entertainment:
HG can explain it better probably. But all of the manipulations were used to fake a relationship and give the impression that you were in something together, going somewhere together …. Then the Grand Switch accompanied by all the devalue tricks of you are not the only one, no one is priority….. The speeches given well AFTER you let your guard down, open your heart, go out of your way, are led to believe you are the only one, only one who could have been, and on and on. The emotional betrayal is like nothing else. And then him faking it had never happened. Emotional cheating because you were set up to believe that you had some value when you had none at all. I had someone tell me that he wasn’t my boyfriend or husband, ergo, I should not feel the depth of hurt I did. What a crock of Sh*t. A ring and a statement of commitment means nothing to a narc so if you are being lured into their web, then you can believe that you are being groomed to feel like you are an item. Absolutely. My emotional reactions were entirely appropriate for what he fabricated. His telling me we are not in a relationship was just one more trick because it was accompanied by future faking, no closure, never a good bye, never sorry it didn’t work. None of that. None. So in the end, I had to decide which side of the lies I wanted to fall on and it made far more sense to fall on the side that I was not wrong for feeling like I was important and someone and his long lost true love and we were an item. And EFF him if it didn’t fit with his agenda. He paid the price for faking all that as he well should have. Love HG’s wording… it erupted Empath Supernova in me. A place I would never, ever had gone to had he been capable of love and honesty because none of what then happened would have had he not endlessly lied and set me up. For me to not honor all the places he led me would be to then buy into his BS that I just made it all up, was somehow magically out of nowhere turned into some fatal attraction crazy person. Nope. But I got my eventual closure and we mentally “broke up” and I made peace that I no longer have any ‘claims’ to what happened. We will never speak again. Ever. We are now officially ‘broken up’ from our non-existent relationship. God. How evil can someone be?
Sarabella,
Sorry for the mind games he put you thorough I read it as from the onset he made it clear you weren’t an item. We may be empaths bit with blount in your face we are not together upfront we will flee.
Sarabella, you describe it as a ‘non-existent relationship’ and he told you that you and him are not an item. I know narcs play mind games, but here it is clear that he told you where you stand. How long were you ‘with’ him?
It was non-existent because it was all lies, a con, a joke to him. One of the points I thought of this whole blog IS to demonstrate that NO ONE is an item with a narc. No one.
You could be wined, dined, seduced, married and everything HG describes in his book Exorcism and guess what? You are still not an item. You could be walked down the alter and on your walk back, be devalued within hours … because you were never an item. You were only a prop in their play. Nothing else. “An item” to us means something entirely different to them.
His whole con was to hook me in and he used everything normal people do. Friendship, love, trust … but in the end, they were all weaponized. He also came after me after 3 decades of when we once knew each other. You know how HG talks about its never over? Yeah. THAT!!!
So what does “an item” mean to a narc? Nothing. We are not talking two healthy people who talked out a relationship and found themselves on opposite sides of what they both want out of it. Or who laid it all out on the table and were honest. NO. He tricked me and conned me every step of the way. At one point, he even pretended to ‘come clean’ and gave me this whole story about how he had just done a number on some woman’s head (HIS WORDS!), a love story, and what was he doing here with his friend Sarabella (admitting he was in fact doing a number on MY head) … but! If I wanted to continue! Another ugly manipulative trick because it was really a devalue/discard. NOT an honest discussion of our needs and expectations and that this was a mistake, it would never work, and we should END whatever it was we were doing. There was no good-bye. He just shifted the doors he was opening. I just had no idea all that had been going on was just one manipulative move after another. I was so blindsided by the horror of what he was suddenly doing, I could not even react properly to that devalue/discard (it’s the place I am working on healing the most right not, rebuilding my RUN mechanism when I ever feel any of the pain I felt the night he did that one to me).
I was just his high supply for the time. That was all. And what he used to hoover me after 30 years and used again and again to control me, gives new meaning to the word cruelty.
So, no, there was no relationship. It was all fake. Even the friendship was fake.
It’s never over is absolutely true. Believe it. Oh, I was HIS item, but WE were never an item, and he will never get near me again. Disordered, isn’t it?
PNA:
It was non-existent because it was all lies, a con, a joke to him. One of the points I thought of this whole blog IS to demonstrate that NO ONE is an item with a narc. No one.
You could be wined, dined, seduced, married and everything HG describes in his book Exorcism and guess what? You are still not an item. You could be walked down the alter and on your walk back, be devalued within hours … because you were never an item. You were only a prop in their play. Nothing else. “An item” to us means something entirely different to them.
His whole con was to hook me in and he used everything normal people do. Friendship, love, trust played off of an old love, … but in the end, they were all weaponized. He also came after me after 3 decades of when we once knew each other. You know how HG talks about its never over? Yeah. THAT!!!
So what does “an item” mean to a narc? Nothing. We are not talking two healthy people who talked out a relationship and found themselves on opposite sides of what they both want out of it. Or who laid it all out on the table and were honest. NO. He tricked me and conned me every step of the way. At one point, he even pretended to ‘come clean’ and gave me this whole story about how he had just done a number on some woman’s head (HIS WORDS!), a love story, and what was he doing here with his friend Sarabella (admitting he was in fact doing a number on MY head) … but! If I wanted to continue! Another ugly manipulative trick because it was really a devalue/discard. NOT an honest discussion of our needs and expectations and that this was a mistake, it would never work, and we should END whatever it was we were doing. There was no good-bye. He just shifted the doors he was opening. I just had no idea all that had been going on was just one manipulative move after another. I was so blindsided by the horror of what he was suddenly doing, I could not even react properly to that devalue/discard (it’s the place I am working on healing the most right not, rebuilding my RUN mechanism when I ever feel any of the pain I felt the night he did that one to me).
I was just his high supply for the time. That was all. And what he used to hoover me after 30 years and used again and again to control me, gives new meaning to the word cruelty.
So, no, there was no relationship. It was all fake. Even the friendship was fake. Soulmate since a boy. Fake. Looked for you. Fake. Please come see me. Fake. You were the only one I could have been with. Fake. This and that. Fake. Not an item? Fake. Only an item when it served his purposes. Then otherwise, Fake.
It’s never over is absolutely true. Believe it. Oh, I was HIS item, but WE were never an item, and he will never get near me again. Disordered, isn’t it?
Snowrab, what I was referring to was if up front narc told us we weren’t going to be together then it makes it easier to manage expectations. Sarabella comment not sure if you are one of the same appeared as though the guy was upfront. My interpretation and experience is how during the love bombing period with the mirroring , admiration, excessive attention. Lavish trips and other methods used during this to suck us in is fraud. How could they be in a relationship due to massive amount of time, money, mirroring they put into the relationship.
If a person can say we aren’t going to be together “friends with benefits ” that’s completely different. Guard your emotions and wallet. We may be empaths but it doesn’t mean we ate stupid, stolen love by fraud and manipulation is completely different.
Entertainment, yes Sarabella, my login name got switched. I hope I fixed it. No, it was all love fraud and manipulation. 100%. Bait and switch, soulmates since a boy, and more, gaslighting, future faking (so much of that before I had a term for it!)…. all of it. He is a lie. Confirmed too late after the fact by his friend. It was all a joke to him. If we had been solid friends that got close, that would have been something else. It was never like that. I was totally conned for no reason but his amusement.
SnowArab, are you sarabella? I was a little confused at first. If you are, thx for your reply. He came back to you after 30 yrs?! Yikes! You must have entered his sphere of influence after 30 yrs! Like HG says, the relationship is until death!
Yes, login got messed up. I think I fixed it all and HG scrubbed some for me that he found. Yayaya 30 years. So imagine how well the soulmate thing worked though it was me who first suggested something about it, he picked it up and gave it a name. Mirrored? Was ever true? I still can’t tell if maybe he meant some of it. Or was it all just part of the for life thingy. 🙁
HG,
These are alternative facts.😊 hurry with the potus article.
Yeah, seriously. He is doing this slow tease. You noticed that, too?
The question I have is why are your kind filled with so much hatred? Hatred of yourself, hatred of others, hatred of life underneath all that above. Despite your fake love of life, underneath is immense hatred. Doesn’t it get tiresome to have all that contempt, all that disdain, all that arrogance, all that desperate need to constantly find fuel?
You are such a slave to everything outside of yourself. I get your superiority doesn’t allow you to see it this way, but how exhausting. Do you ever wonder what you are missing or is it so alien that you long ago stopped wondering or wanting anything but that reality you just described?
The thing is, with hard work, I have seen your reality and how it all works. My empathy allows me to envision your world. It’s bleak and fills me with … despair. The despair that you must not feel anymore. It fills me with rage. It makes me feel how horribly unfair you people are to life around you. I hate the utterly helpless feeling when I think of ‘my narc’ cause other than all that psychological game, he is not superior in anyway shape or form. He never will be as it’s all bluff, smoke and mirrors. And my rage is his persistence in thinking he is someone when he is nothing.
But then, I can step out of your world and return to mine, where I feel real love, comfort, kindness, sharing, I feel at peace and know that I can always find my resources from within even if I have stumbled into your world of hell. I don’t need to belittle those I love. I find joy in bringing them up in life for real, not just to have the power when I smack them down. I truly enjoy their life and value their life. Even if I got caught by your kind, I can return to myself. I can heal. I can heal over and over and light myself back up from within. He cannot, you cannot.
But why so much hatred? Its the hatred that fuels lessers to commit violent crimes and more. But you have it, too. So where did it come from? Do you even know anymore? It seems its your hatred that fuels you to find fuel, not your lack of empathy or compassion or lack of conscience that lets you keep doing this to people. It’s the hatred that bothers me the most. A perpetual, fountain of hatred.
No it is not tiresome.
When your early world kept telling you essentially to go fuck yourself, wouldn’t you then spend your life telling the world to go and get fucked? That’s where the hatred comes from.
You are punishing everyone for the crimes of a few. Not everyone is your enemy, not everyone is going to hurt you. It is easy to assume this -and we do, too, in the aftermath of severe abuse- but it is a trap. We need to rise above that!
Yes, but no. You would not believe the level the world told me that. Probably more than even you experienced, I can almost guarantee that. But my self-respect and dignity and truly my knowledge that I AM better than so many people would prevent me from living in a perpetual state of revenge which is what this is. Hate, revenge and serious unrelenting self pity. You are no better than them, you became them and my pride would never allow me to stoop to their level. Never. I am better than most people and I know it. I always knew it and its not from any of my own narcissism. There was always a part of me that no one could touch. No one. And that is where I stored all my beauty and love and light. Its the only thing that kept me going because the world was relentless in telling me and showing me to go fuck myself. But I never wanted to be like them. To adopt all their ways as you have, seems like in the end, you let them win. Know what I mean?
I doubt it surpassed what happened to me.
I had no choice and did what worked for me. And it does work.
I don’t doubt that you and I shared alot of the same abuse. Much hasn’t been discussed between us. It is misdirected anger HG. You took the eff you rebellion. Not surprising after abuse. You can flip it though. You just don’t want to and that’s your prerogative. All I can do is remain positive that you will change, but stay away from you until you do.
Sarabella, you wrote:
“You would not believe the level the world told me that. Probably more than even you experienced, I can almost guarantee that.”
I’m sure you know that HG was sexually abused by his aunt. My ex was sexually abused by an adult male for 3 consecutive years. His body defended itself the only way it involuntarily and subconsciously knew how- to disengage and to depart its own soul. It’s so sad 😔
Oh, I guarantee you HG that the abuse from my mother and society surpassed yours. Do you know how I know? Because something happened to me that prevented me from ever resorting to survival in the way you did. I could never ever have turned to people and played the tricks on them that you play. I was prevented by the very things that was then used to abuse me further outside the home. I had nowhere to go for fuel. Nowhere. You were given the luxury of some out mechanism , however distorted it is. I had NO release valve and I am only coming to terms with that reality now. Your mother was a cat, toying with you as a mouse. what if everyone else outside your family did that to you, too? And not just in your imagination or paranoia, they really did it, too. Cats were everywhere.
You do not know the totality of what occurred but you will.
Hey now, hey now everyone – it’s not a competition as to whose abuse was worse!
HG – why don’t you meet ABB in real life? Perhaps you can learn from her? And / or why don’t you volunteer to help with victims / survivors (in particular, children) of emotional and other domestic abuse?
Ok, and when you expose it, we will see. I will email you my story. And then we will talk. Honestly I want to know cause I want to know why you turned out like you and me like me. And I really suspect its that I had something else, that was the main reason I took a different path. But!
But, my blind empathy didn’t save me entirely and your understanding of this part is why you have something to teach me to unravel this horrific kind of abuse.
Indeed Sarabella and it is of course a matter of interest to me as well. There must be some differing factor which meant you went one way and I went another.
I assumed sexual abuse was somewhere. Its in my history as well.
I mentioned above the similarities with abuse. I went both ways. I mentally recreated the idea of controlling the abuse by proxy as the predator role. Then switched to over empathy as the correct learning of emotions were applied. Again trying to master the abuse by proxy through victim perspective.The split to one or the other comes from what works to ease the internal abuse dynamic. The catalyst is did you have any role model, neighbor, friend, relative, belief in God that you could see love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, patience and self control? If so then you went empath because you were focused on those traits, the positive ones. If you focused on the abusive negative traits, lies, reviling, cold, indifference, physical assault, etc and the demonstration of them, you became predatory. It is changeable. What is the force behind your thought processes? If it continues to be looking for bad then your mind will turn to it. If the focus is good then you turn to that. You can make a metamorphosis. Anyone can course correct. You can make your mind over, change in synapses. You just have to be taught by a good doctor & have the willingness to do so. 💙
ABB, that is encouraging. Do you believe that narcs can change? Do you believe HG can change? Do you actually feel the empathic traits or is it more of a learned, mirrored cognitive empathy?
PANA,
Yes, I believe Narcs can change. I believe HG can change. I think that to be able to do this, you have to take in knowledge of the behavior. Self examine. Apply the principles that you are taught through therapy and by looking to examples of ones who have qualities that you admire and practice those qualities. I think it is like breaking an addiction or bad habit. Once you make a conscious decision to modify the behavior then practice that, it becomes newly habitual. I do think in order to take away the behavior, you must have something to replace it. If you take away the coping skill without giving a new one then you crash. How do people stop bad habits? They make their mind over. Just like an empath would no longer accept abusive behavior. They educate themselves, then modify their actions. No contact is a modification. You stop the bad habits of receiving abuse. Figure out why you thought that was acceptable behavior and then don’t accept that behavior anymore.
I have more than just cognitive empathy. I feel what the other person feels. I had to learn how to be compassionate. I had to listen to others and try to really see things from their point of view. Repetitively focusing on others and allowing myself to feel in a safe environment caused a foundation to be formed which could then be built upon. Coupled with the fact that I had a baby, I was able to see unconditional love in action. In my situation this made quite a difference. It helped me to learn. Each person will have a way to change that speaks to them. In my case the catalyst to change was partially motherhood.
I didn’t have such a background… kindness, peace, an external role model, stability .. more importantly HONESTY. I did have an extremely traumatizing event, an accident, that I see now was the most important piece as to why I became an empath and my brother a sociopath. A 3 year old who is traumatized by an accident and medical intervention, who has a memorable out of body experience and who becomes self-aware before developmentally normal learns to protect her soul. The core of me was preserved separate from what life then threw at me. But by the time I was 20, I did flat line so to speak at least socially. The only place I felt safe was in nature, in solitude and through writing, reading and making art. So while I did sort of go dead inside, I never became predatorial.
But about the mind seeing good or bad, this is part of the truth seeking aspect of an empath. How does that even work now when you are still very attached to a malignant narcissist? Do I focus on the bad in him and stay far away, or elect to see the little good in him and salvage a long distance friendship? Other people not close to him see the good, the cute, charming, funny, they are flattered, they see his woundednes. I met the terrifying wolf, the lie, the sociopath. So, which is the truth? The predator that I know now lives in him, one I tricked him in to admiting exists, or the sheep?
Amen!