Our kind are not prone to giving credit to others (unless of course it absolutely benefits us to do so) since it has to be all about us. Even when it is your achievement, our needs dictate that your successes become ours. This might be as a consequence of us quite simply sequestrating that success and claiming it as our own or alternatively maintaining that the only reason you secured, for example, that promotion, was because of our support, our input and our apparent sacrifices.
However, our success cannot be stated to be ours and ours alone.
You play a significant part in the continuance of our existence. The maintenance of our control over you. The continued provision of fuel.
Yes, our self-defence mechanism that is narcissism operates on a foundation of omnipotence, omniscience and ensuring complete control.
Yes, this is achieved through the inherent application of the narcissistic perspective, the instinctive (Lesser, Mid Range and Greater) and calculated (Greater only) manipulations.
Yes, this is achieved by the ignorance and brainwashing of other parties.
But, were it not for your contribution it would prove somewhat more difficult and potentially less successful.
What is your contribution? Is it fuel? Yes. It is character traits? Yes. Is it residual benefits? Yes again. However, all of these Prime Aims flow from the application and maintenance of control over you. We of course exert this control and do so through the vast range of manipulations that exist – the love-bombing during seduction, the litany of dark machinations such as silent treatments, triangulation and gas lighting through devaluation and the varied hoovers to prevent your threatened departure or to draw you back in at some later stage.
You add to this control and make it easier for us.
How so? Your predilection for self-torture.
You, as an empathic victim torture yourself almost as much as we torture you. Wait, I hear you protest, you are just blame shifting now, HG. No, I am blame sharing. Do understand, that for all you are ambushed, completely taken by surprise and outflanked by our selection of you and then our sustained manipulation of you, you also play a significant part in being seduced and thereafter ensnared because of your ability to torture yourself.
Disagree? Very well. How many of these phrases have you ever thought or said?
What have I done wrong?
What if I can put this right in some way?
Maybe it is my fault after all?
Am I the narcissist?
If only I had (done this or said that) everything would be okay
If only I had answered that text sooner
Maybe if I had tried harder it would have worked
I guess I am guilty of not listening at times.
What if he is happy with her now?
Why has she chosen him?
What if he isn’t actually a narcissist?
What if I give up too soon?
What if she is telling me the truth?
I suppose I provoked him to do that.
He can’t help it, I should be more understanding.
I need her to understand what she is doing to me.
If only I could make him see how he behaves.
Why can’t we just get along like we used to?
Why did he have to have an affair?
What’s he getting out of keeping this divorce going?
Although your self-torture manifests in hundreds of different ways, it all stems from two platforms. The first is your repeated capacity to blame yourself for the problems which always occur when ensnared with us. The second is your inability to accept the situation for what it is.
Your empathic traits of honesty, decency, compassion and guilt are repeatedly seized by your emotional thinking and corrupted. You blame yourself for the things which go wrong in the relationship with us, you blame yourself for not seeing things, for doing the wrong thing, for not trying hard enough, for failing to please us, for annoying us, for making us do the reprehensible acts which are doled out against you time and time again.
Your empathic traits of being a truthseeker, of fairness and of tenacity are similarly corrupted. Rather than accept that the individual is a narcissist and therefore it was inevitable that you would be dumped and someone else chosen to replace you, you question yourself as to what you could have done better. You torture yourself wondering if we will be happy with your replacement. You put yourself through pain trying to get us to see what we have done and what we are doing. You impose agony on yourself through monitoring the daily declarations of the narcissist on social media. You wound yourself by trying to gain some form of admission of wrongdoing from us. You want answers, you want to speak your truth and have us listen to and accept your truth.
Yet by doing all of this, you continue your engage with us in some form and with that come the Terrible Trio, those three downsides namely
- You will provide us with fuel which is, of course, what we want and need and thus we are winning;
- You run the risk of a malign response from us, some form of continued abuse or unpleasant reaction; and
- You are feeding your emotional thinking and keeping it high. This means that not only will you fail to apply logic and apply GOSO, the associated emotions (anger, hurt, misery, upset, frustration and so on) will continued to pour over you.
Rather than decide this person is not good for you and you should leave them well alone, you apply your efforts to trying to contact us and find out what went wrong.
Rather than realise that this person cannot ever change, you seek to secure such change or you sacrifice your own well-being to make changes in the futile hope of securing happiness through your own compromise.
Rather than be thankful that your disengagement gives you a head start on your recovery and progress, you self-sabotage by trying to contact us and understand what you could have done to have prevented the relationship from souring in the first place.
Rather than accept that this person is a narcissist and this is JUST WHAT HE DOES, you torture yourself asking but why, but why, but why?!
If you did not engage in such self torture, we would find it far harder to ensnare you, to keep you ensnared and to ensnare you once again.
Of course, your self-torture is a product of your emotional thinking and its sole aim of ensuring you keep engaging with us. It does not want you to do anything else and that is why it wants you to reject the answers I give you and instead keep querying them. This is why it wants you to keep trying to contact the narcissist to make her see, to make him realise, to make her understand, rather than you drawing a line and saying ‘no, no more’.
Your heightened emotional thinking makes you lose insight so you do not even realise you no longer have any insight. It makes you think that the pursuit of answers, the truth, change, healing, redemption and so much more is not only noble but absolutely necessary. Yes, answers are important and understanding is key to moving forward to your recovery but before you can apply and absorb those answers provided by my work, you have to make room for those answers. You have to reduce that emotional thinking and that means the imposition of no contact.
Your self-torture is part of the maintenance of contact in some form. This means continued emotional thinking. This means a lack of understanding. This means you stay stuck.
Your self-torture is enabling us to control you. To control you sooner, deeper and longer.
And to keep coming back again and again and again.
We are the enemy without and we will always torture you.
You have the enemy within and it is self-torture.