In the end, we all have to love ourselves.
In my opinion (based on experience) wanting to GET love from a relationship (instead of working on your self-love) is the number 1 thing that attracts narcissists into your life.
What you will get from a cluster B is fake love though – because they’re not truly loving themselves, either. They lack a true connection with themselves. They have a codependent, underdeveloped or false self (just like their supply = people with poor boundaries and a lack of self-love a.k.a. formerly people like you and me) – but they didn’t grow a real self.
So how can we get out of this?
By investing all our energy into the development of our soul and the connection we feel with our true self – and to build from there.
The attention, feeling of being significant, meaningful to someone – if you didn’t get that from your parents, or not enough of it, you may be prone to love-bombing by fake people. Who wouldn’t be?
If you finally get what you always longed for – who would say no?
Love is connection is staying alive. That’s the message we carry in our genes, blood, bones.
It’s very hard to overwrite that with: “I can take care of myself now. I don’t NEED another person’s love anymore. I’m an adult. I’m fine.”
But that’s what we have to do – becoming fully emotionally self-sufficient, independent – in order to have an armor against fake people.
If you want to learn more about this, enroll in one of my immersions.
INDIFFERENCE, for example.
It’s not about grey-rocking, you know?
It’s not about PRETENDING to be over the narc and to be better off without them.
It truly doesn’t matter what anyone, especially a narcissist, thinks about you.
Or what THEY want from you.
Because what you really want and deserve is TRUE love, a real relationship, no exploitation
and what you really need to develop in your life is indifference towards the narcissist or anyone who might want to manipulate or exploit you.
A true, cold, truly cold shoulder.
It’s not about becoming boring to the narcissist – YOU need to become completely bored with THEM.
You need to become immune.
The most painful part, in my opinion, is not finding out they never truly loved you… but losing, killing your own true love for them.
Freeing yourself from your love for a person you ultimately loved more than you ever loved yourself,
freeing yourself from your own true love – is an unnatural, utterly painful experience.
But you have to do that in order to invest all of that love into yourself instead. Because you must learn to love yourself more than a person who harmed you. You must break out of the “fawning, freezing, fighting” pattern of your childhood.
People will tell you “move on”, “let go”, “stop putting him/her/them/it on a pedestal” … and all of that is true, but it’s not that simple not is it easy.
It’s a real struggle against yourself, your own programming – and it’s unnatural and painful.
I hope you find it in you to work with a good therapist. My programs do not replace therapy, they’re based on my position as an experiencer and I have been in therapy myself. I’m a coach, muse, mentor – not a therapist.
In order to reprogram myself, I have made use of ALL THE HELP I could find – and I recommend you do the same.
This is not an easy journey.
Unloving someone I truly loved – and more than myself – and developing indifference towards this person, EVEN letting go of the anger and all the other negative emotions our psyche uses in order to, ultimately, hold on to the person, hold on to the TRUE love we have felt for them… has been one of the most painful times of my life – by far.
You basically have to accept that an experience that was completely true and beautiful and heartfelt for you, from your Soul to theirs – quickly turned into a lot of self-denial, pain, confusion, trauma, selling your Soul for crumbs, abuse and exploitation… and you held on too long because you couldn’t turn off the love for them and you didn’t want to be on your own with yourself.
In the end, if we’re really honest, a cluster B is a WONDERFUL distraction form loving ourselves.
So intense, so confusing, so all about THEM.
“WONDERFUL”.
(Not really. But it does the job to distract us from living the life we deserve. It’s the PERFECT tool for self-avoidance. The perfect drug? Something along those lines.)
When you’re not loving yourself – letting go of such an unconditional love is like falling into an abyss where nothing means anything anymore. (Or does it? I will explore this in my next blog post.) Your life turns into a nightmare, torn apart by fear, anger, yearning and a profound feeling of confusion.
I always likened it to being tossed into a blender.
You don’t “get discarded” – you wake up in a sh*t smoothie from hell.
Now you have the “wonderful” pleasure to reassemble yourself.
Fully knowing: “Hell, I could throw all of this away, everything – it would be easier”.
You have to literally rise from the ashes. On a Soul level.
The pain is different from any other pain, it runs so deep, it’s so at your core, you didn’t even know such a pain could ever exist – it’s not a regular heartache. It actually has nothing to do with a regular heartache and very little to do with romantic love, IMO.
It’s so on a psychological, even spiritual level, a lot of us turn to religion. (Or black magic.)
I truly don’t wish this upon anyone, not even a Cluster B – the experience would probably not change them anyhow. Those who deserve it wouldn’t learn anything from it and those who experience it probably HAVE TO go through it in order to finally start loving themselves.
So if you are in this position or you know someone who is – know that they had a very vulnerable psychological make-up to begin with. Being? They didn’t love themselves and they may have been TRAINED from an early age to love manipulative people who gaslight them, exploit them – more than themselves.
If you know this pattern from an early age: unconditionally loving harmful people WHILE constantly questioning yourself – know that this is not normal or healthy. It’s very likely that your caregivers had narcissistic tendencies.
Waking up to all of this is not as easy as “letting go” or ending any other kind of relationship. It’s NOT a regular breakup.
It’s a wound that goes down deep into the core of a person, it breaks you apart.
From there, we have to rebuild ourselves.
It’s a devestating experience that makes a complete renewal of our self-concept essential.
Reducing that to “just move on!”, “just let go!”…. “well, NOW it’s getting pathologic, NOW you have a grief disorder because you’ve been grieving for too long” … all of these (not truly) well-meant pieces of unrequested advice are only one thing: numbing, estranging and they can make a person who is suffering from this isolate and go completely numb, silent, depressed.
So instead of telling yourself or another person to finally get on with their lives – help yourself / help them build a positive self-concept.
How do you do that?
Tell yourself / them: “There is nothing wrong with you.”
Do not pathologize yourself / a person who is suffering from breaking up with a Cluster B.
Own your mistakes: you didn’t love yourself, you had poor boundaries.
However, trusting and loving, uncondtionally loving someone – aren’t the problem. They don’t make you wrong.
Being angry, sad, grieving, still loving the person doesn’t make you wrong, either.
This is a usually slow, always painful process and the ONLY thing we’re aiming for is a positive self-concept, self-love and from there, the rebirth of love itself.
Don’t let anyone destroy your love. Not forever. Take a break from love. Give it to yourself. Show it.
Develop a lifestyle of self-love.
Then, if you want to, you can let it spill over.
But only if it’s real.
~ Your mindchanger Dee.
