One of the things that makes it so incredibly difficult to move on from the narcissist is the haunting memories of the good times – because no one can show you a good time like a narcissist!
This could be especially surprising if you were the one to end the relationship. Rationally, you know that returning to the narcissist is futile, even if they beg and promise you the world.
Then walking past a favourite restaurant or hearing ‘your’ song will smack you in the guts with memories of when the relationship was soooo perfect. It can feel impossible to resist the temptation to get back on the merry-go-round.
And even if we do move on physically, the memories can keep us emotionally stuck in prolonged grieving for the relationship.
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In today’s Thriver TV episode, I talk about all of this, and even more importantly, I show you how to leave behind those yearnings and fully break free of these toxic bonds.Video Transcript
Welcome to Thriver TV, where you learn how to survive narcissistic abuse and Thrive from it. If you have not yet subscribed to my YouTube channel, please do so, and I’d love for you to share my work with others who need it.
Today’s episode is about how painful it is to miss the good times with the narcissist and how this keeps you stuck and stunts the ability to live again.
As well as what you can do to break free from this.
I’m so excited to share my story and my friend Jayne’s today – to tell of how we managed to move past the pain of missing out on the good times and how we became more joyous and expansive in our lives than ever before.
I promise you that there is a way out of this trauma!
How Does Trauma-bonding Occur?
Breaking up with people who are not toxic is still a difficult and sad process, but it pales compared to the heavy emotional fallout that infects us after narcissistic abuse. If you feel like “I’ll never be this happy again” or “It is excruciating for me to be around nice events, places, and situations that remind me of the good times,” my heart goes to you.
The horrific trauma of the good time memories with a narcissist goes way beyond what anyone would expect or could even begin to understand. Your friends and family may be shocked and in disbelief about how hard it is for you to connect to anything ‘nice’ that, by association, triggers you about the narcissist.
The trauma bonds that energetically connect you to the narcissist are why you feel so compromised. This can cause horrifically painful emotions. Trauma bonds form when you become physiologically addicted to intense emotional feelings, and you start to unconsciously crave or obsessively ruminate about the source of these feelings – the narcissist.
Many complex emotions with a narcissist – bad and good – infiltrate your deep being in perverse ways. It literally feels like a psychic disease that has taken over your spirit. After breaking up with a narcissist, they don’t just live on in your head; they feel like black and sticky goo crawling throughout your insides.
The narcissist strives to be the “Supreme Master of Your Universe,” or in other words, to possess your soul. This is the only way their False Self can be truly satisfied. They expect to be the sole ruler of your life and for you to be their emotional servant. The narcissist needs your life force to be centred around them and won’t accept any form of independence from you.
You may ask, “Why do they bother to do this to people?” Empty people who are disconnected from Source / Creation want ultimate power to infiltrate others because they get to steal your energy like a vampire, and it’s what the emptiest of people do.
Please understand that all parts of your narcissistic infiltration – including devastating anguish when remembering the good times – are because you are in a spiritual battle for your soul and your very life force.
I’m not being hyperbolic – this is the truth!
These feelings don’t stop until you succeed at taking your life force back.
The narcissist wants to control you and strip away your humanity, energy, joy, and capacity to love. If they succeed, they have won: another life is drained, used up, and ultimately destroyed, never to be useful to anyone else. This is the ultimate aim of their cruel dominion.
You can turn this around and win and make this the most incredible growth time of your entire life.
As we go through this episode, I hope you will understand why.
The Foundational Trauma Bonding
Let’s go through the horrific hurt of the good times and WHY this plays out after breaking up with a narcissist.
The narcissist came into your life through a trauma bond, to begin with. This person pretended to be the person who would grant you something you didn’t believe you could provide for yourself.
Much of this was unconscious. In my case, the narcissist came to me, offering me so much excitement, trips, fun, time out and the like. When I met him, I was a severe workaholic and had never afforded myself much work-life balance.
A friend of mine, Jayne, had a very chaotic life, and she struggled to have structure. The narcissist in her life was wealthy and ‘together’; this was a welcome salve to her soul.
Both Jayne and I loved being spoiled in the love-bombing stage – these people in our lives provided us with a lifestyle where we felt valued, spoiled and worthy of attention. Aspects that we did not provide to ourselves – certainly not healthily anyway.
There were also deeper, more unconscious reasons that enabled the narcissists to create feelings of deep connection. Narcissists are very good at identifying our unresolved hurts and pretending to be the person who will take the pain away.
In my previous significant relationships, I had felt like I was not being seen or trusted. In contrast, the narcissist seemed to grant me an abundance of presence, understanding, belief and space to be me – and he also feigned 100%support for my personal ambitions.
Jayne had always felt judged and ignored; her deepest wounds were about not being granted commitment and being treated as an object instead. The narcissist in her life seemed to see her value and give her his presence – attentively and completely.
This turnaround of our lives seemed so powerfully magical, and such an intense relief that we fell into deep dependencies of “you are my one and only”. We had assigned ‘saviour’ status to a narcissist without knowing it. We had each assigned ‘saviour’ status to a narcissist.
Spending time with these people feels so amazing!
They offer us something that we cannot – or do not- do for ourselves, and because of this, they comfort us by taking away our emotional pain.
This is exactly how to create a trauma bond; narcissists know how to powerfully form this emotional dependency. Some have even bragged to this community how simple it is to find out what hurts or is missing and then start providing it in spades to get victims to deeply bond with them. Then they can take advantage and exploit their victim’s vulnerability.
Excitement and highs are part of a flashy narcissistic curriculum anyway, and this is how they avoid the drab and devastating feelings of being alone with their damaged being. If we haven’t done our inner recovery work yet, we love this too – being with the narcissist in a fantasy world of “it’s you and me, babe, against the big bad world” in a haze of fun, highs and indulgent experiences.
In this place, the pain of our childhoods and previous relationships is drowned out in the buzz. We don’t know it, but we are in a drug-like state of idolising. The narcissist is using us as a drug, and we are also high on it.
Society often tells us this is how love should be, but that is garbage and a lie. Healthy love does not follow this narrative.
Real life means reality intervenes, and this is where the second level of trauma bonding starts to kick in – as the cracks start happening rapidly.
Whatever is FALSE in REAL life can’t stand.
Now I’m going to explain WITHHOLDING trauma bonds to you.
The Withholding Trauma Bonding
The narcissistic mask begins slipping, and the real disordered self erupts. You have gone from being glorified as the next newest, shiniest source of narcissistic supply to being despised for not providing the narcissist with a permanent solution to their pain. You are no longer the magical person who grants the narcissist what they want to live pain-free.
Narcissists refuse to face the wounded parts of themselves that generate their painful feelings, and instead, they project onto you; it’s your fault. It’s the way you spoke, the way you looked at them, the idea that you may be doing things now outside of the relationship that isn’t about the narcissist. The list goes on and on in an endless cycle where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
You are absolutely forbidden from challenging the narcissist’s narrative of “I am the King / Queen God of The Universe and totally ABOVE reproach”, and you are harshly punished if you do.
Where did this magical person go?
Where is this being who was so loved up with you? Who stared into your eyes with such adoration that you thought your heart would burst all over you?
How could this person – who you believed was “your one and only” – accuse you of doing disgusting things you are incapable of thinking, let alone executing? Things that defy all definitions of love.
You discover that these are the things they are doing themselves.
How do you assimilate this?
Now you are in deep water, and the rug is pulled out from under you. Yet the parts of you that want this person as your answer to life cling to this scrap of evidence that they care: “But they can be so loving and delightful and adoring.”
You do still have those times. You are in a vicious cycle of violence – tensions build, followed by explosions. You separate from each other, either emotionally or physically. Then you reconcile, either because you hand away more and more pieces of your own soul to stay connected or because they feign apologies and hoover you back in just when you are about to say ‘enough’ and walk away. Making up can feel SO good, and you try your hardest to love and trust this person again because “good people do forgive”.
This cycle of violence continues, cycling faster and becoming more violent and painful every time.
This Withdrawal Trauma Bonding phase is a huge roller coaster of highs and lows. The highs can feel amazing and are as addictive as any synthetic drug. This trauma bonding can easily be mistaken for Twin Flame true love, but it’s destructive abuse and self-abuse.
If you are honest with yourself, the relief you feel during the ‘highs’ of the relationship is akin to taking jagged rocks out of your shoes. It’s as if a weight has been lifted off your shoulders, and you can finally walk without pain. Your feet have never felt so good!
The relief is, “You have stopped hurting me and loving me again.”
Yet there are cracks in the shoes, so they keep filling with jagged rocks.
Cruelly and horribly, the narcissist can promise and renege repeatedly, like a cat with a mouse, torturing and tormenting you. Of course, this is to control your behaviour by withholding love and decency from you whenever you are not adequately appeasing the narcissist.
In my life, the narcissist went from trusting, allowing and validating my independence to hating my passions, breathing down my neck, and violently and aggressively controlling my every move with insane pathological jealousy. Jayne’s narcissistic partner – initially loving, adoring and attentive – constantly ran with other women whilst accusing Jayne of being unfaithful.
This is what narcissists do. They ‘bait and switch’, delivering exactly the unfinished, unhealed wounds we carry that they appeared to be saving us from – whilst we cling to our version of this person as ‘our saviour’.
Is it any wonder that everything about the narcissist – the good, the bad and the ugly – is traumatising to us?
Now let’s look at the third and final stage of Missing the Good Times.
The Grieving Trauma Bonding
The flashy narcissistic relationships that started with a love-bombing bang will often crash and burn just as dramatically.
You go from floating on cloud nine to being dumped from a great height on your butt, surrounded by rubble everywhere – devastation, betrayal, deception, abandonment, invalidation and often grave losses of things important to you.
You have likely lost valuable health, resources, reputation, money, property, and – most shockingly – ‘the love of your life’. You may be overwhelmed and unable to even go about your daily activities, let alone think about restarting your life, taking part in life, and allowing yourself to experience joy and pleasure again – let alone love.
Please know that Jayne and I felt exactly like this and thought we could never recover!
You grieve because you believe, “I will never have what I had again”. You also grieve the ‘solution,’ the ‘salve’, and ‘the saving’ from the utter trauma of your unhealed wounds – more than you ever did previously.
This is the heartbreaking issue with unconsciously connecting with external saviours – they are always the messenger of what we have not yet saved (healed) within ourselves.
How To Win This Soul War and Take Back Your Lifeforce
Let me start by saying your Life-force IS joy, a celebration of life, expansion, experiences and love. Please know I understand how you could feel light-years away from this right now!
The narcissist is NOT your soul keeper and provider of these things – even though deeply, it feels like this at the start.
I want to explain what happened with Jayne and me because we are both Super-thriving now with zero connection to any memories, good or bad, about our previous narcissistic slave masters!
To recover, we both knew we had to turn inwards to work on;
- Accepting we had never consciously built our own enjoyable, healthy lives – instead, we had waited for someone else to provide it. Of course, this had been unconscious and being like this was simply our ‘normal’!
- We had not yet addressed our past hurts and had been seeking other people to take away the pain instead. This had been deeply unconscious as well.
- Focusing on the narcissists and hanging on to their hurtful behaviour kept us from looking inward to face and healing our painful feelings of being unworthy of love. We did not know until Quanta Freedom Healing that it was possible to heal these hurts directly and quickly – to free ourselves from them!
We started the good and true fight of turning inwards to detox these emotional vampires out of our system and build ourselves back in ways we never had before.
Jayne and I decided we would become whole adults in our own bodies and never again need to depend on anyone to create our own amazing lives. Once we used the QuantaFreedom Healings within the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP), we were able to release and heal from Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), rumination, agoraphobia, and all the other nasties caused by narcissistic abuse. As a result, we began to feel an inner Life-force that we had never experienced before.
For the first time in our lives, we were starting to inner-stand what it is to feel whole on the inside.
Jayne and I both started our own business ventures. Jayne worked through her dissociation traumas, making her more organised and focused. At the same time, I kicked my overworking addiction and started creating balance and enjoyment in my life.
We made it our mission to expand into life.
We both did solo travel overseas.
Neither of us was ever again in the position of subconsciously needing another person to sort us out emotionally. We were ready to share our lives with authentic people who were not parasitical narcissists!
We developed boundaries and the ability to speak up honestly. We stopped trying to fix and change people to be loved, and people started loving us for real in healthy ways.
There is no way Jayne and I could have reached these empowered levels of living our lives from an authentic inner space without being slammed to the floor by narcissists to show us that we had to change.
Being in excruciating, crippling inner rumination, longing and having our life force sucked out of us was the total indication that we needed to heal.
Conclusion
Remember how I started by saying, “Not only can you turn this around and win, you also can make this the most incredible growth time of your entire life”?
It’s true, and I hope you now understand why.
If you are ready to take this passage of winning this spiritual war and taking your soul and life force back, come with me, Jayne and thousands of others in our NARP Thriver Community.
You deserve to be OUT of the agony of missing the narcissist – it’s soul-sucking!
Plus, your True Life – the only life that truly gratifies you – awaits you!
You can read all about NARP by clicking on this link.
I hope today’s video has helped, and I can’t wait to help you recover on the inside as a NARP member if you want to choose Quantum Relief and Thriving!
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