Narcissists Keep You In A Trauma Response - Tools To Escape

A narcissist in a relationship will LOVE to keep you stuck, spinning your wheels. If you're not careful, you could remain in an unhealthy trauma response cycle for life! In this episode, Lisa A. Romano Life Coach and personal transformation and empowerment coach will teach you her mental toughness tool that helps you ESCAPE toxic relationship dynamics once and for all!

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

So today we're going to be talking about how you can remain in your power even when a narcissist begins to show you who they really are.

So you're in a relationship and you're super excited.

You feel like this is the one.

You feel like you have been swept off your feet.

You feel like the conversation is really flowing.

You feel like this person is super into you.

This person says things like,

I've never met anyone like you before.

We're meant to be together.

This is the best time of my life.

Where have you been all my life?

And you feel like this person really means what they say.

If you're the type of person that would not say those things unless you really meant them,

Sometimes you can just falsely presume that who you're talking to,

They mean the same thing.

But that's not always the case.

It's my experience that many of us go through this in relationships where we enter into them believing that when people say things,

They mean them just as much as we do.

And if you stay in relationships long enough,

You might end up discovering that that's just not true.

Just because when you say,

I love you,

That means I'm committed to you.

And that means that if I'm unhappy or I think there's something that needs to be changed,

I love you enough to tell you,

And I would never cheat on you or betray you in that way,

Does not mean that your partner feels the same way.

And it is devastating as you begin to realize that just because you're saying I love you and just because you know that you're always going to be there for this partner,

And you take your commitment to this person really seriously,

Does not guarantee that the person that you sleep with,

The person that you're running a life with,

That you've had children with,

That you bought a home with,

You share the same bank account,

You share taxes.

It does not mean that that person feels the same way.

They may have a completely different outlook on relationships.

They may be able to rationalize and justify poor behavior.

And when you begin to realize this,

It's a really painful place.

But I think it allows us to awaken.

I think it allows us to see things more clearly.

And it also allows us to see people as individuals rather than as projections of how we would like people to be.

Many of us who are love addicts,

Many codependents and even empaths,

We don't realize that we're projecting our ideal version of people out into the world,

And sometimes that blocks our ability to see people for who they really are.

There's nothing wrong with being someone who prefers to see the best in people as long as you're not someone who is not seeing who the person really is.

If you are someone who is codependent and you're unable to really accept that your partner is narcissistic,

If you are afraid of being alone,

If you're a love addict,

If you're the type of woman,

For instance,

Who believes in fairy tales,

You might not want to see what's really happening.

You might argue against reality.

You might be in a super toxic relationship,

But be so addicted to the fantasy and the ideal that you're not willing to see what's in front of you.

You might hang on a lot longer than necessary,

All because the fantasy that you have in your head about this person,

Who by the way,

Has helped to create that fantasy,

Is so strong.

You can actually become addicted to the ideal of a person and not be able to see what you need to see.

On the healing journey,

If you have childhood trauma,

If you have suffered emotional trauma,

If you have an insecure attachment to caretakers,

It is not uncommon,

And quite frankly,

It is very common to become someone who has an identity issue.

Who am I?

Where is my worth?

Where do I get value from?

What is my value?

You can have an identity issue that eventually becomes a behavioral issue that manifests inside relationships.

So if I don't know who I am and if I have never felt loved,

If I have never felt seen as a child,

If I don't know that I have value just for who I am,

If I grew up feeling like I needed to be perfect and the worst thing in the world was to not gain my father's approval or the worst thing in the world was to not fit my mother's opinion of what a perfect daughter looked like,

Then I don't know who I am and I'm chasing feathers in the wind thinking that my sense of self is somewhere outside of me.

I have a very fragile ego.

I have unhealthy defenses,

Ego defense mechanisms.

I project my pain out there in the world and I can walk into a relationship expecting my partner to fulfill me at every turn.

Now it's really important that if you are codependent,

If you grew up feeling invisible,

If you come from a home where there was narcissism,

Your parents were narcissistic,

If you came from a home of alcoholism or drug addiction or untreated mental health issues,

If you were adopted,

If you were adopted into a narcissistic family,

Which happens by the way,

If you have these childhood issues,

It's really important that you investigate how they might be affecting you today.

How do they affect the way you show up in relationships?

Are you still looking to heal the wound of feeling unseen?

But if you are someone who identifies as someone who has these childhood issues,

You have to be really careful because you may be attracting people who mirror your wounds.

In other words,

Narcissists are very good.

They have empathy,

But they used it,

They used their empathy to exploit you.

A narcissist will be able to pick up on the fact that you feel invisible.

A narcissist is going to ask you questions about your childhood.

They're going to gather all this information.

So they're going to heal those wounds,

At least pseudo heal those wounds.

How?

They fill those wounds up with fake love,

Fake empathy,

Fake intentions,

Future faking.

They pretend that you're going to have a future with them.

They begin to talk about your future reality and what all their wishes that they have for you.

And they have no intentions really of following through.

And so here you are,

This wounded individual and a narcissist is backfilling all of these holes and you don't even realize what's happening.

You're developing a cognitive bias towards this person.

Your initial opinion of them will create a halo effect.

And if you think about a halo,

If you're looking at a halo,

There's this bright light that will cloud out your ability to see what's behind the halo.

And that's exactly what happens psychologically when we fall in love with a narcissist.

We have our wounds.

We want to believe that the person who is showing up is the person we want them to be.

We want them to be our knight in shining armor.

We want them to be the person that's going to rescue us.

We want them to be that person.

So there's a desire psychologically.

If something is out of the ordinary,

Our mind says,

Nope,

Not looking at that because it creates dissonance.

And our mind would prefer to move towards pleasure than towards pain.

And we can get locked inside narcissistic relationships for 40,

50,

And 60 years because we don't want to look at what's painful.

And at some point we just throw our hands up in the air and say,

Oh,

It's just easier to stay and tolerate this.

I've seen this happen in my family.

My mom was someone who threw her hands up in the air and just said,

Well,

It would just be too difficult to divorce this man.

I can't even imagine what he would put me through.

And so I'll just throw up my hands and give up and acquiesce and subjugate.

It was very sad because in my opinion,

This was a life that could have been lived in a very empowered way because my mom was very capable.

My mom was very clever.

She never gave herself the credit that she deserves to be able to start over and recreate her life.

And I just don't think that's necessary.

I don't think that we need to live this life,

But I also think that we need mental toughness training.

We need mental skills,

Sort of like what the Navy Seals go through when they're trying to override their survival response because you are going to be in the limbic brain.

Your vagus nerve is going to be suppressed.

You're not going to be able to think with the executive part of your brain,

Which is the prefrontal lobe.

So we need mental toughness training when it comes to recognizing that we're in a narcissistic relationship and we need to get out.

So I wanted to create this session for those of you who email me,

Send me Instagram messages,

Facebook messages,

Write to me on Insight Timer.

Like how do I stop feeling disempowered,

Which is the gist of what the emails are about.

How can I feel,

And the thing to consider is that when someone emails me and says,

How can I feel less disempowered?

What they're really asking me in the affirmative is,

Lisa,

How can I feel empowered even though I'm going through this transition,

Even though I'm divorcing a narcissist,

Even though I'm losing my house,

Even though the narcissist who never paid the mortgage was able to kick me out of my house and I'm experiencing parental alienation.

Here comes the smear campaign.

My family doesn't believe me.

I have been part of this whole facade because I never told my family what was going on.

I slapped on the lipstick,

I slapped on the mascara,

I sucked it up,

I carried on and here it is 10,

12 months or 10 or 12 years later and I'm done.

I just can't hold the stress in my body anymore and I realize that I have the right to get out.

Now,

I think it's important that before I even give you the lesson that I want to give you,

I want you to take this away from this session.

I want you to know that you're not crazy if you feel stuck in this loop of survival.

Your brain will naturally and your mind will naturally keep you in a loop of stuckness if as a child you felt stuck in fight,

Flight,

Freeze or the fawn response.

These are the way you survived a troubling childhood and that is why so many of us,

Even though we're in a narcissistic relationship,

Even though we know that we're codependent,

We're part of the problem,

We don't have the next step which is the action step to change the situation.

Why?

Because we were unable to change the situation when we were children.

When you are in an emotional state as a child and there is trauma,

You know that you can't fight.

You can't fight your parents.

You can't flee.

You need them.

You're dependent.

Where are you going to go?

And we know that children that do run away,

Oftentimes these are kids who feel like they have no other choice which is super sad in my belief.

And so if you are someone similar to myself who upon reflection was like,

My feet were never stapled to the floor,

Why didn't I ever leave?

Why didn't I go talk to a divorce attorney?

Why didn't I go talk to a member of the clergy?

Why didn't I tell my friends how unhappy I was?

Why didn't I start looking for an apartment?

Why didn't I start getting a job?

Why didn't I start getting training for a specific skill if I knew that I was so unhappy and that one day I would need to take care of myself?

Why didn't I start doing those things?

Because you weren't programmed for those things,

Dear one.

You weren't programmed to accept how you feel.

You were programmed to think that what you feel was wrong or what you felt was wrong.

You were programmed to feel shame for feeling what you felt.

And so you couldn't flee.

You couldn't run away.

You couldn't fight.

You needed these people.

You tried to fawn and that only caught you so far.

So maybe you froze.

So you might have now found yourself in a relationship that mirrors the childhood responses to stress.

So as an adult,

Here comes your awakening aha moment,

You don't have to live that way anymore.

You can actually break that cycle and begin to push your life forward.

I am proof.

I was in that cycle,

That codependent cycle for almost most of my life.

And when I began to realize that I had a choice,

That I was living out a toxic paradigm,

My marriage had become a mirror for my childhood.

And I thought,

Well,

If I don't change,

The mirror can't change.

And so can you change a reflection in the mirror by sticking your hands in the mirror?

No.

You can only change the reflection in the mirror by changing what is looking into the mirror,

Which is you.

So when I realized I had the right to change and I broke it down in a systematic way,

Which is how I developed my 12-week breakthrough coaching program,

When I understood I needed to see myself,

I needed to understand myself,

I needed to honor myself,

These were all ways in which I was shifting the paradigm within.

And so even if mom and dad,

My sister,

My brother,

My neighbors,

And even if my in-laws were just like,

We're done with you,

I knew that was all just par for the course,

That I had helped create this paradigm.

I was saying no more.

I was pulling the plug on the paradigm.

And in the beginning,

When you begin to change your life and you start to go against a paradigm,

Everyone goes against you.

It's just par for the course.

Everyone thinks you're wrong.

They laugh at you.

They will tell lies about you.

They will justify their anger and their hatred towards you.

And then time,

Guess what?

It takes some time,

But eventually people say,

It was the right thing for her to do,

Or it was the right thing for him to do.

This is what happens when someone breaks the mold.

So expect it.

Everyone laughed at the Wright brothers.

Everyone laughed at Edison.

Everyone laughed at the people who really changed a paradigm and challenged the way someone thought.

And you can think about what happened to the Wright brothers,

For instance.

They were laughed at.

You'll never be able to make metal fly and ha,

Ha,

Ha,

Henry Ford.

What do you need these cars,

These so-called cars for?

Horses are just great.

Now,

Look what happened in our society.

So if you think about what happens culturally or in a society when someone goes against the system that's in place,

When someone says we're doing this instead of that,

In most cases they're laughed at.

They are hated and they're mocked.

And so the same thing happens in a family system.

You're part of an alcoholic,

Narcissistic family system and you say,

I'm not drinking anymore.

What do the alcoholics in your family do?

They scorn you.

Oh,

You think you're better than us?

We're not alcoholics.

You're the one with the problem.

You're just too uptight.

You're the one with the issue because you don't want to drink with us anymore.

Oh,

You're going to AA?

That's a bunch of hogwash.

They mock you.

But if you stay on course,

You will break through,

You will break free,

And in time the truth will reveal itself.

And not everybody,

But in most cases I would say,

Eventually members of the family begin to realize maybe they were right.

You develop an entirely new set of friends.

Your life takes off.

You stay on the path.

You get the skills that you need.

You do what you have to do to improve your life.

And the contrast between you and the family system that refused to change is undeniable.

So you have broken free from the dark.

You are now living out the light and that you can't ignore anymore.

And so I encourage you to understand that if you are someone who is breaking the cycle,

Whether it's you're going up against your narcissistic mother who is in cahoots with your narcissistic husband or the narcissistic father who is in cahoots with your narcissistic wife,

Whatever,

Gender is irrelevant.

Narcissism is narcissism.

It is not selective.

But if you're that person and you're going up against this family system,

This accepted toxic family system,

And your children are turning against you because they don't get it,

You didn't tell them what their father really was.

You didn't tell them who your wife really was.

They have no clue what's been happening behind closed doors.

Yes,

It's going to feel monumental for you to shift the needle,

But you have to.

You have to keep going.

You have to stay on the path.

You have to follow your heart.

You have to follow the light,

Which is the light within you.

And you have to become the person that you are meant to be because there is a song in your heart.

And part of the song is breaking through these faulty patterns that people who are living below the veil of consciousness want to keep you a part of.

Sometimes when people say to me,

How can I feel less disempowered?

What they're really asking for is,

How can I feel empowered even though I'm going through this really tough time in my life?

And so I made a list of just three things that I want you to think about when you're going through this process,

Whether it's you are beginning to feel like something's off in your marriage and something's off in your relationship,

Or you have a friend who you're starting to see things with and you're beginning to become a little bit more uncomfortable.

If you stay in the uncomfortable place for too long,

You might acclimate to that place.

You might begin to exhibit childhood defense mechanisms like fawning or freezing.

You may even get into a verbal conversation or a hostile conversation with someone,

A fighting response,

Or you may isolate yourself and just remove yourself from the situation and avoid people for a week or two or a month or six months or whatever.

But that's not going to change anything.

And so I want to help you understand the power is shifting the needle.

So when someone gaslights you,

When someone reveals a deep dark secret that you've given them and or if someone that you love betrays you and or cheats on you,

So you could have a friend who betrays you in some way or you can have a partner that cheats on you.

I just want you to think about these three things.

If this person gaslights you,

It sounds something like,

I told you about that three days ago and you say,

No,

You didn't.

And your partner says,

Your friend says,

Yeah,

Well,

You just forgot you were so busy.

You know that this person did not say this thing and they're trying to gaslight you into you thinking that they said it and you just forgot it or you didn't hear it.

And on top of it,

It's like a double edged sword because they're insinuating that you're thoughtless or you don't care about them.

So they're even trying to make you feel,

Not only doubt your reality,

They're trying to make you feel bad about yourself,

Like you're thoughtless and trying to make you feel guilty and thus shameful for not recalling something that you know wasn't said.

That's an example of gaslighting.

If someone that you love,

A friend,

A family member,

A partner,

You find out that this person has shared something very secretive,

Something very,

Very personal about you.

This is a huge red flag and this could arrest you because it will,

Just like someone gaslighting you,

It can make you feel ashamed like you did when you were a child because narcissistic parents like to make their children feel like they're thoughtless,

Like they're selfish and that can make a child get arrested in guilt and shame and feel responsible for something that is not real.

It's made up.

It's a fabrication.

It's a justification for a parent's narcissism,

But it will definitely trigger this fight,

Flight,

Freeze or fawn response,

Which we're trying to avoid in adult relationships because that's why we stay stuck.

So if someone reveals one of your secrets,

It's very easy to get stuck in the shame feeling like,

Oh my God,

People found out about it.

I say,

Who cares?

Who knows what?

When you recognize the power in saying,

Yeah,

That happened,

That was me then,

It's all part of my journey and I'm going to focus more on the fact that someone that I love revealed it than I am about what has been revealed.

That is empowering.

It took me a long time to get there,

But that is how you go from feeling disempowered to empowered.

The third thing,

If someone cheats on you and or you have a friend who has betrayed you in some way,

Maybe you let them borrow your car and they went out and they got drunk and they wrapped your car around a pole.

They got arrested and they betrayed you.

They told you they weren't drinking anymore.

They told you you could trust them.

They told you they were not going to that party down at the beach,

But they went anyway.

They betrayed you.

If you have a partner that you discover has cheated on you and or has been cheating on you,

Which is super common when it comes to narcissistic marriages,

Narcissistic relationships,

When you find out about the one,

In lots of the cases I am generalizing,

I don't have statistics on this.

I don't even know if there are statistics on this.

So I am generalizing when I say lots of the times,

Many times when you discover that someone who is highly narcissistic and or has NPD,

Many times you discover that when you find out about one affair,

You generally find out about many other affairs.

It's so common because narcissists bore so easily and they can so easily justify and rationalize why they have a right to cheat on you.

And it's always going to be your fault,

Dear one.

So when these three things happen in your life,

I want you to remember that you have an opportunity to stay in the fight,

Flight,

Fawn,

Or freeze response.

These are responses that help to stay safe.

Thank heaven the inner child was clever enough to rely on one of these defenses to keep us safe.

But hello,

We're grown up people right now and we don't need to continue to stay in those defense mechanisms.

Oh,

Holy Hannah,

No,

We do not.

We are adults.

We are men and women that have a right to be happy.

We are men and women that have a right to see what's really going on in front of us.

We are more spiritual than we are physical,

Which means that greater is the light that is within us than the dark that is outside of us,

Or even the dark that's within us.

There is a power within us that when we connect to this power,

There is nothing that we cannot do,

There is nothing that is too scary to say,

And there is nothing that we cannot be.

The trick is to ebb in the direction.

The trick is to ease into the direction of that power.

If you stay disempowered with shame,

If you stay disempowered with guilt,

If you stay disempowered with reactivity,

You're not going to be able to shift yourself out of this paradigm.

And so even if you break up with this person or they discard you,

The chances are very good you're going to end up in another similar relationship because the mirror hasn't changed,

Which is you.

You have to change.

You have to become more empowered versus disempowered.

So when you change on the inside,

The matrix is going to change.

The mirror is going to change,

And that's a beautiful thing.

Today I wake up,

I look at what's around me,

And it is a completely different landscape than I was experiencing 20 years ago.

This just doesn't happen.

It happened because the inner landscape changed.

I fully accept that what is happening around me is a mirror to what I believe about life,

About my perceptions of self,

And even about the narcissist in my life.

When I thought that the narcissist was more powerful than me,

The narcissist had power over me.

When I believed that I was stuck,

I was stuck.

When I believed that I needed my mother's and father's permission to end my marriage,

I needed their permission to end my marriage.

So their perceptions of me were a mirror to my perceptions of them.

When I realized that I had the power to change,

And I had faith in this idea that if I changed slowly,

Because I couldn't take a giant leap,

There was just too much distance.

But what I could do,

Like we learned in 12 steps,

Is just for today.

Just for today,

Don't react.

Just for today,

Don't give back an email.

Don't respond to an email.

Just for today,

Meditate.

Just for today,

Go for a walk.

Just for today,

Watch a five-minute video on nutrition.

Just for today,

Do five minutes of yoga.

Just for today,

Do 20 minutes to 40 minutes meditation.

Just for today,

Just for today.

So when someone gaslights you,

When someone betrays you,

When someone reveals your secret or a secret,

What I want you to do is shift from the shame and instead shift from what kind of a person does this to another person.

So now what that does is rather than push you back into the trauma cycle,

It pushes you out of the trauma cycle with a different thought process.

Because now it's not me accepting the shame,

Which is what gaslighting,

Betrayal,

And revealing secrets is all about.

I am actually,

I'm rubber,

You're glue,

And whatever you say to me bounces off of me and sticks on you,

Which we could not do as children because the world revolved around us.

At least we thought so.

And what was happening to us was just too powerful.

It was too overwhelming.

We didn't have the power when we were children,

But we do have the power as adults.

And so when I say to myself,

Wow,

That person just gaslighted me.

What kind of a person relies on gaslighting to manipulate another person?

Now all of a sudden psychologically,

I'm rejecting the shame that gaslighting is supposed to inflict on me.

Very powerful.

When someone betrays me and reveals a secret that I've shared with them that should not have left the room,

That I shared to help us feel closer together,

Right?

That's what friends do.

That's what couples do.

They share the most vulnerable aspects with this other person,

But that other person is supposed to keep what I've shared in the palm of their hand.

When it's revealed to me that that person has not protected that vulnerability,

My new thought process is,

What kind of a person does that to another person that's supposed to trust them?

So now I'm rejecting the shame of what other people think about this secret that I've had or this vulnerability that I've had,

I reject it.

And I say to myself,

No,

It's not about my vulnerability.

Everybody has skeletons in the closet.

Everybody has an ego.

Everybody can be narcissistic sometimes.

Everybody can make mistakes.

Many people have struggled with eating disorders and addictions to alcohol and chemicals.

Many people have fallen.

That's the way that we learn,

By the way.

Really,

If you are not a narcissist,

You understand the path and you're growing and you're learning and you're integrating and you are taking all of these older selves,

All of these past experiences and you're tucking them into one self and you're becoming cohesive through accepting that you're a flawed human being on the path to spiritual enlightenment,

Psychological development,

And you're becoming the best version of yourself,

Which is self-actualization.

If you're a narcissist,

No.

You reject the fact that you're not perfect and you continue to justify why you should exploit other people.

No way,

No,

In my opinion,

Dear one.

So if someone reveals a secret,

You say to yourself,

What kind of a person does that?

That pushes the shame off.

It keeps you out of that shame spiral,

Which is fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Or fawn.

If someone cheats on you,

Rather than you go into,

How could he do this to me?

How could she do this to me?

I've given her everything.

I left my wife and three kids for her.

I bought her a house.

I bought her a Mercedes.

How could she go back to her ex-boyfriend?

Rather than do that,

Rather than be the type of woman who is like,

Oh my God,

How could he cheat on me?

How can he do this to me?

I have done nothing but love him.

Doesn't he realize what this is going to do to me?

Doesn't he care about how his children feel?

All valid emotions,

But that type of thinking can be very disempowering because it reinforces this idea that you're a victim of this person.

And even though you are,

Please hear me,

Please hear me,

I'm not saying that when you are dealing with a narcissist,

That you have not been a target and you haven't experienced these things.

What I'm saying is I'm trying to help people understand the fork in the road that each of us has.

If I fork to the left and I,

How could you do this to me?

How could you do this to me?

I am reinforcing a victim mentality.

If I just,

It's a mental toughness training tool.

If I say,

Huh,

This person cheated on me,

Which means that this person is distrustful.

This person is not loyal.

This person does not care about how I feel.

This person might have narcissistic traits.

And how do I feel about what this person did?

How do I feel?

What do I want to do?

What kind of a person does this to another person?

Now rather than feel ashamed because you've been cheated on,

Rather than go down that road and end up feeling like there's something wrong with you because this person did this,

Which is what a narcissist is going to try to do.

I've heard the way wives have totally done their husbands wrong and the rationalizations that they've used to justify having an affair with their boss.

I mean,

It's horrific stuff.

It's mean stuff.

And my male clients have to rebuild themselves,

Rebuild their self esteem so they can overcome some of the things that a female narcissist has said to justify why they had a right to cheat on their husbands and vice versa.

Where my female clients in a heterosexual relationship,

For instance,

Have to rebuild their sense of self and their self esteem after a narcissistic husband has rationalized and justified why they've been sleeping with their wife's best friend for the past three years.

And so rebuilding their sense of self,

Helping them recognize truth,

Fact from fiction is very helpful.

But you can,

Right here,

Right now,

Think about when someone gaslights you,

Betrays you,

Starts telling people your secrets,

It's very important and very empowering for you to ask yourself,

What kind of a person does this to another person?

Just that little bit of space can help prevent you from going into a freeze response or even a fight response,

Which is just going to keep you stuck.

I spent so many years fawning,

People pleasing,

Enabling,

Denying,

Rescuing,

Making excuses for.

And for me,

On my path,

Eventually I became somebody who was all full of inflammation.

I was so full of fire.

I was constantly fighting.

How could you say that?

What are you thinking?

What do you mean?

How could you say that about me?

That's not the truth.

Why didn't you tell your mother this?

Why did you lie to her?

Why are you making up excuses?

So I was,

Here I was in a state of complete resistance to what was happening.

So rather than ask myself,

What kind of a person lies about their wife,

Just to get out of trouble from mommy dearest.

What kind of a person doesn't defend his wife and children?

What kind of a person lies like that?

What kind of a person gaslights his wife,

Rather than taking responsibility for what's going on?

If I had done that earlier,

I probably would have saved myself a lot of stress,

But I probably wouldn't have developed the tools that I've developed along my life and the career that I have now.

And I would not have all of this mental toughness training in my tool belt to pass along to other people.

So at the end of the day,

It all worked out.

Something wonderful came out of my experience.

However,

Many of you are still stuck in the quagmire of those experiences.

However,

You are lucky if you are beginning to identify what is wrong.

So try to remember when you start to notice negative character traits in someone,

You have a choice.

You can either allow this negative trait to trigger you and pull you back into a fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Or fawn response,

Or you can start asking yourself these types of questions.

What kind of a person does this?

How do I feel about this person?

What was this person's intention?

Do I really want to be with this person?

Can I really tolerate this?

Is it worth my time to even explain why this was wrong to this person?

In doing that,

You are now creating an entirely new jumping off place for an entirely new future paradigm.

And if you understand that thought process,

And I sincerely hope that you do,

And you stick with this thought process,

It is my promise to you that what you see in the outside world must shift.

It might take a year,

It might take two years,

But I can guarantee you that it will shift.

Stay true to yourself,

Dear one.

It's an amazing ride,

And there's a reason why you are here listening to this and striving to become the best version of yourself.

And I can guarantee you that if you are in a narcissistic relationship,

You are not able to be the best version of yourself yet.

But I can also guarantee you that when other people don't change,

The payoff is you get to change.

And when you change,

The whole world changes right along with you.

Namaste everybody.

Until next time,

Be careful out there.

Reviews

Wow. This explained a lot about my past (childhood) and current situation. I’m going to listen to it again and again, and hoping it gives me the courage to do what I need to do. It’s a ridiculously hard and terrible situation but I hope I can remove myself after 29 years. Thank you for creating this. It is a wonderful wealth of information.

One of the best.

Thank you so much 🙏🏻

Thank you ❤️
Knowing the difference between healthy compromise and being slowly diminished by a partner is vital!

I love all of Lisa’s talks and meditations. She gives expert advise. This one is particularly insightful in understanding the damage Narcisssists try to inflict and how to change how we see it so that we can get past the victim mentality we can get trapped in. Thank you, dear Lisa, for sharing your light and for holding my hand in this journey. You are giving me the tools I need to change my life and face up to a life of Narcissistic abuse. I feel hope for the first time in years.

Excellent! Lisa is always insightful and to the point. This is directly applicable to my life situation.

fantastic talk as always- i listen to your talks numerous times to get the info into my long term memory 🙏

So much of what I wish I would have known then, I love your talks…thank you.