Narcissists Trauma Bond You To Keep You Ensnared
Let’s talk today about the narcissist trauma bonds that keep you ensnared.
I know you may be shaking your head at how on earth the narcissist is still ensnaring you. You know it doesn’t make sense. You know this person is hurting you, yet you can’t stop yourself continuing to participate with the insanity.
One of the most shocking things about narcissistic abuse is that we seem to keep signing up for our own demise. You know it’s not what you want to do, or should be doing, yet you can’t seem to stop yourself from doing it.
Is it any wonder you can feel so powerless and helpless?
Today, I want to explain to you what is really going on with how narcissists ensnare you … and the 5 ways that you can break these shackles.
Number One – False Promises
Narcissists are very good at working out “what you want”. This could relate to the love and devotion you haven’t yet received in your life – the feelings of loyalty, being honoured, respected and valued. You will feel seen, met and understood at a deeper level than you can imagine.
Not only is this a welcome “salve” to your Soul, it also holds the promises of washing away the pain of your past. It’s a powerful feeling of finally “coming home”.
Or maybe you have always wanted someone who shares your interests, who is into what you are, and seeks the same passions and missions.
In regard to generating security, this person may offer the resources, courage and knowledge you seek, or be the boss granting the opportunity, or show the promise of the contacts and introductions you would like to procure.
Regarding any aspect of your life, the narcissist is very good at creating dependencies with false promises. They identify your anxiety or “less than” issue – and seem to provide the solution.
Here is the thing about narcissists – they don’t bring love, solution, support and success into your life. Rather they bring anguish, drama, fractures and loss. It is beneficial for the narcissist though – they take sex, Life Force, resources and significance through control, whilst you are being emptied out.
The Remedy To False Promises – Becoming Your Own Source
Hanging onto the trust and hope of someone giving you results, when the reality is that you are being emptied out, only leads you to suffer more exploitation.
There is a powerful spiritual lesson for all of us to learn as adults – to become a Source to self. Heal up those parts of ourselves that are still underdeveloped and “dependent” and stuck in “lack” and “poverty consciousness”.
One person is not your Source – you are as a connection with the healthy aspects of life.
In the expansiveness and interconnectedness with “all of Life” you don’t need to be an island, or have all the answers or abilities. Your real job is to develop your confidence and attributes to take responsibility to expand into skills and attributes you can achieve, as well as research and learn how to generate healthy connections to what and who is healthy for additional assistance in life .
This helps you feel empowered. It grants you growth and success in every area of your life. Fearfully being limited and wanting someone else to grant you “yourself” (as it did with myself) creates a very precarious position of allowing abusers into your life.
Taking responsibility out of this pattern entails healing this “smallness” from this inside out, to start anchoring into standing for your values and self-worth and courage, to be able to identify relationships and situations which aren’t healthy and say “no” to them.
Then you will not accept someone else’s invalidation or abuse again, and the doors start opening to that and which is healthy for you.
If you relate to this tendency (as so many of us do or did!) to hand power away and not believe we are “enough” to make life work without the narcissist, then I can’t recommend Module 2 of NARP “Becoming a Source to Yourself” to be released and reprogrammed out of toxic dependencies.
You can’t imagine the joy and freedom on the other side of this!
Number Two – Confusion
A narcissist needs you to be out of your core solidness and truth to keep manipulating and controlling you. If you are constantly distracted and derailed with drama you can’t identify what is really happening or look after yourself.
With a narcissist, regularly, goal posts and information change. What is okay for you to do today is not acceptable tomorrow. What pleased the narcissist last week, now has another condition applied to it. The seeming support for your desires from the narcissist has now been ripped away – again. The argument you thought was resolved, hoping to create a deeper and safer relationship with this person, re-emerges with such ferocity that things are even worse now.
As time goes on you don’t know whether you are coming or going. Not only do you have the brain fog of an ever-shifting reality, you also have diminished self-esteem, self-belief and power. You are not a creative autonomous being anymore, because all of your energy is wrapped up in trying to navigate what this person is or isn’t doing to you and your life.
Your emotional distress, anxiety and agitation allows the narcissist to blame you for the problems and diverts attention away from what he or she is really up to – which is manoeuvring you as an object to exploit for his or her own emotional significance and gain of resources.
The Remedy To Confusion – Purging Trauma To Receive Clarity
The first step to come out of the insanity is to step out of the insanity.
You can’t create sanity within insanity. You can’t make a disordered person act in a sensible way, no matter how hard you try.
By pulling away you can get space. However, this in itself is not enough to get clarity. Within the silence of the space is most often when the obsession comes at full throttle. You don’t start to feel automatically better. In fact, out of the battle, the assaults from yesterday, last week and month and years can all hit hard. Trying to compartmentalize and “work out” the madness and be able to get some closure or clarity around it just doesn’t work.
So many of us have tried this ad nauseam with no results other than to keep going around and around the same madness circles. It impacts terribly – emotionally. It is like shooting yourself 100 times with the same bullet.
The truth is this – with our limited cognitive mind we can’t make sense out of the insanity of narcissism. But at an infinite mind level from deep within we can.
A perfectly aligned healing phenomenon happens when you let go of the triggered trauma within you, with a Quantum healing tool such as NARP. As the trauma leaves, and Source is brought in to replace it (The NARP process) where confusion, anxiety and fear was – calm, peace and power come forth instead.
Then you know the truth. You don’t need to work out what the narcissist is up to, you only need to be anchored into your power and truth without pain and fear. Then you know what you were involved with is rubbish and you don’t have to roll around with it anymore.
This is how to truly break free.
Module 1 in NARP “Release the Immediate Pain and Feelings of Loss” is your most powerful tool to get through this time.
Number Three – Praise And Coercion
Narcissists congratulate and reward you if you agree with their version of things, at these times granting you words of “love” and “approval”.
You may be told that you are the most understanding person in their life, that you are fantastic because of your actions, care, dedication … that you are the best lover they have ever known, the best friend, the most outstanding employee and so on and so forth.
The compliments are over the top, and are intended to make you feel so “special”. The narcissist may even butter you up further with extravagant rewards and surprises at times.
Yet, on a dime, the narcissist can switch from adoring you to abhorring you. This is a trauma bond. It’s not unlike a poker machine – you are either losing tons of money, or if you get the “payout” you win big.
Because you have already lost so many parts of yourself and are suffering an extreme loss of clarity and self-esteem, you feel an incredible high when you do spasmodically receive the narcissist’s validation or rewards. The profound relief is the high.
You start chasing the approval. You keep trying to please this person, acquiesce to them and hope for their praise. This feels like bliss after being regularly demonized, degraded and discarded. It’s addictive, as much as the payout in gambling relieves the stress of all the losses. Before you know it, you are subconsciously chasing this, which means that the narcissist has trained you into behaving the way that he or she wants you to behave – handing more and more of your rights and self away.
The Remedy To Praise And Coercion – Self-love And Approval
The only true self-acceptance, love and approval as humans that we can experience is internal. Whether or not you are spiritual in a religious sense or otherwise, I have found in my experience and with thousands of others who recover – this is a spiritual deal. True “love” comes from our connection to “Source” (whatever your version of a Higher Power is).
We can’t get love and approval; we can only be it.
Personally, I discovered I could finally stop the quest of trying to learn how to love and approve of myself, with Quanta Freedom Healing (NARP) by purging all of the false beliefs and traumas I had taken on in my life. When I let these go and replaced them with the Light of Source, I stopped feeling like I wasn’t enough, was unlovable and couldn’t be accepted.
That was when I felt and experienced Source / God / Creation inside of me. I had the knowing of myself that Source held for me … that I was lovable, enough and accepted simply because I existed.
This changed everything for me. I no longer tried to get myself from others. I no longer clung to people who were unloving.
All of the NARP Modules unravel, release and heal this core belief. Module 7 of NARP “Connect to the Gift of Your Own Spiritual Empowerment” is especially helpful to make this shift.
Number Four – Agitation
Devaluing is another word for agitation. Narcissists are uncannily expert at working out what makes other people tick – identifying their inner insecurities. Hence, why the narcissist appeared in your life purporting to be the saviour of these insecurities.
Once this Trojan Horse has got in your gates and the narcissist has enmeshed you into a dependency, then they start agitating this insecurity. How this looks is by poking it with a nice big stick. They will start delivering your unhealed wounds to you.
If you have fears of infidelity the narcissist will start commenting about someone they work with and how attractive they are. If you have a body image, they will make disparaging comments about your weight or appearance. If you have suffered from violations in the past, regarding not being trusted and wrongly accused, the narcissist will start questioning your character and intentions. If you feel like you have been invisible to others, the once present, attentive narcissist will go missing in action and start ignoring you. If you have suffered from fears of survival and not having enough security the narcissist will take action that threatens this.
By the time this starts happening to you, you have already been trauma bonded, hence why you stay. If this had happened to you at the beginning of the relationship you wouldn’t have accepted it. Without realizing it, you had already created an image of this person for yourself, who you wanted them to be – your Source of Love, approval, security and survival, namely those parts of your life where you did feel insecure.
Now, unconsciously, you are holding this person responsible for being the saviour of these things. When they start withdrawing that support, and even agitating those insecurities by creating further damage to them, this causes you to hook in and hang on harder.
This is the very root of co-dependency and feeling like a victim – holding a person responsible to grant you safety, love and happiness when they have neither the resources or the desire to do this.
In this place, when we stay connected, obscene behaviour escalates – the lies, betrayals, blatant acts of disrespect and abuse … continue to compound if we stay and accept them and righteously assert “this person should not be doing this to me”.
The real truth is we are the ones enabling this, because we are trauma bonded and holding this person responsible for our life, rather than breaking away and healing ourselves.
The Remedy To Agitation – Releasing The Pain Of Injustice And Need For Accountability
One of the most spiritually Soul empowering lessons of narcissistic abuse – if not the core lesson – is letting go.
Letting go of needing other people to care for you and treat you well.
Letting go of someone providing you with the love, honesty, safety and success that you want them to grant you.
Letting go of the resentment and victimization you are suffering when people wrong you.
Yes, you have been hurt – horrifically and cruelly, just as I was too … and I will never not validate that.
Yet, if you are determined to hold other people responsible for your life, you will not let go of the hurt, the abuse will always live on inside you, your Life Force will be sucked dry trying to survive your unhealed inner wounds continually generating your abuse symptoms and you will never be free to generate a great Thriver Life.
So why hang on? There is actually no good reason to. The other person will never suffer from your hanging on – it just validates them more that you were the bad one, they were the right one, and you deserve to suffer for what “you did”. As twisted as it is – that is what the narcissist really believes. You regurgitating the poison every day is destroying you – it’s not affecting them at all.
Your best revenge is to purge this person, and all the horrible things that they did to you, well and truly out of your system, up level, develop and know how to never be in that powerless state again.
Then this person will not be under your skin, taking over your physical body and psychic energy field and renting free space in your head.
The greatest insult to a narcissist is when he or she is no longer your reality. Conversely, their greatest ego feed is you being horrifically affected! By going free you reap the rewards of a graduated Soul and life whereby you will be in higher dimensional living and reality than you were even before this happened to you.
I can’t recommend Module 4 “Release and Heal the Pain of Injustice and Betrayal” and 5 “Let Go of the Fight to Win and Your Need for Justice” of NARP enough to get these powerful inner shifts done.
Number Five – Guilt
Guilt and shame are very powerful sticks to control you with. All humans hate to feel wrong, bad and “not enough”. Narcissists are experts at attacking people at that level – gaslighting you profoundly to make you believe that others also think you are “bad”.
Narcissists perfect how to make you doubt that you are a good or sane person.
It is very easy to get roped into believing you are the one with the problem and the relationship issues are your fault. Many wonderful Souls have tried to fix and heal themselves and get professional help to make their relationships with the narcissist work. They feel responsible. They take on far too much responsibility. They are terrorized and shamed for things such as their reaction to the narcissist’s abusive assaults – where they slip up and do something “wrong’ and the narcissist will pin the entire demise of the relationship on this one act.
This person may feel guilt and horror about their misdemeanour (which was an understandable retaliation under the circumstances) without relief, regardless of the shocking and relentless abuse that the narcissist continually dished up to them. The narcissist will never forgive them and forget it and they can’t either. They are now in the eternal bond to the narcissist of trying to repent and make things up to him or her.
Also, people often feel responsible for the narcissist’s wounds. The narcissist has told them they don’t love enough, are not good people, devoted or loyal and are responsible for the narcissist’s woes and bad decisions and fortunes. These people find themselves in a relationship with the narcissist like a parent, not a partner with rights, and it’s their job to fix this person and make things right for them.
The narcissist asserts, “regardless of how I treat you it’s your job to love me!” Some people, even after being devalued and discarded and replaced by others, still stay subservient and compliant to the narcissist’s needs. Of course, this is coming not from a place of healthy love, but from an inner belief of obligation and requirement – as well as the quest to finally be loved, believed in and approved of.
It’s just another way that narcissists exploit for their own selfish, self-serving agenda – not seeing people as flesh, blood and bone beings – rather just mere tools to serve the narcissist.
The Remedy to Guilt – Self-responsibility
To powerfully come out of this trance and spell, requires healing your self-responsibility, whilst allowing others (even dysfunctional others) the opportunity to grow up and take responsibility for themselves.
And whether or not they do so is not your business. You are!
If you water someone else’s garden and neglect your own – your plants will shrivel up and die, and that person never learns how to look after their own garden. You are enabling them to be powerless while you allow yourself to be abused.
Giving in to your guilt and being exploited in this way, does not bring your peace. There is no thanks, no place it ends, and you get disrespected even more. Your Inner Being is screaming at you how painful, never-ending and debilitating this is for you. It’s Wrong Town with a capital W!
Many beautiful people who were very susceptible to co-dependency and being emptied out by narcissists (myself included) never had it modelled to them that it was healthy to look after themselves, have limits and boundaries and say No!
This is vital inner healing and development to recover from narcissistic abuse, as well as not be prey to narcissists again in the future. It’s also the only way to be treated as if you are worthy of love and respect from others.
If we continue to “go along to get long” and keep “keeping the peace”, and “loving without loving ourselves”, people can’t see us and treat us as real autonomous beings. We are not being one!
It is such a beautiful up-level to get this vital piece!
I can’t recommend Module 6 “Release and Heal the Need to Take Responsibility” of NARP enough to sort this out in your life and be able to say “No”, lay boundaries, lose your guilt and love the Soul truth, that when you serve your own Soul in healthy ways you also honour life and everyone else healthily as well.
In Conclusion
I know that we have done deep dives on trauma bonds in the past, but as I evolve and continually up level, I also feel very inspired to bring you information that comes from difference angles and gets delivered in different ways.
My intention with this is to grant you the “ah-ha” awakening that is your turning point out of the hell you have been in to start becoming the inner unfolding of your best and truest life.
It is my upmost joy to help people connect to the inner work that doesn’t take years to reach personal Thriver recovery and actually makes it possible – which just learning, researching and talk therapy doesn’t produce.
If you know it’s your time to break free … really free, and you know deep down inside that there has to be more to your life than what you are presently struggling with, I’d love to invite you into my Private NARP Thriver Community where incredible breakthroughs are happening every day – with the incredible guidance, love and support of those who know what it takes to achieve this.
And … as always, I look forward to your comments and questions about this article. Did it resonate deeply with you? Can you see how far you have come in these inner developments to release your trauma bonds, and do you have more inner work and development to go?