Alice Little's Blog

 

'Empaths and Narcissists both have the same ability to tune into others. The difference is that Empaths use their abilities to help others but Narcissists use their abilities to help themselves.' 

Are you an Empath? Yes me too! 

Like a sponge for others feelings. An awareness of what others need, how they are, what their story is. It's like having a radar on all day long. But is it really helpful? 

I have spent my whole life helping others, all kind of groups from dying, disabled, ill, whoever I could help. In return I got this great warm feeling in my heart. Helping others is helping yourself they say. Unless you wake up to Narcissistic Abuse.

Once you see that narcissists also have this turned on radar and are able to work people out the same as an Empath you can see how you would be used by them. Because Empaths use their abilities to help others but narcissists use their abilities to help themselves. 

I used to be very open, friendly and warm but now I keep that in check. It is not easy but if I don't I will exhaust myself helping others. It has taken a long time to rein this in because it feels selfish doing so. This was what I was taught as a child. I was there for my parents needs while they neglected mine. 

The last wake up call I had was when an elderly man was lying on the path in front of me, a neighbor who never gives me the time of day. He had fallen due to his legs giving way and was in between two parked cars but as I approached he flung himself in my path. So I immediately helped him. I pulled him up and tried to get him to his house with his arm on my shoulder. I forgot that I am getting older myself, not as strong as I was, joint problems due to NA. So when I left him I realised that I had damaged myself by helping him and was in pain and had problems walking. 

My partner pointed out my folly when I told him. This man still ignores me in the street. I could have let someone else help him, there were others around but I had to be the one rescuing. It was a big lesson I don't want to have again. 

So empathy can be something good but only if you include yourself in that equation by giving empathy to yourself. By not forgetting that you also need help and care. But often Empaths run on empty with no one helping them or not accepting help.

What do you think? Is it good being an empath or has it been detrimental to you. Has it changed over time? Do you now hold back or is it an impossible condition you can't help? 

 

 

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THE NARCISSIST BOSS

 

Do you have a narcissist boss? Get ready to lose your self confidence and you trust in the talents and skills you have and mostly get ready to lose a job you may love.

Maybe in realising that you have had a narcissist partner, in your research, you also see that many others around you as well as your partner were also narcissistic bullies and sociopathic narcissists. It had to happen that you would also unearth the narcissist boss within all of it didn't it?.

The insights and realisations just keep coming. But it is not all bad because these insights, although painful to deal with, are, in fact, a road to healing. Facing it now instead of burying it is healthy.

IT WASN'T YOUR FAULT! You just happened to be abused by narcissist bullies.

 You don't see the narcissist boss for who they are at first. They may be charismatic, clever. You may admire them. When you are first in the throws of the honeymoon period when you can do no wrong in your job you may even be a little in love with them, hero worshipping them. Eventually you will grow to be disgusted by them. So how does it happen?

 

The 3 phases of narcissistic abuse:

Idealise

Devalue

Discard

The narcissist boss thinks you are the best thing that ever happened to their company. (Idealise) They will shower you with compliments, gifts, promotions and more. You will bask in the sunlight of their generosity and be amazed that someone has noticed the talents you have. 

While you are working with a narcissist boss your head will grow to extreme proportions as you finally see you are super human just like they are telling you. Who wouldn't like that. After all we are just humans, looking for an ounce of kindness, looking to be recognised.

Well make the most of it while it lasts because when they have grown tired of you you will rapidly become the worst thing that ever happened to their rotten little company (Devalue). At this stage they probably have waiting in the wings their new supply. The new supply will want you out because at that stage you are still being praised and the new supply wants the boss all to themselves, you are their rival. The narcissist boss will triangulate you with that new supply. At first the new supply may tolerate you or appear to be your friend, but they just want rid of you. You may even grow to hate each other. It is only after you leave that you see what was at play during those times.

The narcissist boss is a nasty bit of work. They are no different to a narc partner. Everything that happens during your time with a narcissist follows a pattern. The boss is no different. So you realise that you are now entering ( Discard ) Well no at the time you don't! You think it's your fault. But this bit hurts so much, all of it hurts, but feeling the pain of how much you gave them and seeing it meant nothing to them makes a dint in your self-esteem.

During this time the love affair has ended and the new supply has been found. You are now a piece of worthless trash needing to be thrown away. If you don't leave they will make sure your life is a living hell. Both the narc boss and the new supply and all their cronies will gang up on you. The narcissist is really just an insecure bully but in the workplace where you may rely on the money, prestige and a good reference you may end up leaving and saying nothing.

If you have been the recipient of narcissistic workplace bullying by a narcissistic boss and their enablers you are not alone. Give yourself time to get back your incredible talents. Narcissists just steal what you have. Reinvent yourself and begin again. Grieve your losses but don't stay there. Don't let them win by believing their put downs of you and the shunning. You are worth more. They lied and manipulated. It wasn't your fault!

 

 

 There is  a term that survivors of childhood narcissistic abuse use, when referring to finding out who they were before abuse, and that phrase tells them that there was no personage, no them that they can go back to due to this narcissistic parenting. 'There was no me' they say to go back to. I find this phrase to be so disempowering for NA survivors. I don't know who started it but it isn't true. If you want to believe it fine, but not me. I was someone before abuse and also someone before I was born. I am someone now despite my childhood, despite abuse as an adult.

To think about who you were as if you were nothing before your parents took you over and abused you into being who they wanted you to be is quite nihilistic. And nihilism I find an extreme view. 

When you go back to thinking of yourself as a baby, unless someone cloned you, you were unique. You were born with a personality. You can see it in babies, they are all different with individual personalities. Within that baby is the seed and potential for anything. If you are lucky your potential will be nurtured and it will grow. With narcissist parents unless that potential suits thier needs it will be ignored and stamped out. But still it is there waiting. Waiting for that right moment when situations arise, when things come together to make something light up inside you, and off you go. The opposite can also happen, depending on the circumstances. In Buddhism this is called karma or cause and effect. You are the only one who can make this potential arise as an adult.

But if you are healing from narcissistic abuse as a child and are now an adult but you have the idea that your parents made you into a nobody, that they took you as a baby and created a clone of them, how can you heal from that?

You have to know that you were born somebody, an individual, a strong little thing that lived through all that abuse and yet are still here. That baby is still there, waiting for you to hold it and help it to grow. There was a you before abuse it is just that you have no memory of that time, no words to express it. But a baby is not nothing, just because it can't speak.

My mother told me a story of when I was small. She said that when she put a dummy/pacifier in my mouth I would spit it out to the other side of the room. Yes that was me, I can see myself in that one scene. Fk this I don't want no dummy. I know even now that if someone tells me to do something I am likely to do the opposite. It was hard to tame me, but tame me they did. So I now look for that wild side of me, the one I am afraid of. The one who got beaten and abused, got the wildness scared out of them. 

So if someone tells you that there was no you before abuse tell them you don't believe that stuff and you are going to go back, rescue that you, that baby, toddler and nurture them yourself. You are an individual with so much potential. Maybe that potential never realised in you. But there is always another day, a new start. You can begin again wih a new you. Go back and rescue that baby from those abusive parents. Start there. Rebirth yourself. 

 

You might be flattered if someone famous tweeted your quote, after all they have a lot of followers. But when they actually steal your quote from you (plagiarising), meaning they used your quote so that everyone would think it was theirs, by leaving off your name, well speechless!

 This week I saw that someone had tweeted my quote without my name, someone from the survivor community who is a so called therapist, not the first time it has happened. So I put in that particular quote on twitter and google to see what else is happening to it that I am not aware of. I know that several people have used my quote but, as would be expected, used my name alongside it, often very small I may add! People seem to like and resonate this particular one. And what do I find when I start to explore online but Paris Hilton quoting my tweet as if it were hers, along with her picture.

 She wears my words like a designer dress.

        Paris Hilton tweet 

Together with her followers saying how deep it is etc etc. I don't know whether to laugh or cry it's so ridiculous. 

So you might wonder why does it matter. After all it's only words. Well it matters a lot and it is not only words, it is my words, from my head, my pen, my thoughts, my ideas. 

This was done by someone who appears to have everything but still wants to take something that belongs to someone else. 

On further invesigation I see that there are at least 30 other people using that quote as if it were their own. This is what people do, they cut out your name.

As a survivor of narcissistic abuse it rings red flags for me. You see I have had everything taken from me, absolutely everything from meetings with narcissists. It has happened a few times and each time I have had to pick myself up and start again. There is nothing that I have not lost to narcissists. You see narcissists feel entiltled to take from you. They feel they own the world. That what is yours is theirs, they have no idea of boundaries. I don't know if Paris is a narcissist, maybe not. But she certainly felt that it was ok to take my quote. To pretend it was hers.

Look I am not the greatest writer. But I write books to help others, self help books. So in this case it would have helped me and other survivors if she had just added my name. Now what has happened is that other people feel they also have ownership of my quote and other quotes.

When I first began writing several years ago I tweeted a quote and a therapist of narcissistic abuse took that quote and even added her companies name to it together with a picture. It was then that someone told me you need to start owning them. So now I add my name to them. I didn't find it easy at first it seemed a bit egotistical but after more of my writing was being stolen I kept it up.

It made me realise that those of us who lived with or raise with narcissists often felt nothing belonged to them. So we gave everything away freely. Or we didn't make a fuss if it was taken. But there comes a point where you realise that it is important to speak out about injustice. As an Indie writer I make hardly any money from my books, that's not why I write. I write because I can't stop. It heals me and resolves things from my past. I write because I saw that others identified with my writing, my experiences and it helped them. So I keep going. 

So if you see a quote without a name, it has been stolen, someone wrote it. Plagiarism is serious. Please if you use quotes, if they really help you, inspire you, heal you, make you laugh...please quote the author

And Paris if you read this you need to take down that quote on instagram, twitter and facebook, apologise and in future add my name if you use my quotes. After all, aren't we just all survivors helping each other. 

 

 

 

Love shouldn't be a problem. It can't always be an easy road either. But loving a narcissist is trouble.

The problem comes not only when you are with them but after you leave them, in recovery. Because you can't just forget the memories of when you loved them and when you wrongly thought they loved you. It hurts. There is a grieving over this that is hard to admit to yourself, never mind others. So that during recovery from narcissistic abuse you are constantly in a state of cognitve dissonance and it drives you mad. You can go from feeling angry at them to feeling sorry for them and back again. 

Our minds want closure, they want a conclusion and once the mind has that it rests. But with narcissistic abuse it is difficult, even years later to get this closure. To stop thinking about the good times. Some survivors try to only focus on the bad times and remain in a state of anger and even hatred. But not everyone is capable of doing that, to some it can be damaging. You just do what works for you.

So what do you do with your feelings of 'sometimes good and sometimes bad' memories of the narcissist in your life? 

What I did to stop the madness of 'sometimes good sometimes bad' stuff was to make peace with it all. To accept that this is how it is. That it is ok for  me to think about the narcissists in my life with love or anger, when it comes. What happened is that eventually the strong emotions I once felt started to fade. It didn't stop me from thinking the same thing but it had less charge each time. 

Trauma bonding leaves you with a tug at your heart towards the narcissists. But if you can feel that tug but not do anything about it, not go back, you have, in fact, begun the process of healing. You can still think of going back but know you never will. Then you can start to grieve what never was, never will be. The loss is great. 

You can't just pretend you loved someone or that you had good times, even if they were faked by the narcissist for their benefit. Our minds store that stuff.

In healing you have to go over all those times and it hurts so much. So if you are going through this just know that it fades but may always be there. And like grief over a person who has died you may grieve the loss of the person you once thought you loved. You will also have to grieve the fact that this person may have never loved you, or hated you, used you in the most horrible way. But you have to find your own way to heal from it.

Betrayal trauma is real and it takes time and courage to face it. You build your life around it, despite it. Then one day you realise that you have to love yourself. That all the love you gave to others may have been a way of avoiding loving yourself. You looked for it outside. But real love comes when you begin to love you, as you are, unconditionally. You don't need a narcissist to fill that need anymore. It is within you. This is the conclusion.

 

 

Love shouldn't be a problem. It can't always be an easy road either. But loving a narcissist is trouble.

The problem comes not only when you are with them but after you leave them, in recovery. Because you can't just forget the memories of when you loved them and when you wrongly thought they loved you. It hurts. There is a grieving over this that is hard to admit to yourself, never mind others. So that during recovery from narcissistic abuse you are constantly in a state of cognitve dissonance and it drives you mad. You can go from feeling angry at them to feeling sorry for them and back again. 

Our minds want closure, they want a conclusion and once the mind has that it rests. But with narcissistic abuse it is difficult, even years later to get this closure. To stop thinking about the good times. Some survivors try to only focus on the bad times and remain in a state of anger and even hatred. But not everyone is capable of doing that, to some it can be damaging. You just do what works for you.

So what do you do with your feelings of 'sometimes good and sometimes bad' memories of the narcissist in your life? 

What I did to stop the madness of 'sometimes good sometimes bad' stuff was to make peace with it all. To accept that this is how it is. That it is ok for  me to think about the narcissists in my life with love or anger, when it comes. What happened is that eventually the strong emotions I once felt started to fade. It didn't stop me from thinking the same thing but it had less charge each time. 

Trauma bonding leaves you with a tug at your heart towards the narcissists. But if you can feel that tug but not do anything about it, not go back, you have, in fact, begun the process of healing. You can still think of going back but know you never will. Then you can start to grieve what never was, never will be. The loss is great. 

You can't just pretend you loved someone or that you had good times, even if they were faked by the narcissist for their benefit. Our minds store that stuff.

In healing you have to go over all those times and it hurts so much. So if you are going through this just know that it fades but may always be there. And like grief over a person who has died you may grieve the loss of the person you once thought you loved. You will also have to grieve the fact that this person may have never loved you, or hated you, used you in the most horrible way. But you have to find your own way to heal from it.

Betrayal trauma is real and it takes time and courage to face it. You build your life around it, despite it. Then one day you realise that you have to love yourself. That all the love you gave to others may have been a way of avoiding loving yourself. You looked for it outside. But real love comes when you begin to love you, as you are, unconditionally. You don't need a narcissist to fill that need anymore. It is within you. This is the conclusion.

 

You don't realise until you leave a narcissist partner how much you lost out on friendships due to that relationship, what it cost you to be with them. Not only do they stop you from making friendships, often without you knowing, but if you do have any they will soon be lost to you. The narcissist wants full control of you. Anyone on your side is not on theirs and will be eliminated. Your friends won't want to be around if they are made unwelcome or uncomfortable and neither will your family. That's what happened to me and probably you too unless you were lucky and had strong allys.

But at the time you are with them they become your life and you accept whatever they do, even if you don't like it. You tell yourself lies about how good it is, make excuses and believe the gaslighting they supply. You may get annoyed that they are not friendly to those you know but that's just how they are you tell yourself. Because you think you love them and you think they love you. You believe you have a strong connection. You will even fight others in your denial of who they are. 

Comes the time after you leave them or they leave you and you realise that you are on an island alone. It makes you miss them even more, being alone with your grief. Makes you vulnerable to going back.

I didn't know I had spent decades not making friends because we had such a lively social life. Always going somewhere always doing things. But when I left I saw with startling clarity that all the people we socialised with were his friends, not mine. He had used me to get friends because together we seemed like a nice couple. So the ones that stayed his friends were the people that he used for something or other, often shady deals! I was left alone totally after I left him because I had also gone no contact with my family of origin. The only person I knew in the world was my therapist. So I made the mistake of staying friends with my ex. The abuse continued.

But life went on and I made new friends started to go places and do new things. He would have hated everything I chose to do. As I started heal I became more forgiving and I let my abusive parents back into my life. In doing so I lost everything and everyone again. I had to leave my home, town and friends and disappear to escape them ,to find peace. At the same time I also lost touch with my ex.

When you look back at the time you spent with the narcissist, often your best years, your youth, you see how you helped them to make friends and neglected your own, or to make any at all. You notice how your life revolved around them and their needs. You were blind to it. You have to start all over again and make a new life and it is not always easy when you are also healing from narcissistic abuse. The abscence of friendships and the inability of making new friends while with the narcissist is a great loss and something that you are only aware of as you heal. Only then do you see how important friendships would have been for you.

Did this happen to you? Did you make new friends and how old were you? Or did you end up alone, unable to trust again?

 

 You would have had good experiences with a narcissist or you would not have stayed. But how good were those time? Because you found out that they were a narcissist does that negate everything you experienced with them?

Many survivors say that all their time with a narcissist was tainted because it was all fake. So was what you experienced personally, in your own head, fake too? I mean good feelings, good times, going to places you enjoyed? If you enjoyed some experiences why can't you still keep them as good memories? I mean they took so much from us anyway, why can't we keep our good memories, fake or not?

Does someone being unkind to us take away all the good stuff too?

Keeping two opposing thoughts in your head leads to cognitive dissonance. It drives you mad. So you go searching for a point where it was either good or bad and stick with it. It makes your head feel more sorted out. But what if in doing so you were making it worse. By sticking to all bad it may give some closure but it also spoils the good things in life. If we make it all good it also does the same as well. But as a human our minds want us to have no dissonance in our minds so we do black and white thinking, all good or all bad. But is that true?

 When I met my ex he had nothing and was ill. I didn't really want to be with him but my world was empty of support from parents or friends. I had fled an abusive family of origin and was in a big city on my own as a teenager. My origins were very poor. He offered me stability and support and I gave the same to him. He built himself up and became successful and years later we were living the high life. Travelling the world on the firms expenses and having amazing experiences. When I look back at those times I can't take away the fact that I had the time of my life. I was with a hard man, selfish, demanding, ungrateful, king of the castle type but still I experienced some life.

When I say I had a good time I don't mean with him, I mean in my own head, on my own. My mind belongs to me and what I experienced was my own private world. I was on my own a lot during those experiences when with him or without his company. I was invisible and became more so as time went on. But I can't say that I didn't have a good time. I can't say that I didn't have a bad time either. So for my own closure, I saw that I was with someone who was narcissistic, but that I had had good experiences. It is irrelavant to me who I was with. Yes it would have been nicer if I was with someone better. But with my childhood experiences that would have been impossible to expect. Being with him was not easy but I saw and tried the options and he was the best one.

In order to heal I let go of all bad or all good, and sat with the dissonance of sometimes good sometimes bad. It helped me to move on. I could still have my good memories instead of trying to block it out. It is not an easy way to think because you then have to deal with grief and loss. But I preffered that to feeling anger and bitterness. I make no excuses for who he was and how he was with me. I have picked at that for decades in order to heal. I had to make sense of it and making sense of it was making that time and what I experienced my time. Not allowing him to steal yet something else from me.

It is my way of making peace with it all. It may not be for you. But it works for me. I refuse to let the narcissist steal my good memories because everything else was taken from me. I remember the bad stuff and I have gone over and over it. But I decided to visit all those pictures in my mind, the places I went to, the adventures I had and I took him out of the equation and see them as something I was experiencing on my own. They are my memories, he just happened to be there. I own them.

 

Toxic positivity had taken a grip everywhere and it is very damaging. 

If you have experienced severe trauma or are dealing with sadness and suffering due to an experience in life that has traumatised you, the outcome is that you will be feeling sadness, depression and grief. It is completely normal. In fact, it is helpful to allow yourself the time and space to go through the turbulent emotions that traumatic events cause. Trying not to feel them doesn’t make them go away. Keeping a mantra of positive quotes in your head won't make it go away. There is nothing wrong with feeling positive but if it detrimental to your healing, if it seems that your feelings are being denied by doing so and if you are hearing others deny them in this way, it is time to take action.

Other people may feel uncomfortable around you. This will happen. They may try to get you to move on with your life or tell you that you are wallowing in it. There are many ways that people will tell you how uncomfortable they are with normal, human emotions but none more so than ‘toxic positivity’ and people parroting positivity quotes at these times. They can’t stand to acknowledge either their own or others hardships. Whenever you even slightly mention that you are feeling down they will come up with a positive phrase to counteract what you are feeling. Yes but..

So strong is their aversion to feelings that they will attack you for not being positive. They are not even interested in your story or what you have gone through, they do not want to hear it. All they want to hear is that you are getting over it. That you are thinking positive even though you are dying inside. Yet all that people want who are going through a bad time is someone to listen to them and accept and witness their story.

We can all be guilty of toxic positivity in the way we think and speak to others. So let us uproot this cruel way of behaving, starting with ourselves. We should call it out when people are talking to us this way or at least just stop engaging with them if they can’t support us in our hardest times.Once we have experienced gaslighting we never want to hear it again.  Toxic positivity is gaslighting and I have so done with gaslighting!

 

 

Spirituality and trauma recovery.

I rarely talk about my own spiritual path or spirituality in general. It seems such a  private thing to do. But something major happened to me in my thirties that I can't deny. I write about it in my books No Contact Survivor and also in The story of my life and Liberation I started to wake up in a big way. Completely out of the blue. It ripped my life apart and I was never the same again. My world slowly unraveled and fell apart. It needed to, but it was painful. Few understood what was happening to me, even other survivors, so I just kept quiet about it.

I have started to notice that many survivors seem to be going through similar experiences right now but may not instinctively know what it is that is happening to them like I did. So I thought it would be helpful to give a brief story of what happened to me back then. To help others understand that going through flashbacks to childhood is a spiritual awakening and a normal part of evolving as a human being. As scary as it is at the time, knowing that this is what is actually happening, can help to aleviate the fear of what one is going through. 

I will not go into big details of my story because it is too long but if you want to know more you could read my books. 

I began to have flashbacks out of the blue to childabuse.They happened at all times and anywhere. In the car, at work, in the street, while talking to someone. It was relentless until I realised how to manage them. I did this by doing inner child work, talking to the parts of me that were stuck and were showing me the flashbacks. It sounds crazy but it worked. I missed it when it all stopped. I missed those children who I had loved and integrated into myself. I rescued myself from those awful times. Became my own super hero. Made myself whole again.

 Alhough I had remembered how bad my childhood was, once the flashbacks came, it was much, much worse than I could ever have imagined. These flashbacks lasted for four years. During that time I somehow managed to work as well, using methods I describe in my books. I somehow knew what to do. I trusted my own mind and what it was showing me. When the terrifying flashbacks abated I then began to have flashbacks to previous lives. I was not taking any drugs nor under a doctor so I was not stopped by anything, I just went through it. It wouldn't be for everyone I know. I started therapy a year after the flashbacks began. But even my own therapist, as good as she was, had no idea what was happening to me.

From the outside it may have appeared as if I was a bit crazy, but I knew I wasn't. I knew that what was happening to me was a great opportinity for waking up. It was both a terrifying and an uplifting experience. Yet there was no one to talk to about this.

 I began to do some research to see if others had had similar experiences and found a great book by Stanislav and Christina Grof it is quite an old book but still relevant. I now see that there are many who are writing books on this subject and also some fake guru types one should watch out for. It is a difficult minefield to walk in finding out where to look and who to trust with this awakening. 

For myself I just trusted what I was going though and knew that I would have everything I needed to get myself through it. How great it would have been to have found authentic people to help one at the time. But get through it I did. In the end the flashbacks stopped and normal life resumed and how dull it all seemed. But I was different now. I could not life the same life I had been doing before it all began. I lost my relationship, family of origin and everything else at that time. Dealing with the loss was huge.

I then became a Buddhist following a Tibetan teacher for 25 years or more including a three year closed mountain retreat. Yet even that I gave up eventually. Now I am a lone yogi walking my own path using everything I learned along the way. I don't see my spirituality as anything separate from my life but as all the same thing. I have learned that when one steps into the boat to get to the other side that when one gets to there one has to step out of the boat. So it is with the spiritual path. Even when one has been following something for years they may have to give it up or be stuck with one foot in the boat.

I am not saying here that I am awake or enlightened, far from it, but rather that I have woken up and am now unable to go back to sleep. The world no longer holds a fascination. My goal is total awakening. 

Flashbacks to child abuse or trauma can be an awakening experience. It seems like you are going mad. But sometimes it is just an awakening. You have to find your own path. I am not just advocating to do it the way I did. It was the only way I knew. I don't know if any of this will make sense to you but to the few who will get it:

 Keep going, keep letting go and never stop until you reach the goal and even then give that up.