When you get serious about setting boundaries with a destructive narcissist, when you shut the door entirely and for real, the narcissist is going to make gathering the troops and collecting allies their full-time job. The purpose of all of this, of course, is to get everyone to agree on just how awful you are and what a victim they are. No matter how much evidence to the contrary, they will hone in on any little thing they can and make stuff up as they go—whatever it takes—including telling everyone that you did or said all the terrible things that they actually did and said.
Your job in all of this is to get your self-esteem to a place where you don’t care at all. Now, I’m not saying this is easy or that it won’t hurt when this happens to you. What I’m saying is that’s the direction you’ve got to be heading in if you want to break free and heal from these painful relationship patterns in a real and lasting way. Make that your goal. Get yourself to a place where your opinion of yourself is the one that matters most. You know who you are. You know exactly what you’ve lived, what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, and why. Let that be enough.
All of their little stories, false narratives, distorted perceptions, and lies by omission, along with whoever chooses to believe the nonsense without giving you the benefit of the doubt or a conversation, all have to not matter at all. And the truth is, it’s quite likely that you are not a perfect human being and haven’t always done things perfectly or gotten it right. Meaning, in response to being targeted, betrayed, abandoned, abused, harmed, and hurt in all kinds of ways, you may very likely have done and said some things you’d absolutely do or say differently if you were given an opportunity for a do-over. Welcome to the human race on planet Earth.
Such is the place we find ourselves in when we’ve been deeply hurt by narcissistic perpetrators. Here’s the thing: narcissists will quite deliberately hurt, harm, instigate, and provoke just so they can trigger an emotional reaction and then point the finger at you. It’s called reactive abuse. And if you want to learn more about how narcissists use reactive abuse to gaslight you in this fashion, you can watch this video here.
Number Two: Flaunting a New Source of Supply
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