An excerpt from an ebook i was reading on narcissists and how much i felt it relates to me..

2) The narcissist needs to offload his or her internal pain

Narcissists have limited or nonexistent resources available in order to work through their own emotional conflicts, which are numerous. Because the narcissist struggles to be accountable and self-reflect, he or she projects emotions onto others (offloads the parts of themself they cannot resolve) in order to gain relief from internal pain. This is why the narcissist will proclaim that it is your fault and will continually accuse you of the poor behaviour that the narcissist is performing.
Projection is a strategy necessary for the narcissist to emotionally survive and retain his or her false self. Projection is an egoic created defence mechanism.

Healthy and emotionally mature individuals have the ability to self-reflect and take responsibility for their own emotions. The narcissist doesn’t and won’t.

The unfortunate side-effect of the narcissist’s projection is that you may be incredibly confused and think much of the destruction is your fault. You may have bought into the projection that you are in fact the damaged one who is causing the problems.

Just ask yourself - Am I a malicious person who operates without conscience? Yes, you may have retaliated like a crazy person and even been nasty and aggressive, but who doesn’t crack when they’re being significantly and repetitively abused?

That certainly doesn’t make you, at your core, a bad person.

I can assure you – healthy people with emotional intelligence who really believed you were untrustworthy, manipulative, controlling, competitive, adulterous, nasty and wrong would NOT be having a relationship with you. They’d leave! Yet the narcissist continues or continued to be with you while accusing you of these things...and more.
Why? Because he or she was maliciously maiming you and dumping his or her tormented self on you – pure and simple.

Decent people simply don’t do that. I don’t care how deranged or crazy you feel – you are being abused, and it’s important to
get clear about this.

Conscience verses conscienceless

Having a conscience is the defining point distinguishing the co-dependent and the narcissist. Co-dependents feel really bad about using abuse, lies and manipulation to gain attention, or the upper hand, and would feel devastated if anyone accused them of possessing anything less than decency and integrity.

I’ve had the conversation with many of my clients in relation to how they themselves could never operate like a narcissist. It would be true to say that even in your most dire times of pain and grief that you’d find it very difficult to lower yourself and literally sell your soul by performing the lies, manoeuvres, cruelty, atrocities and immoral behaviour that the narcissist is capable of. You just simply wouldn’t do it.

He or she holds a very powerful trump card over you. You’ve been hooked into wanting to prove to the narcissist that you are trustworthy, you are decent and you do love him or her.

This has been an extremely painful and difficult task because the narcissist is always insisting how bad you are (the projection of his or her disowned parts on to you).

You’re mortified about letting the narcissist prove that you are in fact a bad person, because in your human model of the world this means you’ve failed achieving what you set out to experience with this person. It’s soul-destroying because you’ve been misunderstood and lost the possibility of regaining the perfect relationship with this person who you thought was absolutely the love of your life.

Is it the relationship you’re fighting for? Or maybe really it’s the need to be validated, respected, trusted and loved – unfortunately by someone that never wanted to, and never held that as a normal human goal. It isn’t about that or you, never actually was, and never will be.

From the narcissist’s viewpoint and model of reality, it was always about you supplying the narcissist with narcissistic supply.
The interesting part in all of this is – you’ve been conditioned by the narcissist to accept the assault of the narcissist’s projections. He or she has day by day, piece by piece been turning you into another version of themselves. By confusing and diminishing you and projecting the bad parts of themselves on to you, the narcissist has created you as the tormented person.

By doing so he or she has been able to feel momentarily healthy, and temporarily spared from his or her own internal torture.
The feelings that you’re feeling – the emptiness, manic depression, fear, loss of self-esteem, helplessness and loss of faith in yourself and life, are the feelings that the narcissist feels within their real core every minute of every day.

The difference is the narcissist, in order to function, goes after narcissistic supply (attention which means stealing other people’s energy), in order to have any sense of ‘self’. The narcissist requires other people reflecting energy back to him or her, because without this the narcissist is a literal wasteland of no-self.

The reason why you appear to be an empty shell and the narcissist doesn’t, is because you cannot sell your soul in order to go out and feed off and steal energy and resources from people and life in order to emotionally survive. You’re not doing the tactics which gain the relief. In fact you’re much more likely to keep losing more and more pieces of yourself, shrivel and fall deeper and deeper into the black abyss that you’re becoming.

Narcissistically abused victims all report the feeling of having NO self left, and that their life force has been literally sucked out of them.

The physical, emotional and mental torture of being in this state is unthinkable, and unless you’ve experienced it personally, which I know you have if you’ve been narcissistically abused, you know what I mean when I say – you could not even begin to fathom what this feels like unless you’ve personally experienced it.

If the narcissist was cut off from receiving narcissistic supply, this is exactly what he or she would feel like. He or she would experience a complete and utter breakdown.

Not being a bad person is killing you in this instance. Please know, in no way am I advocating that you become bad in order to survive, therefore becoming a model of no empathy or conscience. The quick fix is not the durable answer, and you certainly can’t attack the narcissist with his own arsenal. He is a seasoned professional, whereby you’re a raw novice shackled with a conscience, and therefore the narcissist will always win.

The narcissist is a model of self-serving entitlement, and he or she believes they own the rights to you and anything else they feel entitled to take (which is most things). There is no way he or she is going to grant you the energy you require to feel better. He or she needs to take, and the narcissist is going to do his or her best to cut you off from other sources that could grant you energy, such as friends, family, children (yours or the narcissist’s), hobbies and areas of your life that give you connection and pleasure. The narcissist knows that by doing so you will be shackled to him or her so that supply can be extracted and ensured.

The narcissist is pathologically envious, often to the point of inner rage, that you can and do find ways and people to feel genuinely good. The narcissist knows this is an possibility for him or herself, and wishes to dismantle all of your sources of energy, leaving you totally at the mercy of his or her control.

You will have experienced the disinterest; displeasure and even wrath of the narcissist when you were upset, grieved or in a state of needing support from him or her, or when you were deriving pleasure and energy from sources other than the narcissist.

Now you can understand why. The narcissist after the process of giving to get (securing you as narcissistic supply) has no desire, and quite frankly no resources to genuinely give support, and certainly has no desire to support and encourage your happiness and achievements.

The narcissist may monetarily grant you positive energy, but often it’s only to prop you up so that you will remain and stay as narcissistic supply. Agendas drive the narcissist’s responses and actions.

Narcissists operate from the insidious agenda of requiring narcissistic supply like a drug addict requires heroin, and just like a high-level junkie the narcissist will sell out individuals, or trample on other people’s emotions and resources without remorse, in order to feed this all-consuming need. No-one receives immunity in the face of this compulsion.

Close intimates are the main targets from whom the greatest amount of narcissistic supply can be extracted, simply because an intimate will hang around in the game whilst the extraction continues to take place. Less intimate people that haven’t been successfully hooked won’t. They will tell the narcissist to get lost and refuse to endure the abuse.
The narcissist doesn’t fear the abandonment and punishment that comes from his or her bad behaviour. In fact he welcomes the angst and repercussions. All of this grants him the knowing he or she has the power to affect other people in extreme ways. This is A- grade narcissistic supply at its best.

What’s more, unconsciously, individuals who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder have inbuilt masochistic tendencies. The narcissist knows that he or she is empty, and has no ‘self’. Self-loathing takes up the space where self-esteem, self-knowing and self-worth should reside.

There is a perverse and twisted relief when receiving punishment and failure, and narcissists seek it out time and time again. At a deep inner level they know that every significant relationship they enter into will fail, and they grind these relationships into the ground towards this conclusion mercilessly. By purposefully bringing about the end themselves, this grants them additional power and control.

The ending always comes through one of two means, they either push the partner away, or they create the complete disintegration of the partner and then discard the corpse when there’s no narcissistic supply left to gain. There’s no beating this system – it just is what it is, and the narcissistically abused victims who have tried to change this reality, and don’t want to accept the relationship is doomed all become corpses. I was a hair’s breadth from becoming one of these discarded shells myself.

It must be remembered, in amongst all of these startling and chilling facts, victims of narcissistic abuse do have the inner ability to have a self. Therefore for you, there is the hope and the opportunity to break away from this manic and soul-destroying dynamic in order to heal, empower yourself and recover. I and many other people have done so.

The narcissist, however, can’t create an authentic self, and won’t, and will meet the same inevitable conclusion that all narcissists meet – a place which he or she has been maliciously and frantically trying to avoid. The reality of having no energy left to procure narcissistic supply, and being left alone with a horrifying tortured self with no way to gain relief.

It is then that the narcissist meets his or her maker – and knows firsthand that the charade or his or her life, and the carefully scripted and constructed false self has all amounted to absolutely nothing – the wasteland of having no authentic self becomes the all- encompassing play with no exit.

It’s here that the narcissist is demised, because he wasn’t able to beat the system that we all face: Without an authentic self, nothing is real.

Generally this happens to the narcissist later in life, rather than earlier, but it does happen. Therefore don’t envy narcissists and think they have it all. None of what they have is real, or brings real feelings of fulfilment. The truth is: it is impossible for them to be genuinely fulfilled and at peace; they simply aren’t wired that way, and that doesn’t change regardless of how much material stuff, notoriety, acclaim or even fame and fortune they manage to get.

Don’t be tempted to try to save the narcissist from him or herself and this inevitable fate with the belief Love will conquer and fix all, because another truth is: the narcissist will resist all of these attempts, and in fact punish you for trying. He or she is disgusted by individuals that try to love him or her, and will detest you for it. The unconscious reason playing out within the narcissist is: How repulsive and wrong it is to try and love a ‘nothing’, an entity that doesn’t exist. This makes me despise you even more.

I was just telling C the other day: why my first relationship must be so dramatic / memorable in the wrong way? Other people's first loves are full of the sweetness of puppy love, lovey-doveyness and then a sweet memory to reminisce on when it's gone.

My first relationship is one where I fell hard and fast for the "ideal image" ("knight in shining armor"), thought he was the love of my life and we would marry and settle within 2 years, (that's where the fairytale ends), then i got cheated on / lied to, my friends were too heavily involved, and on top of that he is a Narcissist , which means i won't get the normal healthy sort of breakup with its closure and normal symptoms, i had no proper closure but a truckload of his empty promises of forever and "i can't live without you", "I want to spend the rest of my life with you", "you are worth everything", and him scarring me on occasions such as Christmas, Boxing Day, Valentine's Day, Chinese New Year period, my birthday (he promised holiday together in Mauritius), instead to deal with, i would suffer from withdrawal symptoms from the lack of this "drug", (as I came across in an article: where the counsellor said ex-heroin addicts have described the effects of the withdrawal symptoms from lack of a narcissist is 10 times worse than lack of heroin) and I may never love or trust again (i cannot even think of being in another relationship now without scarring myself and the other party).

She said that for what i have not gotten in my teenage years (the beauty of a first love), i am getting everything now at once. TOo much, too intense, but i am sure there is a lesson somewhere in it for me. And if I survive this "drama", i will be stronger than ever.

Now i just gotta focus on the grieving, healing, purging, carthasis.

These 2 days of non-activity and just purely grieving helps alot.. esp the material i came across online too.. shall copy a couple here for my own reference in future:

Dispositionally, the narcissist is of most, "Controlling". The need for control is most formidible, in every aspect of their life. Nothing can be compromised at any time, any event, or in any detail. Deceitfullness is utmost, and the edge to further any situation to have as one may is only to be subjected to a petty artifice, or that of a, "grifter". Words are spoken as an illusion of confidence. Despite all. Ignore and move on to that of what you can enjoy. They have free rent in your head. Fill it with some new tenants! That of what or those you enjoy! You may need to start long ago where you left back in you life before the "Wolf came to your door." Keeping the door locked may not be such a bad idea. Negative emotional contagion, and the parasitic symbotic relationships need to end. For every cloud has silver lining.

A relationship with a narcissist is as beneficial and pleasant as a relationship with a rattlesnake. Deal with them the same way you would deal with the situation if you spotted a rattlesnake a few feet away from you.

When you terminate the relationship with the rattlesnake er... narcissist, do not seek "closure" or try to explain to them why you are taking such steps or explain to them you still wish them well etc. A narcissist will merely try to exploit what s/he sees as your weakness when you do such things.

Remember - you can't out psycho a psycho and you can't hurt someone who has defenses that would make the Marines proud.

Couz said something before: always pray that u don't encounter such characters, esp characters who can outdo u psychosocially. I learned that there are such sick people in this world.. who have no innate goodness and live and thrive on the unhappiness and pain of others. At least i learned something out of this.

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The other thing that crossed my mind is: if i have to think of the worst case scenario, and that is to see them happy and married now, or within a few months, or him informing everyone that she was the one who changed him. Then here comes the catch 22: for how long dude? for how long.. 2 months, 6 months? a year? 10 years? Depending on the length of time and of course the character of said partner involved, Narcs being emotional vampires would have sucked all the life outta the victim. Hey, perhaps the biatch prefers it that way.

Seems fitting that his initials coincides with Narcissist and the women in his life are all Narcissist Supplies (NS). Extremely befitting.. Cheers to that.

It feels difficult to breathe today.. But guess what? I made it out of bed =)

If there was a "erase memory" button... but there must be a reason there isn't. After all, didn't like i walk out of the M&L saga that time intact?

I can do it.. i will not become like him.. walk in and out of relationships incomplete and having alot of spare tyres on the sideline to fill up his slots of loneliness.. Never satisfied.

I will walk out whole. Without needing a slot.

I think it is especially hard today cos i am suffering from withdrawal symptoms from the holiday.. and the fact that my period is here and i still wake up feeling panicked and in fear that it would not get better.

So what did i do?

I literally forced myself to get up to face the day, and tell myself that it is only part of my life, not my whole life, not my whole self, and everytime he comes to mind, to force myself to replace a thought of him with a positive thought of something else, something like hey, so what i am going to do for my work today?

I also cannot forget or forgive the fact that he knew it was my first relationship and he was still vindinctive enough to hurt me this way, even telling me that nobody forgets their first love. Haha. I will not let him win. He wants to be remembered in the most impacted manner possible.. I guess his sense of self-importance is utterly misplaced cos he was the lowest-down worm that i allowed to enter my life. Has to be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

And how do i do that? My life, as i know it, is surrounded with some of the most beautiful, smartest and characters of quality that he would never have in his life (seeing that his life is empty and filled with superficial people or deluded people who pander to his charms and probably think he is going to be someone important when all he is doing is leeching off his family's influence and he is still a nobody at 34, scratch that, even the people he claimed to be friends with for decades must be of no quality not to see the character flaws in his personality). But then again, he is a narcissist, and narcissists get through their lives living off narcissistic supplies and die thinking they got the best deal of all.. Ah well. So be it.


What's important now is me. I need my own self-healing, why i'm attracted to characters like that (oh wait, i know, i have the tendency to want to "rescue" people) i definitely must be more selfish now and only rescue myself.

So let's start. I must be selfish today by doing something that makes me happy, even if it's something that will not agree with someone else.

So I am back from Batam..

Told mum today.. i didn't feel like coming back.. afraid to come back to face all the nightmares again (not that i did not have them in batam)..

I think i need to take out more of that courage i know i possess inside me and push myself on..

Amidst all the tears and sadness and wallowing, I don't want to forget how to live.. I want to live, to hurt and to find happiness amidst it all.

I will keep crying.. and hurting... and crying and thinking and hating and replaying.. till i learn to forgive and forget. And let myself go.

And most importantly, i need to believe i can do it myself. And not seek solace from someone, or something, or sweep it under the carpet and have it revisit me in a few years' time.

Shuling, your healing will begin =)

This is something i keep telling myself when it gets super painful and excruciating.

No matter how painful it is now, i have to go through with it. Even if it slaps me in the face or stones me or sticks a thousand blades in my heart.

Because at the end of it, i want to walk out of it smarter and better. Not angry or bitter. Being able to stand being alone. Address all my fear of abandonment issues. Whole again.

So the intense pain now is necessary. I dont like it. I dont want it. But it needs to happen.

I dunno when the tears will stop. When i will stop crying.

But i know i had a good cry tonight, and its cathartic, its not the end and i wanna cry some more.

Knowing that is another step forward i hope.

At a time like this, i think i need to keep writing again to journal my feelings..

It's been a month since the "official breakup"... When will my heart feel whole again? I been pestered to move on, to heal, to do this and that. and all i wanna say is, "GIMME A BREAK!!"

It's not going to be easy seeing that at this point in time, all i still wanna is for him to leave that biatch and grovel back. They shouldn't be happy. They don't deserve to be happy.

Yet the mind tells me that, if i suffer now, i can really enjoy my happiness later. And whilst they are enjoying their superficial happiness now, they will suffer later.

My heart tells me to go ahead and message and demand the answer i never got cos my well-meaning friends told me not to msg as dignity is the way to go.

I so need a vacation.

I dunno whether to feel happie or not. Just enjoy the moment i guess.

心情 down.

淑玲，你没想象中坚强。
淑玲, 你比想象中坚强。

不同的意义， 在一字之差。

For eveything that I have now, I am thankful.

I want to remember every moment i feel this way and record it down.. so here i am =)

Like i was telling flo the other day, i know there's a reason why things turn out the way they are, no matter whether it was what we predicted or unplanned.

I am grateful. For my life.

Feeling that super-alone feeling more than ever this period...

It makes me feel kinda glad in a way that i know nobody really reads this space anymore, not the people i know of anyway.. i think. Yet there are times i do wanna cry out for the attention. But pride and sensibility prevents me from doing so.

I always did think, my kids have no idea how lucky they are to be involved in all the stuffs they are now.. cos i have the feeling.. i'm feeling restless this way cos i dun hv enough to occupy me.

Then again, i know i shun have done tt that time... it's prolly one of the contributing factors to this feeling of super-aloneness..

I just need to work harder to keep the mind occupied. And remind myself not to do stoopiak things when i can't handle the consequences..

Intense emotion overload today...

sweet smses from a couple of youths.. it's always the unexpected that touches you..

reminscient and revelation of those bittersweet memories with a close friend.. it feels good to let it out and look upon them not just as lessons learned, but to clear it within yourself too..

the story of the Prince's Tale.. the chapter in HP that always dissolves me in tears whether it is in print or picture..

Intense emotion overload today.. but i welcome every min of it =)

... needs to learn to stop thinking too much. hoping too much. expecting too much.

Maybe i really dunno how the game is played. That's why i am in this confused state now of not knowing what to expect. Can i don't play games at all?

Haiz. the consequence of being born in the wrong era.

I used to be a worrywart. I worry about balloons flying away even when they are wound around my wrist on strings.

I don't think much has changed since I have grown up.. still a worrywart, more than ever. Think too much.

It doesn't happen often..

But it's one of those nights when I feel scarily , painfully alone.. and I am hanging onto every sms from friends like a life thread, going on a random site to seek attention.. just to give me validation for this existence and distract me a little from the painful loneliness..

So so alone.. wanna hug myself but even my arms are cold..

I need to peace out.

Just Stop Thinking.

I hate it when my mind is in this obsessing drive, especially when subject of obsession isn't worth a damn minute of the obsessing.

Chin up Ling.

You know you are better than this.

On the other side of the coin, perhaps I just need to trivialize this situation.

No Big Deal.

Really?

Quote of the Day: “Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious...” Michael Stipe

I am my worst enemy, best motivator, worst nemesis, best advisor..

haiz.

"Gatherings" like this make me think too much, especially about people. So-called relatives we have grown distant from, but are forced to come together obligatorily.

Made me think of the happier times, the times when things were so much easier, where laughter was aplenty and negativity, bitterness, suspicion and complaints were lesser.

The family photo we took that fateful day in 1997 now has 3 members lesser.

It is really the living who has it harder. I hope my beloved aunt and her brothers are having a nice gathering in the other dimension.

There are times I wonder why the men in my family are so childish, so superficial, so immature. I mean those who are in their 40s, 50s. I mean seriously, rolls eyes.

Or the men I encountered this generation are just too spoilt or fail to understand the meaning of graciousness or chivalry simply becos they are used to being spoonfed.