Narcissists Change You & BLAME YOU

If you are involved with a narcissist—whether it's a relationship partner, family member, friend, or co-worker—it will change you. This is commonly known among psychologists and therapists. It is even more damaging if you are dealing with more than one narcissist, such as in your family or at work. The more narcissists you are dealing with, the more damaging it will be to you, and the more it will change you.

You may lose your sense of self. You may lose your self-worth. You may have difficulty making decisions. You may begin to question reality. You may develop trust issues. It may affect your future relationships. You may avoid intimate connections with other people. You may feel like you have lost control of your life, and you may blame yourself—all while the narcissist is changing you and blaming you.

You're losing your identity. You're isolating yourself, or the narcissist is isolating you. You're experiencing a lot of insecurity, self-doubt, and anxiety. You walk on eggshells to avoid arguments because even the slightest criticism or disagreement will trigger their rage. At the same time, you're prioritizing their needs over yours, and you're being used and abused because they view people as objects that exist to serve them. They're blaming you for everything or gaslighting you, which may cause you to doubt your own memory, perception, and sanity until you end up blaming yourself. When that happens, they can make you tolerant and accepting of anything because they've conditioned you into seeing yourself as someone who is deserving of the abuse.

But no one deserves to be abused. Abuse is wrong, but this is what narcissistic abuse will do to you. They will financially abuse you. They will coerce and guilt-trip you into spending all of your money on them while they will rarely spend any of their money on you. They lack empathy, so they don't consider your health and well-being. They deprive you of kindness to the point where it makes you crave it, which only causes you to become even more susceptible to their love-bombing and manipulation. They love this because it keeps you trapped in a cycle of abuse where they can get their narcissistic supply.

The longer you spend in the cycle of abuse, the more it will begin to affect your mental, emotional, and physical health. You may experience anxiety and depression because you're isolated or because you've lost your self-esteem. It can also cause eating disorders, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, bloating, irritable bowel syndrome, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Narcissistic abuse is worse than cancer, and in fact, it has also been correlated with certain types of cancer. It can also cause mental illnesses such as generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, agoraphobia, Stockholm syndrome, and suicidal ideation. It can also cause personality disorders in children, such as narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, sociopathy, and even psychopathy.

But again, the narcissist will only blame and shame you for anything that happens to you, and you will be left to deal with it on your own. If you're dealing with a narcissist who is very high on the spectrum, they may even use the after-effects of the abuse to start a smear campaign against you by telling other people that you're crazy or that you're losing your mind. This is usually an attempt for the narcissist to defend their own false image or reputation, but it may also be to further abuse and incriminate you. Narcissists can't be satisfied. They have these insatiable desires that can never be fulfilled, which is why even when you think it's all over and you've jumped over all of the hurdles and obstacles, that's often only the beginning of a never-ending journey. Narcissists gain their false identity and self-esteem through scapegoating their victims. If the abuse were to come to an end, it would threaten their false character, which means that the abuse cycle would have to start all over again. It's a cycle—a series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order. It's like Groundhog Day for the narcissist. Whatever events have happened before will happen again. They may involve a new participant, but either way, it's still the same series of events.

Even if you're fortunate enough to have been involved with a narcissist who was able to detach and let you go, you may still experience a loss of identity even after the relationship has ended. It will feel like you were a completely different person at the beginning of the relationship compared to who you've become by the end of it. Narcissists change you. The narcissist will push you outside of the state of arousal or stimulation in which you are able to function in everyday life to the point where you will have difficulty learning, focusing, and remembering things. You won't relate well to yourself or other people, which means that you won't be able to identify with yourself, and other people won't be able to identify with you because your nervous system has been altered by narcissistic abuse.

There may have been a time when you had passions and interests, when you used to enjoy reading or painting, and you may have enjoyed the company of other people. You may have had connections. You may have had certain impulses or inclinations that made you, you. When you could behave openly, naturally, and in an uninhibited manner rather than it occurring with an external cause. But once you've experienced narcissistic abuse, you lose that natural impulse and tendency, and you tend to act in a more planned or forced way, as though you've lost the ability to act without outside intervention. It's like you've lost your own free will, and in many ways, you actually have because you've lost touch with your passions and interests. You've been stripped of your values by being pushed outside of your state of arousal and stimulation because it's affected your ability to function effectively and normally. There was a time when you valued your authenticity, when you valued learning, when you valued your health. But narcissistic abuse even affects your personality traits and characteristics. You used to have a positive attitude. You were optimistic about situations and directions and even yourself. You envisioned and expected favourable results. You saw the bright side of life. You used to be passionate and forgiving, but you may have also had a low tolerance for toxic and negative behaviour, and it felt comfortable to you. You felt like you were being your authentic self. You didn't feel like you were doing something wrong. But narcissistic abuse makes you feel like you're bad for being you because they despise your authenticity, your quality of being real and true, because it's seen as a threat to their false character, to the illusion, and their false narrative. They want to turn you against yourself so that your entire existence from the point of being involved with them consists of nothing more than being a lifelong extension of them. Because if they can stop you from being you, they can get you to serve them. They can trap you in their web, and then they can mould you into who they want you to be.

You may enjoy reading or painting, but the narcissist will shame you for spending time with yourself. They will give you the narcissistic stare, or they will call you selfish. Even though you may recognize that what they're doing is abusive and wrong, you may struggle to control how you're reacting to it because you're being provoked. They're deliberately stimulating and giving rise to certain reactions and emotions, especially those that may be unwelcome. Because what you resist persists, so it may be very challenging for you to stop these intrusive thoughts. It's like if someone told you not to think of a pink elephant, it's likely to linger in your mind, and it may even affect you subconsciously. Our thoughts and emotions have a profound effect on one another. Thoughts can trigger emotions, and our behaviours are strongly influenced by our emotions, which is why advertisements and salespeople often use emotions to drive buying decisions because it's very effective. A victim's inability to inhibit certain thoughts can be worsened during times of stress, especially in those who are prone to anxiety or obsessive thoughts. It can even result in the victim doing something immoral or out of character, which the narcissist will then use to paint the victim in a negative light. But even if you somehow manage to take control of your mind, you can't control how your body responds to it because your body is responding to the emotion that is being provoked as a result of their behaviours. There is a huge difference between the mind and the body. Your mind knows that what they're doing is wrong, but it has less power over your life than your body. Even when it comes to your mind, it's your subconscious mind that has the control, and your subconscious mind is linked to your nervous system. So whenever you're being yourself and the narcissist causes you to feel a negative emotion, it causes trauma energy to stick two things together that shouldn't be together because the limbic system and the reptilian brain perceive a potential threat, so they go into a stress response because you're experiencing something overwhelming or something that you're unable to cope with. The energy from that stress response gets stuck in the systems of your brain because the brain and the body want to avoid any situation like that happening ever again. This happens whether or not the logical mind is aware of it because it's meant to protect you.

If you're reading or painting and the narcissist glares at you or calls you selfish, you may be able to recognize that what they're doing is wrong, but your nervous system is going to reach the conclusion that it's bad for you to read or paint. Over time, you may become hyper-aroused and hypersensitive due to heightened anxiety to where you may just hear them enter the home or arrive in the car, and then you're panicking to hide what you were doing as though you were doing something wrong because you've been taught that it's bad for you to do anything that you love. Narcissists are very aware of how their victims respond to the abuse. They deliberately traumatize their victims, and they're highly receptive to the trauma, which they will then use to control you. They will use it to slowly erode you by frightening or intimidating you anytime that you try to do something that you love, even though it makes no sense for them to be angry about it. They despise healthy behaviour, which is why they will try to isolate you because they can't stand the sight of healthy interactions. They like things that are chaotic and dysfunctional. They don't want to see anything that is helpful for you.

If you have been avoiding healthy interactions or anything that is normal and functional, that is a red flag that someone has gained access to your subconscious mind and changed and altered who you are, which is something that narcissists typically do. The subconscious mind learns through emotion and repetition, but they do it covertly. It's under the radar, and the emotion and repetition form our beliefs. It causes us to accept that something exists or is true, even though they may never have explicitly said that you can't do something. But they provoke the emotion in you anytime that you did something healthy and normal, which caused your nervous system to change. So it doesn't matter about their words; it's the emotion that they're provoking in you because that's what causes you to change. It caused your natural state of arousal and stimulation to change, where you were once able to function and thrive in everyday life, where you once engaged in activity for amusement and enjoyment rather than for a serious purpose that caused you to be worried and afraid. But when you're involved with a narcissist, whatever makes you who you are becomes associated with arguments, disagreements, abandonment, rejection, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and loneliness until what makes you feel comfortable after narcissistic abuse is being nothing of who you really were.

You just hate being around people, and you would rather isolate yourself because being around people feels uneasy and awkward. It means you're meant to be yourself when you were taught that being yourself is dangerous, so it's just too overwhelming to deal with. You feel safer being alone because you feel like you can't trust anyone anyway, and you don't feel comfortable laughing or smiling, so you may worry that other people won't feel comfortable around you. Many people lose years of their life to narcissistic abuse, where they can't even remember what it feels like to experience peace or joy. Even when you're out of the relationship, it can take some time for you to return to your normal state of being. It's not something that happens overnight because by that point, it will feel uncomfortable to you. You will feel more comfortable with feelings of anger, hatred, and resentment because whenever you were happy, the narcissist didn't like it, and they provoked you. Then when you got angry, they would calm down, and you would finally get a moment of relief from the abuse, which caused your nervous system to make abnormal connections where happiness may mean anger and safety may mean being on edge. Whenever you're not angry or on edge, something bad happens, so it teaches you to stay in that unhealthy state of being until it becomes your personality, even though it's not really you because they rewired your brain.

They recreated you to their liking so that it serves them when anything that does not serve you is not really you. But now, when you try to be you, it feels uncomfortable. It feels like there's something wrong with you because the reptilian part of your brain is only concerned with your survival. It's really the perfect setup for the narcissist to blame and shame you, which is what they will typically do at the end of the relationship once you've dissected everything they've been doing. By that point, they're like a deer in the headlights. There's nowhere for them to run, so that is when they will typically rip off their mask and show you who they are. Then they will go all out to ruin your reputation so that you don't get the opportunity to leave them behind.

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