You don’t need to stand for it

What you’ve been through is not normal. Recover from that past and have your safeguards going forward

Narcissism exists and it’s out there. A lack of empathy doesn’t automatically bring with it malevolent behavior, but quite often it does. Roughly 30% in the west appear to have these traits at a substantial enough level, so it is our reality that a lot of us have to deal with people like these.

Whether it was a parent we didn’t choose, a friend we did, or a romantic partner who targeted us, a lot of us have experiences with these types of difficult people and end up with memories that range from mild annoyance to complex trauma with triggers abound. There is a rhyme and reason to it all, both w/r/t the formation of the scars and the recovery from it.

What happens to us in our formative years inform a lot of the rules we live by. Sometimes parental abuse primes us to be targeted by the same thing as adults. Abuse and presumed parental love intermesh and we don’t recognize healthy relationships later in life, instead vying for familiar suffering.

The path towards healing revolves around psychoeducation on how narcissistic family dynamics work, how trauma and triggers develop, processing what is presently unprocessed out of that trauma in order to move on, and inoculating ourselves against future instances of the same situations by training ourselves to recognize the signs of such people and relationships.