When you have decided to walk away...

 If you have decided to walk away, don’t buy into how you are going to be portrayed. 

Walking away from someone you love who has treated you badly is an act of self-respect.

Please let that be a powerful statement. Because it takes great courage. 

It will not, however, change the person. None of us have the power to change anyone except ourselves. It can, though, be an opportunity to change yourself. To begin to accept who they are will be a large part of that. 

Within the certainty of that, there will likely be more felt certainty for you than when you were trying to make them see.

The likelihood that you have walked away from what started out as charm, mirroring, and felt as a lovely thing, will be more in truth like consummate illusion.

More smoke and mirrors than real depth and joy.

This illusion is then replaced by subtle changes at first, and the shift by way of demeaning remarks may be presented like questions, such as, "Don’t you think you would look better with..." or more questions about the way you show up or do something. But it will always be about something you aren’t doing well or right.

Slowly, you begin to feel uncomfortable, and your authenticity in the relationship diminishes, and you begin questioning what took place. It’s like a fog, a mist over what was said or what happened. This whole overall feeling will be one of contention, where the argument will be either a dispute or a suppression of self and spontaneity, all of which are uncomfortable.

This feels ambiguous. That is because it is a foggy boundary.

Here in this shift, where things don’t seem like they were, there will be a great deal of ambiguity. Because when someone is behaving in an ambiguous way, things are muddied, unclear, the message is muddled, and it is undefined. The intention of this – and there is intention – is to provoke, to propagate uncertainty. By creating uncertainty, something that could have meant something else. 

An example of this might be that you are constantly evaluated, and the source of the problem – being "too sensitive", being told, "It was only a joke."

You might choose at first to give them the benefit of the doubt because, of course, the focus is that you somehow have got it wrong, but the shift will be felt and more likely if mentioned, either denied or deflected.

But you will be giving the benefit of the doubt, again and again, questioning yourself and feeling that, somehow, you must be the problem.

As things don’t add up and words and actions don’t show congruency, but instead incongruence, your anxiety replaces the desire to maintain harmonious exchange, because your discomfort and the feelings of anxiety are telling you something – that they are not what you have been led to believe by the drip-drip devaluation. This is then questioned internally because your inner voice and instinct are rising above the mist. As l have written in a previous article, fiction is not tolerated forever. 

The chaos is what someone toxic relies upon, your not knowing. Because through the chaos created, the anchors of self have been undone.

When you begin to question because of your emerging clarity, that is not what they bargained.

Bracing yourself to leave will seem scary and like entering a kind of no man’s land because you are not clear.

As a rule of thumb, narcissistic people or those with their traits don’t stand a chance with any other type of person other than empaths. They are called out in seconds. 

Their traits are self-serving and manipulative, so they only play or fraternise with empathetic, kind people who will engage in long suffering and fixing and saving out their own goodness, and also their desire to heal, to understand and to nurture. You will be expecting the same, but you won’t get it. So, by the time you are thinking of leaving, you will be weary and feel that you have no alternative. It will be hard to see the good on the other side.

There might have been a lot of trying to make things work, maybe endless calls with friends and family, but even if you have just kept the unhappiness you have felt and feel to yourself, it is a big decision, and where there is leaving, there is grieving.

That is normal.

Recognition in place of confusion 

Through awareness, your confusion will begin to clear.

Healing 

Healing is not trying to hurt someone in some kind of retaliatory game or exchange; it is about finding yourself again. The you that was manipulated and taken in, the you that is now becoming awake!

Your pain changes into healing, purpose, and being able to be discerning and discriminating about what and who you let in.

Please do not look to make sense here in this exchange you had or go deeper into trying to understand.

Destabilising the narcissist through stillness 

You are not seen as an individual with sovereignty or with agency by narcissistic people or those with their traits, and let us be honest here: the word narcissist is not new, but l believe never before has there been so much focus on it. Why? Because never before has entitlement existed so ubiquitously. 

There are social reasons for this, but even as we dig deep and unwrap bullying roots that disregard an individual’s rights and respective values, those with this affliction will not be giving your rights a second thought, because their intention is to convince you of their apocryphal beliefs in order to garner the effects of their distortions.

Incrementally, this erosion and distortion creates belief illusions, which is ongoing until the disillusionment starts to kick in.

There can be many different ways of leaving. Either in its literal sense, or by putting your focus on what is achievable through your own self-care. When we behave differently, we create a different response.

There is an undeniable stillness in this. That is unshakeable.