Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-am-I-so-traumatized-by-narcissistic-abuse

The short answer is because Narcissistic Abuser is the most incomprehensible mindfuck designed to destroy you. It is lethal. Literally.

Preventing premature death (whether by suicide anytime or by some auto-immune related disease later on) depends on working hard at resolving the trauma soonest, and then recovering your mental and physical health shortly thereafter.

Understanding the following about NPD is a good start………

What Drives the Malignancy?

The most scary thing about the Narcopath’s evil is that in many instances, their damage is not accidental. More often than not, narcissists are who they are as a result of traumatic abuse inflicted on them in childhood. From the moment of this incident(s) onwards, narcissists convince themselves that they are victims (and understandably so – they are), but rather than turn this affliction into a force for good, it becomes an irresistible driver for evil. They are so consumed by envy at the wonderful traits that others possess in abundance (self-confidence, kindness, compassion, empathy, happiness, positivity, optimism, naivety, virtuosity, etc) that they are intent on destroying other people’s enjoyment of them. They are so jealous of others’ positions in society (healthy relationships with friends and family, accomplished careers, respect and recognition, achievement and wealth etc) that they will deliberately set out to rob and/or deny their victims of these precise things.

Threat to Sanity

Narcopaths abuse their victims with a very subtle blend of psychological abuse that includes Gaslighting. Designed to deliberately distort their victim’s sense of reality, it is so convincing, so subtle, and inhumanly machiavellian that their victims start believing that they are losing their mind. Moreover, the manipulation of third parties to triangulate the victim, and the duplicity of the Jekyll & Hyde personality whereby no bystanders could possibly question the virtue and wonderful qualities of the narc, and it is easy to see how the victim soon becomes isolated in their bewilderment.

Early warning signs of this are:

• constant rumination in the search for answers and solutions,
• taking 100% of the responsibility of the situation, and blame, on themselves without for a second pointing the finger at the true culprit, the narc;
• Absent-mindedness and reduced power of concentration;
• Loss of focus, a sense of achievement and accomplishment, enjoyment etc out of other aspects of your life including career and hobbies.

Threat to Relationships

The ability of the Narc to upset and destroy the victims’ healthy relationships with friends, family and even their own children in mind-boggling. Narcs will often bait and trap their victims into behaviour that could be questionable and regrettable, and then the narc will take grains of truth and mix in hefty doses of lies, in order to routinely paint their victim in a bad light. Achieving this is an important aim of the narc, because the victimhood will be an important part of their narcissistic supply they need and seek post-discard. .

Early warning signs:

• Your relationship with said friends and family just seems off. They lack the warmth and sense of fun towards you. You feel that they hold back, they have misgivings and are very wary of you;
• People avoid you. Rather than crossing a street to greet you, they will duck away to avoid your paths crossing. You will be excluded from parties and social gatherings. You will be left out of the loop with news that you would have expected to be party to.
• Your friends lose contact. No phone calls, they’re busy when you suggest meeting up, there is less interaction with your social media posts, you sense parties are happening but you’re not invited.

Watch you Wealth

Narcs have the most extraordinary sense of entitlement – what is yours is theirs, and what is theirs is – well, their’s of course. They resent you for your’s and want as much of it as they can get their grubby paws on. And if you come from a wealthy family, there’s a sense that they deserve a goof chunk of that action too.

Early warning signs.

• Shared bank accounts are a one-way street – you bear the lion’s share of putting funds in, they delight in doing all the work when it comes to spending.
• Your wealth is deemed to be joint, but they are private and protective about theirs.
• There is a mismatch in assets and liabilities – your name is in the frame for debts, whilst assets are registered in theirs.
• They don’t pull their weight in shouldering their fair share of domestic bills -from mortgage / rent, to loans, to the weekly food bill and one-off extras.

Career Killers

In healthy relationships, your loved one will champion you in your career – supportive, understanding, encouraging. Not so a narcopath, who will be jealous of your success, who will resent the time spent on it and not on them, and regard your achievement as obscuring their own wonderfulness. You will be gobsmacked to find out that rather than supporting you, they are in fact undermining - welcome to the toxic world of the narc.

Early warning signs:

• Subtly making to you late for work – by hiding your car keys, for example.
• By being disparaging about you to your boss at social events.
• By questioning your dress sense as you head out the door for an important meeting.
• By losing important business paperwork.
• By undermining your self-confidence just before an important interview.
• By seeking to isolate you from your own work colleagues.
• By feigning some disaster just as you are about to perform some important work task, such as presenting at a conference.

Eradicating Self-identity

Despite their apparent self-confidence, charm and charisma, narcopaths hate themselves. Deeply. So the fact that you are happy in your own skin, are confidence and self-assured really grates with them. It acts as a daily reminder of their own inadequacies, an uncomfortable feeling that must be dealt with. As they do all they can to boost their own fragile sense of self, expect the parasitic relationship to drain you slowly of yours. It is why they are referred to as emotional vampires.

Early warning signs:

• Constant little jibes and criticisms.
• Criticism disguised as jokes.
• A complete absence of gratitude or support.
• Scorn of your interests and hobbies.
• Double bookings, timed so that you have to give up your own social engagements, pastimes and sports.

Ultimately the narc will seek to dismantle and destroy each and every aspect of their victim’s self-identity:

• their relationship with their family, kids, and friends;
• their careers;
• their hobbies;
• everything that their victims take pride in, including their home, car, values;
• their physical health (by dissuading them from pursuing healthy pastimes, and instead trying to get them hooked on alcohol and drugs);
• the mental health (see gaslighting).

By the time they are finished, their victims are complete shells of their former self - empty husks awash with depression, poor self-worth and confusion. Many will commit suicide - with the cause of death put down to depression but hiding the real culprit.

Danger to their own kids

Healthy parents prepare their children for adulthood and independence by giving them self-confidence and courage – that is the unspoken parent-child covenant.

Not so the Narcopaths who are intensely jealous of anyone else’s good traits – and sadly that extends to their own children. Moreover, they expect their children to be extensions of themselves – to provide them with the normality and camouflage they want, and the narcissistic supply they need. As such, they will deliberately hamper the development of a child’s self confidence and undermine any the child develops themselves. They will do all they can to ensure that the child remains dependent on them, malleable and controllable, for years to come.

Consequently the children of narcissists will approach adulthood without the foundations of self-confidence – some that will limit their success and enjoyment of the trials and tribulations that adulthood represents.

Moreover, adults should model loving and supportive parenting styles to their childhood. Without knowing what healthy parenting looks like, a narcissist’s children will incorrectly assume that the dysfunction is the norm. This very often leads to problems when the children of narcopaths try to form loving adult relationships later on in life - self-confidence and trust issues abound.

Warning signs

• Parents overtly criticise rather than explain.
• Parents withhold praise and encouragement where it would be appropriate.
• Parents control money, friendships, extra-curricular activities.
• Parents unreasonably invade space and boundaries including kids’ bedrooms, private diaries, phone messages etc.

Parental Alienation

If you co-parent with a Narcopath, beware. We all want amazing relationships with our kids, who we want to prepare for the big wide world with confidence, life skills, qualifications and for whom we want to model healthy adult behaviour and relationships. We want to be present in their lives, and we want to be there for them when they stumble. We want a strong bond with nothing in the way of a loving, wholesome and fun relationship. And therein lies the problem.

The narcissist is on a completely different agenda. The problems exacerbate when it comes to the relationship with the healthy parent. Narcs are jealous of any healthy bond that develops between child and loving parent, they feel very threatened by this, and they are driven by their overblown sense of entitlement – “the child needs to worship me and serve my purposes - and mine alone!!” Thus from birth, the child is often programmed by the narcopath to distrust, hate and distance themselves from the loving parent through a subtle campaign of brainwashing, and through management-by-consequence (whether the child consciously knows or not, showing any love towards the targeted parent invites a backlash by the alienating one). It gets a whole load worse when the inevitable discard happens, at which point kids-in-common are used as the most potent weapon to destroy the healthy parent – a role that is confusing and devastating for the kids involved. The reality is that the healthy parent may be escape and cut ties with the narc – but they can never cut the bond of kids-in-common and thus the kids become the Achilles Heal that narcs will use mercilessly in destroying the healthy parent regardless of the detrimental impact that this will have on the kids.

Warning signs:

• Your kids are off with you, even to the extent of being disrespectful.
• They stop enjoying cuddles and physical intimacy.
• They reduce the instances of looking to you for advice and support.
• They appear guarded and wary of enjoying your company, laughing with you.
• The strained relationship extends to the healthy parent’s birth family – thus the kids are also poisoned against the grandparents, aunts uncles, cousins etc.
• These campaigns of hate are built on a string of lies designed to brainwash the kids – lies that may come out into the open if contact between the kids and healthy parent can be maintained.
• The time that should be spent with the targeted parent as part of the agreed custody arrangements is constantly disrespected, changed and denied – and if the kids are able to spend any time with the healthy parent, it is disrupted with some form of contact from the narc.
• The healthy parent is denied all forms of input on the kids’ lives – school reports withheld, barred from parent/teacher meetings, knowledge of illnesses etc are not shared etc.
• The kids behaviour is markedly different when a long way away from the narc’s sphere of influence – they relax, become less hypervigilant, are more loving and engaging with the loving parent. In essence, they become themselves again.

Wrecking entire communities, teams, workplaces

Narcopaths deeply resent happiness, calm, order and other people enjoying healthy relationships. They therefore continually walk a very fine line between causing chaos and drama on the one hand, whilst appearing innocent and angelic on the other. How well they pull this feat off depends on how high-functioning a narc they are.

Warning signs

• Deep division within teams into us and them camps
• Whispering rumours circulating
• A plunge in morale
• Often switching loyalties
• An extension of the same BS and tactics that occurred with playground bullies

Physical ailments to terminal disease

Narcissistic abuse often triggers in victims Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). We are all familiar with PTSD, say, in soldiers returning from horrendous operational tours in places like Afghanistan where exposure to fierce and frantic fire fights can leave soldiers battling flashbacks and mental health issues. Such underlying causes are distinct (a soldier knows when he has been in a firefight), they are understood (the army has plenty of mental health professionals monitoring and treating soldiers returning from such nightmares), they are generally shared experiences (soldiers engage in firefights alongside their colleagues, who offer mutual support during and after the engagement), soldiers are selected / prepared / trained for such experiences, and to the degree that they can, wider society understands and supports affected soldiers returning from the frontline and adjusting to home life.

Targets of narcissistic also experience PTSD, but unlike soldiers, their experience of abuse is so different that it is considered Complex – the victim is never prepared or forewarned about it; they suffer alone (and because of the creeping insidious nature of it, most will only realise the extent of the abuse long after the event); there is little support available for survivors who are often scapegoated by law enforcement, the legal system and even their friends and family; the abuse is ongoing (not only does the abuser rarely let them “escape”, but the ongoing secondary abuse – be it any combination of psychological, emotional, physical, financial, isolation, career & reputational abuse etc) can be crippling.

The confusion and bewilderment, and ensuing ruminations, invariably result in Complex-PTSD, and with the body in constant but subdued freeze/fight/flight responses, the autoimmune system takes a massive hammering. If not rectified soonest, this in turn will lead to a range of potential ailments in the short term together with a host of serious (and too often terminal) diseases in the longer term.

Early warning signs:

• Sore and aching joints, especially the shoulders
• Bad skin conditions
• Poor sleep patterns
• Erratic appetites and digestion

Longer term diseases:

• Fibromyalgia
• Cancer
• Alzeimers
• Parkinsons
• Motor-neurone disease etc

Risk of Suicide

The psychological abuse inflicting on their victims during the Devaluation Phase of a relationship slowly and insidiously erodes the victim’s self-esteem, confidence and very sense of self. At discard, there is an almighty sting in the tail as the narc does their best to finish their victim off with the Mission to Destroy. The toxicity and relentlessness of this, coupled with the isolation of the victim that the narc has been able to achieve through the smear campaign, can very often been overwhelming and I have yet to come across a survivor who has not entertained serious thoughts of suicide at some stage in the process.

Such thoughts, and indeed actions, are not restricted to weak characters. I myself have gone through the motions despite being an ex-Army officer, a much-loved son and well-supported friend. One of my fellow 30 Sandhurst cadets took his life this year as a result of suspected undiagnosed post-divorce abuse. Moreover, again this year, in my NPD-life coaching practice I have helped two people deal with female narcissists (in one instance a mother, the other a girlfriend) – in which the narcs in question have each clocked up three – yes THREE – suicided exes. Narcissistic abuse really can be that deadly. It really is that dangerous.

Early warning signs that creep up on you during the devaluation phase:

• You feel that you are having a mid-life crisis and/or mental breakdown.
• You feel detached from life – not in the driving seat.
• You seem to be the only one conscious that something is off, and the only one doing something about it.
• You feel empty, unenthused, lacking in energy.
• You miss the good old days, wondering what happened to all your dreams, and why you are not enjoying the life of abundance that others are.

Threat of Murder

Narcopaths have a sense of entitlement, feel that they are above the law, have no compassion or empathy, have a volcanic rage coupled with a sadistic streak, nothing can ever be their fault and they are ruthless with their backlash with anyone who criticises them or tries to hold them to account. In short, they have all that is required to commit murder.

Are there any warning signs? Unlike the psychopath and sociopath who commits premeditated murder, when the malignant narcissist is more likely to kill on the spur of the moment and with little prior warning. The warning signs are therefore more circumstantial – are they cornered, are they exposed, are they desperate, are they raging? If so, understand that the chances of them doing something very serious are dangerously high. When you hear of these stories of a parent killing their soon-to-be-ex kids and spouse before turning the gun on themselves, it is likely you are reading about a malignant narcissist going out in a blaze of notoriety.

Mass Murderers and Serial Killers

Yep – they can do that too. Please see Stewart Cook's answer to How many serial killers have been NPD? British doctor Harold Shipman (pictured) was widely regarded by his patients as being a charming man - little did they know he was deliberately killing them.

Don’t Tango with Narcs

Tangle with a Narcissist at your peril. Even when you think that you may have the relationship under control, do not assume anything, do not underestimate them, do not trust them, do not count on their loyalty, do not consider them predictable, do not presume that you understand them. Narcissistic abuse can strike anyone, anytime, and no-one is safe and there is a very good reason they want you in their lives.

Remedies

Conventional wisdom suggests victims of Narcissistic Abuse follow policies of No Contact or Grey Rock, which can be very effective if the victim is able to escape. Sadly conventional wisdom does not serve those who are unable to do so (eg with kids in common, with shared businesses or property, in the case where your boss or work colleague has NPD). In these circumstances there are other strategies available that are increasingly proving very effective - feel free to Contact Me - Stewart Cook to find out more.

In Summary

It is difficult for those who have not endured narcissistic abuse first-hand to understand just how insidious it is, how it creeps up slowly and unnoticed, and how devastating it can be. The Jekyll & Hyde characters are so cunning, manipulative, Machiavellian and toxic that if people could see them for who they really are, they would be dangerous enough. The fact that they are so covert and misleading, and their charming and charismatic public persona is so believable, makes them lethal to all they come across.

Sadly it is invariably only their nearest and dearest who see them for who they really are - the monster that lies within – that they not only have a battle to protect themselves from the abuse, but also to stand against public opinion that is unlikely to go in their favour.

Have you survived narcissistic abuse? Awesome achievement, right that bell and give yourself an upvote! Do you need to defend yourself against the tactics of the narcs’? Do you want to understand their mindset further? Please follow me and flag “Notify me” to receive notifications of new articles - I write exclusively on the subject.

Moreover, as a victim of narcissistic abuse, it falls to us to warn the rest of society about this menace. So please share articles such as this far and wide.

NPD Life Coaching & Consulting - Stewart Cook - taking the fight back to the narcs

Thanks for the A2A.