You ever notice how a lot of times when you end a relationship with a narcissist, you find yourself completely
isolated and alone? Suddenly, you look around and you see that there's no one with you.
You have no backup.
Your family's not around. Your friends aren't around and yet before you met the
narcissist, your life wasn't like that. You had family. You had friends. Everything was fine. You're not even sure how this happened.
Well, today at queenbeeing.com, that's exactly what we're addressing. Why it is that you find yourself
so isolated and alone after a relationship with a narcissist. So let's get started.
My name is Angie Atkinson and on this channel, I offer free daily video coaching to help you discover, understand and overcome
narcissistic abuse in toxic relationships. I like to call it Toxic Relationship Rehab.
So if that sounds good to you, hit that subscribe button and let's get going.
So narcissists have a lot of reasons for wanting to isolate you from other people
starting with the fact that very often they're living a double life
but it's bigger than that because here's the thing--when you have people in your life who support you,
chances are that you're going to be far less likely to actually
allow the narcissist to control you. And in some cases, your family or your friends have controlled you up to this point
because we do tend to attract narcissist but very often,
anyone who appears to support you or to go against what the narcissist wants for you is a direct bit of competition
for you, for your attention with the narcissist. They use
isolation against us quite simply because it allows them to better manipulate and control us
like I said.
Sometimes, they'll even try to isolate you from your own children in the same
household or from the other parent if your parent is your
narcissist and the fact that so few people actually really get what you're dealing with
isolates you even further because you feel a lot of shame for allowing yourself to even be in that situation in the first place.
So there are some real serious truths that we have to discuss here. Narcissistic abuse
not only isolates you from the people in the outside world but also from your own friends and your own family.
So part of the reason they isolate you from other people is
including sometimes their own family is because if you had access to those people openly then you could
probably find out exactly who they really were a little too quickly.
That's why sometimes narcissists don't want you to meet their families unless their families are kind of in on it with them.
You know what I'm saying? They're kind of flying monkeys are also narcissists themselves.
They are so focused on keeping their false self mask on that they'll do almost anything to protect it.
They will be very careful about which selves go out to the world,
what images of their family, what beliefs about their family and they'll do whatever they have to to protect
that false mask and that false image of themselves to the world even to themselves at times.
One of the things that narcissist tend to do when it comes to keeping you separate from your family
is called the divide and conquer because the narcissist is so likely to just really ruthlessly pick family members against one another which they do
directly because of the fact that they want to control everybody.
They will do things like treat one kid better than the other.
We've talked before about the golden child and the scapegoat for example and while they're treating that child better,
they'll target that other child. So that obviously puts those 2 children at odds
and they may never ever have a relationship as a result of that.
They create this atmosphere in their houses and their homes where everybody's competing for his or her attention--
the narcissists attention and their approval and because of that, again
they're naturally pitted against one another. If they're always buying for approval then they can prevent themselves from being attacked by the
narcissist but at the same time what ends up happening is that if one gets approval and the other doesn't then essentially they're
sort of forced into this position to protect themselves much like The Hunger Games. You know what I'm saying? Where it's me
or you, it's you or me
and what are they gonna do? They're gonna choose themselves
especially as children and that sort of attitude will continue with them throughout their lives very often and then you end up with another
narcissist. These attacks, they can take a lot of different forms like they can be narcissistic rage, they can be ridicule, they can be blame,
teasing, any of that kind of stuff, in some cases physical abuse. When it comes to the partner, the narcissist does things like
criticize them, project their own negative qualities onto them, bullying them, violently
exploding their emotional vomit all over them and
sadly because of the fact that the partner does everything they can to try to keep the narcissist
happy, a lot of times
this means the narcissist ends up being enabled by the partner because they sort of have to
support them in order to avoid being attacked.
So a lot of times, the narcissist
uses these support--the forced support of the partner to further divide the family and that of course
causes the children then to feel less warmly toward the partner in many cases.
And here's the really interesting
thing that I don't think a lot of people think of, the fact is that things like the gas lighting and the manipulation
usually lead to something that I don't think a lot of people recognize. You become sort of
isolated from yourself as in you forget who you really are or maybe you didn't even really know who you really are.
Your reality is denied often and so you start to not really understand the world. You go through a lot of cognitive dissonance
which is a
conflict between what you actually see and what you know to be true or what you feel and what you know to be true. The
narcissist will project their own abuse and corruptness on to their victims
but the cognitive dissonance is created when the narcissist
constantly tells you that your reality is different than what it really is and then it gets angry when you don't believe it.
So you start to question yourself. As long as you agree with the narcissist, it'll be fine
but when the narcissist tells you red is blue and the sky is green and the grass is
orange and you disagree then you start to think that blue is orange. Do you see what I'm saying?
This creates cognitive dissonance in you. The cognitive dissonance then undermines your own
connection to reality, your sense of reality. It separates you from your own self. You
begin to really
fundamentally doubt who you are and doubt your own eyes, your own senses and your own ability to see what's really happening
because narcissistic personality disorder is so hard to detect if you haven't actually had any experience with a narcissist. This
kind of adds insult to injury. When you try to talk to someone in your life about it
even often therapists and psychologists and by the way, I have a video about how to find one that's qualified for you
so make sure you check that out of my channel
but even if they understand theoretically what
narcissistic personality disorder is, it's so hard to detect because number one narcissists don't think anything is wrong with them and number
2,
part of their whole stick is to put that false mask on and make people believe what they're saying is true and if they aren't
displaying obvious signs and someone hasn't
experienced this type of abuse, they really truly just don't understand and they might think that you're just whining or you're not really
experiencing abuse but you're just thinking too much
or you're reading too many articles on the Huffington Post or whatever. So a lot of times when you reach out for support to somebody
like your minister or your psychologist or even your own family, you're told, "You're imagining things.
You're worrying too much. You're thinking too much."
And even like I said, therapist will dismiss it and then you're left going, "Am I the crazy one?" You're further isolated.
You're further confused and you don't even know what to do with yourself. This is dangerous advice
these people are giving you but when they say, you know, "Oh!
You should go back to that person." or, "Oh! Maybe you guys can try again." or, "Oh!
He seems really sincere or she seems really sincere."
You have to listen to your intuition which the narcissist has taught you not to do.
You have to trust yourself and you have to recognize when you're watching videos like this or other videos that other
Youtubers have done where you see yourself and you think, "Are they listening in in my kitchen window?
How do they know what I'm going through?" That's proof that you're going through something that not a lot of people understand.
That's proof that you are being abused. If someone makes your life worse whether they're physically striking out at you or not,
they're not someone you want in your life regardless of what label you want to put on them.
It's about someone being healthy for your life or toxic for your life. Does that make sense?
So how are you supposed to find support when you've been completely isolated? Well, there are a lot of different options.
Obviously, you can like I said watch the video I did about how to find a good therapist.
There are tons of online support groups, some in-person support groups. Me personally, I offer several options.
You can join span on Facebook. Just go to queenbeeing.com/span. In about a week,
I'll be opening up a new option for those of you who don't want to be on Facebook.
So stay tuned for that and you can come here in the mornings. I do live streams. We have an amazing community here.
If you're interested in that, you can hit subscribe on this channel and hit the bell notification and
or send a text that says Angie live all one word to 33222 and I'll text you a few minutes before
I go live each day
but if you have friends even if they don't fully understand, friends who truly support you--
sometimes they can listen and sometimes just having them listen is enough
but I truly think that having other survivors to talk with has made all the difference in the world for so many different people.
I also offer coaching and a lot of other options. I've got a podcast.
Hit up QueenBeeing.com to get a full scale of what the options are if you're interested.
The narcissist also has a way of isolating you from other things in your life and we'll go into more detail about that
tomorrow in our next video. All right.
This brings me to the question of the day and the question of the day is have you had a narcissist
isolate you from friends and family in order to manipulate and control you better or why do you think that happened?
Have you been isolated from other people by a narcissist or is this part of the experience that you didn't have?
Share your thoughts and your experiences and your ideas in the comment section below and let's talk about it.
Don't forget, take a look at the videos
I'm leaving for you right here and right here plus the videos I left for you in the cards above. Also while you're here,
let's continue on this healing journey together. Hit that subscribe button right there. I'll see you in the next video.
That's all I've got for you right now.
As always, thank you so much for being a part of my day and a part of my life and hey,
thanks for letting me be a part of yours. It really does mean a lot to me. I'll see you soon!