Are you trying to move on from a narcissist and you just don't know how, and maybe you're
just at your wits' end?
By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly, step by step, how to move on
from that narcissist.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Zung, top 1% divorce attorney and the bestselling author of the books Negotiate
Like YOU M.A.T.T.E.R. and Breaking Free: A Step-by-Step Divorce Guide, and I've helped
thousands of people just like you go from lives of drama, trauma, and chaos to step
into lives of freedom, possibility, and purpose.
So before we go any further, hit that subscribe button, hit that notification bell, so that
you can be notified every time I upload brand new content so that you can be helped and
live that new life too.
This is part two of my conversation with Joanna Kleinman, who is a life coach, who specializes
in helping people move on and dethrone their inner critic.
In this episode, she's going to talk much more about how to move on and get that narcissist
out of your head and out of your life.
So without further ado, let's dive into part two.
I know for me, just like all of a sudden, because it was like little things, because
I was dealing with a covert narcissist, well, I had two different ones in my life, but the
one that you knew about was...
It was like this death by a thousand cuts.
There were like a whole bunch of little things that weren't right.
But with covert narcissists, they're so subtle and they're really, really good at being passive-aggressive
and just manipulative enough to get under your skin.
But they live on this balance of this teetering of just enough to annoy you and traumatize
you, but not enough for the world to see what they're doing to you.
So the rest of the world sees them as good and kind and great and so nice and wonderful
people, and only you see that other side of them, and so it's that whole gaslighting thing
of making you think like you're the one that's crazy because look, the rest of the world
thinks I'm amazing.
Yes, yeah. so it's really, really tough.
I know for me, one of the things, because I'm a ruminator, and I was always obsessing
over what is this person doing, what are they going to do next, and so I would say one of
the things that people can do to stop, and I say this in other videos as well is don't
obsess, don't, stop.
I had this epiphany of if I'm obsessing about what this other person is going to do to me
next or is stabbing me behind the back or whatever they're doing, I'm not creating,
I'm not in positive mode.
I'm not experiencing joy in my life at that moment.
Yes.
Yeah.
Can you tell us more about that?
Absolutely.
Okay.
So obsession, obsessional thoughts, what that really is, is control, okay?
Let me think about this over and over and over again so I can in some way control whether
this person is going to hurt me, how is he or she behaving, right?
What's going to happen, right?
So that's all about trying to control your future, which is an illusion.
It's impossible, okay?
Now, control issues put your physical brain into fight, flight, freeze, right?
Remember going back to that brain, that physical brain that's geared towards survival, okay,
when we're trying to control something that we have no control over, which is somebody
else's behavior, we have no control over how somebody else behaves, okay?
But we're trying to find that control over something that we have no control over.
So exactly what you're saying when we're in fight, flight-
Let's say that again.
Fight flight, freeze.
Yeah, fight, flight, freeze.
It is the primitive part of our brain, okay?
It is the primitive part of our brain that is only rooted in survival.
That's your survival mechanism, okay, is trying to control your future so that you don't have
pain, which sets you up to always feel this overwhelming sense of fear because we can't
control the future, so- We can't control the other person.
You can't control the other person and you can't control anything that isn't right here
right now.
You can control your thoughts, your emotions and your behavior, and so when you are in
fight, flight, freeze brain, you don't have access to the higher level of thinking in
other parts of your brain, and it is those parts of your brain that are associated with
creativity, innovation, groundedness, right?
You don't have any access to that.
So you get into, when you talk about obsession, what you're talking about is this repetitive
thought loop where you've got a thought that leads to a feeling that leads to a behavior
that leads to another thought, right?
Before you know it, you're in this vicious cycle of a thought that keeps looping.
Yeah.
It just is like the loop of insanity is basically the definition of insanity because there's
never going to be any good outcome from that.
When you were saying about you were expecting this narcissist or this toxic person to make
you feel better or feel loved or whatever, the flip side of that is people who will say
to me, "He makes me feel like crap."
He makes, or she makes me feel blah, blah, blah.
So giving them that power of saying, "I'm going to allow you to dictate how I feel and
I'm giving you that permission to dictate how I feel."
You're giving this person who feels worthless about their own selves-
That's right.
To dictate how you're going to feel and you're never going to have any satisfaction from
that.
That's right.
So I want to also talk about a lot of people who are dealing with these people, they're
constantly going, "Why are they doing this?
A reasonable person wouldn't act this way."
So talk about how to stop trying to apply reason to unreasonable.
That's right.
So where you lose your reasoning, right, if you are in a toxic relationship, where you
lose your reasoning is by buying into the thought, okay, which is really fundamentally
a belief, right?
A belief is a thought we think over and over and over again, okay?
So the belief is you make me feel worthless, no good, right?
You make me feel that way.
Now here's the thing.
The we, okay, if you're a healthy person, the most fundamental thing that you can do
as far as shifting into a different mind is recognizing that there isn't a human being
alive that can make you feel worthless, unlovable, unimportant, no good, okay?
They behave how they behave.
It is your thoughts, your thoughts about how they behave that makes you feel these emotions,
and most people don't understand that, right?
Most people do really believe that it is this person that makes me feel that way, or it
is this circumstance that makes me feel that way [crosstalk 00:08:25]-
So it's a faulty logic and cause and effect.
Absolutely.
It is always, it is our thoughts.
Right.
It starts with our thoughts.
Our thoughts determine our emotions, determine our behavior.
So when we can recognize, right, that we can control our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors,
we can let go and let people...
They're going to behave how they behave.
This narcissist is going to behave how she or he behaves.
There is nothing, it has nothing to do with you.
No.
Only thing that we can do, right, when we're in a better mindset because-
Even if they say, "It's your fault, you caused this," blah, blah, blah.
Oh, [crosstalk 00:09:12].
It's still not.
I mean, they're going to say that, right?
They're going to say that.
That's part...
Listen, so the narcissist's automatic thought is always it's your problem.
That's what a narcissist does.
There's no ability to take ownership, right?
Right.
That's why they have a string of, right, dysfunctional relationships.
The narcissist will always blame you.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know for me, one of the things that was really important and I had to recognize, oh
my God, this person is sick.
Or these people that I'm dealing with are narcissists.
That's what they are.
They're not going to get better.
It's really sad.
It's too bad.
You want things to be different because I'm a fixer.
I have always been able to fix things, make things happen.
So I thought that I could fix it, make it better, have it be at least cordial, have
it be at least...
But you just can't do that when you're dealing with a person who is sick.
So acknowledging your own behavior, acknowledging what you did to allow this to happen is I
think really important because then that actually allows you to take control over and realize,
okay, I have control for the next time, and forgive yourself and go, "Okay, this happened
and I can learn from this.
So now I know these things."
But allowing...
I allowed it to happen.
I mean, I love Maya Angelou's where she says, "When people-"
I was just going to say that.
When people show you who they are, believe them the first time, and I didn't do that.
So I had to take responsibility for that and then forgive myself and then move on.
Yes.
So- So we have a couple of minutes that I really
want to get some of your really awesome tidbits in there.
So give us your last thoughts on how people can really move on and get over this.
Absolutely.
Well, okay.
So also to quote Maya Angelou because she's so brilliant.
I know I love her.
Oh, she's amazing, right?
Yeah.
So she says that we are blind until we see and that when we know better, we do better,
okay.
Oh yes.
That's such a good one.
Right, right.
So here's the way it is for all human beings on the planet, all human beings.
Our lives, right, our journey, okay?
So with every step that we, right, every chapter of our lives, we're blind until we see.
So rather than looking back and saying, "Oh, I should have done this and I shouldn't have
done that," the way that you can see this is this relationship, as toxic as it was,
okay, it's all in service of your growth.
It's all in service of your journey, right?
Yeah.
Remember when I said it's a mirror, so that really almost you needed to be in this relationship
and have this painful experience so that you can wake up because human beings, unfortunately
for every one of us, we only grow when we're in pain.
Yeah, so true.
Sometimes we got to get hit in the face with a two by four before we wake up.
Yeah.
[crosstalk 00:12:38] toxic relationships do, they wake us up.
Yeah.
Was it Rumi that says something like where the wound is, that's where the light enters
or something like that.
Yeah.
Yes, yes.
It's so good and that's so true.
Honestly, I wrote books on negotiation.
I've presented a camp empowerment on negotiation and my whole thing about negotiating with
a narcissist has been born from having to deal with real narcissists in my real life.
So yeah, I mean, I've been able to help now thousands and thousands of people because
of the pain that I suffered and helping people get past that.
Exactly, exactly.
That's why I developed dethroning your inner critic because of my 30 year journey of needing
to unhook from my own automatic mind and rewire a new mind, right?
Yeah.
It's like that's what happens.
We learn from our pain and we grow.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
This has been amazing.
So tell us about you, where people can find out more about you, what you're up to-
Absolutely.
What they can do to get some of your amazing, awesome stuff.
Great.
Yeah.
So my website is dethroningyourinnercritic.com and I have a podcast, you can find it wherever
you find podcasts called Dethroning Your Inner Critic.
I work with people all over the world.
I work with men and women individually.
Then I also have a group program that's all online.
It all takes place over Zoom and it is a program that's called mastering your mind where...
That's for women, okay?
I keep the groups fairly small and you literally learn how to rewire a brand new mind to design
the rest of your life moving forward.
Awesome.
It's amazing.
Incredible.
[inaudible 00:14:36].
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, fantastic.
I'm so excited that you were here and I know this is going to help so many people.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Joanna.
Thank you for having me.
This was wonderful opportunity, Rebecca.
Thanks for watching part two of this two episode on how to move on from a narcissist with Joanna
Kleinman.
I'm Rebecca Zung.
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If you're getting ready to negotiate with the narcissist, then you're going to want
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as well.
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