The Wily Survivor

Scapegoated children have incredible awareness and emotional maturity. This threatens the narcissist's ego because they mirror back what the narcissistic parent doesn't want to see.

Flying monkeys aren't interested in the whole story. They get the narcissist's exaggerated, nasty, rage-fueled projection. And they run with it, because believing the lie is easier than believing what they did to you.

If you're in the orbit of someone manipulative, emotionally dysregulated, abusive, and draining… What are the chances you're really living your best life?

Emotional reactivity occurs when your body reacts before your brain has a chance to catch up. Your nervous system hijacks your logic. Narcissistic abuse wires you to react fast and defend, explain, fawn, or shut down. Pause. Do not take the bait. Resist the urge to explain.

Narcs will ask mutual contacts about you. Are you mad? Sad? Still single? Still emotionally available? Don't think for one second it's because they care. It's a recon mission. They want to know if they still have access to control you. Be mindful of the flying monkeys inquiries.

If you feel guilty about resting, over-explain everything, or take care of everyone but yourself, there’s a chance you've been parentified. Instead of your parents nurturing you, you were expected to take care of them. And now your nervous system thinks love = over-functioning.

When you've spent your whole life managing other people's moods, silence can be triggering. So you stay busy, fix, over-explain, and even apologize unnecessarily. You were taught to believe that self-abandonment equals safety.

If you were expected to soothe your parents’ emotions, solve their problems, or be their emotional support, that wasn’t maturity. That was parentification. You were put in the role of the adult before you even got to be a child.

If you feel ashamed for being abused, manipulated, or neglected, that shame isn’t yours. It was unloaded onto you by someone too entitled, manipulative, and emotionally stunted to carry the weight of what they did. That’s their shame, not yours. You’ve carried enough.

You’re not addicted to the narcissist. You were trauma-bonded, gaslit, and emotionally worn down until chaos felt normal and your needs felt like a problem. You don’t miss them. You’re in withdrawal from the high-stress survival state they kept you in.

You don’t need to earn love. You just need to stop giving it to people who see you as a resource to exploit, not a person to cherish.

Narcissists ghost you when you stop playing by their rules. Disagreeing with them threatens their control and their facade, and they don’t tolerate that, so they punish you with silence.

Sometimes we keep chasing love from the same kinds of people who taught us love had to be earned. Ask yourself, are you reenacting a scene from your past?

Why do I keep attracting narcissists? Because your body has become accustomed to dysfunction & now mistakes it for normal. What feels familiar isn't always safe. It's not your fault. It happens to many of us. But now that you're aware, you can start to choose something different.

That eerie, gut-level “ick” you feel around someone new? When you shrink, over-explain, or start people-pleasing, even though they haven’t done anything? That’s your intuition waving red flags your brain hasn’t caught up to yet. You might’ve just met another narcissist.

I hear so many survivors blaming themselves for how they responded to trauma. Stop judging yourself for the ways you survived. There’s no right way to survive.

A narcissist grooms you to overcompensate through intermittent reinforcement, blame-shifting, emotional unpredictability, and by convincing you that love is something you earn by being useful, compliant, or perfect.

There’s a complex kind of grief that comes with healing from abuse, especially when the abuser was someone you loved or depended on. It’s okay to grieve the people who hurt you. That grief doesn’t mean you were wrong to walk away. It's just part of the healing process.

Minimizing sounds like: “It wasn’t that bad.” “I’m not in danger.” “They didn’t mean it.” “They had a rough childhood.” It’s a trauma response. When the truth feels too threatening, your mind morphs it to survive. Be mindful of this. Minimizing can keep you stuck.

The narcissist doesn’t disappear. They quietly regroup, plot, shape-shift, and patiently wait for a crack in your boundaries to regain control.