Narcissistic relationships can rattle us to our core, and this video is gonna be for childhood trauma survivors who had, or they have patterns of getting involved with narcissistic partners or friends or bosses due to our family system of origin, trauma conditioning. And a way of dealing with being that rattled is usually about needing to protect yourself by consuming videos or reading literature about narcissism, because really maybe you don't trust yourself and your ability to call it out upfront or avoid getting involved with a narcissist in the first place.
So here I am creating another video yet again about narcissism, but I want to focus on healing advice. And getting your perception back, not focusing on that diagnosis and how they like get you. So this video is actually more about you than it is about what to watch out for. So, I'm Patrick. I'm a licensed clinical therapist and a life coach, and I specialize in childhood trauma from the family system of origin.
How that impacts our adult lives and how to do healing work. , um, to find some childhood trauma therapists near, near you, um, that are training with me. You can also find some e-course work that I offer there, my Patreon, as well as a healing community membership that I offer where we connect.
People connect with me twice a month in a live q and a, so moving right along. I want to focus on three tips that I have about reclaiming trusting yourself and being able to protect yourself from narcissistic jobs or bosses or partners or family members or friends. So, and I'm not saying that all those folks are NPD, I'm saying they exhibit narcissistic behavior that childhood trauma survivors don't catch for many reasons.
So first though, let's reiterate the problem. If you identify with having childhood trauma, I think we're raised in narcissistic families and we're so familiar with off behavior that we're like immersed in it to the point that it's really normal for us, like we don't see it. And waking up from all that usually involves like a hard reckoning, like where you realize that one of your parents or a sibling or a grandparent displays narcissistic traits or cluster B symptoms.
Having cluster B symptoms doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. It just kind of falls in line with sort of narcissistic traits. Like that's a hard rollercoaster, that reckoning, and you are usually the only family member who sees it, which is also really hard. So this awakening can come from after being involved with a highly narcissistic partner, um, and with clients, I educate them with how the narcissistic family system sets individuals up to be vulnerable to narcissistic abuse because it's so familiar.
So here, I'm not saying that individuals seek out narcissistic, abusive relationships on purpose. It doesn't work like that. We don't like pop out of bed in the morning from our single life and say, I'm gonna start dating a total disaster and, and, and not see it and have immense consequences to my mental health or even my physical safety.
It doesn't work like that. What I am suggesting is that our inner child or our childhood trauma conditioning or your amygdala, if you like, gets in the way of our perception where we have trouble seeing toxicity upfront and that inner child part of us is also trying to unconsciously like capital U, unconsciously, um, um, trying to fix something in our childhood, which can make us.
Get engaged in the push pull with extremely difficult people for many reasons. So here are some examples of how childhood trauma and abuse contributes to not trusting ourselves or our perception, and we end up engaging with narcissistic people. Think about like a broken radar system. So in childhood where there is no healthy validation.
Or you're not being seen as a child, or the adults don't call out abuse themselves. Like in an abusive family system. Kids get treated horrifically and then they become invisible, like none of that abuse happened. This is about having no healthy adults addressing what just went down for the child, like advocacy.
And another version is being shamed for telling the truth. So that telling the truth goes so underground to the point that we don't know how to actually tell the truth about what happened anymore. And at a very young age, many of us give up on telling the truth, uh, or keep it to ourselves or we lose it if there are no healthy adults confirming things with us.
We don't know what's real and what's not. Another example is not seeing abusive people being held accountable or called out like that. Rageful violent stepdad is never challenged, so we learn that the most, the loudest. The most manipulative, the most volatile person has all the power, and that never changes.
So diving right in these tips are like a plan for healing. Say that broken radar system with the goal of trusting your own perception, trusting your own gut, and not needing to be so vigilant because we now trust ourselves. Moving along. Number one is have a safe and sane person to bounce things off of.
A solid friend, a solid therapist who gets your history and gets narcissistic abuse. Someone we can debrief with, say after a date or a job interview where we might be triggered around, maybe be wondering if we got it right or we got it wrong. How I learned to trust my own gut was from a therapist who could help me feel when things were like a big deal and I wasn't feeling that they were a big deal and they could also help me.
When I was feeling that things were too much of a big deal and I was kind of going over the top, I was usually focused on the wrong issues due to my own trauma. Um, if my codependency or my inner child was way more forgiving when I, I shouldn't have been, she gently reflect back to me how things sounded to her, and if I could get triggered and have a big over the top reaction to the friend or the girlfriend or whatever, she'd be able to see that, that I was triggered and that I was probably projecting in some way.
And then she kind of asked me like, what the trigger would remind me of from growing up. You know, and she would do this in a non-controlling way and she was encouraging me to think for myself while validating situations and how they sounded to her. You know, she was also very safe to me to hear feedback.
So that's important too. Don't pick someone who is just as hypervigilant as you are because then it just becomes like a big agree fest, like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Super sketch that Definitely avoid that person who was 10 minutes late. I, you know, that would trigger me. Pick someone that you respect or that they have a kind of recovery that you want to learn from or that you want to emulate.
Um, we need someone who can challenge us when, when something sounds off in another person, but also call us out when we sound like we're not seeing the humanity in somebody else. Like being 10 minutes late on a date doesn't have to be such a major red flag. And a bump in the road with this tip is you really have to take your time and pick a, a good person in this.
Like we've, I've had clients that who say that they saw a therapist for a long time that didn't get the narcissistic stuff and they kept encouraging the client to keep trying to work it out with that difficult person or, and they missed this huge abusive dynamic that was going on. There's a huge disconnect there.
Um, and we should really get this kind of debriefing from our parents if we grew up in healthier systems. Like imagine if we had a safe home base that in high school you could actually talk to a mom or talk to a dad about how that first date went, and they could help us figure out if we wanted to go on a second date if we.
Them if they, if they were a good person to date, not just saying yes to a second date for not knowing what to say to the kid or not wanting to be single when our other friends aren't. So, so a parent can kind of like almost like. Check all that if they were healthy. So a solid friend, a solid therapist, a mentor, or someone that you can get good feedback from, and then you can bounce things off of about yourself, right or wrong.
The second tip I have is to do a vulnerability inventory, and this is an investigative exercise. To figure out how your trauma makes you vulnerable and how to start working with it so that you're not so vulnerable to narcissistic people or difficult people. Inventories, they come from the 12 step world about looking at resentments, which lead an at lead, an addict to relapse, and it's helpful.
In that addiction setting of like rigorous self-reflection and being honest about what we, the, what the addict brings to the table. And this exercise in that setting is called a four step. And I know 12 step is not everyone's cup of tea, but it was actually really helpful for me. And FYI, you have to be in a certain place and be ready to do inventory work, um, within the 12 step place because it's only really concerned with what.
You brought to the table, which is triggering, it does kind of acknowledge that yes, people can be a-holes, um, but it's really triggering, especially when your resentments are involving like abusive family members or perpetrators. It's hard to like do that work and look at what your part are is and all that.
So I value that work and I'm just saying it's triggering work. That's all I'm saying. So usually a 12 step inventory consists of four columns. Um, here's how a traditional 12 step inventory columns are set up. The first column is you list the person that you're resentful or people that you're resentful at, like a list, say your ex or toxic boss.
The second column is what happened. How it all played out, how it went down. The third column is what did that affect for you? And the last column is, is what was your part in it. So, and this is usually done in a notebook or whatever, it can be an Excel spreadsheet and you're creating a list of many resentments.
You can, you can have, be it. People, places and things like you can have a resentment for the university that you went to or the, the jobs that you've had or your exes or your parents, I think you get it at this point. So there's a bunch of resources online and journals online about doing a four step in that traditional 12 step way.
All kinds of healthy formats. Let's pretend that you are an addict in recovery from, say, alcoholism, and you're doing this exercise just to show you what it looks like. You've had wreckage and you've caused wreckage. So the person is say, resentful, uh, or simply carries negative feelings for someone named Jill.
And why is the second column here, Jill reported you to your boss that you weren't just sick. When you called in for the fourth time, you were actually hungover because you drank too much. You guys were out and that's what happened. But still her reporting you felt like a betrayal and you, you may or may not know that your behavior was sketchy.
What did Jill's reporting affect for you? It cost you the job. You took a hit to your self-esteem. It took a hit to your finances. It took a hit to your emotional security, and it definitely took a hit to your pride. The fourth column is what was your part in this? And we're gonna tweak this one in the exercise that we'll do about trauma vulnerability.
The part here for the alcoholic was dumping work onto Jill when you didn't show up due to your drinking, and you might have had to. Say loose boundaries. And you went way too buddy, buddy with her in a fast, dysfunctional way, and you made her like your, your work BF. Mean, I know this is really specific, but it might sound familiar to you.
So, um, you might have had an alcoholic in your life like this. So back to this hypothetical, you were selfish when she told you she'd have to do your work and then you said you couldn't handle that kind of feedback right now 'cause you were hung over. You had some special rules, like if she was hungover, which she never is, you would never do that to her.
You would never do the same thing like report her special rules. Are like manipulations around fairness. And a lot of these behaviors that I'm describing are not just unique to alcoholics. You know, sort of we can, as trauma survivors, we can have these two or cluster B or whatever, but it's that fourth column that the addict or the alcoholic might gain insight into why things.
Go wrong for them in a relationship or wrong for them in their jobs. It's what their ism brings to the table. That is their responsibility. So that's the general idea of this thing. Moving on to our tweet inventory, we're gonna do it a little bit different. Let's do one about the narcissist and. Someone who has childhood trauma that engages with a narcissist, you know, will creatively tweak this 12 step format to reflect our resentment or our wounds being involved with a narcissist.
So let's say the survivor here is resentful at their narcissistic ex. Now let's look at the cause there was love bombing. There was constant on edge fights, like daily fights being caused by this person, that this person owes them a lot of money and back rent or whatever, that they crossed boundaries and they went to their friends for help.
Um, which created like a cartman triangle, like the narcissistic person sought rescue from your friends, making you the persecutor, the boundary cross was that they were your friends, not theirs. What did that affect to this third column? It affected the trauma survivor's mental health. Boy, howdy. Did it ever, with all the daily triggering, it affected their self-esteem.
It affected their finances, it affected their emotional security. It affected their pride. It affected stuff going on in their social circle, like when the narcissist crossed boundaries. The most important part, this fourth column, is the childhood trauma vulnerability. The difference here. As opposed to a traditional 12 step four step inventory is that we're really looking at the childhood trauma symptoms that made us vulnerable to engaging with a narcissist.
This is the secret ingredient that we're trying to figure out. So maybe the person's trauma vulnerability is never feeling like they had a home, so they seek out trying to build one with whomever is open to doing that. Like, but not getting that. They're trying to build something with someone who is super dysfunctional and unsafe.
Or maybe their inner child trauma was around trying to make a miserable parent happy, and that's still like running them. Or maybe they fawn and they lose all sense of their inner adult as a biological survival mechanism takes over and they just submit to whatever the narcissistic person is upset about, like submitting to their will, like having to do so say with a sociopathic or volatile or really troubled parent growing up, or a narcissistic parent.
Maybe this person also has a fantasy of being someone's number one, for having been a child of extreme neglect of being scapegoated, where they were never really important in their family system. You may already know what your secret ingredients is from your childhood trauma, which is great, but here are some other possibilities that are more unconscious.
Trying to get a toxic person to become sane for your benefit. Fit like with a troubled abusive parent, we might do that to try to fix our childhood. If we can make somebody sane, then maybe we've got a little bit of a family going there. Um, trying to become more tolerable to someone. So much that we don't see the toxicity in others is probably really familiar to their family system.
Or trying to resolve a trauma cycle, um, a drama cycle, excuse me, so that we're so familiar to the highs and the lows of being okay and then not okay with a caretaker that we're so in that game, that we're committed to that game. We're committed to that kind of cycle, like just like we did with a moody or provocative abusive parent.
And we can be kind of attracted to that cycle as well. Another is trying to solve a narcissistic person's problems by being kind to them so much that we don't see that they bring those problems or those issues to them, to their own life. They draw, they, they cause all that. Um, but you might be trying to be kind and fix it for them, like you had to do with a, say, a tragic or irresponsible parent.
Another is trying to provide for a narcissist who disguises themselves as a victim because you might over identify with having been marginalized and you are left without resources in childhood. Another is needing a strong-willed person to tell us what to do with your life because you've never had someone really advocate for you or have faith in you and you struggle with making decisions for yourself.
Another is attempting to still test or confirm that narcissistic people are just, you're like your lot in life because that's what the family system sort of taught us, that you're, you're kind of testing that you can't do better, which is like self-sabotage. And a couple of really deep seated runner ups is having like an ego fantasy around being able to handle a super difficult person that shows how determined you are or how tough you can be, even when your could be.
Another version of is when your inner child takes on a narcissistic person to protect. Others like you are the sacrificial lamb. Hopefully that kind, that stuff made sense. So notice how all of these examples have a codependent nature to them, um, that they might, they might actually define codependency stemming from childhood trauma itself.
So why do all this? Well, the vulnerability that we name that comes from our childhood trauma becomes now the focus in this work. It's like figuring out what your kryptonite is. Um, and then we start to do some healing work around that kryptonite issue in therapy or your self-guided therapy or whatever.
Uh, if we can name, own, and focus on that vulnerability, that childhood wound, then we can shift out of not needing to be so vigilant. Uh, around narcissistic people, like how powerful would you feel if you didn't have like your own sort of private kryptonite in like a, in like a secret pocket in your system or something like that.
And lastly, if you're stuck due to really not knowing about your family system, like you can't make that tangible, you can't connect the dots. Um, you can try something called the Family Rules, the Children's Bill of Rights, or doing a genogram, which are all e-course available on my website. They really help us.
See an abusive childhood more clearly and be able to connect more, more dots to the present life. So the third tip and the final tip is to work on how you are set up. In my videos, you often hear me talk about holding parents accountable, holding abusive parents accountable. What that means is actually a mindset.
It's not trying to get your abusive parents to own their part or to try to get them to get it because you told them about your trauma. That's actually also codependency is when we're fighting. People to get them to change. So holding parents accountable is shifting feelings of shame and deep seated faults, like personal fault away from ourselves and onto actually how we were parented.
And we do that by researching the differences between healthy family systems and toxic ones. Some examples, scapegoated. Kids are set up for abusive relationships later in life. And or being overly submissive to other people or they're, they actually can be overly provocative, like in a rebellious way.
They were set up for that. Neglected kids are set up to be seeking attention from anyone who will give it, which isn't good. Raise your hand out there if you were already getting yourself into trouble, say in high school by dating somebody older who was sketchy, but no one in your family knew about it or cared to know about it.
Um, kids are who see one parent behave codependently with a narcissistic partner are set up to think that that's how intimacy rolls. To think of, that's how our relationship works. Children who are gaslit about the cause and effects of things in the family, like, look what you, look what you made me do, kind of stuff.
They're set up to not know where the line is between someone being awful to them and they become terrible lawyers for themselves. And at the heart of this concept of the setup is think about your parents now. Um, would they care if you, if they, if they knew that you were in a really abusive relationship for a while, what would they say about it?
Chances are, is you would most likely be blamed for getting into that relationship in the first place. Or you might get something that's just like, oh, I really liked them. You might want to try to patch that up. I thought that that was the best that you can do. That says it all about this stuff. It says it all about the type of family system you might come from.
And many of my clients get something similar in retrospect where you break up with a, with a highly abusive person or a narcissistic person, and then you might have a parent kind of say like, well, I knew they were bad news. I just didn't want to say anything. It's another thing that just says it all about our family systems.
So the setup there is, is still not having anyone from your family in your adulthood really be concerned with your wellbeing or how your relationships are. And yes, we're adults now, but what I'm referencing is different. Like this stuff is not new. This is not the blame game or passing the buck. It's really just looking at how toxic families shirk responsibility away from raising well adjusted human beings.
And simply looking at what happens to kids in these situations and what kind of adults do they become. And this exercise is actually writing a letter to one or both of your parents about how the narcissistic partners or bosses or friends you've had. Um, and you actually are holding the parents accountable for setting you up for those relationships.
Stuff like, you know, the, you might write down in the letter, you know, like I stayed with Jill or Jeff for five years and daily fights and supporting their addiction and supporting them financially only to have gaslit every day about. How I was the reason they were like that, and you set me up for that because that's what you told me every day growing up, that I was the reason why you were so miserable that you wished that you had never had me, or that you wished you never got married.
I know that that cuts deep, but these videos are for individuals who know what I'm talking about because. They have heard those things ad nauseum in this letter that I'm referencing can be anywhere from three to five pages. And, um, you use it as an exercise to solidify that not only did you not grow up in safety, but that you were set up for any of the following.
To not catch narcissistic people upfront when they came into your life to not use your voice, to not get out sooner. To not being in your body enough to know the full impact of what being in a relationship was like with somebody like that. That last one means that we can actually be more in our head dealing with a narcissistic person like a chess game than to be grounded in our body and to.
Fully feel how exhausting and depressing and generally crappy the person makes us feel. So things like that. If you can read the letter to an empty chair and imagine your parent or parents being sitting in that chair, that's the second part of this letter exercise. It's also more powerful to have someone witness you reading the letter to the chair, reading the letter to your parents who gets this stuff, maybe a therapist or a friend, and because they can witness what you went through and they can sort of judge the parents for the.
Their part and things too. And there'll be a link in the video description that takes you to a sample letter of what I'm referencing to an abusive parent so that you can get a sense about what that's like. You can just download this letter from that link. So some final thoughts. The work here is not about the narcissist or knowing what to watch out for or why they specifically have a sweaty upper lip when they lie.
I just made that up, but it's about doing your work around your abusive family system of origin. I think if we can reclaim our self worth. If we can reclaim our trust in our own perception, if we can get some healing around our attachment or our abandonment issues that stem from this abusive family system stuff after that, we tend to seek healthier people in our life.
We don't have time, we're we lose interest or my role with people is to break their tolerance for difficult people. Nothing changed in my romantic relationships until I started finishing business with my parents who set me up. For very messy and difficult partners because of what they modeled around intimacy and what they modeled around marriage was like this gross, messy power struggle and I didn't want to get in one of those.
So I just became very codependent and very caretaking. So, and also like I've mentioned, I was really set up to take care of people who refused to take any responsibility for their own mess or themselves. So I hope that this video was helpful. I hope it actually made. Sense. I'd love to hear your thoughts, your experiences, some comments.
