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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 20 - June 7, 2025
ONE: Do you make excuses for your partner? This was mentioned before. Do you almost punish yourself because of his or her behavior, saying that you should have known how to handle him or her, should have understood better?
Yes
TWO: Do you want to go back to the way the relationship was at the beginning? Was that beginning exciting, lovely-feeling, sexually- and emotionally-intoxicating if it was a romantic relationship, a relief that finally you'd found who you were looking for, maybe? You were being love-bombed, and now it couldn't be more different. Now your partner is critical, difficult, cold, obviously bored with you. Are you thinking that the love-bomber was your real partner; and that this cruel, conflicting one you feel restless in the presence of now, is somehow not the real person you've ended up living
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Yes
THREE: Do you think that if you improved yourself, were more successful, made even more effort to be affectionate, generally just tried harder, that your partner would respond by being faithful, more loving, less critical?
Yes
FOUR: Do you keep on because there are a few brief moments of happiness, a few days of good behavior on the part of your spouse or partner? Do you live for them? Do you try to find out what you did to deserve them, so you could have at least a few more 'eyes in your hurricane'?
Yes
FIVE: Do you say to yourself that it's too late to change? That you'd love to get out of this, but it's too difficult? That you've put in too much of your time, of yourself, to leave it behind?
Yes
SIX: Have you ever found yourself believing that it is actually DANGEROUS to try to leave? That your partner would retaliate by harming you physically? What about fearing that he or she will be so enraged that you won't be able to cope with the strain? Do you fear that he or she will try to blackmail you if you left, tell lies or secrets about you? SEVEN: Do you feel as if you've lost everything? Can you look back on your life and say, "I used to have more friends; I used to have more fun; I used to feel more confident"? Do you feel that life is much worse now than it was? Is the money
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Not pyschically but would give me silent treatment and withrawl to make me feel punished
SIX: Have you ever found yourself believing that it is actually DANGEROUS to try to leave? That your partner would retaliate by harming you physically? What about fearing that he or she will be so enraged that you won't be able to cope with the strain? Do you fear that he or she will try to blackmail you if you left, tell lies or secrets about you? SEVEN: Do you feel as if you've lost everything? Can you look back on your life and say, "I used to have more friends; I used to have more fun; I used to feel more confident"? Do you feel that life is much worse now than it was? Is the money
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No
EIGHT: Do you think that no-one will want you now, now that you're so depressed, maybe so old, ugly, and carrying a baggage of problems? That you're just not lovable any more?
Maybe a little
NINE: Are you still persevering because you believe you'll find a way to make this relationship work? Do you think you'll have a breakthrough that will make your partner a better person; and you, able to manage him or her better?
Yes
TEN: Do you hate yourself now? If you always did, do you hate yourself more than you ever did before? Or have you just started liking yourself less and less during the history of this relationship?
Like myself less
The truth may hurt, but it always heals.
Firstly: do you wish your partner would come back, traumatic though it almost always was to live with that person? Do you think you might have made a mistake to leave? You put off making changes because you know he or she might not approve... For example, a woman thinks of sending her child away to a boarding school. He'll be safer from the abusive father there, and the standard of education will be better. Yet she procrastinates, puts off changing his school, because she knows that his father wouldn't agree, would fly into a rage if she sent their boy away. Even though she's left the boy's
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Secondly: you are an abused partner whose 'ex' is trying to invite you back. You are being love-bombed, and told how very sorry he or she is about the past bad treatment. Promises are being made, kind words said. You were abused, truly mistreated - but you find there are times when you want to believe what you are hearing. Maybe not all the time, but sometimes you feel a pull to go back and try again. You start wondering if this "new leaf" your 'ex' has turned might not be genuine, and thinking about the terms under which you'd go back to him or to her. Is that you?
Thirdly: do still catch yourself making excuses for your partner's behavior in what is now the past? Do you say to yourself that you must be at least partly to blame for the insults, criticisms, infidelities and attempts to 'gaslight' you, that you endured? It's true, no-one's perfect; but if you hardly ever returned his insults, didn't dare to criticize him for things in his own life, were never unfaithful, and never tried to confuse him... how is it that you're trying to share the blame for his doing that to you?
Fourthly: there is still a kind of emotional "connection" between you. If you hear news of your former partner, for example when his shop in town puts on a promotion and people are talking about it, does it really stir your emotions? As it would obviously do if you were still living with him? Do you find that, uncannily, you are reminded of him so strongly, for example, when you hear an expression he used to use... and then within an hour he's sent you an SMS text message? So that it seems there's a connection still there, that's as if it MUST be, even though part of you knows that you need to
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Fifthly: you keep on thinking the way your narcissist wanted you to. Ideas and assertions that person made still seem to sway you at times. For example, her strong views that street-market vendors are all crooks and confidence-tricksters still keep repeating themselves noisily in your head every time you go to look at a street-market, and you find yourself looking suspiciously at all their goods. You might fight against it, but you can't stop feeling it is so, even though your reason tells you it's unfair and generalizing.
Sixthly: you think a lot about your ex-partner. Everything reminds you of that person. You remember so much of his or her past injustices that it's like feeling it all over again. You wish you could have avoided what happened, re-plan it, imagine what you should have done... To remember is, of course, part of understanding, and so to be healed, some analysis is called for; but this kind of memory is passive, and it is making you feel helpless and bitter about the past.
Female energy attracts the energy of other people to itself; male energy seeks to find the energy of others and give to it. They are opposites and yet similar.
When that emotional balance happens, you will have been released from emotional bondage to them. You will need to remember what happened, and picture yourself, now adult, explaining and loving yourself in that situation. You need to make yourself feel loved in that time when you weren't.
We cannot try to prove these here, but return to the basic agreement of therapists: you need to be healed from within, to be able to resist the influences of people who may seem powerfully attractive, but are NOT right for you. When you can do that, people who are good for you will come to you in their, and your, own time.
Yes, a victim can find his or her soul-mate, but only once he or she is healed! This is what the dynamics of emotional energy suggest - when you no longer suffer from deep unmet needs and trauma, you will attract the truly compatible type of person to your life, the one whose male or female energy is matched to yours by being opposite. When you do, what heals in your life will heal them. No-one is perfect, but your soul-mate will be someone who wants to grow WITH you. Not FROM you...
When you have become enough for yourself, another suitable person will "mirror" your inner personality, and there will be a sense of peace. You won't need to fight to win them, have to ask them to come into your life with pleading. They will just come near you calmly and your bond will grow, as said before, steadily and slowly.
After all, abusers often say that they're doing what they do as a reward or as a punishment, even if they are horribly inconsistent. The victim gets these double reinforcements, and starts trying to please the narcissist. From not going out of their home, to wearing smarter clothes, to waiting before she answers him back... she treads on thin ice, so as not to fall in. This, she hopes, will stop him from coming back home drunk, from hitting her.
Normal, healthy relationships just aren't like this. They can seem... boring in comparison. Does this not help to explain why victims can become confused, and stay in unstable relationships too long? Or why a victim who is seduced by a narcissist might find it dull and difficult to remain faithful to their spouse? The good times can, especially at first, be intense. It makes victims confuse love, truthfulness and honesty with beautiful emotional firework-displays. It can also confuse other people around them as well, since many narcissists like making these displays of affection in public.
The only sincere apology is a change in someone's behavior...
Ask yourself, if you know that you are suffering abuse, what you need to have in a relationship as the bare minimum to live in it. If you decide, and find that after a time you don't get it, then you know you have to leave. Don't keep bending your expectations lower and lower. What would you absolutely love to have in a relationship that would make it happy? Write it down. What is enough to have to make it worthwhile? And what things are absolutely wrong, and cannot be tolerated? Review these definitions. Of course people will have arguments or disagreements... but disagreeing is not the same
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When dealing with a narcissistic sociopath, especially a violent one, the same may apply. His or her victim may also be weakened and confused, and it makes sense to adapt rather than fight and risk serious injury. In
In healthy bonding, as we covered earlier, there is no need to hide oneself from the other: one can be true to oneself.
He needs to be guided though a process of learning who he really is, of maturing his identity so that he won't confuse his own needs with those of others. Actually, he needs to bond with himself before he can do so with other people. Mark is likely to have a very poor estimate of his worth, and think that he can only find worth in what he does for someone else who has worth. Instead, he could be able to give his own love and personality as a gift to someone else, a precious gift of worth to someone who also has worth.
It is a sort of mental hostage-taking; we have seen that Stockholm Syndrome is a similar survival-strategy. There is a perceived danger or threat to the victim's life and integrity (physical or psychological), a menace to their personality (victims feel de-personalized); then he or she gets treatment that looks to be kindness and love, but is just the bait covering the hook of hostile, critical, uncaring behavior that always follows.
Cognitive dissonance in a seriously-abused victim will have that person swinging between two opposing ideas, thinking one thing in one minute, and the opposite the next. Beautiful fantasies of getting 'love-bombed' clash with ugly realizations of abuse and lack of love. These realizations are not very pleasant and offer serious challenges, so that denial becomes very tempting.
