It is the 4th of July Independence Day and what topic is more apt than your independence?
Today we are going to discuss 21 signs that you have truly, fully, completely and irrevocably recovered and healed from your narcissistic abuse, that you have expunged the narcissist from your mind, eradicated his internal voice and silenced it, that you have reacquired agency, autonomy, pride in yourself and the capacity to move on, trust other people and reestablish bridges to the world out there, bridges severed by the narcissist's relentless, merciless, ruthless and callous siege on you.
Because yes, narcissistic abuse is about being besieged by the narcissist.
Before we go there, the self-supply corner, academia.edu is the largest academic website in the world with more than 228 million members, professors, teachers and so on and so forth.
And I have just been informed that I made it to the top 0.1%, that's not 1%, that's 0.1%, top 0.1% of these 230 million academics.
That's quite an honor.
Academia.edu also points to 1,464 articles, academic articles, peer-reviewed academic articles. That cites my work and that is a major understatement because Academia.edu scans only for my full name.
So, if you take into account variations like Vaknin, Vaknin, and so on and so forth, we are talking much closer to 5,000 articles, not to mention close to 3,000 books.
I'm out there, it seems.
It may not please quite a few people, but that's reality.
Let's wake up and smell the wine.
Okay, Shoshanim and Shoshanimot, there's a new playlist for your edification, narcissistic abuse, healing and recovery playlist on my channel and all the videos that have to do with techniques for recovery and healing from narcissistic abuse. All these videos can be found on this playlist, anything and everything you ever wanted to know about separating from the narcissist, individuating, self-help techniques, deprogramming yourself because narcissism is a kind of cult and so on and so forth. All of these are in the new playlist, narcissistic abuse, healing and recovery.
Today's topic, 21 signs that you have made it, that you have truly survived, that you have recovered and healed and moved on.
Again, I'm not going to deal with bodily signs.
There are videos in the aforementioned playlist which discuss the way your body signals to you which stage in your recovery you are because the body keeps the score as is the famous title of a very famous book by Van der Kolk and others. The body keeps the score, but today we are going to discuss the mind.
I'm going to give you 21 signs that you are a recovered victim of narcissistic abuse and therefore not a victim anymore, but a proud and strong and resilient survivor.
Go through the list, check the boxes, see where you are. The more boxes you check, the further along the way, further along the path of healing you are.
Number one, there are no more disparaging, introjects, internal voices that harshly criticize you, humiliate you, chastise you, castigate you, doubt you. Voices which are hostile, enemy voices inside your mind, voices which are intrusive and you can never silence, never mind how hard you try. These voices are known as introjects.
They are part of the harsh inner critic. They stick onto or collaborate with your sadistic superego.
The narcissist invades your mind and then creates a coalition with everyone and everything in your mind that is against you. He implants his own voice there in the role of a coordinating campaign coordinator. He instants an app in your mind, in your brain and the attack is on an internal smear campaign.
So are these introjects still active? Do you still hear them? Are they still talking to you? Do they still disparage and criticize and mock and ridicule and humiliate you?
If they are, you are far from healing. You are far from true recovery.
When you dig deep, you will realize that many of the messages that are intended to take you down and put you down emanate from the narcissist in your life even long after he had exited it, long after he had gone.
You need to silence these voices and there are two or three videos in the playlist which discuss how to do this.
Other voices in your mind, other interjects which collaborate with the narcissist interject are the interjects of flying monkeys, your best friend, your mother, your father, your colleague, your boss, the neighborhood pastor, clergyman, your doctor, medical or otherwise, your psychologist, I mean your therapist.
They could all become in due time flying monkeys of the narcissist and they all create interjects in your mind and these interjects, these voices collude and collaborate with the narcissist's voice to render you disabled or to destroy you altogether.
You need to identify these voices and silence them and if they are still active, you have a long way to go.
Number two, no egodystony, no discomfort, no self-hatred and self-loathing and no hesitancy in decision making.
You're making decisions that you are fully happy with, you're fully in accord with, you have no qualms, no doubts, no internal debates as to your decisions.
You deliberate of course, you're not stupid, you think things through, you compare options but then when you make a decision, you're okay with it.
This is a sign of mental health, decision making, choosing choices that generate egodystony, extreme acute discomfort, hesitancy, inability to decide either way, being skewed on the horns of every dilemma.
These are signs that the narcissist is still active inside your mind.
The narcissist wants to render you dependent and one of the great ways to make you dependent on him is to deactivate and eliminate your capacity to make autonomous independent choices and decisions.
So first thing the narcissist does to you, he replaces his own decision making, his own selective processes. He replaces yours with his.
If he wants your opinion, he typically gives it to you.
Number three, the ability to trust. Can you trust people again?
However incrementally, however gradually, however haltingly, however doubtfully, can you still trust even minimally?
If you can, it's a good sign.
If you can't trust, if you are besieged by paranoid ideation, by suspiciousness, if you attribute to people bad evil motives invariably in all situations, if you tend to interpret every act however benevolent, every succor offered, every advice given as malevolent and malicious a type of conspiracy, your mind has been infected by the narcissist because that's precisely how the narcissist sees the world and other people in it.
Ability to trust is one of the three major signs of recovery and healing.
Number four, you no longer doubt your judgment. You're able to make up your mind and stick to it, not necessarily make decisions, not necessarily opt between choices and alternatives, but simply judge something, have an opinion and then feel congruent with your opinion. Feel that this opinion is truly yours. This opinion renders you more authentic, supports your authenticity.
If you are able to trust your judgment and you feel comfortable with your opinions, you have been cured, you have been healed. It's a sign of healing.
Number five, independent reality testing has been restored. There are no cognitive distortions.
One of the major weapons of the narcissist is that he becomes your reality testing.
You delegate to him the sole exclusive capacity to tell you what is real and what is not.
You see the world and yourself through his gaze, contaminated gaze, through his eyes, eyes which are clouded by fantasy and worse.
You divorce, when you're with a narcissist, you divorce reality.
You let him become the only interface with reality and the only mediator between you and the world.
The narcissist having exited your life, you should regain the capacity to test reality on your own without his mediation or intervention or contribution.
You need to be the sole decision maker as to what is real and what is not and you need to see the world through no glasses, not pink glasses and not a glass darkly.
You need to see the world unmediated. You need to experience reality directly.
If you feel that you have restored your intimate connection with the universe, with the world around you, human and not human, animate and not animate, inanimate, if you feel this direct connectivity, connection with people and otherwise, even with objects, even with your neighborhood, even with your city, even with the world at large, if you feel this, you're on the right path.
Number seven, I think, yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
A sense of agency and, sorry, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, yeah.
A sense of agency and self-efficacy restored.
You saw I lost touch with reality for a minute there.
A sense of agency and self-efficacy restored.
Suddenly you feel that you're able to extract and extricate favorable outcomes by interacting with other people and with your physical environment and with your body.
You feel in charge. You feel in control. You feel at ease.
You feel efficient. You feel good about your capacity to direct your life and everyone and everything around you so as to make your life a better place to be, to make your experience more palatable, acceptable.
And so agency and self-efficacy, the narcissist takes these away from you.
He makes you dependent. He renders you dependent because he wants to control you. It's all about control.
And he does it in a variety of ways in training, coercive, snapshotting.
I discussed all these ways, means and methods of subjugating you, rendering you submissive. I discussed all these ways and means that the narcissist uses in other videos.
But now you're reclaiming yourself. You're reclaiming your agency and self-efficacy. That's part of healing.
Number eight, autonomous motivation.
We distinguish between autonomous and non-autonomous motivation.
Non-autonomous motivation is the clinical term for people pleasing.
Actually, people pleasing is not a clinical term.
Autonomous motivation simply means that whatever you do, you do for your own sake, whichever way you act, you act for your own reasons.
You pursue your own goals. You are there participating in any kind of interaction, anything from sex to shopping, whatever it is that you do, you do because you want to do it. And you want to do it because it makes you feel good. And it truly makes you feel good.
You don't do anything in order to please someone. You don't do anything for someone to like you or to accept you. You don't do anything because you want to belong. You don't do anything because you're afraid to act otherwise. You don't do anything because you're intimidated or under threat. You don't do anything for non-autonomous reasons. You act because you're an autonomous agent and you act for your own well-being and for your own good.
This is a sign of mental health and a major sign that you have been successful at removing, expunging the narcissist, purging him from your mind.
Number nine, no catastrophizing, no feeling of imminent doom, no experience of all pervasive, ubiquitous gloom.
You don't immediately assume the worst. You don't expect the most difficult and harrowing scenario to always materialize because this is the narcissist view of the world.
And so you recapture your original optimism, joie de vivre, elle, un vital, the French get it best, you know, they are bon vivant.
So you recapture your zest for life. You want to live. You want to live because you anticipate good things. You believe that your initiatives, your choices, your decisions, people around you, your environment will reward you somehow.
This is not to say that you should become gullible or naive or stupid.
No, that's not what I mean.
What I mean is that you should weigh everything realistically, remember reality testing, and then decide what may end in a catastrophe and what may not.
What the narcissist instills in you is fear of life itself.
This wants you to reject life so that it can impose on you.
And it's a coercive process, a shared fantasy where he becomes your life. He is the source and found of your existence. This is an existence once removed by proxy, his proxy.
So by reclaiming your life, taking it back from the narcissist in your mind, by doing this you are repudiating the narcissist's creed and message.
There is no life except through me.
Remember the narcissist regards himself as a God, a divinity. And exactly like in the scriptures he says, "I am life, you can live only through me." That is never true, of course. The narcissist is not life.
If anything, the narcissist is death. The narcissist is desudo. The narcissist is fanatos. He is the death instinct. He is mourning and grieving, reified. He is dark.
So just erase him. Just delete him from your mind.
And by vacating him, life will gush in and rush in and fulfill the place that he has held in your brain, in your existence, in your life and in your mind.
Next, non-desipatory anxiety is somewhat connected to catastrophizing.
Catastrophizing is the process of attributing catastrophic outcomes or consequences to very clear paths, decisions and choices.
Anticipatory anxiety is much more diffuse. It's a feeling of unease. You feel ill settled. You feel something is wrong. You can't put your finger on it. It's just a dark, gloomy atmosphere. It's ambient.
And so as long as you're with the narcissist, you actually anticipate the varieties of abuse that the narcissist is bound to inflict on you. You know it's going to be tough and rough and horrible. You know you're going to pay a price for being with the narcissist.
And this creates in you and genders in you a generalized form of anxiety, which is essentially anticipatory.
If you're borderline, you anticipate abandonment. If you are healthy and normal, you simply anticipate being tortured, being reduced, being eroded and corroded by the narcissist's presence, his demands and his imposition on you of a fantastic, dystopian, almost sci-fi planet, narcissism.
Getting rid of anticipatory generalized anxiety is a sign of healing.
Next, no addictive cravings, no sentimental nostalgia, no separation insecurity, abandonment anxiety.
If you remember or recall your times with the narcissist, if you conjure up the narcissist in your mind and then you feel cravings for the narcissist, you feel sentimental, your eyes tear up, you feel nostalgic, you feel abandoned and anxious about that abandonment, you're not healed.
He is still in your mind, he is still exerting this power over you, the power of a parent, of a mother, the power that a mother has over her infant child.
It means that you are still regressed into infancy.
If you care to watch my other videos, I describe how the narcissist regresses you to infancy in order to prevent you from creating healthy boundaries and taking over your mind via in training and other processes.
So if you crave the narcissist, if you miss the narcissist, if you want the narcissist, if you begin to rewrite history and consider your time with the narcissist to have been fun and good, something is wrong with you.
You are still regressed. You are still an infant.
You need to grow up via the twin processes of separation, individuation, and I have videos dedicated to this.
Next.
You're capable of trusting again.
Many of the signs that I described are no longer present.
You feel confident. You go out into the dating market or you start to interact with people.
Are you still looking for the same type of partner? Are you still seeking a narcissist because he is colorful?
He is confident. He is amazing.
Is this the case?
You still go for the same type of mate?
In clinical terms, do you still have narcissistic mate selection? Are you looking for narcissistic love objects?
Then you are not cured and you are not healed. You are simply trying to replace one narcissist with another.
You need to transition to an aclitic mate selection, an aclitic love object.
There is a video, I uploaded it yesterday, where I discussed the differences between one type of mate selection and another.
If you are out there looking for someone who reminds you of your narcissist, a substitute into your narcissist, a stand-in, a doppelganger, someone who is a replica of your narcissist, a copy, you are still infected. You are still infected.
A narcissistic virus is still in full-fledged, full-scale operation in your mind.
Next.
Do you still develop maternal or parental impulses? When you do date or you do team up with the next intimate partner, do you find yourself thinking in terms of a mother or in terms of a father or in terms of a parent, a kind of abstract genderless parent? Are you trying to provide services, display emotions which are more typical of a parent than an intimate partner? Do you parentify yourself?
When you are not healed, you should avoid narcissistic transference, idealization, mirror and twin-ship transference. I discussed them in yesterday's video.
If you go out dating, pick up a date and you begin to develop an intimate relationship with that person and you find yourself acting inexorably and increasingly more like his mother or his father or whatever, then something is wrong.
A narcissist is still in your mind and he still compels you like a parasite. He still compels your brain, compels you to act not as a full-fledged adult with her needs or his needs for intimacy and love and sex, but as a mother or father substitute.
It's a sign that the infection is still ongoing.
Next, do you still think in terms of us versus them?
Now I'm talking on a stage where you have regained trust, self-confidence, autonomy, an agency and you're out there dating people, trying to find your next intimate partner. Do you still think of yourself as a mother or a father?
Bad sign.
Are you still looking for the same type of partner? Bad sign.
Type constancy is a bad sign.
Do you still consider yourself and your new boyfriend or girlfriend or intimate partner? Do you still consider yourself as a unit, a single organism, twin flames, soulmates, us against the world?
This is cult-like thinking. This is a form of splitting, deparenting thinking, where the world is all bad and you and your intimate partner form a unity which is all good. This is sick. This is sick.
You should consider an intimate relationship as an arena, a place where you can be more of you, where you can safely become, where you can self-actualize, where you can realize your potential, where you can enhance your separateness and bring all these treasures to the common chest of your togetherness and couplehood and dyad.
If your partner encourages you to suspend yourself, to immerse yourself, to subsume yourself in totality of the togetherness so that you vanish and disappear and reappear inside the couple, that is sick, that is cult-like thinking, it is merger, it is fusion, it is a shared fantasy, your boundaries are breached and evaporated and eradicated and you need your boundaries intact to avoid enmeshment and engulfment.
If this is still happening to you, you have a long way to go and a lot of work to do.
Next, are you attempting to read other people's minds, including his or her mind if you have an intimate partner?
Do you still assume that it is your responsibility to make your partner happy, to preserve your partner or enhance your partner's well-being, to not hurt your partner's emotions even at the price of self-sacrifice?
This is wrong thinking.
Do you still believe that you should have anticipated your partner's expectations and needs and you should have fulfilled them well ahead of time? That is wrong thinking, that is sick thinking.
You should never presume to read your partner's mind, he or she should communicate with you. And you should never sacrifice yourself, your well-being, your interests, your needs and your goals and your life in favor of anyone else, anybody else. That's always wrong.
Unmitigatingly so, irredeemably so, there's no redeeming feature in such behavior. It's 100% sick to the core.
That's what pleases do. That's what codependents do.
Next.
You're not self-sacrificial anymore. You don't have people pleasing impulses, but you're still giving to emotional blackmail.
It's easy to push your buttons. It's easy to force you to be empathic and understanding and kind and compassionate and attentive and affectionate against your will and when the partner does not deserve it.
Partner, when your parents, your children, your neighbors, your colleagues, whoever.
If people are able to emotionally blackmail you into behavior, into the kind of behavior that does not reflect reality and that impinges or impunes your well-being and self-interest, something is wrong. Never succumb to emotional blackmail. No one has a right to demand anything from you emotionally. You are under no obligation to gratify anyone in any possible way in regarding any emotion whatsoever.
People, adults, contract freely and exchange goods and services and emotions freely. If they do it under coercion, under blackmail, under extortion, under intimidation, under threat, under fear, that's not a fair exchange. It's not a free exchange. It's potentially criminal, actually. Stop it. Put a stop to it. Don't let anyone manipulate you into being who you're not and into doing what should not be done and what you do not wish to do.
Next, do you find, do you spot in yourself infantile defenses, infantile defense mechanisms?
For example, do you split the world or other people into all good and all bad, black and white? Do you then cycle one day someone is all good, the next day the same person is all bad? Is your identity stable? Your values the same from one day to the next? Your beliefs persistent and consistent?
The only answer to any of these questions is no.
And if you do deploy primitive defenses such as splitting or projection, you attribute to other people things, traits, behaviors, thoughts and emotions that you hate in yourself that you reject in yourself that you loathe in yourself and you attribute these to other people, that's projection. It's a primitive defense.
If you divide the world into black and white, good and bad, all good and all bad, all black and all white, no gray, no compromise, no middle ground, that is splitting. It's a primitive defense.
If you find yourself doing this, you have been infected by the narcissist because these defense mechanisms are typical of cluster B personality disorders, especially narcissistic and borderline personality disorders.
Sometimes people are stuck at an early stage of development.
They have arrested what used to be called arrested or stunted development.
They're children. They're simply children. They're infants.
So normally they have infantile defenses and they pass on these defenses to you because they filter reality for you.
They isolate you from reality. They become the screen upon which you project what they want you to project.
They tell you what to think and they also inform you how to think and they penalize you if you don't comply.
It's as simple as that.
You need to get rid of these ways of seeing the world. You need to see the world through your own eyes. You need to get rid, you need to dispose of the narcissist's internalized gaze.
However, every single thing the narcissist has told you is not true, not because the narcissist is a liar, is actually not a liar, not because it gaslight, gaslit you.
Psychopaths do this, not narcissists, but because the narcissist is deluded. He has delusions. He's on the verge of psychosis.
And so the narcissist sees the world in an extremely cognitively distorted way.
Narcissists also do not have access to their positive emotions. They have positive emotions and negative emotions like every other human being, but they have blocked the access to their positive emotions because there's a lot of shame and pain and hurt associated with these emotions.
In the absence of functioning positive emotions besieged by numerous cognitive distortions such as grandiosity, subject to infantile defense mechanisms such as splitting and projection, how can you trust the narcissist to give you a true picture of reality?
Is a bad guide and an even worse advisor?
Get rid of everything you've learned from him, especially infantile things and infantile defenses.
Do you idealize yourself? Do you devalue yourself? Do you still find yourself doing these things?
Because this is the whole of mirrors effect of narcissism.
The narcissist takes a snapshot of you, introjects the snapshot, photoshops the snapshot, ideally idealizes you and then he grants you access to this idealized image of yourself in a whole of mirrors.
You see yourself multiplied a thousand times. It's addictive. It's irresistible. You fall in love with yourself actually with your idealized image.
When the narcissist is gone, no longer with you, exited your life, you may still be addicted to your self-idealized image.
The narcissist departs in a hail of self devaluation. He devalues you. He renders you for secretary object, an enemy, worthless kind of thing. He implants in you a bad object.
Do you therefore swing or switch between self-idealization and self-devaluation?
If you do, the narcissist is still firmly embedded in your mind. You still have a lot of work to do.
You need to develop realistic introspection, totally self-awareness, your limitations and shortcomings as well as your strong points and endowments. You need to see yourself as you are an imperfect being. We all are imperfect, except me of course.
You need to see yourself this way. When you see yourself this way, it would be possible for you to develop self-love.
I have a video dedicated to this, to self-love, the four pillars of self-love.
That's what the narcissist does to you by coercing you to pendulate, to oscillate and to vacillate between self-idealization and self-devaluation.
Narcissist prevents you from developing a constant, stable self-image and self-perception, thereby denying you the possibility of actually loving yourself as you are.
How can you love yourself if you are not you?
The idealized image is not you. The devalued image is not you. You are never you.
Just make sure that you are never you and then you depend on him for external regulation. He is the one to reduce your inability and your dysregulation, mood and emotion.
Okay, how about your functioning? Is your functioning restored? Are you socially active? Do you perform in the workplace? Are you a good parent again? Did you regain your empathy?
These are hallmarks. These are signs and signals of recovery and healing.
The narcissist damages your functionality, hampers it, obstructs it, reduces it, diminishes it, tramples on it, discourages it with intermittent reinforcement. He doesn't want you to function.
Showing your functionality is a rebellion against the narcissist's compelling, overriding, over-winning and dominant introject. It's showing the narcissist two middle fingers and back to life and prospering and thriving and functioning your gun for good and for real externally and internally.
Next, when you experience emotions, do you experience them directly or do you experience them through other people?
In other words, when you are the one who should have been sad, are you actually sad for someone else? When you are the one who should have been happy, are you actually happy for someone else or for someone else's sake?
Do you find yourself crying while watching movies or attributing emotions to your pet and anthropomorphizing your pet?
These are all ways of indirectly experiencing emotions by proxy, as it were, emoting by proxy.
It's a major sign that you are still not healed and you have not recovered.
When the narcissist is truly, truly purged from your mind, when he is deleted, when his voice is silenced, at that point you will have regained the capacity to emote, to experience emotions in a very direct way and to attribute them to yourself rather than project emotions and attribute them to other people, you would understand that you are the one doing the emoting, you are the one experiencing the emotions and that's a healthy thing.
Not trust aversion, remember, I told you when we were both much younger, you need to trust again but trusting again is only half of the equation, the other half is intimacy.
You need to not be afraid of intimacy, to not dread intimacy.
The narcissist, the experience of having survived the narcissist, the kind of intimacy that the narcissist parlayed and imposed on you is debilitating, it's terrifying.
The narcissist provokes in you an aversion, aversion to intimacy because he connects intimacy with pain and hurt, every time he tried to be intimate with the narcissist, he hurt you, he caused you pain, he degraded you and humiliated you and shamed you and punished you, so you've learned to not be intimate.
The greatest art and the greatest infliction that the narcissist has to offer you, the greatest affliction the narcissist has to offer you is to disable your capacity to be intimate with people because he teaches you to associate intimacy with damage, with brokenness, with hurt the same way he associates intimacy with all these things because as a child his intimacy with his mother has been disrupted to the point that he experienced life threatening shame and overwhelming pain.
The narcissist has dysregulated intimacy, he is intimacy anorectic and he causes you to be the same, regaining your capacity to be intimate is possibly the greatest sign of healing and recovery from narcissistic abuse which leads me to the last point.
Do you still consider yourself a victim? Is victimhood your new identity? Are you somehow proud of your victimhood? Do you use your victimhood to score points with people, to position yourself compared to other people, relative positioning? Do you compete with people as to who is the bigger victim? Do you eulogize your victimhood? Do you try to inform other people of your victimhood as if it were some kind of badge of honor? Do you assume personal responsibility for your contributions to what has happened to you? What has happened to you?
If you are still in a victim mindset you will never ever recover and never ever heal and this is why I am so furious at all the self-styled experts online who seek to perpetuate your victimhood, to glorify it, to glamorize it because they make money off of it.
This is unconscionable, this is sick, this is unethical, this is immoral, this is unbelievably cruel and callous, this is capitalistic.
These people are making money off your victimhood and they want to keep you in a state of victimhood. As long as you are a victim you are going to buy books, you are going to participate in seminars, so they want you to remain a victim for life.
And to accomplish this they are telling you that victimhood is an angelic state.
They are exactly like the narcissistic abuser, they are teaching you to split the world into all good victims and all bad others, including your abuser.
They do this laughing all the way to the back, they are con artists and worse.
So get rid of your victimhood, you have been victimized and being victimized was through no fault of your own, you did nothing wrong to be victimized but you did contribute, you did contribute to the state of having been victimized.
For example, you made the wrong mate selection and being victimized is not an identity, it's an event, it's an occurrence.
You have been victimized, move on.
Your identity is not that of a victim, your identity is who you are, joyful, joyful, happy with potential, with skills, with talents, with a smile that lights up the room, that's who you are.
Live victimhood in your past, don't touch it, it's a substance as poisonous as narcissism itself.