Number 6: Do not give them access to your personal life.
Do not tell them your pain points. Do not tell them everything that hurts you or your wants, needs, and desires because they use that information against you. I know for a lot of us it’s already late; you may have already done that. I get it, and feeling guilty about not knowing better is not going to solve the problem. It’s just that you have to stop doing it because it becomes a part of trauma bonding.
When we are trauma-bonded with narcissists, logically, we know what we shouldn’t do, but when we feel vulnerable and we think they’re changing, we tell them everything. We just regress to an older version of us, hoping that being vulnerable and telling them what hurts us will change them, but that gives them more ammunition to use against you.
Understand that a narcissist wants to know what’s going on in your heart, what is going on in your mind, and the difference between the two so that they can weaponize that confusion as well. They know how to keep you trapped by intermittently reinforcing you with positive treatments and how to keep you psychologically bonded to them.
Number 7: Do not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
What is that? That simply means when somebody has invested a lot of money, a lot of time, years, love, and effort into something in this case, a relationship the problems they are facing now, they minimize because what they have invested in their mind seems to be a lot more than the negative impacts of the thing they are so attached to.
We are afraid to lose our relationship with the narcissist because we are terrified of losing it all, of finding out that everything that we put into this was wasted like it was a lie from the beginning. It makes us feel like a fool. It makes us feel like we have wasted our life. That is what the sunk cost fallacy is in this context. It’s like holding on to something that does not move, it does not do anything at all. Just tying that rope around your hand is only hurting your hand; it’s not changing what you are holding on to.
That is what happens, and it’s true, there is grief in all of this. There’s grief in realizing that all those years were truly wasted, that it was nothing but a lie, that I’ll have to restart my life. I get it, but it’s never too late to start again. When and if you leave, there’s hope for you even if it feels there is none. But if you stay, there is decay, and there is death nothing beyond that.
Read More: How To End Trauma Bond with a Narcissist?
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