8 Ways Narcissists Make You Lose Yourself And Bond To Them
You have probably heard of the term ‘trauma bonding’ before, and even if you haven’t, I’m sure that like me, you will have experienced the symptoms of trauma bonding within a narcissistic relationship.
Trauma bonding holds us attached to an abuser even when our brain is logically screaming at us to leave and stay away. It holds us prisoner and we feel incapable and terrified of breaking free – trying to escape brings up emotional pain and horrific physical symptoms.
How do narcissists manage to change really tough, capable, amazing people into frightened dependents, with no self-esteem, self-respect, self-truth and self-value?
How do they convince you that you are the problem, and that you are incapable of coping on your own – in spite of all your previous experience to the contrary? Most importantly, how is it that you end up feeling like you cannot live without them, so that the prospect of it hits you like a sucker-punch and leaves you feeling broken and unable to function?
In this Thriver TV episode, I want to look at the 8 ways a narcissist will use to bond you to them. And best of all, I will show you the antidotes against those tactics, so that you can break free of those damaging trauma bonds, reclaim the driver’s seat of your life, and move forwards into the life you dream of and deserve.
Video Transcript
In today’s episode I want to talk to you about the eight ways that a narcissist can trauma bond you to them, and the antidotes to these: the real, wise, inner truth that can help you pull up and out of those trauma bonds.
If you are new to my YouTube channel, I would love you to ‘like’ this video, subscribe, and hit the notification bell. Then please share, share, share! Let’s get this information out there so that we can create a revolution of healing for real from this – for ourselves, our children, and our planet.
So let’s get into the first way that a narcissist can trauma bond you, and this is how it initially happens.
Number 1 – Love Bombing
You might have heard of the expression ‘love bomb’, but what does it really mean? Love bombing is the way that a narcissist can position themselves to give you that emotional feeling of “I’m seen, I’m heard, I’m safe, this is what I’ve been waiting for”.
I’m going to give you a really simple example. Let’s say you meet a narcissist via dating. You’re on a date, and the narcissist may say to you, “Why are you single? What happened?” And you could say something like, “Well, my previous relationship, he ran off with another woman,” or whatever it is. The narcissist, if they’re interested in you, will lean forward and intently say to you, “I can’t believe how people could do that, I’ve always been monogamous.” They’ll say other beguiling things – very intently looking you straight in the eyes – that seem so believable that you think you’ve hit pay dirt. You think, “oh my gosh, this is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”
And a narcissist can do this in any walk of life.
They could be the neighbour who saw you upset and asked “what’s wrong?” or, “what has hurt you in the past?” They pretend to be so attentive, invite you over, and lend you this and lend you that.
They could be the friend who very quickly works out that you’ve had friendships in the past where you’ve felt not included and unimportant, and like you’re the one doing all the work. The narcissist will then start delivering in spades all the things that you’ve been missing in a friendship.
They could appear in your work environment telling you they are the boss that you’ve always wanted. Or if you are a business owner who is recruiting, the will come and appear to be beyond the perfect fit for that job description.
Now, here’s the thing about this: for the narcissist this is never about delivering what you want.
Instead, it is all about connecting to you, and getting you to trust them and open your doors to them so that they can enmesh and trauma bond with you. This then means that no matter what they do or how badly they treat you, you’re going to stay bonded while they are siphoning out and taking your soul, your life force, your resources, your money – whatever they feel entitled to (which is pretty much everything). And they do this by getting you to trust them and let them in very, very quickly.
So what we have to understand about love bombing is that it only works if we allow ourselves to be rushed.
As an adult in your own body – living in a quantum reality of plenty and self-generation (by doing the healing work that we do in this community to thrive) – what will happen is that you will take your time with people. You absolutely have the mindset of plenty: “I’m going to check you out, I’m going to take my time before I commit to you at any level, and if you’re not the real deal I’ll say goodbye, because there is better from where you’re coming from”.
There’s an old saying that I love, that hungry people make the worst shoppers. If you go to a supermarket and you’re really hungry you’ll just chuck junk in the trolley. After doing the inner work to get solid and much more whole, it is like going to the supermarket when you already feel satiated and full. You will make some really healthy choices for your trolley.
I want you to really think about that, it’s so important. Because narcissists aren’t going to change, but we can. That’s where our power is.
Number 2 – Future Faking
A narcissist will make out that they have exactly the same interests and the same visions for the future as you do.
“Yes, I want to start a family”; “yes I want this; yes, I want that”; “yes, I see this is where we’re going to take the business” – whatever it is that you want is what they will say they want too. So you think, “oh my gosh, I’ve met a soulmate! Somebody who’s on the same track, who loves the same things, who has the same vision for the future.”
The narcissist in reality is an empty void, with no self. They don’t have an inner being and they are a false self which depends on other people’s energy and resources to try to be a self. It’s like a vampire needs to drink human blood to be alive – the narcissist is the same.
The narcissist isn’t interested in the future, and in fact unconsciously most narcissists know there’s not going to be a future to your relationship. It’s all going to go belly up and they’re going to have to recreate everything anyway. So the narcissist is in it for the feed of your money, your resources, your stuff, your life force, your sex, your body – whatever it is that they can siphon and suck out of you.
They’re not worried about the future. They don’t want happily ever after – the sheep dog, the picket fence and the 2.3 kids – that’s not what they’re after at all. Those things can happen, but they’re not after that. They’re after your life force, your soul and your stuff, so they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear and pretend that they’re that person who wants that future.
Just like with love bombing, this creates a trauma bond. We get hooked on “I need this person for that dream, for myself, for my life force, for my future”. So it’s very similar to love bombing in that when we heal up in a quantum way and get solid on the inside, then we know where we going. We know our values and our truths; and our unfolding and expansion is our own. As an individual fractal of source and our higher self, our expression and our truth is not dependent on what a certain person is or isn’t doing. Your fellow journeyers – the genuine people in your life who are aligned in the same way – will come with you.
For example, my lovely partner Glen and I have had some very serious conversations in our relationship. I said to him, “You don’t need to want what I want, but the truth is, this is where I’m going and this is what I’m doing, and if this is what you want, come with me, and if it’s not, I’ll have to do it without you, because this is the truth of my life.”
Whereas in the past, with narcissistic and even non-narcissistic people, I would sell out my truth, my values and my soul to either try to convince them when they became the opposite, or to lower myself and hand over my soul and my truth to keep them happy when I wasn’t living true to me anyway.
Glenn is a soulmate; he’s a beautiful soul who is on this journey with me. But if he wasn’t I would let go and know there’s better from where that came from. That’s the Thriver up-level healing that we need so that we do not get trauma bonded into somebody who is future faking us – because a narcissist doesn’t want what you want, and they never will. In fact, they will never give you what you want because they don’t want unity consciousness or win / win, they want superiority / inferiority. They’ll pretend it at the start, but then they’ll withhold and punish you by giving you what you don’t want and not letting you have what you want. All narcissists do this.
Number 3 – Creating Dependency
Narcissists create dependency. They do it with gaslighting, they do it with diminishment and they do it with devaluing you. This dependency is done using Problem; Agitation; Solution – it’s part of their superiority trick.
A narcissist will tell you you’re a problem because you’re not good enough, you don’t have the information, you don’t have any idea, you don’t have the capacity, you don’t have the strength, you’re not lovable, you don’t have integrity, or you’re not good. Devalue, devalue, devalue.
The agitation is created by constantly ‘poking the stick’ at you. A covert narcissist will do this in a passive aggressive way whereas an overt narcissist will just do it directly and brutally. But it doesn’t matter, it’s the same thing. You’re losing your sense of your own confidence and self-esteem, and your own identity is absolutely compromised.
What then happens is that the narcissist says, “Well I’m the solution and I’m the answer. I know what I’m doing and I’ve got the capacity. You’re nothing without me. Without me, you wouldn’t cope, and if you don’t acquiesce to what I tell you to do and to the control I have over you, you’ll be nothing. You won’t survive. You can’t live.” They all do it.
If we try to acquiesce our way out of tyranny, we are handing over our authority to them and granting them authority over us. It’s part of the narcissistic, “I am the king / queen / god of the universe. You are nothing, and what I say goes.” There’s no unity consciousness or teamwork there. It’s all about them.
Our way out of this is to become self defined. It is to do the inner work on ourselves so that we can stand in self-respect, self-truth and self-value so that we can lay boundaries with people. This allows us to see who is going to respect our voice and our truth, and who wants to do teamwork, solution-building and win-win.
But we cannot do that until we come out of our fears of authority: our fears of, “If I don’t acquiesce, I’m going to be out in the cold. I’m going to have no options. I’m going to have no ability to create.” See, narcissists play on that. They know that’s how we think, and that’s how they hook you in through this trauma bond.
Once again, like with love bombing and future faking, this comes back to the healing and development of ourselves so that we can rise up and out of that trauma bond, and never fall into that trap again in the future. Even if you are significantly, horrifically going through this right now, your healing will enable you to stand, create boundaries, and let go of somebody who is absolutely controlling and siphoning you and diminishing you.
You cannot acquiesce your way out of tyranny. It doesn’t matter what you go along with, what you give in to, what you rise up for and how much performing seal you do to try to make this person happy, the pain is not going to stop until you say, “No! No more.” So that’s number three.
Number 4 – Flipping The Script
Originally the narcissist came into your life saying, “Here I am. I’m the person who will never cheat on you. I’m the person who’s going to give you all your business contacts. I’m the person who is the answer to your prayers after being ignored all your life. I’m the person who sees you like no other when you have been controlled and questioned all your life. I’m the person who trusts you and gives you space.” So of course, that’s who you thought you met.
It was actually the exact opposite. Because what narcissists do is they hook you in and then the mask will drop. And when the mask starts to drop, the narcissist will flip the script and start delivering your original wound in vivid Technicolor.
Let’s say for example that your thing was monogamy because you’ve been cheated on in your past, so they pretended they were totally monogamous. What’s going to start happening is the narcissist will start looking at other people and making comments to get you off balance and wondering, “Oh my, is he or she interested in that person at work? Are they having an affair? Are they…”
Then they’ll escalate it. They’ll keep pushing it to see exactly where your boundary is. Of course, eventually you will become triggered, causing you to confront them with, “well, what’s going on with this person at work?”
The narcissist will then turn it back on you and say, “Just because you’ve been cheated on in your past doesn’t mean you have to be paranoid. I’m totally monogamous and you’re the crazy one. You need therapy and you need help.”
It is the same with every vulnerability. Maybe you felt invisible and the narcissist came into your life giving you so much attention and presence. But then they begin going missing, so that you say to them, “Where are you? What are you doing and why don’t you care about me anymore?”. They’ll say, “You’re actually really insecure and oversensitive and you need to sort this out.”
Maybe you were sexually ignored in the past, and the narcissist drew you in with sex and then began ignoring you sexually once they had you hooked. It will be the same thing – it’s your fault. They flip the script and it’s always your fault.
This trauma bond hooks you in and is so difficult to get out of because you want them to go back to being the original person who was the answer to your prayers.
The truth is that you have to be the answer to your own prayers.
The narcissist was never the saviour of your wounds: they were the messenger of them. So the more you try to get them to be the saviour of your wounds, the more they’re going to be the messenger of them. They are going to show you the truth of quantum law: so within, so without. You had unhealed trauma that led you into the relationship because they pretended to save you from it. You made them your god unconsciously – we all did – but they’re your destroyer.
The only way out of this is to let go of them, come inside and heal your trauma. By doing this in a quantum way, you become a solid, whole and healed adult in your body, rather than still feeling unconsciously like a broken child trying to get a metaphoric parent do it differently this time. That’s the massive shift that will happen within you, which is life changing.
Again, it comes back to the inner work.
Number 5 – The Cycle Of Violence
The cycle of violence doesn’t have to be physical, but this happens in any abusive relationship. Tension builds and builds until there’s an explosive event. Separation happens, either emotionally or literally. You get back together. You feel like things are resolved and maybe you even have a honeymoon period, where everything’s wonderful. Then tension builds again, and then the explosion goes off again, then you separate again, then you get back together again, tension builds…explosion…. And so on.
This is typical of toxic relationships, and of relationships with a narcissist. What happens with a narcissist – and you know this – is that when you do get back together and you feel like everything’s great, well, a narcissist cannot stand it. They cannot tolerate calm, harmony, teamwork, love and peace. They need trauma. They need to trigger you, they need your louche, and they need your pain. It’s their currency, it’s their food.
They’re a dark soul – a no self that cannot exist in a plane of oneness and unity consciousness. It is disgusting to them because they cannot be superior without you being inferior. So the explosion is always going to happen.
Now, what happens after the explosion is either they take off and discard you, or you pull away to try to salvage yourself. Then you often get back together, because you miss them so much. You are so trauma bonded that maybe you get into cognitive dissonance: “Oh my God, it’s my fault, and I haven’t taken enough responsibility! This is what I can do, and I’m going to try again”. Or, “I’m going to go in there and try and get accountability and I’m going to…” So you go back.
Or perhaps you get strong enough to hold out. In that case, the narcissist will come back in to love bomb you, or trigger you, maybe by saying something horrible that they know will get to you. They will do whatever it takes to pull you back in again to get the control back.
Eventually you kind of thrash around and work it out so that you think it’s all resolved. You go forward, the explosion happens, and you find out it never was resolved. It was never a resolution – it was just a cycle of violence.
How do we escape this cycle of violence?
The way out is to recognise that you’re in cycles of violence that just get amplified, accelerated and worse each time. This is what happens in toxic relationships; they spiral downwards faster and faster and faster, whatever you do.
The relationship you need to get right is not the relationship with the narcissist. You now need to get the relationship right with yourself, so that you will no longer participate in a cycle of violence.
As always, this comes back to your own inner healing. With Quantum healing, which is what we do through my Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP), you will be able to maintain No Contact and heal yourself to become the person that you wish to be.
You will then find yourself participating in evolved relationships – which of course have their problems and their moments, but they evolve upwards into unity consciousness and solution together.
This is the complete opposite to the cycle of violence, and it is the relationship I live now with my beautiful partner, and that I was unable to have with others in the past. Without healing, I wouldn’t be able to generate it, stand for it and create it.
Number 6 – Saving The Sinking Ship
This one is so huge. Narcissists are a mess and they create messes everywhere. They’re loose cannons, they’re not accountable and they don’t play team. They don’t give a crap about authority and doing the right thing. They’re actually criminal in the way they think and operate, and they’re completely selfish. ‘The ends justify the means’ as long as they’re getting the goodies, so narcissists create messes in life.
Whereas most of us who get involved with narcissists are really good, decent, honourable, respectful people who do the right thing and take more than our fair share of any load.
When you get into any kind of relationship with a narcissist, you will start to see the roof caving in, the bills piling up and the messes everywhere. You will realize that things are going to get absolutely trashed and smashed, and so you go into doubling and tripling down to try to save the sinking ship.
This allows the narcissist to continue being a crazy narcissist. You are trauma bonded and trying to fix everything, while they are keeping you off balance and taking everything they can get.
Narcissists are often setting up bank accounts on the side, or doing and creating things behind your back. You will only find out about these things after the fact – things you never, ever believed were possible. This person is fleecing you while you are trying to keep the fires burning and the roof above your head.
The ship is sinking. The longer you stay on the ship, the more you’re going to lose. And the most horrific thing you are going to lose is your soul.
I promise you this: money, wealth, direction, expansion can all be recreated in incredible ways when you go quantum, so don’t even worry about that. But what is hard to recreate is the absolute shattering of your soul.
So I say this to you. Let go. Look after your soul and focus on becoming wholeness and solidness inside.
This is the Thriver work we do in our NARP community. The healing program enables people in the most horrific disasters to get whole, solid, and calm – and then reclaim what they have lost. Because once you are a source to your own self, that’s when you get massive results – so within, so without.
The people in our community who turn inwards with NARP and do that inner work also have the support of our incredible NARP global community to back them in finding their solutions. They are guided in their healing process and also in the practical aspects needed to move forward. In our community we regularly get people manifesting really big, powerful wins in custody, or in settlements with properties and businesses, because they walk that Thriver path.
Whereas people who stay traumatized trying to save the sinking ship usually end up losing everything. That’s just how it works and is Quantum law.
Number 7 – Peptide Addiction
Peptide addiction feeds into all of this.
Within any narcissistic relationship, you will be getting constant massive rushes of negative emotions. Things like betrayal, heartbreak, devastation and feeling like you’re being annihilated. You feel so unsafe. You don’t need me to tell you that you feel the most shocking, unthinkable, unbelievable emotions that you’ve ever felt in your life. They are like a sucker-punch to your solar plexus that leaves you feeling like you can’t get up off the ground again, it’s so bad – and this is what you are regularly experiencing.
Is it fair to say that these emotions have massively powerful charges? Absolutely.
Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza and the late Candace Pert (a specialist on peptides) discovered that when we have an event in our life, it registers in our consciousness before our brain picks it up. Our consciousness is who we are already. It’s everything from our past up to now, and is how we perceive and feel an event as an individual self.
For example, if you come from a family where you felt betrayed, lined up and as though people chose their ego over you, then betrayal from anyone will feel very personal to you. It will impact you very heavily, and give you a massive emotional feeling on it, which then sends electrical signatures to your brain.
Your brain receives those signals and sends a perception of that betrayal to your hypothalamus. Your hypothalamus then creates an amino acid chain peptide (a liquid cocktail, similar to a drug) of betrayal. This is distributed throughout your entire being – your whole cellular body structure – and your cells recognize and accept that peptide of betrayal. They recognize this peptide because they’ve had it before.
Every time your cells split, you get twice the amount of docking points to receive a particular peptide. This is how you get hooked on the peptides of the strong emotional rushes that you’re getting. You are geared to accept betrayal as your peptide, because the cells of your body are full of docking points that need the fulfillment of betrayal peptide. You are getting addicted to the betrayal peptide, therefore you will continually obsess about how this person betrayed you – with no solution or ability to let it go.
This is how you become a drug addict to the peptide of betrayal, and the narcissist is the drug dealer who provides that betrayal. Hence why you can’t stop breaking No Contact, you can’t stop going back, and you can’t stop thinking about this person.
People can get really stuck in this peptide addiction – I’ve seen it last for 40 years. So it’s a game-changer when you realize what’s going on and that you’re not defective or losing your sanity – you have a physiological peptide addiction.
Quantum inner healing releases you from the peptide addiction. It actually gets that emotional signature out of your being, which stops the chemical being created by your hypothalamus, which stops the rush, which short-circuits that whole vicious cycle. It’s really powerful, it works, and it’s key for you in going forward,
This leads us to number eight…..
Number 8 – The Inability To Leave, Stay Away And Move Forward
The inability to leave, stay away and move forward is a massive trauma bond. A lot of people think it’s logical, and of course it can seem that way: “I can’t leave because of the kids”, or “I can’t leave because I’m going to lose the house”; “I can’t leave because, because, because…”. But really it’s because of everything I’ve just spoken about.
There are trauma bonds that go way beneath the level of logical consciousness. Whatever you read or are told, there is a much deeper, more powerful story going on inside your inner being – inside of you.
This really shocks most people who have been narcissistically abused because most of us are really tough, capable, amazing people, who’ve always been able to think and ‘do’ our way out of difficult situations. We’ve always been able cope, even when other people haven’t been as strong.
This time is different. We think we can’t. It’s shocking and stunning to us that we can’t just leave, get it through our head, stay away, and move forward.
It may be because we feel like, “I can’t live without this person. I’m too sick. I’m never going to be able to work. I can’t rebuild my life. I have no other options.” It might even be, “I feel really guilty and obligated that I’m meant to stay with this person and I can’t just leave them.”
But at the end of the day if we stay and don’t break free to heal and move on, there’s no happy endings to this story. Instead, it is a descent into that deep, dark hole of losing your soul, your life force, your health, your dreams, your missions and your ability to lead the way for your future generations. Our kids don’t do what we say, they do what we do.
Once again, we change this around by going within and doing the work there. If we don’t go within, we’re going to go without. As the saying goes, ‘nothing changes if nothing changes’.
We don’t have any power to change a narcissist – we don’t have any power to change anybody. You don’t have any power to exact change beyond your skin. The only person we can change is ourselves and that’s why my focus is on healing from the inside out. It’s quantum.
In Conclusion
If you want to discover more, you can find my free 16-Day Recovery program by using this link, so that you can start to get a deeper understanding of what I’m talking about, Or if you have been following me for some time and are now ready to fully commit to the inner healing process, you can find NARP here. And my dear NARPers, if you want the best of the best support over the coming year, you can sign up for my most personalised supportive program, Love, Health & Wealth Super-Thrive, by clicking here.
I really want to hand you your power back so you can get in the driver’s seat of your life rather than staying stuck in these terrible trauma bonds. They destroy your future and they can even literally destroy you.
I hope that this has helped, and I want to send out so much love to everybody who is in trauma bonds. Please share this video far and wide with anyone it can help, who needs to hear a deeper truth about this.
Until the next one, keep smiling, keep healing, and keep thriving because there is nothing else to do!
As always, I look forward to your comments below.
