You are a threat to the narcissist

Hi there dear truth warriors, welcome back to the channel. For those of you who are new to the channel, I'm Petra Van Dale, a life coach, breathwork practitioner and advocate for survivors of narcissistic and emotional abuse. I just want to say a quick thank you to all of you who have emailed me in the last couple of weeks and months asking whether I'd shut down my practice, whether I'm still active on my YouTube channel. Well the latter, no I haven't been very active and that is simply due to the fact that my practice is very busy. So I'm speaking to hundreds of men, women, teenagers who have unfortunately and sadly enough been through the trauma of narcissistic and emotional abuse. So I don't have a whole lot of time to make videos that I used to in the beginning, every week or every couple of days and now I just whenever I get the opportunity, like in this very moment, I will sit down and make a video. So thank you, thank you for all your emails. Today I wanted to focus, I want to focus on when you have been discarded by a narcissist and what that does to your psyche, what that does to being able to function or the lack of function in your daily life and this is because the narcissist's agenda is always about dominance and control. You are a threat to their very existence because they do not hold the same values that you hold, the strengths that you have. Because they have none of that they are looking to break it down, break down those values, those strengths in every single person they encounter. So it's usually not that a narcissist will target a weak person. They usually, nine times out of ten, target a strong person who has strong values and strengths that you may not be aware of because you are downplaying your existence and this is exactly what a narcissist wants. So when you start to break out of their their evil web, for lack of a better term, this is when they're going to come after you and try and continue to break down those strengths that you hold within yourself. So you are a threat to them and again the only card they can play is to dominate you and control you. It has nothing to do with love. As the late Miss Tina Turner sang, what's love got to do with it? Well in this case love has nothing to do with it. There is no that the narcissist does not understand the concept of authentic and unconditional love. They just don't get it. They are just looking to dominate, control and diminish you. And this brings me to my next point because what often happens when you have been discarded by the narcissist is that you yourself feel shame, you feel fear, you feel guilt and this really has nothing to do with you because how often have you asked yourself, I know I did it myself when I had been discarded or when I came out of these toxic relationships, is that I asked myself what did I do wrong? Did I say the wrong thing? Did I do the wrong thing? Did I present myself in the wrong way? So we always question ourselves what is it that I did when it's not about what you did. It's about what the narcissist has programmed into your brain because the narcissist is all about denial, degrading, dishonouring and this is what has been programmed into you in the course of the relationship that you've had with them. So they program you to feel this way, to feel that you need to be doing more, saying more, giving more in order for them to feel better about themselves and this is why a narcissist has themselves at a certain level and they want to keep you below them. They do not want you to succeed, they do not want you to accelerate your life in a good way because that makes them feel powerless. It diminishes them so this is why they always practice control, always and the thing is when you're feeling guilty about what you may or may not have done, this again leaves the door open to the narcissist in order for them to return and continue the manipulation tactics. So there happened to be, there was a sweet lady that I spoke to this morning who has just recently been discarded and she says I feel so much shame and so much guilt because I could have done more, I could have been more for this person in my life and she had been through some horrific, horrific experiences. You know it even, it broke my heart, it always does. Every time I listen to these stories and I'm in conversation with survivors of abuse, it always just, I have so much sympathy because these are absolutely horrific stories that are told and you still leave those relationships feeling that you could have done more and been more for the narcissist. No, no, no, no, no. Take a breath and tell yourself this is not my doing. Abuse is never your doing, it's never your fault that abuse occurs. It is however your responsibility as I've said in very many videos, it is your responsibility to raise your awareness as to what you are experiencing and to keep yourself safe, to rescue yourself out of those situations if at all possible. So you can never build a healthy relationship with unhealthy values. You can never build, establish and maintain a healthy relationship when your foundation is one of deceit through the narcissist, when it's one of manipulation, dishonouring, disrespect, denial. There is no way when your foundation is that eroded can you build any healthy relationship. So this is very important to remember. Don't engage, stop engaging with the narcissist and I realise that it is so painful when you have been discarded but what we wrongfully think is that if I re-engage with them, if I explain myself, if I defend myself, then we can come to an understanding and we can have an open and honest conversation. Well honesty does not live within the world of the narcissist. It's all about denial. There is no honesty there. There's no respect for themselves. They think they're very respectful towards themselves and others but the opposite is the truth. So you are there to fuel the narcissist. You are simply an object that they are going to use and use and use until they are tired of you, until they find new fuel, a brand new shining object and then you will be discarded. So if anything, be grateful for the fact that this person has discarded you and I know that sounds terrible when you have just been discarded. It's very painful of course as you all know but this is a gift. This is a gift that has been given to you and the sooner you stop engaging with them, stop defending yourself, when you put all of your focus back onto you, that is how you can start on your journey of healing. Because when you keep returning and re-engaging with the narcissist, this just fuels them and it diminishes you and there is nothing valuable in diminishing yourself because this just makes the narcissist feel stronger about themselves. So where you diminish yourself, where you say that maybe I'm a bad person, maybe I shouldn't have spoken up to the narcissist, maybe I shouldn't have confronted them or called them out on bad behaviour, this kind of terminology is diminishing your very existence and this is exactly what the narcissist wants from you because they feel even more powerful when they see that you're doing this, that you are demonstrating this behaviour. So stop engaging, stop defending yourself because there is no end to it. It's an endless cycle, an endless cycle of abuse and yes we all long for the beginning stages of this relationship where everything was hunky-dory, where it felt soft and warm and fuzzy, all the good stuff, but if you look back and you're very truthful to yourself, you will realise that this was only just a matter of weeks that you had this wonderful feeling and then the abuse set in, then the red flags started showing up and it's very easy to say, well I see the red flags but I'm going to ignore them. Of course it's easy to do that because you want to hold on to all the good stuff, the way you felt in the beginning of the relationship but this is something that they had to do in order to seduce you into this relationship. So stop diminishing yourself, cry, be angry about it, have all these emotions. If anything, don't deny what you're feeling and and the emotions that you're going through but do it in the space and the comfort of your own home, by yourself and this is very important because when you disengage from the narcissist and you hold that space for yourself where you can go through those emotions, go through those feelings, get the therapy you need, get the coaching you need, the help that you need. You need assistance going through this, you cannot do it on your own. You can try but it's always great to have a support network around you and someone professional who can help you through this and when I say professional what I'm meaning is preferably someone who has been through it because narcissistic abuse is very difficult to explain and very difficult to understand when you haven't been subjected to that kind of abuse yourself. So again as I said, stop diminishing yourself because you're only making them stronger. Break that cord if it means blocking them on your phone. I've said this so many times before, block them on the phone, block the email, learn to set healthy boundaries, learn how to protect yourself in a healthy way because we cannot, it is impossible to get rid of every single narcissistic person. They are all around us, we're living among them, they are living among us but what you can do is honour yourself, is hold yourself to a higher standard, protect yourself, learn to set those healthy boundaries so that when you see, when you sense that you have once again encountered someone with very toxic behaviour you will then immediately be able to put up those boundaries and hold yourself in high esteem. So I hope that has helped some. Please send in your video topics and I will be on a break for the next couple of weeks which is also going to give me more time to make more videos. I'm hoping to be able to do that in the next month. Please send in your topics and I will definitely choose a couple of them to make videos with. Take care of yourselves, stay strong and stay true to yourself. Speak to you all next time.