Trauma Bonding: This must be my problem with breaking the connection to my stalkers

Here is an article about trauma bonding.  It describes how having some sort of relationship, even abusive, with a narcissist is addictive.  Because it is an addiction, it is very hard to break your mind off it.  This is one reason why people keep going back to their abusers.

I have also noted something quite interesting: the posts my stalkers keep looking at.  Like at least one of them is also addicted to posts about my current life, not just posts about them.  Why don’t they just ignore my blog?  Does this go both ways?

I have begged Richard to leave me in peace, said he’s keeping me connected to him, to please go away and let me heal and forget.  But here he still is.

It must be on purpose, to, as my husband would term it, keep his hooks in me.  Why?  What does he hope to get from this?  Narcissistic supply?  So I have to fight it off, break the connection even while he tries to keep it going.

I’ve been working hard to break it.  I noted my weaknesses and began fortifying the walls against him.  I noted what made it so easy to fall for certain lies, and discussed with my husband what warning signs to watch for.

I’m finally eradicating the grief and reminding myself again and again of the evil that I have seen in Richard these past few years.  I’m fighting off the doubts that he’s actually a narcissist.

I did get a setback last week when, for several frightened minutes, I thought for sure he was stalking me in real life as well as online.  But I’m identifying triggers and fighting them off.  Getting them out of my head, defusing those “time bombs” which narcs implant in your head that keep them affecting you years after they leave your life.

I’m trying to reach out a bit more to others.  I was reaching out, making friends, reconnecting with friends, starting to heal, when my narcs found my blog and began stalking it and harassing me.  It sent me back into my shell.  But I must break out of it and reach out again.

My new church friend may have moved away, but I can still talk to him on Facebook.  I should get back into the spiritual and theological conversations we were having a year ago, which helped me start disconnecting Orthodoxy from Richard and reconnecting it with other Orthodox believers.

Unlike Richard, this guy is a Democrat, and he agrees with me that doctrine is important, not pews/organs/etc. (things which are contested in many Orthodox circles).  One of his friends, who is converting, has taken a liking to me, chats with me before services, even called me for a few minutes tonight just to talk nonsense.

An old friend and his wife seem to love reconnecting with us, and I’m introducing the wife to my favorite movie, Clarissa.  She’s really gotten into it, and I’m supposed to bring the last episode when next I visit.

One huge help has been the blogs of other narcissist victims:

• Seeing how universal my experiences actually have been, even though the circumstances differ from others’.
• Identifying triggers.
• Discovering that my PTSD symptoms are common with narc victims.
• Discovering that we all have trouble getting narcs out of our heads, because of the “time bombs” they put in our heads.
• Discovering that even getting upset, shaken, nauseous, and the like, is quite common just from running into your narc and/or abuser on the street.
• Discovering that recovery, healing and moving on can take years.  But if you try to force it along by pushing down, denying, ignoring and “forgetting” about what happened to you, rather than processing and facing the pain, it comes out in other ways: migraines, physical ailments, a short fuse and lashing out in anger at family and friends, that sort of thing.
• And discovering, most of all, from those farther along this path than I am, that recovery and healing is indeed possible.

Many of us don’t understand why it’s so hard to stay away from the Narcissist even after we learn how toxic they are to us. Aside from their obvious charm, it’s important to recognize how the Narcissist brainwashes us.

I know it sounds dramatic, but it’s true. Narcissists literally brainwash us. They know exactly how to keep us coming back with the lure, the promise and the hook. Understanding how they do this is helpful to your recovery.

Narcissists are master manipulators. They know how to make us feel guilty, so we will come back for absolution.

They know how to make us feel sorry for them, so we will offer to help them.

They know how to promise great things, so we will return in hopes that it will be different this time. They know how to make us doubt ourselves, so we will seek validation from them.

Ultimately, they have trained us to return to them over and over again.–Lisa E. Scott, Why is it so Difficult to Stay Away from the Narcissist?