Seeing is believing. Hearing should make you skeptical.

A primary aim of mine is to expose narcissistic behavior and help identify and heal the effects of being raised by one of these damaged individuals. True narcs can be harder to spot than you might imagine. They invent an idealized self and then do everything to hold up that appearance except the things that would make the authentic. My dad studies the Bhagavad Gita but is incapable of selfless action. He has literally never made a decision that wasn't out of his own narrow self interest, regardless of how the external logic might appear. Donald Trump never actually was a successful business man. He had how many bankruptcies? 5? Including casinos? Do you know how hard it is to bankrupt a casino if you aren't a complete moron? He wasn't intellectually capable of doing the necessary work of learning to be a good businessman. My father lacks the emotional intelligence to understand the words he's spent his life studying. Its pathetic.

Narcs are so limited by their self centeredness that traditional intelligence escapes them. They are master manipulators with no conscience who are incapable of acting out of anything but their own self interest. It should surprise no one that they are disproportionately successful in a capitalist society. We reward their awfulness and their willingness and outsized ability to use and abuse everyone around them. Let's make an agreement to stop confusing those things with intelligence. As a society we reward the qualities we pretend to abhor and punish the qualities we pretend to revere. It's fucked up. We are a profoundly sick society facing a crisis of identity. The narc will develop very charismatic persona's to attract victims, but there is nothing beneath the surface. Their own crisis of identity. They are empty vessels. For this reason we need to be aware of them and develop strategies to deal with their abnormal behavior.

One of the first things a child of a true narc will need to heal is his ability to trust. Without being able to trust healing will be virtually impossible. The narc parent has absolutely obliterated this in a child. For me I began to see it everywhere. My inability to be in relationships successfully was a product of my inability to believe anyone could love me. This is directly attributable to a parent incapable of love. If the people who created you don't love you, why the fuck would think anyone else would. This is part of the source code. A core belief. It lies in our subconscious. We may not even be aware of it as the source of so much unease. I realized my lifelong fear of heights was essentially a trust issue stemming from a family structure that provided no safety. To a child who had to arrange his world into threat reduction tragically too early. What is a fear of heights if not an absence of safety despite literal guardrails?

Most importantly and most damaging is the child's inability to trust himself. Look at what Donald Trump is doing. He is explicitly telling his followers not to believe what they see. Only believe what he says. Consider for a moment this as a 4 decade parenting strategy. My fathers abuse and neglect depended on his ability to convince us of his greatness at the expense of our fragile minds. If he blew off a Saturday, he was incapable of being accountable. Both internally and externally. So he would create a reason, a lie as to why it wasn't his fault. Don't trust what you feel, see or experience. Only trust my words. Now repeat that thousands of times over 40 years for literally everything and you begin to see the singular hell that is a child of a narc's inner life. You can begin to understand how hard it is to heal.

The ability to trust must be practiced. Like a muscle it must be shaped and built into something formidable. For us children of narcs when we being to heal we begin with our ability to trust at far less than zero. If we are lucky we have some friends or some family members that truly know us and see us. That will listen to us and hear what we are saying. Identify these people in your lives and use them. Tell them what you are doing. Tell them who you are and what you need from them. If they are the right people you will know because it will feel uncomfortable. We have felt unsafe for so long that safety with another person is not familiar. Identify that feeling and embrace change. Vocalize your fears. Trust them to keep you safe. Your vulnerability will be a gift to the person who knows what to do with it. You offer them the chance to love on a deeper level and the good ones know this in their souls. It's ok to be afraid. It's not ok to let fear hold you back from the healing you deserve.

Its hard for us to know who to trust. That's the crux. Trust yourself to know. Begin by knowing what not to look for. It's a puzzle. As I write this I see the catch 22, but that is the healing. It is a risk. It is a plunge and you may have to start over a few times. But we have to do this. We have to trust ourselves. We have to trust someone. One of the absolute joys of recovery is in the discovery of the power of vulnerability. We cannot know what it feels like to be safe unless we understand why we feel unsafe. We cannot understand why we feel unsafe without knowing ourselves. We cannot know ourselves with sharing ourselves. In the eyes and hearts of others we find ourselves. It's that simple. It's that complex.

The narc has stolen this from us and we need to take it back. Simple exercises in mindfulness can be a good way to begin the process of trusting. Bringing ourselves into the moment and living there is the antidote. If I am washing dishes its easy to acknowledge I'm washing dishes and subsequently to trust that I'm washing dishes. Its seems silly. The process of moving into the truth begins with smalls steps. Our minds take time to mold. Our mental habits are not easily broken. Consciously trusting things that are obvious trains us to trust the things that require a little more work. Brick by brick you build yourself. Another aspect of mindfulness that helps is emotional recognition. We don't even trust our emotions. Sadness becomes anger. Anger becomes self hatred. Self hatred becomes unresponsive depression. If we dealt with the sadness nothing would have happened after. Be honest with yourself. If you are sad, recognize your sadness and it's source. Allow the feelings to pass without judgement. Be connected to yourself through an accurate acceptance of whatever life is making you feel. Whatever it is, it is ok. Trust yourself to feel the right things at the right time.

I'm sure this sounds like a bunch of weird bullshit to most people. Thankfully my experience isn't most people's experience. My hope is that someone reads this and it eases their pain even just a little bit. There is no handbook for this. Conventional wisdom from really smart people didn't work and made it worse. This has worked for me. I'm still on the path of processing. It helps me to share and it helps me to organize my thoughts. If you read this, I thank you for the gift of your time.