Why is "NO CONTACT" so important after a break up?..

 This post is not just usefull for people getting over a narcissist or particularly abusive relationship, but indeed it is timeless advice, fit for anyone with an "ex", which as i think we can all agree, is most of us!!

WHAT IS NO CONTACT?  Well, as the name would suggest, it is the term coined for the act of cutting off ALL means of contact between you and your ex, be it *Phonecalls, SMS's, Whatsapps, Social Media, Snap Chat, Email, Tik Tok, Insta, Twitter, Signal, Telegram, etc. Also, another important, and often overlooked avenue (whether intentional or not) is friends - if you have any mutual friends, family members or acquaintances, it is absolutely VITAL to inform them of your breakup, and of the fact that you are going "no-contact", which includes them not carrying stories about wither of you to the other one - NO MATTER WHAT!!

 WHY IS IT SO VITAL? As you go through the various stages of grief and healing, the last thing you need are reminders of what you left behind, and open doors to crawl through in moments of intense desperation. We all know that, in any given situation, or even just in day to day life, we all have our ups and downs.. Now think about how those  swings are affected by things such as grief, bad moods, personal trauma, or break ups - the downs are amplified, and the ups are minimised almost to extinction. What we have to be most careful of is the down times, which, at their lowest, can be accompanied by extreme depression, thoughts of suicide, or worse - the sudden and overwhelming urge to cut out losses and carterise our wounds by going back to the person who caused them in the first place, and often nothing that anyone else can do or say in that moment will dissuade us from this goal. This is why it is so important to preempt these moments, no matter how unlikely they may seem right now, trust me - theyre coming!! Knowing that they are looming on the horizon, however, is an essential and priceless piece of arsenal in our healing toolkit that we can put in place now to save us from certain heartbreak in the future.

HOW DO WE DO IT? In order to properly prepare yourself for going No-Contact you have to be BRUTAL. You need to effectively cut a person out of your life who, until recently, has been the very centre of your universe and your sole reason for being. The overwhelming desire is going to be to leave one or two avenues open, either by downplaying their importance / likeliness of possible contact , or even refusing to admit to yourself that they even exist at all. If you feel that this is something you can not yet face, which is completely understandable by the way, then it may be helpful to ask a trusted friend, councellor or colleugue to do it for you. 

WHAT TO INCLUDE: Places to focus on include all the ones mentioned above (See link*) as well as deleitng all your old chats, photos, saved videos, portraits, paintings, snaps, stories, tweets, posts, call records, email logs, etc between the two of you. This last part is an especially important step, as we tend to look back on these and romanticize them in moments of desperation. The only thing i would suggest you hang on to for the time being are any possible recordings of fights or arguments that you may have. Though for some of you this may sound like a strange thing to have in the first place, its existence is not so strange - if you are anything like me, and the millions of other victims of narcissistic abuse, then you would have felt compelled at some point to start recording these regular circular arguments, whether to capture how events actually unfolded to get a grasp on how it unraveled so quickly and dramatically, or possibly even to catch them saying certain things on tape so they can not recant / deny saying them later on. 

As you can clearly see, the reasons behind going No-Contact are many and varying, yet all are equally important, and not to be taken lightly. I can only hope for your sakes that you take this saged advice to heart and that it may help you avoid even more pain in the future. 

💔💔💔

I dont know what you are going through right now that landed you here on this age, but atleast if you found your way here it means you are on the right track and you want to get better, so i wish all the best of luck on your journey forward, and hoe to hear your tails of success one day in the not-too-far future xxx

 My Beginners Yoga Workout Video

Hi guys, so one of my major philosophies in getting over a relationship, a marriage, loss of a loved one, a job, a beloved family pet, well really the loss of anything, is EXCERCISE!!!

Keeping a healthy body and focused mind are the key tools in getting over a traumatic experience, and learning to take control of your life by taking control of your time, your body, and your mind. This is especially usefull when healing from a particularly damaging experience like dating / loving a narcissist, and all of the verbal, emotional and physical abuse that goes along with it.

I can happily and confidently say that doing these simple (simple to do but not easy to follow) things atleast once a day was my absolute saviour - when I was at my worst and darkest hour these excercises brought me back to life!!

So my philosophy for this is called: "HEALTHY BODY FOCUSED MIND" and im gonna go ahead and break it down for you guys here quickly so you can get a basic idea of what im talking about.

First I'l break it up into sections, and then give examples of each..

HEALTHY BODY

• Do Excercise - Yoga, Pilates, Swimming, Walking, Cycling, Aerobics, etc
• Eat Healthy(er)
• Treat your body better - get enough sleep, eat enough fruit & veg, get fresh air, drink water, etc

FOCUSED MIND

• Do Meditation
• Incorporate Positive Affirmations into your daily routine
• Watch Motivational Videos and Speakers (NO MORE NARC VIDEOS!!)
• Practice Mindfulness
• Practice "Active Refocussing" - this is just a name I gave to a very useful technique I doscovered, which is that every time you find yourself thinking about your ex / feeling sad about your ex / wanting to phone or text your ex / see something that reminds you of your ex / are just feeling sad about your lost relationship, etc, then you actively have to reshift your focus onto something else that is positive and motivating, for example, what i did was everytime I caught my own mind drifting back to him, I would stop my thought cycle, tell myself its ok to miss him but im done being sad, and then i would really concentrate really hard on doing my affirmations. In the beginning until I had them memorised, I actually just wrote myself out a little list of affirmations to carry around with me and from that list i could pick and choose which specific ones were best suited to that moment of that day, and then do those until i started believeing them and began to feel better!! It may sound silly to you but I can guarantee you it is completely successful IF YOU DO IT CONSTANTLY AND CONSISTENTLY!!

So please guys, put your comfiest workout clothes on, clear 30 minutes for some "ME-TIME", follow the link at the top of this page to my workout video, and have a blast!! If you dont feel better after this then let me know and I will personally apologise to you live and on air!!

Ok guys thats it from me today, take care Y'all xxx

Narcissists

 Narcissists.. Narcissists.. Narcissits..

What / Who / Why / How  are these people??? This in itself is an EXTREMEMLY loaded question, and absolutely not something that we can ever tackle in only one post, on day, or even one year. 

There are so many small details about these people and their unsettling behaviour that are easy to forget about, or to look over, yet each and every one of them are so extremely significant in their overall "game", that it is almost impossible to capture them all together in one place and in an understandable manner. 

Also, what makes it 100 times trickier, is the fact that there are also so many different types of naricissists, including covert, overt, malignant, vulnerable, master, lesser, sociopathic, etc., each of them slightly different in their own way, but yet still all based along the same lines and whos behaviours are built on the same basic foundations. They are all, however, classified as "Cluster B" personality type disorders. I would not recommend trying to do too much personal research on this CLuster B personality disorder as a whole, as it is hugely voluminous and can be extremely complicated and overwhelming, ending up being just too much to digest and absorb in any meaningful way whatsoever. 

If you find yourself dealing with a narcissist, whether you are involed in a romantic relationship with one of them, were raised by one (or two) of them, am working for / with one of them, or even just suspect that you may be friends with one of them, my advice would be to first make sure that they fit the basic requirements in order to be categorised as a "narcissist", or rather a person with mainly narcissistic traits. As soon as you have done the checklist with that person in mind, and they have met most, if not all of the necessary criteria, you atleast have a baseline on which to work from, and from there you can start to go a bit deeper into it and even try figure out which kind(s) they are, not that i think it is completely necessary for you to do so, if you dont perhaps, have the time, means, resources, etc to do so - for once you know that you are dealing with a narcissist, the specific category into which they fall is not always highly significant, unless, for whatever reason, you cannot escape this persons poisonous grasp, and still have to spend whatever amount of time with or around them in the forseeable future, in which case you would need to do as much research as possible in order to figure out which exact type you are dealing with and what the best coping strategies are for these specific types of people.

If, however, you are in the fortunate position of being able to fully and completely extract this person from your life, then the only advice to which you have to listen and adhere to right now, is: 

RUN! RUN THE FUCK AWAY AS FAST AND AS FAR AS YOU CAN. RUN FROM THIS PERSON AS IF THEY LITERALLY ARE CHASING YOU WITH A BUTCHER KNIFE, AND ARE TRYING TO KILL YOU - WHICH THEY ARE!! JUST RUN. RUN. RUN. RUN. RUN. RUN. RUN. RUN...

And, if you are sitting there with a smug and pittying smile on your face, and thinking (wrongly), that you have landed on this blog by accident and that you know no such evil persona in your life, then you are lying to yourself, or, more correctly, they are. We are all living with or dealing with a narcissist in some way or another, we just probably dont know it yet. And the sad thing is, once you finally know, it is already sadly too late, because the only time you (normally) learn this word and what it means, it means that you are already so far down the rabbit hole that you have started doing research on the topic and that is how you landed on this blog, and / or others like it, of which there are MILLIONS!!

They are insidious, evil, heartless, terrible people that are all around us every day, and most often, they are the ones of whom you will be the least suspicious. The sad / scary thing about them is that on first meeting, or in casual or social settings, they appear and come across as charming, confident, together, sparkling, caring and happy people, and that is the base of their entire "game", and that is how they catch us and fool everyone else at the same time.

Dont get me wrong though, just because someone displays one or two narcissistic traits, are not necessarily full blown narcissists!! Only people who display most, if not all of the narcissitic traits should be classified as such. In fact, most people will diplay several narcissistc traits in varying degrees, such as confidence, entitlement, arrogance, infidelity, neediness etc. Being either, or all of these few thing, does not make you a narcissist, for sure it might make youta toxic persona, or at the very least slightly annoying in big doses! You need to be very careful, clear minded, honest and realistic in doing your research and doing the checklist / diagnosis of this person in order to be completely sure before you get carried away, only later to figure out that yore actually on the wrong train!!

How do i know that i might be dating a narcissist?..

So, technically you aren't supposed to try to "self analyse" anyone - yourself or anyone else - as that is meant to be a job left to the "professionals". But, sadly, getting someone diagnosed by a "professional" is not always possible due to the condition that you want diagnosed in the first place! One kind of person with whom this rings particularly true, is a narcissist. It doesn't matter what kind of narcissist you may be dealing with, and there are many, as there are still core features and traits which connect them all, and it is because of those features and traits that getting them a "proper" diagnosis is almost impossible. 

You see, the nature of Narcissism is the inner belief of :

"I'm perfect. There's nothing wrong with me, and you will never prove otherwise.".

 It is only once you can really let that soak in in its entirety, and fully understand and comprehend what that means and what it does to that persons psyche, that you will come to understand and accept what i said in the beginning to be true. It is this self perceived "perfection" that is the root of all their 'evil'*, which i will get to in more detail later in another post.

*Please note that this 'evil" i address is not to mean that they themselves are in any way evil, to the contrary most of them are actually very nice and charming people, which is exactly why we fell for them in the first place isn't it?! No, the evil that i address is very specifically targeted towards the Narcissist inside them, and all of the 'evil', mean, hurtful things that it makes them do. Honestly you can call it whatever you want if you aren't comfortable with that term, but i chose to use the word evil because it rings so true so much of the time, and it also helps me to distance myself from this person and to remind myself of the reason i left.

So then, if you think your partner may be a narcissist, but you're not sure, and you cant take them in to a professional to be sure.. what can you do?? Do you just continue to live in this crazy mist, always thinking there might be something wrong with one of you but you're no longer sure which one? NO!! You do what we've all done and you get sure!! And the most sure fire way to get sure is to get smart. You have got to read up on this topic and study it like you've never studied anything before in your life. You've gotta read blogs like this one, you've gotta read articles and posts and forums and comments, you've gotta watch videos about it, etc.

It is also extremely helpful and empowering to start a journal. Write down everything that 'just doesn't seem right' - write the dates, the times, the exact things they said, or how they reacted to things you said. Write down when they come, when they go, where they say they are, what times you phoned them and their phones were off, exactly how much money they had on them when they left the house, how much they drew, how much they swiped for, and how much they came home with, Write down what they say say spent money on and how much, who they said they were with, and what they said they were doing. The reason for this is that if you are dealing with a narcissist, and i hope to god you're not! But if you are, then you will still be stuck living in what i love to call "The Crazy Mist"! 

And only those of you who are in it will ever know what i am talking about. Its that mist that makes you think that something in your relationship inst 'quite right'. Its that mist that drove you to start looking around and wondering why other people weren't as deeply and constantly as you were. Its that mist that drove you to find this blog and other like it in the first place. Its what they have spent years cultivating and the reason why they've been getting away with their shenanigans for so long. Its what makes you forgetful, subservient, scared, confused, anxious and unsure of yourself in normal, every day situations. And it's exactly why keeping a journal and documenting absolutely everything that they say and do, and how you feel about it, can be such a powerful tool - so that the next time you are in an argument with this person, instead of having to rely on your own shaky memory, you will have all the facts in front of you, enabling you to be sure of yourself, and handle yourself, and the situation better! But it is also extremely important that the suspected narc never finds out about your extra curricular research or journaling, as this will trigger their deep seeded paranoia, and is very likely to throw them into a mother of a rage against you, so just be careful ok?..

Ok, so back to the topic at hand - you are thinking that you might have a narcissist on your hands, but youre still new to this, and as such, you have no real idea of how to tell and be sure. So before you launch into your many pronged research quest, first read these few points below and see if any or all of them match up..

1) So, I think pretty much the number one sign that you might be dealing with, or dating a narcissist (any type), is that you're confused a lot. You feel confused after a fight, when you try to go back and remember how it started, what was said, and exactly what happened to make it escalate so quickly and dramatically. You're confused about why you feel so anxious all the time around this person. Your'e confused and on edge because you never really know exactly what will set them off next. Basically confusion just becomes your general state of being. If that sounds about right, then keep reading, if not, then this might not be the problem in your relationship, but just keep reading anyway because some of the stuff might still apply! 

2) The second thing, that kind of ties in with the first thing, is that you just feel anxious ALL THE TIME!!! They have got you trained to expect a possible negative reaction from any small thing that might set them off one day, but not the next, and this is no accident either. Just like point 1, they have spent years getting you to this point of constant fear and angst, and will be dammed if they will let a good thing go to waste!!

3) You are unsure of yourself, meaning that you no longer trust yourself or your own judgement. For me, that even extended to mundane decisions that i had made every day of my life prior to meeting this person with no trouble at all. Then all of a sudden I find myself standing in the middle of the aisle at Checkers just staring at the different fabric softeners, and having no idea which one i normally buy. I knew that i couldn't get the most expensive one, because then I'd be accused of "needlessly wasting money again', and if I accidentally buy one of the hundreds that my moms allergic to then I'l never hear the end of it from her (but that's a different story!), etc etc.. 

4) You notice a constant and extremely one sided theme of double standards in your relationship with this person, and all seemingly somehow tilted extremely in their favor!! For instance:  

> I am allowed to go out without telling you where i am, who i'm with or what i'm doing, but you cant!

> I am allowed to spend vast amounts of money on whatever i want (no matter how tight the budget is, or whose money it even is!), but you cant!

> I can do or say what i want, to any person i want, about any topic i want to discuss with them, but I don't like you talking to other people, especially not about us!

> I don't have to cook or clean or help you in any way around the house (even though you work and I don't), but I expect the house to always be clean, groceries to always be bought, and dinner to always be delicious and on time!

 This goes hand in hand with their inflated ego and self-worth, which is almost always laughably unjustified, and can be quite hard to spot and to understand. That  is why, if you, at any time, try (foolishly) to address these issues, and bring to their attention the matter of the double standards in place, it will set them off in a narcissistic rage like you have never seen before!!

and 5) They simply do not care about you, your hobbies and interests, your dreams and goals, your feelings, or even the things that you want to talk about and what you have to say. This one is a particularly hard pill to swallow, and can be very damaging to you, your self worth, and your self esteem. This one often takes a while to come into play - after the love bombing stage has passed, and well into the devaluing stage (don't worry guys, I'll be addressing these different stages in future posts, so keep reading!!). Although, to someone in, or close to the relationship (if there is anyone left who is still allowed to be close to the relationship), it is normally not that hard to spot, for example:

> They only talk about themselves, their experiences, and their own hobbies or interests, etc., and can do so with great excitement and passion. Should you then, however, try to add some input into the conversation by voicing your opinions etc, you will either be steamrolled or simply just ignored.

> Whenever you try to discuss a topic that spark your interest instead of theirs, or if you try to share with them an experience from your day, or even just a funny anecdote that you heard recently; you will be met with severe disinterest and often even exaggerated and exasperated eye-rolling!

> Any time you express genuine emotions they will often become, either extremely uncomfortable, or extremely enraged.

There are obviously many more points i can list, and very very many examples of each, but I think that should be enough for now to compare to your suspected narcissist, which should give you a basic idea of whether or not you are on the right track! 

*At this stage it is also important to note that just because someone matches each of these descriptions, does not necessarily make them a bonafide narcissist - many of the narcissistic traits are actually shared between many of the Cluster B Personality Disorder Types. And also, someone can display absolutely none of these items and still be a narcissist. I know that this little curve ball is probably quite severely frustrating, and can even make this whole thing seem pointless, but don't let it get you down! Just stick at it and keep reading and learning as you are doing, and you will soon start to get a better idea of why I say this!

Lastly, if you like my topic and my writing style, please hit the like and subscribe buttons here below so that you never miss out on a future post! Also go check out my YouTube channel at XXX.com

Thanks for reading guys, hopefully i'll see you at my next post!! xxx