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!!
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.
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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
