Overcoming Narcissistic Abuse and Addictions

Most of us know first-hand how difficult it is to go No Contact with a narcissist. The agonising pain of being without them can have us feeling powerless, out of control and unable to resist the compulsion to contact them.

Even when we do ‘detox’ from them, we can find ourselves falling into other addictions to try to self-soothe. We may turn to alcohol, food or cigarettes. Or we can push healthy activities to unhealthy levels, perhaps by over-exercising, or numbing out with endless self-help techniques.

Today I want to shatter some myths and show you how overcoming narcissistic abuse and overcoming addictions require the same process, because they have the same underlying root cause.

Whatever your compulsion or addiction, today’s Thriver TV episode explains how you can truly break free.

 

 

Video Transcript

Today I want to talk about overcoming narcissistic abuse and overcoming addictions.

You may be really surprised to find out that these topics are closely related, hence why I’ve linked them today. We’re going to take a deep dive into what it is to be trauma bonded to a narcissist, what addictions really are and how to overcome them.

Is it true that you can only hope to manage your addictions and cannot truly go free from them?

NO its not!

Rather, you can truly free yourself, so that you are no longer haunted and plagued by addictions that pull at your life force, your attention and your power – running your life.

Today I’m going to explain to you how and why. But before we get started, I’d like to remind you to please subscribe to my YouTube channel and share my work with others if it resonates with you. Let’s get the word out so that people know it is possible to not merely survive narcissistic abuse, but to truly thrive after it.

Okay, so let’s get started with this very important piece of the conversation.

 

What Are False Sources And What Do They Have To Do With Addictions?

A false source is a self-medication choice: a person, a substance or a pastime that you use to try to get relief from internal trauma.

For example, if you were to get triggered into an anxiety attack or depression, you may choose to go for an alcoholic drink. Or maybe you ring a girlfriend and dump how you’re feeling all over her. Perhaps you reconnect to have sex with somebody, or you eat a cheese sandwich or smoke a cigarette. Or you may turn to social media, shopping, or taking a pill.

Any outer choice like these is an attempt to numb out what hurts. We’re trying to distract ourselves, or fill an empty gaping hole with some kind of comfort, or maybe alter our consciousness so that we can’t think about (or feel) what hurts anymore.

Narcissists are one of these false sources because they pretend to be the solution to our fears and our unhealed trauma – the feelings we have of loss and inner emptiness.

Narcissists pretend to be gods, but they are really punishing overlords.

They don’t take the trauma away. Instead, they infiltrate your life, capture your attention and your energy, and become the center of your universe. They add to your trauma as they suck your life force dry and destroy your life.

No different to other False Sources.

Things like drugs, smoking, shopping, gambling and overeating are all ‘comfort’ choices which we use to try to save ourselves from trauma, but which actually damage and destroy us further. They add to our problems and our brokenness.

This is because, just like a narcissist, these things are False Sources.

 

How Do We Get Addicted to False Sources?

Firstly, we are struggling to have an inner relationship with our own soul or spirit – our Real Self. This relationship is the true core of ourselves where we can handle and work our fear, pain, anxieties and depressions through to completion.

Instead, we self-medicate with our drug of choice, whether it be food, drink, nicotine, obsessive behaviour or running towards a bad person. We assign that drug as our means of self-soothing.

When we pick up the choice of self-medication, it seems to work initially. That person, food, drug, drink or activity provides momentary relief. You get a hit of endorphins and a feel-good chemical. It’s a high because you momentarily escaped the CORE trauma, the Root of the issue. That’s what the high is, and it’s very addictive.

But the relief and the high do not last, and when it fails, we end up doubling down.

We get even more trauma bonded to this ‘thing’ or this person, in an attempt to try to fix the escalating negative energy and powerlessness that we’re feeling inside of ourselves. We become powerless and out of control with our addiction to this thing or person.

Let’s say as an example, the core root, the real cause of the trauma, is abandonment. It gets triggered in ‘the now’ because it’s always been lying within you from your past. It’s a part of your inner identity that you haven’t yet healed.

Because of that, you are locked into realities today that match that unhealed pre-existing trauma. You are connected to situations and people that are going to represent more abandonment in your life. People who are going to trigger and rip open this wound over and over again.

And when it happens, it’s horrible – it hurts. You reach for your addiction in an attempt to escape this terrible emotional pain and this often means you’re running into the arms of the very person who abandoned you, promising to do anything to keep them.

If that person won’t accept you back, then maybe you will chase another to fill that hole, or you maybe take up drink, drugs, food or pastimes to try to numb out.

Whatever your choice is, it distracts you from the unhealed, unresolved abandonment trauma. It puts a Band-Aid over the top of it.

Just like taking a sharp stone out of a shoe, the relief is huge and it feels soooo good in the moment.

Yet it’s short lived, because your metaphoric shoe has still got holes in it where more stones can get in. This is your unhealed trauma, which still exists. You only escaped it for a moment. So long as the holes are unsealed, the relief can never last.

The endorphins of that relief now are an addiction, which means that you’re addicted to your choice of self-medication. This False Source is only a Band-Aid – it’s not a true solution.

What’s also interesting is that if we have unresolved trauma, our choice of False Sources will be in the vibrational level of the trauma – they’re lower level, unhealthy choices.

Even healthy choices such as exercise, good food or spiritual practices will become unhealthy if we use them as False Sources. We’ll get obsessive about it, following all-or-nothing diets, over-exercising or following strict, rigid spiritual practices that are self-punishing rather than healing. These things are incredibly damaging to our inner being because we are trying to smash and bash ourselves into shape, which is not what our Inner Being needs at all.

The issue is that our unhealed trauma generates more triggering by people and situations that are more of the same. This is how the Quantum universe works – ‘so within, so without’. We keep choosing and interacting within the bandwidth of the composition of our Inner Being. If it contains significant unhealed trauma, then we’re going to have toxic choices and people in our life.

The more we are triggered because we haven’t healed yet, the more we double or triple down with our addiction to try to self-medicate the original trauma. We eat more, drink more, smoke more, shop more, social media binge more, have sex with bad people more, break No Contact with narcissists more and obsess about these people more.

It’s a vicious cycle and a spiral into absolute destruction.

Reversing this has everything to do with narcissistic abuse recovery – and recovery from every addiction you have ever battled with.

 

 

 

The Addiction Is Not The Issue: The Core Trauma Is

Focussing on the addiction equals how to lose because the addiction is a symptom. This is why a lot of people give up one particular addiction and ‘switch the witch for the bitch’ – they take up another addiction in full gusto to try to self-medicate their still-unhealed trauma.

The true issue is the unmet unhealed internal trauma; the unfinished business that is hijacking your life with emotional triggers.

You may say that you just need to learn to manage your triggers, but that is exactly what has been getting you into trouble – trying to medicate or distract yourself away from them.

A much better choice would be to dissolve these internal traumas, so there are no triggers and you live free of them because they’re no longer wedged within you.

This is the power of Quanta Freedom Healing. It enables you to get free from needing to numb out the triggered, unhealed internal trauma with False Sources and people who were a toxic match for these unhealed traumas.

 

Detoxing Internal Traumas Takes Away All Urge Of Addiction

The truth is detoxing the internal traumas takes away all urge of addiction. I’m going to give you some examples, similar to those we hear about all the time in our community.

Mary was missing Joe the narcissist, and she couldn’t stop herself breaking No Contact. Every time she felt like Joe was moving towards another woman, she would panic, reach out to him, go see him, have sex with him and do anything to keep him in her life and stop him moving on with someone else.

Mary hated herself for this – she felt like her self-respect was in the toilet but she couldn’t stop doing it. After the initial relief, each time she plunged further into devastation and powerlessness.

Every time she did this, she was destroying her Inner Being, integrity and self-trust. She began to think of herself as love addicted in general, and addicted to Joe in particular.

Mary’s true problem was the unhealed trauma of “If a man replaces me I can’t survive.” Many women have this. It’s collective, past life trauma, passed on genetically and energetically through the female line.

Like Mary, many may have experienced the trauma of an adulterous father or maybe one that abandoned his wife and children for someone else, putting great survival, strain, and terror on the family – and on them as a young child.

Unless Mary addresses this inner fracture, she will continue to be trauma bonded to Joe, probably until his cruel final discard. She then runs a huge risk of continuing to play this unhealed trauma out with future narcissists.

I want you to realise that trauma bonds are responsible for addictions – and trauma bonds to people happen because of unhealed trauma that matches what that person is delivering you.

In the next example, Bob could not stop trying to please Marjorie the narcissist. It didn’t matter what he bought her, what he did for her, how much he told her that he loved her. She was never happy and nothing was ever good enough. He was addicted to trying to please her regardless of how terribly she treated him – including leaving him, going back to her exes and then returning to Bob again.

Bob’s issues were also not about love addiction or addiction to a narcissist. The addiction was the symptom.

The true problem was the unhealed trauma of, “if I can’t please her, she’s never going to love and accept me”.

Bob had gone through this with his narcissistic mother who shamed and blamed him for everything. She was sick and he felt guilty that he couldn’t save her. So here he was in the exact same pattern again, feeling hopelessly addicted to Marjorie and trying to fix her. Until he healed his internal unfinished business, that addiction was going to continue.

Now, let’s look at my example. I was addicted to the narcissist through quite a few unhealed wounds that many in our community share: “I need a man to survive”; terrors of abandonment; a belief that I couldn’t survive on my own; security and survival fears on many levels.

It wasn’t until I turned inwards with Quantum Healing tools – specifically Quanta Freedom Healing – that I was able to get free of him and have no addiction to him.

Ironically, I had tried to heal these known traumas cognitively for decades. I knew what they were, but they still existed inside of me, because knowledge is not power. The wisdom of how to release yourself from inner programs is what grants you the power to live free of them.

Even after getting away from the narcissist, I still had more to go. I had a terrible nicotine addiction that felt unbreakable. I’d tried everything – hypnosis, patches, Champix, so many things to try to get free – and nothing worked.

I realised I was never going to get free until I went to the core root of this with Quanta Freedom Healing.

I turned inwards to load up and release what was really keeping me trauma bonded to cigarettes – which was a terror of “no one is coming. I’m all alone and no one is coming”.

Cigarettes were a dummy for me. They were my way of holding onto something and getting some comfort when I felt despair, was alone, had any kind of significant pain, or even at times of heightened excitement.

Once I cleared that trauma out of my body, I had no connection to cigarettes – no addiction, no desire. It was gone and it never returned, which was astonishing after an almost 40-year addiction that nearly destroyed my entire life.

 

In Conclusion

I hope that this makes sense to you and that you now realise what is really going on with your trauma bonds aka addictions. They are being fueled and generated by unhealed trauma from within, and there are true solutions for you to get free of this.

If you are ready to be free of your addictions, please click on this link to the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program now. This is the Quanta Freedom Healing 10-step process which will enable you to get free from your trauma bonds to a narcissist or any other addiction.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. And until the next one, keep smiling, keep healing, and keep thriving because there is nothing else to do. Lots of love.