The Unexpected Teachers

There is a wound so common that almost none of us reach midlife without brushing up against it somewhere. A mother who could love you, but only when you weren’t outshining her in any way. An ex-mother-in-law whose warmth never reached her eyes, hiding her real self behind closed doors with a cold, evil stare. A sibling relationship quietly rearranged through triangulation, where jealousy wore the mask of concern, working behind the scenes to make sure they stayed the center of every room. A partner. A boss. A friend. Someone who wore love like a costume, only to take it off the moment you stopped performing for them.  As the saying goes, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

If any of that landed somewhere in your chest just now, I want you to know something before you read another word: I’ve been there too. Different faces, different rooms, but the same architecture of confusion, self-doubt, and slow return to myself. This isn’t a clinical breakdown written from a distance. It’s written from inside the healing.

So let’s talk about narcissism. Not the version that turns it into a checklist and a villain, but the version that actually sets you free.

What We Keep Getting Wrong

We’ve become fluent in naming narcissism with quizzes, acronyms, entire feeds built around spotting it in other people. There’s real value in that; it ends the loop of “was it me?” so many of us lived in for years.

But here’s what the checklists leave out: narcissism isn’t a species, it’s a spectrum, and every one of us has a foothold on it somewhere: the flash of envy at someone else’s good news, the need to be right in an argument that didn’t matter, the moment you made someone else’s pain about your own reaction to it. None of that makes you the person who hurt you. But the line between “them” and “us” is thinner than the internet wants you to believe, and that thinness is where the healing actually lives.

I don’t believe in reducing anyone to a label, so here’s the plain truth: most people who taught us this pain were never taught anything different themselves, unfortunately. Somewhere back along their own line, a parent, a caregiver, a culture that prized appearances over honesty, showed them that control was safety and being seen mattered more than being real. That doesn’t undo what was done to you, and it doesn’t mean you owe anyone your patience or your precious energy. But it does mean the pattern was inherited, not invented, passed hand to hand until someone finally has the awareness and the willingness to become the cycle breaker.

Because the moment healing becomes about correctly labeling someone else, it stops being about you. And the only person in this story you actually have the power to change is you.

The Body Keeps What the Mind Explains Away

You can understand exactly what happened to you: the manipulation, the double standards, the way you were made small so someone else could feel large and still feel your whole body brace the moment your phone rings with their name on it. That’s not a failure of understanding. Insight lives in the mind. Healing lives in the body.

This is the part most narcissistic-abuse content skips, because it’s easier to explain a manipulation tactic than to sit with a nervous system still bracing for impact. But your body was there for every “I’m sorry you feel that way,” every silent treatment, every time love was used as a leash instead of a home. It kept score long after your mind moved on. Healing means going back for it, not through more analysis, but through breath, movement, stillness, and enough safety to finally let the bracing go.

What Are We Actually Attracting and Why

This is the question I get asked most quietly, usually after everything else has already been said: why do I keep finding people like this? Why did more than one person in my life, in very different settings, teach me the same lesson?

I want to answer without a trace of blame — blame is exactly the language these dynamics already speak, and we don’t need more of it aimed at ourselves. The honest answer is usually this: somewhere early in childhood, many of us learned that love was something you earned through usefulness, silence, or shrinking. Once a nervous system learns that lesson, it gets remarkably good at recognizing anyone who speaks the same language, because it feels familiar. And familiar gets mistaken for safe.

Noticing this isn’t self-blame. It’s self-information. It’s the difference between asking “what’s wrong with me” and asking “what did I learn to accept, and am I still accepting it?” One question keeps you small. The other hands you your power back.

Healing was never about proving what they did to you. It was about becoming someone this could no longer happen to.

Raising Your Frequency So It Simply Doesn’t Stick

Here’s where I want to go somewhere most articles on this topic won’t: energy. Not as a metaphor, but as something you can actually feel and actually shift.

It can sometimes feel as though people who operate from manipulation, triangulation, entitlement, or control are drawn toward the same unresolved wounds: self-doubt, over-explaining, the reflex to earn belonging. When those old patterns are still active, it’s a bit like leaving a door unlatched. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the door simply hadn’t been closed yet.

You’ve probably heard them called energy vampires. They don’t want your blood, they want your delicious, sacred energy, your attention, emotional reaction, your reassurance, your empathy, secretly wishing for your return, your endless willingness to explain yourself for the hundredth time. The good news?  Vampires have one rule everyone already knows: they can’t come in unless you invite them. Turns out you’ve had that power the whole time. ✨

And the old vampire lore holds up here too. Garlic works, if your garlic is a boundary you actually enforce, not just talk about. Sunlight works even better. These dynamics tend to lose their grip when someone is no longer willing to abandon themselves for approval. Keep your light on long enough, and they’ll get the hint that you’re no longer serving the buffet they came for.

Raising your frequency isn’t about performing positivity or bypassing what happened to you. It’s slower and quieter than that: a boundary you no longer explain or defend such as going no contact, a body regulated enough to feel discomfort without abandoning yourself to fix it, a sense of worth that doesn’t wait for anyone’s approval to switch on. Time spent in whatever reconnects you to your own steadiness: breathwork, movement, nature, stillness, prayer instead of someone else’s mood, and with people who leave you feeling grounded, supported, and more like yourself.

When that shift happens, something remarkable follows. The dynamics that used to find you so easily start to look elsewhere. Not because you got harder or colder. Because you stopped emitting the frequency they were trained to seek. You become someone this simply doesn’t stick to anymore.

When They Try to Rewrite Your Story

At some point in this healing, many of us run into the same experience: the smear campaign. The whispered version of events where they play the victim. The story rewritten, often with the help of ‘flying monkeys’ recruited to do the dirty work, so you’re the difficult/unfair one, the unstable one, the dramatic one, the problem told to people who were never in the room and never asked you a single question before deciding to believe it. Protecting their image often matters more than protecting the truth.

This was never about correcting every rumor. It’s about deciding, in real time, whether you’ll let someone else’s narrative change who you actually are. Don’t let it compromise your character or drag you down to react from the same place they’re operating from. Rising above isn’t passive, it’s the hardest, most powerful thing you can do.

In narcissistic family systems and often in romantic relationships, workplaces, friend groups, or other close-knit communities, one person gradually becomes the scapegoat, often labeled the black sheep. Rather than acknowledging unhealthy power dynamics, blame is repeatedly directed toward them. Over time, they begin to carry responsibility for problems they didn’t create, while the behaviors that contributed to the conflict are minimized, excused, or ignored. It becomes less about what actually happened and more about protecting the existing roles and power dynamics.

Here’s the part that stings a little, but is worth saying honestly: anyone who hears a secondhand version of you and chooses to believe it without asking you directly was likely already looking for a reason to step back. That’s not a loss, that’s information. It tells you exactly who was never truly in your corner and it’s a strange kind of gift, because now you know. 😊

You don’t owe an explanation to people who never bothered to ask. Focus on yourself. Reclaim your peace, clarity, and stability. Stand up for yourself, clearly and without apology, to the people who come to you directly and save your energy for the ones who actually show up, not the ones who drain you. 

And watch for this: the moment you stop reacting, when you choose yourself and are simply living your best life unbothered, is often exactly when things escalate. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not a coincidence. People who rely on others for attention and emotional supply rarely handle losing it gracefully. 

If you find yourself face to face with that anger, meet it the way you’d meet a tantrum from someone who was never taught another way to regulate on their own: calm, matter-of-fact, at a distance. You’re allowed to simply decline the conversation.

Eventually, without your participation, this kind of story runs out of oxygen. What’s left, once the noise settles, is one quiet truth worth holding onto: the only opinion of you that was ever going to matter is your own, and the people who truly love you.

The Gatekeeper

And once you stop explaining yourself to people who never earned the right to ask, the next question becomes: who actually gets to be close to you at all?

You are the sole gatekeeper of your life. Not your mother, not your in-laws, not the family member who’s learned to play every side of a room — you. Nobody gets a seat at your table simply because of blood, marriage, or history. Closeness is earned through how someone actually treats you, not the title they hold. You decide, every single time who gets in.

I first learned this from Evy Poumpouras — former Secret Service agent, author, and one of the most badass women I know during a 1:1 mentor session several years ago. She put it simply: you are the gatekeeper of your life, and you get to decide who you let in and who you keep outside that gate.

It’s such a simple concept. And still, one of the hardest things to actually live by especially when the person standing at the door shares your blood, your last name, or twenty years of history with you.

The One Thing I Need You to Protect

If there’s one thing I want you to take from all of this, more than any technique or reframe, it’s this: please don’t let this close your heart. It would be so easy, so understandable, to armor over, to decide that being this open, this trusting, is what got you hurt, and that the safest path is to simply feel less.

Your compassion was never the problem, and your empathy was never a flaw to sand down. The goal was never to make you smaller or more guarded, it’s to keep that same open heart, now paired with a discernment and a set of firm boundaries it never had before. A soft heart and a strong spine aren’t a contradiction. Held together, they’re the whole point, and what will keep that beautiful, deeply feeling nature of yours intact for the people who deserve it.

Think of it like a diya, a small oil lamp, a flame that was never meant to go out just because it’s stood near the wind. It’s meant to stay lit long enough that one day, you get to help light someone else’s. 🪔

Healing Without Becoming What Hurt You

There’s one more piece worth naming honestly, because almost nobody talks about it: the danger isn’t only that these patterns were done to you. It’s the quiet risk of carrying them forward: into how you parent, how you love, how you show up for the people who trust you most, especially in the raw, reactive months after you first see the pattern clearly.

The good news is that these patterns don’t have to define the people who experienced them. Not everyone who grows up around narcissism or emotional neglect repeats it. Many people become deeply compassionate precisely because they know what conditional love feels like. Awareness gives us something previous generations may never have had: the opportunity to choose differently.

This is why the inner work has to come before, or at least alongside, anything else. Not because what happened to you doesn’t matter. But because the deepest form of freedom isn’t just leaving the dynamic behind. It’s making sure it ends with you.

The Truth You Get to Keep

People who operate this way are rarely drawn to someone weak. They’re drawn to potential — a bright light, a gift, a way of being they sense but have never been able to reach in themselves. That was never a flaw in you. You were chosen because of what you carried, not because of what you lacked.

Take your power back, not to prove anything to the naysayers, because they were never going to see it anyway. Take it back to prove it to yourself. Because a flame that’s survived this much doesn’t dim from sharing itself; a diya can light a thousand other diyas and lose nothing in the process. That’s what your light is for now.

REFLECTION

Wherever you are right now, let’s take a moment to reflect:

• Where in your life are you still performing for approval that was never freely given?
• What would it feel like to become unavailable to people who require your smallness?
• If narcissism truly lives on a spectrum, where might you be practicing a version of it without meaning to and can you meet that with compassion instead of shame?

If this stirred something in you, if you recognized yourself, or someone you love, somewhere in these words, let it sit for as long as it needs to. Take only what serves you right now, and leave the rest for another day. There’s no timeline for this kind of healing, and nothing here asks anything of you but your own honesty.  💛