You should always aim for no contact unless it’s impossible.

However, you must know that a bag of tricks will not do the job. Only understanding how they abuse you will. Knowing everything about how they manipulate and abuse you is the answer. It’s the ultimate commandment.

I always thought if I was smarter and if I had everything figured out more, no one will be able to touch me.

Having understood that abuse is and should never be considered your fault, I still don’t think I was entirely mistaken in my assumption.

I always thought: okay, now I am smart enough. I’m ready. Now what?

I’m dealing with stuff that makes you think okay what they did was profoundly stupid it’s disgusting. This is beneath me. Since that is so beneath my level of comprehension, I will not bother wasting my time with it. I will not argue or explain myself to people who are too stupid to understand basic everyday stuff.

I was right about that, but I was almost always easily defeated because of that, to the extent that the smarter I got, the more easily I lost the fight. I failed due to my higher IQ, not due to arrogance, but because the pain increases the higher your intelligence is.

I have no problem with that. I just wanted to know why my insane levels of intelligence didn’t help me. Why was I always perceived as the bad guy with grandiose issues instead of the other way around.

I did everything in my power.

I was fascinated to experiment with this, because I was already screwed up beyond repair to the point of not giving a damn anymore, so why not have some fun while being tortured in hell.

And every time I tried to learn something new while thinking I have nothing to lose, I end up failing miserably, learning nothing, the voices getting louder, the self loathing reaching new peaks, and the inability to survive becomes exacerbated dramatically.

To say it was hopeless will be an understatement. I now know why you have no idea what real suffering looks like. When your own mind and body become the enemy, that is a whole different animal.

I’m sorry, but there was never a happy ending to this story.

Anyway, along the way I had the privilege of exploring and discovering stuff that others didn’t have the opportunity to explore because they didn’t sink that deep. Or if they did, they became too broken to learn anything. Think drug addicts, being thrown in prison for decades, dying, etc.

No contact is the best and most recommended way to deal with anyone from the dark triad or tetrad. No doubt about that.

The problem lies in trying to apply this when you’re still in hell. When you’re still a victim and liable to be victimized by anyone who has the power to victimize you.

In hell, you can’t give the silent treatment. You can only receive it. Some people argue that if your response to everything they say to you is whatever, you will emerge victorious from every situation and starve the narcissist every step of the way. I don’t know where did they get such an idea from, but it sounds good on paper. Trying that in the real world would be on par with being suicidal. You will be asking for it and then wonder why all this happened to you. I followed the instructions. I want my money back. This is worse than defunding the military. This is like disbanding the military altogether and hoping for the best. There is no healing. There’s only defending yourself and protecting yourself from such attacks, from such garbage world, and from such people. Good news is, you don’t need to heal. You just need to become stronger. Peace through strength, not through outrunning the inevitable. You have to learn how to fight back, and win every single time, and that, my friend requires practice.