The biggest factor responsible for your perpetual state of helplessness and weakness is the belief that you can’t help or defend yourself, no matter what you do or how hard you try. It is useless to resist. And that weakness will inevitably spread into all other areas of your life whether you like it or not.

Narcissists aren’t good at manipulation. In fact, they’re extremely horrible at manipulation. They can’t lie without you noticing it. It’s too obvious to miss. Lying to them is just saying something false. Period. They don’t even bother to put in the effort.

They only win because you’re stuck with them and you’re out of options. You have nowhere to go. There’s no escape. You’re trapped. They always use every single manipulative technique they know of in every single situation, making it look like an overkill.

You always lose because fighting back never occurred to you. You never even tried to defend yourself. You just let them attack you like there’s no tomorrow. You were told to not sink to their level. Do not attempt to fight fire with fire. In the end, you’re left too concerned with what not to do, and then end up being unable to think of anything that you should do in these situations. The only reason they treat you contemptuously is to make you believe they’re superior to you in every way imaginable. And when you happily embrace that belief, you add to it what it entails. Things like, yeah, they must be really good at manipulation and criticism. They can crush your self-esteem in a matter of minutes. They can make you hate yourself in no time. They can make you hesitate too much and doubt your reality. Bro, you’re attributing superpowers to non-existent entities! No one is there! It’s worse than absolute and total vacuum! They can’t even get small talk. Someone who’s trying to really manipulate you will put in a little bit of extra effort in order to earn your trust. They do nothing to achieve that! You catch them sleeping with someone else and they just reflexively and compulsively deny it like clockwork. Like a program of denial. Even if it doesn’t help them. They will have a better chance if they apologized for what they did. I want you to focus on the absolute lack of intelligence. There’s no superior manipulative thinking. There is no intelligence. There is nothing. They just take the shape of the container. Anything negative that can possibly be done by them that won’t throw them in jail, they’d do as if they get sucked into it. And then they’d deny that anything has ever taken place. Nothing happened. It’s all in your head. It’s like when they tell you that you’d definitely win by volume. A hundred pieces of content a day on all social media platforms. They try everything, not just what works. They can’t fail at hurting you, because they’ve tried everything there is that can possibly hurt any human being who’s alive, that they can legally get away with. Some tactic is bound to work. They’re so focused on destroying you for their own pleasure like there’s no tomorrow, without missing out on any single chance that they can take advantage of in order to accomplish just that. They do it like it’s the purpose of their life, if they have any, because it is. There’s nothing else when it comes to the narcissist other than exercising full-blown narcissism or narcissistic abuse against other people, even fellow narcissists.

The problem is that you return back to them with the intention of not fighting back or defending yourself, because you think you can’t win, because they’re better than you at this. No they aren’t. They’re not better than anyone else at anything. They can’t. They only win because you’re too kind and gentle to fight back, or you think you are. I understand that you need to avoid negativity and negative energy. I understand that you need to not waste your time, energy, or life fighting with people who have nothing to lose, because they can’t have anything in the first place. You need to focus on your life. That’s why you need to not engage. Not because you can’t win them, but because you don’t have the time or energy for this. You don’t have to waste ninety percent of your energy fighting with them every fucking day just to prove a point. That is, assuming of course, you’re not stuck with them because you don’t have the money to move out.

You were told that defending yourself means you’re a bad person. Means you’re like them. Means you’re immoral. You will leave, but you will always let people walk all over you, because you’re not allowed to defend yourself. You have successfully left the narcissist, but you’ve learned nothing. You only conditioned yourself to remain weak and easily victimized for good. And that’s why you’ll get into endless relationships with other narcissists. You’ve escaped the location where the abuse initially took place, but you haven’t escaped the abuse. You took it along with you. Because the reasons why they managed to abuse you are still there. Nothing has changed. And that’s why the memories and the traumas keep repeating themselves over and over again like a broken record. Because nothing has changed. You are still susceptible to what you’ve been through in the past, even though you’ve managed to escape. You’re now just physically present outside of the abusive environment. That’s why you attract someone who can take care of you and protect you from going through any of that again, and hence the codependency. You are totally helpless and in need of being taken care of. Because you can’t fight back, even if you can, even if you wanted to, because you can’t win, or so you were told.

I hate to say this, but believing that you can’t win them, ever, no matter how hard you try, is in and of itself, a limiting belief. That’s why you will never have a chance to win.

It’s not about winning. It’s about not dying without a fight.