Don’t take it personally. There’s nothing wrong with you.

A narcissist wants everything that has anything to do with you to become associated with pain in your mind in order to paralyze you into a helpless victim.

Don’t take it personally doesn’t only mean they are filled with rage and they just want to take it out on someone. It also means that what they’re criticizing about you isn’t a problem or a shortcoming even from their own sick perspective. It is just something that could be criticized. The purpose of that criticizm is to make you think that this is something that you should stop doing, although there’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing, so that you end up doing nothing at all in the end, because everything that you do and everything about you is wrong, bad, ugly, disgusting, and immoral. So you end up out of options. That’s how you end up doing nothing to fight back or defend yourself, because you don’t want to be criticized any further. In the end, you will find that you have been conditioned to do nothing in the face of whatever that they ever do to you. This is where you’ll notice a huge smile on their face. A smile of victory. They have crushed you into submission. Into the ideal victim or supply. Whatever utterance you can ever make is going to be made fun of. Whatever that you can ever say or do can and will be criticized by the narcissist instantly, like they know it’s objectively wrong and disgusting ever since they came to this world. All in an attempt to make everything that can ever come out of your mouth associated with pain. The purpose of their life is to make you associate everything you can ever say or do with massive amounts of pain, until you no longer exist. I do not believe, given the circumstances, that going no contact is still up for debate. It’s not optional. It’s a life saving measure. And there’s no alternative.