Why, despite going no contact, you keep replaying those fights in your head and trying to say or do something better this time that you think you should’ve said or done back then.

No contact. The best approach, the approach of choice, that you have to implement when dealing with abusive people. No doubt about that. Any excuse you give for why you don’t implement no contact with abusive people is just part of the problem. It stems from self-loathing, and self-sabotage. You cannot be sane and in your right mind and think you shouldn’t or you don’t need to implement maximum no contact when dealing with a narcissist of any kind, an antisocial, a sociopath, or a psychopath. No contact is the only way to go for all of the above cases, without exception, and there’s no excuse for not implementing it, no matter what.

If you’re on your way to making it happen, then that’s understandable, but if you’re not even trying, then you’re part of the problem, because all you’re doing now is enable the narcissist, and give excuses for why you think someone torturing you for the rest of your life for pleasure is okay from a certain point of view.

Go no contact, and never look back.

The problem lies however in the fact that you don’t know what to do if you found yourself in a situation where you’re stuck in conversation for example with a narcissist or an abusive person. What are you going to do now? How do you wish to proceed from there? What will your next action be? You still have no idea. You still are going to argue, yell, defend yourself, or explain why they’re wrong. You know you shouldn’t be there, but you found yourself there anyway, through no fault of your own. What are you going to do then? You have no idea. And that’s why you keep ruminating and repeating in your head every previous fight, argument, or conversation you’ve had with the narcissist, trying to win this time. That is not you debating whether or not you should never talk to that person again. That is you trying to not get traumatized next time that happens despite going no contact. And you do so because you told yourself before I’ll not talk to that person ever again, but here you are, stuck again in an endless conversation, argument, fight, or battle with them where you’re unable to leave before getting maximum trauma first. You weren’t able to leave before getting hurt. Since you have no solution to this problem, your trauma won’t heal or go away, and will keep bombarding you with flashbacks of each of those fights, until you do. Until you find a solution to this problem. Until you know what to do once you’re already stuck with the narcissist through no fault of your own, even though or even if you went no contact with them for good since a very long time ago.

Implementing full and maximum no contact is a must, non-negotiable, and is not up for debate. It is not a matter of opinion. You have been warned. It is crucial, and you shouldn’t resort to anything else in its replacement for any reason whatsoever.

It still doesn’t indicate what to do if you find yourself in a toxic situation where you’re already stuck with an abuser. No contact means they can’t reach you at all, no matter how hard they try. It does not mean sitting there while being abused doing nothing at all, because you’re supposed to say nothing, because anything that you’d do can and will be used against you by the narcissist, and will only serve as fuel for the narcissist. Think about it. No contact means saying nothing, and doing nothing. If however, you decided to go no contact while being under attack by the abuser, you are subjecting yourself to the entirety of the harm that they can inflict upon you. If you said nothing, you are not protecting yourself from the abuse. If you did nothing, you’re not protecting yourself from the abuse. I know you should’ve went no contact when you had the chance, but what are you going to do now? No contact during the fight is not going to help you. For a simple reason, if you are physically present around the narcissist where they can abuse you in any way whatsoever, this means that at this moment, you’re not engaged in or implementing no contact with that narcissist or abuser. This means that at this moment, during the fight or argument, you are not in no contact with the narcissist or the abuser. Even if you went no contact before this moment with the narcissist or the abuser, as long as you are in a situation where the narcissist or the abuser can talk to you, hurt you, or abuse you in any way, shape, or form whatsoever, you are not in a no contact position with the narcissist or abuser. You are not in a situation where you are maintaining your no contact with the narcissist or the abuser. Which means they are mutually exclusive. Going no contact and saving yourself from the abuse as it is happening or when the argument or abuse is still taking place are impossible to coexist simultaneously. You either are successfully in no contact with the narcissist or abuser or you’re not. If you’re not, then the way out of this cannot be no contact. And that’s why you failed every time. That’s why you’re still trapped. Because the transition from being under abuse to going no contact cannot be through going no contact itself, it has to be through something else that is external to and cannot be part of going no contact itself.

You have to under no circumstances be physically present around the narcissist or abuser, no matter what.

The solution is to not make the narcissist or abuser stop. The solution is to instantly begin doing something that makes you unreachable by the narcissist or abuser. The solution is to get from where you are to where the narcissist or abuser cannot reach you, communicate with you, talk to you, contact you, or abuse you, no matter what they do or how hard they try. Anything that gets you to that latter place or position is supposed to be your number one priority at the moment. Look for the exit, and figure out how you can get there instantly and immediately, as fast as you can, before any further abuse takes place. And that doesn’t mean you wait until they do something that hurts you. Anything that the narcissist or abuser says or does is abuse and part of the abuse. Get away. Get out, as fast as you can. Don’t engage, but that is not because you’re sitting there waiting for them to lose interest in you because you’re not responding. That will only make things worse, especially if they’re also violent. You don’t engage, because all you can think about right now is how to escape the abusive situation, instantly and immediately, as fast as you can, even if they didn’t say or do anything wrong yet.

The solution could be as simple as to program yourself to get up, turn around, and run for the exit, and get as far as possible away from the narcissist or abuser the moment you detect their existence around you. The moment you see or hear the narcissist or abuser is there, wherever you are. Run for the exit. Run for your life. And you do that every single time, until it becomes a habit.

You don’t need more training. You already have been training for years. The reason why you keep failing, isn’t because you’re not good enough to ever win, necessarily. The reason why you keep failing, is because you haven’t won in a long, long time.

You think that because I told you that you need success that what I had in mind was the quick and easy path to success, even if it involved immorality, corruption, hypocrisy, or evil. You think that when I tell you failure is bad, and there are no lessons to be learned from it, that this means that you shouldn’t take risks or get out of your comfort zone, or expand your comfort zone, for any reason whatsoever. You think that this means stay where you are for good, and never ever try to change anything. Don’t face your fears, and don’t try anything new. Never learn. Keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again forever. Don’t explore stuff. Assume you know it all before you even begin, because this is all there is, and you’ve seen it all before, and there’s nothing new to learn here, and there’s nothing that you don’t already know, and there’s nothing that you haven’t seen before. You think that avoiding failure means avoiding something that is not failure in and of itself, because it might lead to further failure. You think this means avoid aiming high or dreaming big. You think this means you’re no longer allowed to be ambitious. You think you are supposed to avoid doing anything that you might not necessarily succeed at it from the first attempt. If you might fail at something, don’t do it. Not to mention, if you might make some mistakes in it, you also shouldn’t try to do it in the first place.

You think that I meant all of this, or any of this. You are wrong.

Intention changes everything. Not my intention, yours.

If you approach something with a mindset of failure isn’t a bad thing that should be avoided, you will not be incentivized to succeed. You will have no reason to aim for success. You will have no motivation to not fail again this time. Since it’s all lessons and learning, and there’s no such a thing as failure, and you either win or learn. And failure doesn’t exist. You only fail when you quit, you will have no reason to try to succeed or win this time, no matter the cost. You will not have that burning desire to win or succeed, by any means necessary. You will not have that whatever it takes mentality. You will not even care about success or winning. Both outcomes are the same to you now. Why would you pick one over the other? Why would you put in the extra work that is necessary to make it happen this time around if both success and failure are equal to you, and it’s all about the journey? Why would you get rewarded intrinsically for success if you can short-circuit that by getting a sample of this huge reward through further and persistent failure? You can’t get something that you don’t truly want. And if you don’t want success, why would you ever get it, especially when things get challenging? Whatever happened to desire being the starting point of all achievement. Now you think a total disregard to desiring success or achievement does not change the outcome or rate of success. Because failure is not that bad actually. Not bad at all even. How would you ever succeed or win against all odds if you have that kind of mindset that normalizes failure and diminishes the importance of success? Especially when you exacerbate that by thinking success doesn’t matter, what matters is genuine happiness only. As if you can be truly happy while being a total failure. Or worse, success does not lead to happiness. Where did you get that from? Have you ever felt bad before because you succeeded at something? Isn’t progress better than perfection? How the hell are you going to make progress and keep things moving if you always get stuck and bogged down because of excessive failure, especially when that failure takes place successively or in a row? How will that positively impact making progress?

You think that your mindset around failure is making you unstoppable. In reality, all it does is make you indifferent towards success. You will never quit because of it, I’ll grant you that, but you will never win either. At least not at something slightly challenging or a little outside of your comfort zone. By not trying to aim for avoiding the negative, you ended up avoiding the positive and getting nothing but the negative.

I want you to tell me how does it feel like when you fail. Right after you’ve failed. Does it feel inspiring? Does it encourage you to sit down and figure out why you failed? Or does it open up the floodgates of negativity that makes it impossible for you to think constructively or be able to think at all in the first place? Does it expose you to the exact reasons why you keep failing every single time, or does it only feed your victim mentality out of nowhere, like there’s no tomorrow, even if you are against it to begin with? The truth about failure is that for whatever reason, it decreases your abilities, which makes it harder for you to win next time, even if you know exactly what you need to do to win, and even if you have what it takes to win every single time. Failure in this case will take place inevitably, not because you still need to learn something new that you don’t already know, but because you have failed too much recently, or in your past history, even if your failure was totally not your fault. That is assuming of course that the game itself you’re playing is not rigged, and that everybody is playing fairly. It is a form of unstoppable self-sabotage that happens against your will, to weed out the losers amongst our ranks, to only make room for the best and most competent of us to prevail, so that we don’t lose in battle again in the future because of you. Nature, when trying to achieve that, selects you not on the basis of competence, but on the basis of results, presumably because Nature has no intelligence that allows it to be able to determine how competent you really are except through real world external results or indisputable success, with disregard to how competent you really are. Just because your past history is full of instances of failure, you’re not allowed to win or even compete anymore, even if all this failure was through no fault of your own, even if it has nothing to do with your actual competence. Even if it has nothing to do with how good you really are, or how strong, intelligent, or competent you really are. Even if you failed because of being too smart. Even if you failed because you were too good to win at something that easy for you. Even if your failure was due to corruption, or entirely due to external circumstances. Even if your failure was due to narcissistic abuse, or its long-lasting negative effects on you even after you’ve managed to escape it for good. Even if it’s not your fault. Nature doesn’t care, and it will continue exercising its oppression onto you for as long as it can, until you win.

Until you learn how to defend yourself against narcissistic abuse, you’ll never heal from it.

You have to understand that narcissistic abuse is at least one of the worst and most severe forms of torture known to mankind ever, if not the worst and most severe of all already. As you already know, you cannot fully heal or recover from a traumatic event without you learning what needs to be done so that this kind of trauma never happens to you ever again. If you thought why me, why did that happen to me in particular, me of all people, you will end up adopting a narrative that exonerates you of any necessity for learning anything new from that traumatic event, except what can serve as proof that you were right about being helpless, hopeless, useless, and worthless, and that there’s nothing you can do to have a normal life, like everybody else. You will then be consumed by a narrative around your situation in life that is disempowering to you, and only helps to further deepen how pointless it is for you to even try. Which makes you give up. Which makes you fail. Which makes you depressed. Which makes you never reach anything good. Even if you are right about how hopeless your situation in life is, and even if it is fact that there’s nothing that you can ever do to make your suffering stop while you’re still alive, without you losing anything of value in the process. Even if it really is pointless for you to even try to make anything better, even if you’re right about that, that still doesn’t change the fact that you are not becoming better because of that kind of attitude towards your situation. Again, even if you’re absolutely right about being helpless, and in an absolutely hopeless horrible situation, that still doesn’t change the fact that such negativity won’t change anything about how bad your situation is. Even if your negativity cannot possibly make anything worse, because it is already the worst. What you’re going through and what you’re suffering because of cannot be made worse by negative thinking, because your situation is absolutely the worst suffering you can possibly imagine for a human being like you. It cannot get worse, no matter what you do. And I am not denying that this could be true, or invalidating any of how you feel about your situation, because what you feel about your situation could be factual, and not just your own subjective experience or opinion. I understand. The fact remains though, that if you didn’t learn all there is that could be learned from a traumatic experience, the flashbacks and the traumas are going to haunt you for the rest of your life, adding to your currently existing suffering considerably. Adding to it a perpetual form of torture of a special kind, a special nature. One that is repetitive, intrusive, persistent, and insistent upon showing up during any moment you seem to be enjoying yourself in peace and having what could be considered a glimpse of what happiness looks like. Any time you are stuck with yourself, without doing something that distracts you from your own thoughts nonstop, you will find yourself going back to the traumatic experience or event and reliving it as if it happened yesterday, or is still happening now. That is torture. And it certainly isn’t positively contributing to the quality of your life. What are you going to do about that? There’s no escape. This follows you wherever you go, and forces itself to take place no matter what you’re doing at the moment. And the only way you can make it stop is to learn all there is that could be learned from such a traumatic experience or event, no matter what. It is not possible to say hey, I’ve learned a thing or two from that traumatic event or experience, am I now off the hook? Am I free? No, you have to leave nothing behind. Nothing whatsoever. Here, gratitude won’t be of help. Gratitude won’t save you this time. Gratitude will not work. You have to be insatiable. You have to learn it all, as is, without leaving anything behind. Leave no stone unturned. If there’s a single lesson that could be learned from such a traumatic situation, experience, or event, that you didn’t learn yet, you have accomplished nothing. You are as good as you were back then when you were still fresh out of the traumatic event. It doesn’t matter whether or not it was your fault that this traumatic thing happened to you. What you care about is making it impossible to happen again, because life with the possibility of this happening to you again is impossible. Is unbearable. You cannot go through this twice, much less more than two times. This cannot keep happening to you again and again and again. This has to stop, not just stop happening only, but stop being possible to happen to you ever again, no matter what. This has two components to it. One is making sure that doesn’t take place ever again. And the other, what are you going to do should that happen to you again, through no fault of your own. Since you took care of the first part or component, it is then supposed to be something that is impossible to happen to you ever again anyway, but theoretically speaking, let’s assume you got stuck in such situation again, what are you going to do? If the answer is I don’t know, then you are still as helpless as you were at the time where the traumatic event was still taking place. Even though you made sure that this kind of traumatic experience, event, situation, or thing is impossible to ever take place ever again, and is impossible to happen to you ever again. Even if you did everything in your power to make that the case, to make that a fact, you still haven’t dealt with the aforementioned second component. You still have no idea what are you supposed to do if something like that happened to you again. You are still as helpless as you were during the traumatic event. Even if taking care of the first component means that this could never happen to you ever again, which means learning what you need to know in order to be capable of saving yourself next time when that happens will be for nothing but theoretical purposes. Just for the sake of the argument. Hypothetically speaking. It’s like learning how to deal with an imaginary problem. Food for thought. Nevertheless, it is no joke. If the answer is a blank space, if the answer is I don’t know what to do in this case, you are absolutely helpless in the face of such traumatic thing, and you will never heal or recover from the trauma fully or completely. And I think you will achieve no healing whatsoever until you do. Until you learn how to make it stop happening to you, and also how to deal with it and make it stop if it ever happened to you again, theoretically speaking, of course. Not even partial healing. Why is that a problem? The problem is that whomever thought that hitting both components is the only way to go did not have narcissistic abuse as the mother of all traumatic experiences in mind. They didn’t see that coming. Because if they did, they would’ve just said there’s no such thing as healing from traumas or trauma recovery. It’s easier, because if you add the trauma of narcissistic abuse to the equation, everything falls apart. Not because the equation of healing itself is wrong. But, let me explain to you why. In narcissistic abuse, you’re supposed to not engage. Everything you say is supply for the narcissist, which would make them gain more energy, whilst yours is being drained. Everything that you say to the narcissist is fuel that increases the chances of them winning the fight, it makes them happy, not feel pain. It makes them feel alive. Like when a vampire feeds. It makes them feel good, really good, like no other. And you said what you said to make them stop. Good luck with that. They don’t want it to stop, they just want it to keep coming. You were told that the best course of action, the wisest and most beautiful of all courses of action in this scenario is to not engage, but instead, just walk away. Master the art of walking away. During the argument, during the conversation, right in the middle of the fight. Yeah, it means you made sure it never happens to you again. It doesn’t render you any less helpless when it does happen, though. Exposure response prevention is at the heart of psychotherapy for a reason. If you do not become strong enough to handle it next time it happens, you have learned nothing, and you are still helpless. If all you do is avoid snakes and being anywhere where snakes are likely to be found, you are still helpless when snakes show up. You still have a phobia of snakes. You’ve accomplished nothing. Every single psychologist knows that. The same could be said about healing and trauma recovery. But you still think healing is just a natural process that is all about forgetting what happened to you and moving on. Just taking time to cool off, and heal your wounds. Until the pain goes away. And you say I’ve been healed, even though it’s the narcissist within you that has taken possession of your body that says you’ve been healed, because they want you to waste your life thinking this is all there is when it comes to healing, this is as good as it can get, and that you’ve completely recovered and healed, even though you haven’t made any progress whatsoever. The narcissistic abuser dwelling inside you controlling your thoughts, actions, behaviour, decision making, and every movement you make, is the one that is convincing you that you’ve healed and recovered. Is the one who says so, not you. Insofar you haven’t learned what to do when exposed to narcissistic abuse, except the first component, making it impossible to take place ever again, not what to do when it happens to save yourself next time, if it happened to you again by mistake, which is the second component. Going no contact means you will never be exposed to such traumatic stress, experience, event, situation, or thing ever again. Means you are finally safe from narcissistic abuse. That is great. But I’m afraid, my friend, that this is not good enough. At least it’s not good enough for healing and recovery from the traumatic effects of narcissistic abuse. You don’t know what to do when it happens. You are still helpless. And that helplessness will extend to every other domain of your life, until it consumes everything. I’m not saying that going no contact is wrong. I’m not saying that you should go and face your abusers every now and then to practice how to face narcissistic abuse and win every single time instead of just hiding from it. They are right to tell you that you can’t win. You are dealing with absolute vacuum that doesn’t exist. Emptiness. A black hole. You cannot win that. Which means don’t waste your life. Don’t engage. Leave. Walk away. Don’t try to make them stop, change, or feel bad. Go no contact, and never look back. That is the only answer, and they are right about all this. I am not here to tell you otherwise. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either an abuser themselves or someone who has no idea what they’re talking about. You see why there’s a problem here? What are you going to do next time when the abuse happens? Yeah, yeah, I understand that I should’ve went no contact when I had the chance, but what if I met another narcissist, or a psychopath, or a sociopath, or an antisocial, what am I going to do? What if I’m stuck with them for quite some time until I have the chance to escape and go no contact? What am I going to do to make them stop? Everybody just says don’t respond, don’t engage, basically go grey rock, until they leave you alone. What if they kept hurting you until you were able to leave? Does this mean that I should just be okay with getting hurt and doing nothing about it over and over again for the rest of my life every single time I run into one of those people through no fault of my own? And I don’t mean the same abusers, but new ones I never knew existed? Never met before? And it doesn’t stop here, there’s the fact that if you went back in time and faced the same situation, could you have saved yourself, given you know now what you know, or are you just going to stand there and suck it all up until it’s over, and then go no contact? If faced with the same situation, are you going to get maximum trauma from it, and then go no contact? If the answer is no, of course not, you have to be able to face it and save yourself this time without getting hurt or traumatized at all this time around, how could you do so when anything there is that you can ever do except no contact will serve as fuel for the narcissist, making them more capable of abusing, hurting, and traumatizing you even further, and even harder? Which means you shouldn’t try to do anything whatsoever, except going no contact. Which means you are still helpless. You still don’t know how to save yourself from the abuse or the traumatic event itself once it happens, or once it had already started. You only know how to avoid its occurrence altogether from the start, before it even begins, before it could ever take place. You only know how to avoid the abuse or traumatic event. You only know how to not let the abuse or traumatic situation, experience, event, or thing happen ever again in the first place. You have no idea what to do if you’ve found yourself in that situation ever again where the abuse or traumatic thing, event, situation, or experience is already taking place or has already started happening to you again. And that is at the core of why you are failing to heal. That is why the trauma is still haunting you. Because you have learned nothing.