4 Unexpected Life Lessons from a Lonely Cupcake

You could argue that Lonely was just a cupcake, my portion control was off, and why make a big deal about it in the first place. But that would be dismissive thinking and I would urge you to beware of dismissive thinking. It was the dismissive thinking of toxic people that led you to believe that your feelings didn’t matter, and it was okay for them to gaslight and isolate you and then blame you for it.

The Freedom to Make Mistakes

You learn, in a toxic relationship, that there are no innocent mistakes ever. At least when you are the person making the mistakes. As ever, an entirely different set of rules apply to the Narcissist. Even when, one way or another, the Narcissist exits your life, your patterned trauma response does not depart with them. You still retain the same dread of making mistakes.

How easily wounded are you by people’s hurtful words?

Almost all survivors of narcissistic abuse need to perform a total rethink about the power of words. We have been taught – mostly by people some way along the abusive spectrum – that their words are not a big deal.  They argue that we we should be able to brush them off.  (Even though this is yet another of those cases where there is one law for you and quite another for them.) Instead, you need to learn what their words say about them.