Narcissist Recovery Blog

As we've discussed, we must process and validate our feelings before we can move on. Repressing our feelings has been shown to negatively affect our physical and emotional health.

We know that stress chemicals are released through emotional tears. Therefore, we should never be afraid to feel sad or cry.

We also should never be afraid to feel angry. Unfortunately, many of us were taught to repress anger, especially women. Anger has a negative connotation because most people associate it with aggression. But in reality, anger is followed by violence only 10 percent of the time, according to Howard Kassinove, PH.D., co-author of Anger Management: The Compete Treatment Guide for Practice.

As humans, we have what is called "Selective Memory," which our mind uses as a way to protect us.

Good memories are vividly clear and much more readily available for recall in our memory than bad memories. As mentioned earlier, bad memories are fragmented, stored in a different part of the brain and not as easily accessible. We tend to obsess about bad memories more because they are unresolved and scattered. They pop into our heads more frequently when we have not sorted out the chaos or made any kind of effort to understand what happened.

Here's why it's so important to write about what you're experiencing:

Today we now have proof that writing is therapeutic. James Pennebaker, PhD., a psychologist and researcher, has conducted studies that show improvement in immune system functioning and emotional well-being when research participants write about difficult or traumatic events in their lives.

As Linda DeSalvo points out in her book, “Writing as a Way of Healing,“ many writers, like Virginia Woolf and Henry Miller describe their work as a form of analysis or therapy. Before treatment was available, many writers used their work in this way.

DeSalvo describes the therapeutic process of writing like this:

Yes, it is critical that we accept the fact that the man we fell in love with is gone.

Part of Step 4 - Accept It - involves writing his Eulogy. I believe this is important because we must fully grieve the man we fell in love with and accept that he is gone and never coming back.

The man who stands before us now asking for forgiveness and playing with our minds is NOT the man we fell in love with at all. We must not try to fool ourselves into thinking that he is. Trust me, he is relying on us to do this.

Instead, we must recognize this new man as an IMPOSTER and nothing more. We must fully grieve the man we fell in love with and say goodbye to him. We must pay our respects to him and mourn him. I believe by writing his Eulogy, it will help us do this.

Simply put, Narcissism is the "Abuse of Power."

At the LA Book Expo in 2008 where I found my publisher, none of the publishers I tried to talk to were at all interested in publishing a book on narcissism. Most of them suffered from it themselves! No joke!

You should have seen the look of disgust I got from some publishers when presenting my book to them. One guy handed it back to me and said, "Psssh, this is the reason my sister-in-law gave for divorcing my brother" and handed it back to me with a look that could kill.