Dark Psychology & Gaslighting Manipulation (2 in 1)

Dark Psychology & Gaslighting Manipulation (2 in 1): Understand Narcissists & Mind Control + Use Body Language To Improve Your Social & Communication Skills

By Tiegan Williams

Dark Psychology And Gaslighting Manipulation: Understand How Narcissists (& Others) Brainwash & Mind Control People To Influence Human Behaviour Using NLP, Body Language & More

Tiegan Williams

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. What Is Narcissism?

Research and Discovery

Clinical Definition

Types of Narcissism

What Causes Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

Narcissist Strategies

Chapter 2. Narcissistic Abuse

False Self and True Self of a Narcissist

Toxic Behaviors

Abuse Cycle

Depreciation and Discard

Hoovering

Chapter 3. Recognizing Narcissist Language

Manipulation

Verbal and Nonverbal Cues

Language of Cruelty

Chapter 4. Why Did They Choose Me?

Personal Relationships

Professional Relationships

Chapter 5. Emotional Trauma

Side Effects of Narcissistic Abuse

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Men and Women Experience Emotional Trauma Differently

Chapter 6. How to Break Up with a Narcissist

Chapter 7. Recovering from a Narcissistic Relationship

Reconnect with Life

Control and Improve Your Empathy

Manage the Energy that Surrounds You

Reconnect with Humans Again

Self-Analysis

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Eat Well, Sleep Well, and Exercise

Conclusion

Meditations

Sitting Body Scan

Sitting Meditation with Focus on Sounds

Meditation while Focusing on Thoughts and Feelings

A Self-Love Meditation Guide

Meditation for Letting Go

Anxiety Meditation

Passive Relaxation

Stress Relief with Breathing

Meditation for Getting Rid of Shadows

Mindfulness of Breath Meditation

Meditation for Difficult Emotions

Empathic Meditation

Meditation on Forgiveness

Mindfulness Practice for Analyzing Difficult Emotions

Cultivating Well-Being through Mindful Reflection

Developing Well-Being by Visiting Your Special Place

Getting Started

Chapter 1. What Is Analysis?

Analyze Yourself

Observe Others

Terminology

Chapter 2. What Is Body Language?

Nonverbal Communication

Body Language Signals and Positions

The Importance of Reading Body Language

Posture

Personal Space

Body Language Myths

Chapter 3. Useful Body Language Tips

How to Recognize Whether an Opportunity Is Open or Closed

Lying or Telling the Truth?

On Your Side or Against You?

Dominant or Subservient?

Dedicated or Not?

Tips That Will Help You Make the Most of Your Body Language

Chapter 4. Gender and Culture

The Language of Gender

The Language of Culture

Chapter 5. Appearing Self-Assured

What You Should and Should Not Do

Initial Impressions

Gestures

Displays of Affection

Regulation

Adapting

Chapter 6. Reduce Your Stress, Anxiety, and Tension

Stress Management

Identify Stressors

Cognitive Behavioral Approach

Live Healthier

Time Management

Overcome Anxiety

Meditations

Breathe

Welcome Everything

Relaxation Meditation

Managing Negative Emotions

Inner Tranquility Meditation

Anxiety Mindfulness Meditation

Anxiety Meditation

Progressive Relaxation

Scan of the Body

Letting Go of Painful Emotions through Mindfulness

Meditation to Help You Turn Your Awareness into Action

Getting Over Shyness

Meditation for Mental Clarity

Meditation for Mental Control

Introduction

Have you ever had to let someone go from your life? Was it a toxic friend whose personality came into conflict with yours? A partner who was not the person you expected them to be. A competitive coworker who saw every project as a chance to get ahead?

While each of these scenarios may present different inconveniences and challenges, one thing remains true: saying goodbye and walking away probably didn't eat you up inside.

It's natural to feel the remnants of the relationship as your heart and mind worked to cut the remaining ties that bound you to this person. However, once those few days or weeks had passed, you were most likely fully functional again. You might not have even thought about that person unless someone else mentioned them to you. You recovered, moved on, and improved. Why is it so difficult now that it has happened before?

A narcissistic relationship has characteristics that make it particularly difficult to deal with. As a result, after you walk away, you may experience the same intense pain that you did when they were still a part of your life. So, what are the factors that make it so difficult?

The grip is perhaps the most intricate and effective tool that a narcissist has for keeping their victims in line. This metaphorical grasp is gradually built over time, using conditional love and affection as a tool to get you to act the way they want you to.

As time passes, the victim grows fond of the narcissist, and the abuser will take advantage of this bond. Even if the victim had no involvement in the development of the issue, the victim becomes a scapegoat for all the various problems that may arise in the narcissist's life.

The narcissist now insists that you are the problem, that you are to blame for everything that goes wrong in your lives together. They persuade you that you require their services because you are not perfect, and they know what is best to keep you from causing further harm to yourself or others. They make you believe you rely on them, as if you owe them an explanation or an apology for everything that goes wrong.

You, on the other hand, are completely convinced. The kindness, affection, and love they showed you at the start of your relationship has convinced you that they have the best intentions. They've persuaded you that they’re ‘superior to everyone—including you—and thus the only viable counsel and the only one who can provide you with verified truth and advice.

You've become entangled in their web without even realizing it. You feel reliant on them, and the first question that comes to mind whenever you need to make a decision is What would they think? You're constantly walking on eggshells, careful not to offend them and doing everything you can to please them.

Unfortunately, simply leaving is insufficient to dismantle such a deeply embedded mechanism. This is because, over time, this system will cause you to lose your sense of volition. Your reliance on the abuser becomes reflexive and making decisions on your own becomes difficult.

So, now that you've left, you're left wondering what to do next. You feel the need to have someone tell you how to proceed, and the only person who comes to mind is your abuser. Unfortunately, no one else will be able to help you through this difficult time in your life as much as you can.

Feelings of Guilt

A civil disengagement from a narcissistic relationship does not exist. As a result, you're probably not speaking with your abuser right now. In fact, you may never be able to communicate with them again. This is a fact that must be accepted.

Knowing you're not on good terms with your abuser may trigger feelings of guilt. They persuaded you that anything wrong with your relationship was your fault, so now that you're ignoring each other indefinitely, you feel responsible for the situation.

This sense of guilt can make you want to crawl back in, apologize, and reclaim your place in their intricate mechanism. Going back and apologizing for something that wasn't your fault won't help much because you didn't do anything to deserve an apology in the first place.

Guilt is so important in a failed recovery because it is often the reason why victims rekindle relationships with their abuser. Allowing guilt to simply push you to reach out can be especially dangerous because it allows the abuser to shape the way you think and feel, increasing the likelihood that you will engage once more.

The Absence of Support

It would be much easier to deal with narcissistic abuse if your family and friends could support and educate you. However, because narcissists are great pretenders, they can effectively hide their true selves from everyone.

They spend their entire lives constructing an image of perfection and intelligence, establishing a character worthy of praise and admiration, even if their actual life is far from perfect. This well-executed charade makes it impossible for others to see the truth.

Approaching friends and family who may know your abuser is often futile because they are unlikely to believe what you have to say. After all, they've come to regard the narcissist as the ideal person, if not the perfect person. As a result, they'll conclude that what you're experiencing is most likely the result of misunderstanding.

Most of the time, you will have to heal on your own from a narcissist's abuse. Of course, there will always be support groups and online resources where you can find people who have experienced similar things. However, if you were hoping to gain the sympathy of those around you, especially if they are also acquainted with the narcissist, you may be disappointed.

The Unacknowledged Reality

Perhaps you've already noticed signs. Perhaps you've already noticed the strange behavior. Perhaps you chose to remain silent because you didn't want to start a fight. Perhaps you turned a blind eye because that's not how you've known them. In any case, you saw the warning signs and chose to ignore them.

Many people who fall into the narcissist's trap can detect the problematic personality long before it manifests itself. But they choose to remain silent and avoid confrontation in order to believe in the best. They want to believe that this is a good person and that these glimpses of strange behavior are isolated incidents.

Going against your gut and then discovering that you were correct about how you felt can make it extremely difficult to move on. The feeling of betraying your own radar will make you want to beat yourself up and cry over the milk that you've spilled.

Although it can be discouraging, keep in mind that everyone makes mistakes, and no one is immune. While the consequences of ignoring your gut may appear insurmountable, especially because it entrapped you in the narcissist's grasp, you must recognize that the mistake was a learning experience. Because not everyone gets to go through and survive such intense abuse, you now have a unique opportunity to grow and mature that many people do not have.

Don't beat yourself up about things over which you no longer have control. Instead, look forward to the future and learn to credit your gut instinct whenever it warns you the next time. If you give your intuition the attention it deserves, you'd be surprised how well it can keep you safe from a variety of threats around you.

This book will look at how you can release yourself from the narcissist’s grip and the steps you need to take for self-care and a positive recovery. The book also provides a selection of meditations to help with self-care.

Chapter 1. What Is Narcissism?

Research and Discovery

Since the publication of the first edition of the DSM in 1952, psychological thought and science have undergone several revolutions. In addition, the book has been revised several times. Early editions were dominated by Freudian theory. Narcissistic tendencies were blamed on our early experiences with our mother or father, and the cure would be a lot of psychoanalysis. However, starting around 1974, Freudian theory began to lose favor, and a more scientific orientation came to dominate the DSM. As the pendulum swung, the DSM began to adopt a disease model of mental illness, in which psychological disorders are viewed as a medical condition that can be treated with a pill rather than talk therapy. The most recent edition (DSM5), with its symptom checklist and elaborate numeric codes, aims to identify psychological conditions that are as discrete and circumscribed as any physical illness, such as glaucoma or asthma.

There are numerous positive consequences to this shift and viewing psychological problems as diseases rather than moral failings has helped to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness. At the same time, the DSM has taught us to think of many disorders as the result of chemical imbalances or genetic flaws, rather than investigating the meaning of their symptoms or their roots in personal history. Patients are told that depression is caused by low serotonin levels in the brain and that medication will take care of it.

This prevalent view of mental illness is not only inaccurate, but also dangerous. It focuses on extreme cases that fit a clinical definition rather than providing guidance on how to identify and deal with less severe but often serious manifestations of a disorder. Narcissism is not a disease that can be treated with a pill.

Some men and women just barely meet the diagnostic criteria. Others come up just short. Many other people appear to be narcissistic but more closely match another diagnosis. These individuals may be just as troubled and destructive to themselves and those around them. . . and getting them the help they require can be difficult because they do not fit some rigid definition in the DSM.

In fact, narcissism, like many other high-profile medical and psychological conditions, exists in many shades and degrees of severity along a spectrum. To understand narcissism—to make sense of the narcissists we all know and find ways to cope with them—we must look beyond the DSM's strict definition. Seeing people with diseases separates them, as if they have nothing to do with our own emotional experiences and are thus incomprehensible. However, as I'll demonstrate in the following pages, the narcissistic characteristics they exhibit are actually the most extreme form of traits that appear across the spectrum of mental disorders, and more mildly in the general population. In short, narcissism is a universal aspect of human psychology that manifests itself in a variety of ways.

Although the DSM defines nine potential criteria for narcissistic personality disorder as distinct disease traits, similar to the fatigue and shortness of breath that frequently characterize anemia, those nine features actually overlap and interconnect. From a psychological standpoint, where symptoms have meaning, those nine symptoms actually boil down to two: an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a lack of empathy for others; the remaining features are byproducts that naturally follow from them.

A person with a grandiose sense of self believes she is unique, a member of a superior elite, and destined for greatness. She would believe she was entitled to preferential treatment, come across as arrogant or haughty, and expect others to admire her. Someone who lacks empathy is more likely to exploit others for personal gain or to envy them simply because they have what she desires.

As I'll be discussing throughout this book, narcissism is characterized by an overinflated sense of self-importance and a lack of empathy for others. According to the DSM, they largely define narcissistic personality disorder, but they frequently appear in other psychological disorders as well. Mania and the manic phases of bipolar disorder are characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance. The ideas of reference that manifest in paranoia and other psychotic disorders organize the universe around the self; others become two-dimensional enemies, characters in one's personal drama, with no authentic interior life of their own. People suffering from manic-depressive illness have little emotional space for others. In other words, many people who do not meet the full diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder are still narcissists. And they're all around us, causing us harm and wrecking our lives. We're not prepared to deal with them. We frequently fail to notice them until it is too late.

Clinical Definition

The term narcissistic is thrown around quite loosely in popular culture, usually referring to vanity and self-absorption. This reduces narcissism to a universal trait and minimizes the symptoms displayed by people suffering from the disorder. While there is a spectrum for narcissism, narcissism as a full-fledged personality disorder is quite different.

Because of their deceitfulness, lack of empathy, and tendency to be interpersonally exploitative, people who meet the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder or have traits of antisocial personality disorder can operate in extremely manipulative ways within the context of intimate relationships. Although this book will focus on narcissistic abusers, due to the overlap of symptoms in these two disorders, this can potentially apply to interactions with those who have antisocial personality disorder to some extent.

It is critical in any type of relationship that we learn to recognize red flags when interacting with people who exhibit malignant narcissism and/or antisocial traits, so that we can better protect ourselves from exploitation and abuse, set appropriate boundaries with others, and make informed decisions about who we keep in our lives. Understanding the nature of these toxic interactions and how they affect us greatly improves our ability to practice self-care.

A narcissistic person is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as someone who has a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy that begins in early adulthood and manifests in a variety of contexts. Five (or more) of the following indicate this:

• Has an inflated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).

• Is obsessed with fantasies of unending success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

• Believes that he or she is special and unique, and that he or she can only be understood by, or should associate with, other people of special or high status (or institutions).

• Excessive admiration is required.

• Has a strong sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).

• Is exploitative interpersonally (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends).

• Is unable to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

• Is frequently envious of others or thinks others are envious of him or her.

• Displays arrogant or haughty behavior or attitudes.

That's the clinical definition, but a narcissist's behavior in relationships is more subtle and complex than the visible signs of narcissism depicted on this list.

This book will teach you about the red flags of narcissism and how it manifests in relationships, as well as how to begin healing and recovering from narcissistic abuse, as well as important insights drawn from research and survivors. You'll learn healing strategies and tips to help you detach from your narcissistic partner if you haven't already, as well as why you may still be addicted to your narcissistic partner and how to channel your experiences into constructive healing.

Types of Narcissism

There isn't much that can be done to treat narcissism because it is a personality disorder—you either have it or you don't. Furthermore, as previously stated, not all types of narcissism are harmful.

This disorder manifests in various degrees and shapes. Narcissism is classified into three types: stable, narcissistic personality disorder, and malignant narcissism. The final form is the most disruptive, as it does not require a clinical diagnosis to detect. This type has a significant impact on those around the narcissist, causing both short and long-term harm. The first two are nearly identical, stable narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, with the second becoming pathological.

That is, no matter how a person is wired, he or she cannot suppress his or her narcissism. This section will primarily deal with this type of narcissism.