The Lost Letters: The Dark World of Narcissistic Abuse

You Are Going To Be OK

It's true. You are going to be ok even if right now you don't believe it. After everything you have been through, perhaps the idea of a life where you are not living in constant fear, anxiety, doubt, and fighting feelings of worthlessness and despair must seem like a fantasy.

It will take time, but you will get there. These negative thoughts, feelings and emotions are not who you are—they do not define you. They were buried there by your narcissist, poisonous seeds meant to control you and keep you paralysed in doubt while they shredded your goodness, empathy, generosity, and kind heart.

The good news is you have the power to purge the poison they have left in you. Below are simple, yet extremely effective strategies you can use to work through the harm they have done to you, to uproot the toxic weeds of their hate, and burn away the lies that choke your mind and contaminate your thoughts. These are strategies I use myself. A word of warning: It's a journey. Your healing won't happen overnight, but so long as you persist in your recovery, identify the lies as theirs, and not your truths, you will overcome.

It's important to recognise your recovery will be a day by day battle, one that will be hard in the beginning but will get easier over time. Never forget you are fighting against them, their voice, and their programming which still lingers inside you, an ugly legacy. Only you can make this stop, but you have an arsenal of weapons ready and waiting for you to aid you in your fight. You are not alone, and you are stronger than you think.

Hanlon's razor

In an earlier chapter we talked about building trust and how the most critical key in gaining the ability to trust others again is to build trust in yourself. One of the key components to building trust in yourself is opening yourself up to a subtle shift in thinking, in how you frame situations and behaviours beyond your control while still missing critical information.

This powerful tool is called Hanlon's razor. It's a simple thing, which offers a double benefit: it alleviates an enormous amount of stress plus helps you develop a more positive mindset. It's one of my most favourite methods to stop myself from spiralling into anxiety and experiencing deeply unpleasant emotions whenever ambiguity in the actions of others is present. Done often enough, this practice becomes second nature and leads to a calmer state of mind.

Hanlon's razor is a way of reasoning through unclear scenarios which helps you narrow down the most likely explanation for something to which you would otherwise assume malice. Here it is again:

Don't attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by anything else.

In the majority of cases people are not out to get us, intentionally hurt us, or make our life worse. The trouble is for those of us either in or recovering from a narcissist's abuse, our experience with them has taught us over and over that in fact, everything they did or do to us is attributable to malice. This means we lose the ability to differentiate between their treatment and that of others. Eventually we only see malice in the intentions, words, and behaviour of others in every ambiguous situation. It becomes our go-to reaction and causes us an exponential amount of distress. We are trapped in a vortex of suspicion, fear, defensiveness, and self-fulfilling prophecies. We feel we have no choice but to push people away because we believe we cannot trust them.

The trouble is when we assume bad intentions two things happen right away: We immediately suffer a tsunami of unpleasant emotions like anger, resentment, bitterness, maybe even revenge—all of them ugly things, and we reinforce the programming the narcissist planted into us. Neither of these things contribute to your healing, instead they set you back. Way back. So this is battle number one in reclaiming yourself. Don't let the narcissist's malice make everyone else malicious.