This is the post: Everyone wants to change the world but few are willing to change themselves.
I know how relevant this is to what we have all been playing out with each other – narcissists included.
We were all brought up under the pretence that if someone or something could change, then our own life could change and become fulfilling.
That is conditional living, and in so many ways that premise doesn’t hold up.
I really just want to be straight to the point here. I know we were all mesmerised to think differently, and those illusions we have been programmed with are very powerful – yet if you think about these points you will see, not only how obvious they are, but also how they have demonstrated as absolute truth in your life.
1) No-one ever changed their behaviour because someone else believed they should.
2) Everyone is acting in a specific way that they believe is justified given their own emotional background.
3) When someone is forced against their will to reform they will defend their position even more strongly.
4) Overloaded and burgeoning jails, courthouses and duplicitous and questionable legal results let us know that something is not working in our system regarding trying to hold people accountable.
What our new science and spirituality model is waking us up to is:
1) Prior subconscious programming is what creates people “the way they are”. Therefore reform needs to be about changing belief systems rather than trying to hold people accountable and punishing them.
2) People’s beliefs don’t change regardless of what “outside forces” we try to inflict on them.
3) Unless there is re-programming, through purposeful inner work or a spiritually reforming “Higher Power” experience, this person will always default back to “the way they are”.
4) We cannot force someone through our own statements of horror, pain, guilt inducing, lecturing, prescribing, pleading, coercing, “loving” or any other form of “enabling” to change – if they don’t want to change.
5) “Enabling” never works because it grants people a distraction from true cause and effect (consequences) and grants them the alibi of pushing back, receiving energy and having aspects of their life maintained for them whilst they live out their dysfunctions.
6) People only reform when people stop enabling them, stop granting them energy and allow them to face true consequences of their actions which, without enabling, would cause their present life to no longer be sustainable.
The Deal That All of Us Lived and Knew With Narcissists
Let me paint this following scenario for you – it’s a very familiar scenario.
Leslie is a narcissist. She has been in a relationship with Paul for two years. She gambles, smears Paul behind his back, constantly seeks attention from other men as narcissistic supply and incessantly accuses Paul of having affairs behind her back.
Paul is hooked. He is trying to reason, convince, console and help her realise that he does love her, and that he is faithful and is committed and loyal. Paul fixed up Leslie’s credit cards a few months into the relationship, because they bought a home together and he wanted a clean slate. Since then he has paid up her fines and debt on three separate occasions.
Paul is forever explaining the fundamentals of trust between two people in love that any mature adult should just “get”. It doesn’t matter how many times he feels he has broken through as a resolution with her, the next day it is like that “sane” conversation never happened.
Leslie is not learning the consequences of her behaviour. What she has learnt is the more she rants, raves and accuses, the more consoling and confirmation of her attractiveness she gets from Paul.
She has also learnt that if she does gamble away her paycheck, or not give a crap about going to a parking meter because she is running late, that Paul will fix up the mess, and there will still be a roof over her head, a meal on the table and the mortgage will get paid.
And of course she is not going to learn, take responsibility and heal beyond her behaviour – because she does NOT have to.
No matter how desperately Paul wants her to change – what he needs to do is change himself for there to be any change in his life.
But, he isn’t changing himself.
So … things get worse, Leslie acts out more, Paul gets hooked in harder. The more he tries to control her the more he is controlled by her, and the sicker Paul becomes. Then six months later Leslie leaves him for a man richer than himself, and she is now going for the house that Paul and her bought together (with Paul’s money of course). What adds insult to injury is Leslie doesn’t have to pay any legal bills, because her new partner is a lawyer!
Now, Paul is no longer playing the role of the protector, fixer, nurturer … he is under siege from a woman who surmises that Paul has been abusing her with constant affairs. She is relentless and Paul is devastated, shocked, and intensely victimised …
We can imagine how he is feeling, and what he is saying. Paul has found an on-line Group, discovered she is a narcissist and is sharing his story full of his pain and devastation and her insane, cruel betrayal.
Now … this is the BIGGEST message – this is the biggest deal … what I am about to say …
We can all (and we did) jump up and down and scream “How dare he/ she?” “How can he / she do that to me?” “After all I’ve done for this relationship this person is a monster!”… and “How dare he / she betray me, have affairs on me, rip me off etc. etc.”
BUT … and it’s big – we haven’t realised the truth when we are stuck in this.
The truth is this: What we accept in our life we will get dished up – period.
It’s called poor boundary function and lack of self-love, self-deservedness and the struggling to be responsible for our own wellbeing. It’s co-dependency.
When we point the finger, scream and play victim – we are powerless … and this is the other big deal …
… NOTHING changes.
We are powerless to change the narcissist, and we are powerless to change the person who we most need to change – ourself.
It was never about changing the narcissist – and that was something we never had the power to do anyway. The only person who could ever change the narcissist is the narcissist – and that is NOT our concern.
Now let’s get the focus where it needs to be … on “self”.
The Change Within Ourselves
Getting back to Paul …
He couldn’t change Leslie – that was impossible. But if he changes himself his world will change. It will be a different frequency – a different level. He will embody self-love, deservedness and boundaries.
He will realise Leslie was NOT his abuser – she was his messenger.
She showed him what he had never healed in himself – the ways he was not showing up in life authentically, not honouring himself, the ways he was dangerously handing power over – and quite frankly giving to get.
Paul was playing out with Leslie what we all were unconsciously – trying to appease another so that they could supply us with the emotions, love and life we were not taking responsibility to supply for ourselves.
We didn’t know at the time we were doing this, and for many of us it took narcissistic abuse experiences to awaken and find out.
This is not exonerating Leslie in any way – she is a narcissist, sick and tormented. Not a healthy person to have a relationship with by any stretch of the imagination – but for Paul – the question was: “Why did I draw her into my life and co-generate this experience with her?”
Because within all of that VERY honest self-enquiry and self-development Paul’s power is brought back to himself. And here lies Paul’s emancipation from not just the pattern of abusive relationships but also his original unconscious wounds that set this up for him in the first place.
Fortunately this story takes on an evolutionary turn …
Paul took on self-partnering and the commitment to evolve himself as a result of this experience.
He did this because he knew the only way to change his life was to change himself.
Once he started living that path he realised people who had been taking advantage of him and not respecting him were now raising to meet his level, or they were leaving his experience to make way for people who did meet his vibration.
Leslie did not have the ability to become “conscious”, and she certainly didn’t want to – that was not her self-development goal at all … so it was no deal with her.
Yet, people who Paul worked with and his family members started having direction from Paul. He was honest with them, he would say “No” if something didn’t feel right for him, and he also starting asking for what he needed. These relationships changed from people not feeling connected to Paul, to wanting to give more to him genuinely. He became more real, attractive and more “visible” to these people.
In his new solid embodied emotional reality of self-love and deservedness, Paul gave up his old victimised beliefs. He knew he was the generative source of his own experience. He knew that his boundaries, life, love and wellbeing was NEVER dependent on one specific person supplying him with it … he knew he was.
Paul made the full commitment in his future to speak up when necessary; to lay boundaries and have limits – and mere words that didn’t follow with solid action would no longer be acceptable.
This is another lesson we learn when we take on the radical responsibility of our mission of empowering ourselves – we know that words are cheap and actions speak volumes.
What we learn is: authenticity is king.
This starts with us being honest about how we feel, what we need and what is or isn’t okay with us. And we diligently clean up the inner emotional wounds that were trapped in our inner programming which used to stop us doing that – the fear of rejection, abandonment, criticism or punishment.
And then we know we WILL receive the answers from people that allow us to transparently see who is or isn’t with us in truth, love and wholesomeness.
All because we became honest … we were finally honest with our own insecurities enough to want to heal them – and then we could finally show up honestly to others. From our own journey of self-honesty we know that no-one gets better or changes unless they are 100% honest and humble regarding their own insecurities.
Because if we hadn’t become totally self-honest and looked inwards we would not have started healing … and we realise that all unwholesome and unconscious behaviour is caused by wounds, by insecurities, just as we had inner wounds that caused us to NOT show up honestly.
We realise that anyone’s mere words without an honest self-disclosure and humility means they cannot and will not reprogram their inner wounds, change their behaviour or let in a profound Higher Power that can heal them.
And we stop taking it all so personally.
We know that we can’t make people face and deal with their inner wounds if they have no desire to. If they are still unconscious that that is their trip. So, with compassion we let go and allow them to play it out, because the only responsibility and right is our side of the fence.
Here is a profound truth …
You have to lead the way.
People in your life experience cannot and will not show up as authentic until you become a generative model of committing to that lifeforce yourself.
It was never about “them” – it has always been about “you”.
As Paul discovered, yes there were casualties and he had to pay a price – he had to pay her out of the house. But he discovered that the price for the lesson was completely worth it, because it catapulted him into another way of being – a completely different and more evolved life.
Why is Narcissism Rife On Our Planet?
There are three main reasons …
1) Because our world is uneducated about the necessary programming for children to become heathy, whole and emotionally solid adults, and
2) Because there are so many people enabling abusers to be abusers, and
3) Because we were taught the powerless victim model – to put all the blame back on abusers instead of doing the two things that are paramount to change our world from the dynamics of abuse /abused.
These are the ONLY two ways we will ever transcend abuse / abused.
1) Develop ourselves enough to stop enabling and feeding energy to abusers. Which means letting go, creating healthy boundaries, detoxifying ourselves of all the pain, blame and fear that keeps us hooked in and handing over any physical or emotional energy. And doing this simultaneously with our mission to expand our own consciousness – to become wiser, more empowered and solid human beings.
And then:
2) Living and teaching a higher consciousness by example, especially to our young children in their impactful, vulnerable, learning stage where everything is accepted deep into their psyche as “truth” (up to around 7 years of age).
I’m really passionate about this … and this is why I am so active about trying to heal people past the illusions of the victim model – because I see so clearly how not only is it not stopping narcissists, it is also cementing the problem deeper.
It means that people are even further away from creating the two above necessary steps to heal themselves and our world.
More About Childhood Programming
One of the greatest mistakes is to think that you are going to have the emotional solidness to be a more conscious parent unless you have worked on your own consciousness.
As a parent I learnt so much – it was impossible to impart what I had not yet embodied, because we can never lead people where we are not going ourselves.
The truth is: all of us are products of the unconscious parenting we received and the wounds we took on from our parents as our own.
What you will find profoundly is: when you begin working on your own consciousness as your first and most important mission (because your entire life emanates from that foundation) your parenting naturally improves. As does the emotional empowerment levels of your children … and much of this happens organically.
The more whole, at peace and “full” you feel in your own life as a result of letting go of outdated wounds, the more ability you have to love and accept yourself and let go of trying to control people and things that you can’t control. Then the more and more you are capable of letting go of holding people and things outside of you responsible for your life.
You stop handing your power over and start filling with and generating life from your own personal authentic power.
As a result, anxiousness, fear and dread start to melt away from your outer life and your inner being.
Then you start showing up from a much cleaner emotional space. You start being honest and transparent – and from this comes great insight, love and connection with your children. It also invites them to show up without fear in honesty with you – knowing you will validate, support and guide them instead of attempting to prescribe, criticise and control.
For the purpose of this article I want to explain to you the scientific reality that we now know about childhood programming.
Prior to just recently, we did not know the truth – we were clueless. In fact we thought that how children were treated emotionally was a really low priority. We thought that practical survival, physically not abusing them, educating and granting opportunities were key for them to have a great life.
This was the Newtonian model – that the predisposed genes of a newborn were on an already set trajectory, and practical supplements were all that could help the positives of the child come to fruition.
Through studies we now know how important the child’s environment is, and this means the emotional contribution of the parents.
Indigenous societies knew what we are now discovering – that the parent’s influence starts to take place even before birth – that the consciousness of the parents at conception impacts the child’s brain development. This is why these societies had periods of emotional, mental and physical cleansing before creating another human lifeform.
As Bruce Lipton writes in his book The Biology Of Belief, “The foetal and infant nervous system has vast sensory and learning capabilities and a kind of memory that neuroscientists call implicit memory.”
In Bruce Lipton’s book there is a great deal of scientific evidence regarding children taking on the emotional dispositions and neuron brain pathways from their parents even before they are born.
Human babies and young children are fascinating – they are powerful learning machines. Human babies are not born with survival instincts like animals that allow them to naturally adapt and survive.
We are in a human world evolving at breakneck speed; this means babies and young children require voracious subconscious minds to suck up information at highly accelerated rates, as a necessity to be able to survive and participate in the human experience.
For all of its superior learning advantages, the power of the subconscious has major disadvantages. The subconscious does not differentiate any message as “wrong” or “right” and up to around 7 years of age in delta and theta brainwave there is NO conscious filtering going on – everything is simply registered directly into the subconscious as “truth”.
Let me give you a really simple example.
Mum laughing: “You clumsy, silly girl. You fell over again.”
Daughter’s subconscious belief: “I’m a clumsy, silly girl.”
You see the subconscious has no sense of humour – it is LITERAL.
It gets really impactful when you think about – what you took on, and what you have passed on. All the limiting, small, fearful beliefs that are possible about ourselves, others and life. All the damaging information our parents unknowingly fed us that went straight into our subconscious.
This is how we know when we have subconscious beliefs that are opposed to our conscious desires – we feel at war with ourselves.
We can’t seem to stop eating junk food, or despite our best intentions and planning we can’t get motivated, or do what we know we should do, or we keep handing our power away painfully in actions and obsessions about people and things outside of our control … that we know aren’t helping us but we can’t stop doing these actions.
Keeping hooked into, connected to and abused by abusers is a classic example of painful subconscious beliefs.
That’s all a part of it.
And within the self-battle we lose self-respect, and self-esteem and we can feel powerless and defeated.
We may not realise how powerful the subconscious mind is and how futile our conscious mind is when pitted against it – and that this is the problem.
Science has proven that our subconscious is a million times more powerful than our conscious mind. When we think about it, we can easily understand the validity of this claim – our subconscious runs countless chemical operations that keep us alive within our body and makes millions of simultaneous multi-directional choices without any of our conscious input or recognition.
Bruce Lipton writes about his incredible “ah ha” moment in The Biology Of Belief when he first received kinesiology. When he made the statement “My name is Bruce” his arm held strong, whereas when he said “My name is Mary” he could not hold his arm up when it was pushed down no matter how determined he was to keep it strong.
The same goes for all of us when we are muscle tested – if we make a statement that our subconscious doesn’t agree with, our body loses energy; it loses body-Chi.
This he knew meant, point blank, no matter what direction he wanted to do in life (such as hold his arm firm or create a new direction is his life that he had never been able to create previously) if his subconscious did not agree with this direction “as truth” then no amount of conscious effort could create it.
So let’s imagine if we had the ingrained belief “love hurts” that we learnt as a child. This literally means this is true for us and we will never be able to hold and create any other reality … unless this belief is re-programmed.
This is the powerless grip humankind has been in – nil understanding of the subconscious mind, or how to access it and change it.
In this powerless panic and pain people have been futilely trying to battle these beliefs consciously – and then trying to change everything and everyone else outside of themselves to get relief when that didn’t work.
That’s the victim / perpetrator mess. Look at our world – it’s not working.
That is why we have not been healing, and that is why we haven’t been passing on the necessary programming to our new generations – in order to change our world.
But we can change – starting with ourselves.
One by one.
Many of us are doing just that … waking up to become the change we want to see, and all of us who are willing to be authentic can do that – absolutely.
I hope this article has helped you realise “What Can Be Done About Narcissists?”, the topic of this conversation, actually has nothing to do with narcissists – the power was always inside ourselves.
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