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Stop hiding: Find the true you!
1 Suppression (Turtle syndrome):
Intimidation breeds inhibition. Fight, flight or shrink into our shells.
Exposure to narcissistism/abusive behavior is disempowering.
Narcissists/abusers destroy you for what you do or do not do
Belittlement, abuse, hate, ridicule, criticism, and lack of recognition.
Possum syndrome
2 Stop trying:
One exit: Quit trying. Low sense of self worth
From "they won't allow me" to "I can't"
Someone holding a door shut; otherwise you could walk through.
You'll never know your true potential because you fear taking the next step.
Marathon? Not even the first step.
When you get to your end-of-life decades, you ask, "What if I'd moved forward?"
3 Mental exhaustion:
Suppressing talents leads to negative self image and even self hatred.
I wish I were someone else. (I wish you would go somewhere else)
Devaluation by narcissists/abusers is gaslighting.
4 Inhibitions:
To hide ability to is stunt growth.
Fear of narcissistic/abusive response inhibits development and, therefore, fulfillment.
5 Impact:
Buried abilities result in chronic stress, anxiety, not to mention, lost opportunties
You no longer recognize your authenticity or potential and embrace the false self imposed upon you.
Life fulfillments are lost due to absolute surrender. Economic, emotions, social, etc.
Tie it all together:
What if you could be the self you would have been had it not been for abuse of others?
Literally lose my voice. Inhibition/intimidation
Transcript:
Now stick with me on this first point because it's important, but when we are abused by a narcissist or by anybody for that matter, we have two responses. One is we can get away from them, or number two is we can fight with them. So it's fight or flight.
And one of the ways we sometimes flee from a narcissist if we can't literally physically get away is we hide within ourselves emotionally and mentally. I call it the turtle syndrome. And the way that I like to say it is intimidation breeds inhibition.
So we can't fight this person, we can't get away from this person physically, and so we withdraw within ourselves. Probably a better term than turtle syndrome is just suppression. We are emotionally suppressed.
Now, why is that a problem? Should be obvious is because the abusive, abusive rather behavior is very disempowering. We can't do what we would normally do because we are locked inside ourselves, or we are locked inside a closet to get away from the abuse. Well, what can you accomplish in a closet? Well, not much.
Well, nothing. You're just stuck. But we get locked into an emotional closet because of narcissistic abuse.
They want to destroy you. And they destroy you for one or two reasons. Because of what you do or because of what you didn't do.
Have you ever had somebody in your life, it didn't matter what you did, it was wrong. And when you did nothing, it was wrong. You should have done this and you should not have done that.
That's what we're talking about. Narcissistic abuse. I told you, you need to stick with me on this first point.
Because it's foundational, it's really important. So I call it the turtle syndrome. Hiding within our shell because there's nowhere to run.
Turtles can't run. I've never seen a turtle run. I've seen them move faster than normal, but not typically.
Another way I like to refer to this is the opossum syndrome. You've heard me talk about that before. Where opossums, you know, they say they're playing opossum, that they're asleep, they're pretending to be asleep.
No, they're not. It appears that they're asleep. But what happens is, and they can't help it, when they're under stress or pressure, what happens is their brain just makes them freeze.
They can't not do that. And when we are abused by a narcissist, often we just freeze. We can't express ourselves.
Well, again, as I said a moment ago, that is so very disempowering. We're locked in a closet. We can't do anything.
Imagine going through life locked in a closet. I mean, literally locked in a closet. What would you do your entire life? Nothing.
I mean, there's nothing you can do. But mentally, psychologically, emotionally, narcissists will lock us in a closet. We can't get out.
If we can't get away from them, we can't get out. And what happens is, well, number two is we just stop trying. So we can think of it in these terms.
Let's say that somebody knocked you to the floor. Some big guy, physically strong, just hit you and knocked you to the floor. All right, so you get up.
Well, you try to get up, but he knocks you down again. Well, now you're kind of mad, kind of frustrated. You're not going to put up with this.
So you try to get up and he knocks you down again, over and over and over again. And if you have many narcissists in your life, or just one narcissist who is continuously abusive, I like to think of the analogy of Goliver's Travels. Remember when Goliver was in the country or the land of the little people? What do you call those people? I'll think of it in a second.
But no one of them could have defeated him or come any close to it. But collectively, all together, they were able to bind him and tie him down. So you may have several narcissists in your life, but more likely you have one narcissist who is using a lot of lilliputians.
Is that the word? But you have a narcissistic abuse. This is one lilliputian. I think that's what it's called.
And all these collectively are able to take down your giant and you can't get up. You're tied to the ground because of all these abuses. So again, what you do is you quit trying because you have a low sense of self-worth, emotionally, mentally, not physically tied down.
I guess in some cases, that could be a reality, but more likely, unless obviously, we are tied to the ground, locked in the closet, shrink into our shell or bubble or become a possum, whichever analogy you want to use, because that's our only option. And it's just automatic. We can't not do that.
So it begins with a saying, they won't allow me to do this. And sometimes a narcissist won't allow you to do something. If it's an employer, maybe somebody who is influential and has a lot of support from others.
Maybe if it's somebody who is above you in a family structure. I mean, there's a lot of places where a person has authority over you, real or imagined, and they just won't allow you to do things. And then it becomes, I can't do those things.
Kind of like the elephant. You've heard the story of the elephant who was tethered to a pig. And finally, the elephant realized he couldn't get away.
So he quit trying. And then they untied the tether and he just can't or he doesn't think he can. So imagine somebody holding a door shut and you want to walk through that door.
So you reach out and you touch the doorknob, you're going to open the door. But what you don't realize is somebody has wired the doorknob to a live electrical line. And when you touch it, you get shocked.
So you can't get through the door, right? Every time you try to open it, you get shocked. It hurts. You can't open the door.
Well, if you can't go through that door, you can't go through the next door. And you can't go through the door after that. And you can't go through the door after that.
So all the narcissist has to do is make sure you can't get through this one door. You can't walk through that one door. And so emotionally and mentally, we're believing that we can't get through the door because, well, every time we try, the narcissist will, figuratively speaking, will shock us.
We're thinking these terms. You need to run a marathon. I like to run.
I like to take walks. I like to go out and jog or I call it more of a slog or a trot. But I like to go out there for an hour or so and get my heart beating and all of that.
But what if you can't take the first step? There's no way you can run a marathon, right? Every journey begins, as they say, with the first step. Well, the narcissist will trip you up so that you can't take the first step. I mean, not literally, but maybe literally, but mentally, emotionally, they want to keep you tripped up so you can't move without their help.
And they're very good at this. They're very astute at keeping us on the ground. And imagine, some of you don't have to imagine, but if you're not as old as I am, imagine that you're in the end-of-life decades.
I mean, you're in your 70s, 80s, maybe into your 90s and you stop and ask yourself the question, what if I had not had these narcissists in my life tripping me up? Where would I be? How many doors would I have gone through? How many marathons would I have run? How far would I have gone? But I couldn't because emotionally, I was locked into my shell. And I couldn't do anything about it because nature has bred me to be like that, bred everybody to be like that. So we need to be very much aware of narcissists in our life.
And it's hard. It's not easy in that love-bombing stage to know this person is fake because they are so good at acting. They fool people.
Number three is, well, we've kind of alluded to this, but mental exhaustion. So our abilities, our talents, our gifts, whatever it is that we have, those have been suppressed, as we said at number one. And that leads to this negative self-impression.
It's not true, but to us, it is real. And sometimes, extreme cases, we will either find, we will find ourselves in what I would call self-hatred, where we just hate who we are because we are this way. Reality is we are, again, hardwired, bred to have either fight or fight.
And if we can't fight, we're going to flee. And we're going to flee into our shell if we can't get away otherwise. And so we say to ourselves, I wish I had been somebody else.
I wish I had had a different personality. Folks, this is the outcome of abuse. I wish you would go somewhere else talking to yourself so you can get away from these people.
Problem is, there's nowhere you can go where you can get away from narcissists because they are ubiquitous. They're everywhere all the time. So we tend to devaluate ourselves because we have been devaluated by narcissists.
And sometimes, well, this is, I guess, an expression of gaslighting, where they have convinced us that there's something inherently wrong with us. And in a sense, there is. Something inherently wrong with us is that possum syndrome, you know, that withdrawal into our shell, into our bubble, that's natural.
But without the abuser, you know, that's not going to happen. Number four is inhibitions. Or would it be, yeah, it is inhibitions.
I was going to say are inhibitions, not good grammar. So we have this stunt growth, and we try to hide it. We try to pretend it's not there.
But we know deep down inside, because we've suppressed it, it's been hidden. But we know deep down inside that we fear abusive response. That is, they're going to inhibit our development.
We know it. And if they inhibit our development, guess what else gets inhibited? Our fulfillment. Fulfillment in life.
We never move ahead. I know some people, they never get married to the right person because they are so inhibited. They're never ever able to get a good job, or if they do, move forward in the job because they are inhibited.
So their life is not fulfilled. And the reason they are inhibited, remember we said intimidation breeds inhibition. The reason we have this sense of inhibition, or I can't do it, is because every time we've tried, we got knocked down.
But the reality is, if the person weren't knocking us down, we could get up. We could do it. If the narcissist were not there, we could have accomplished who knows what.
So we need to find a way to get around. Narcissistic abuse. And that leads us to number five, and that is impact.
We're going to tie all this together in a minute. So we have these varied abilities. We could have accomplished so much more in life had it not been for the abuse of a narcissist.
Or usually it's a number of narcissists that we have encountered in our life. Maybe it's just this one guy that you experienced in elementary school, or maybe in the college dorm who kind of singled you out and you weren't able to take the guy down, or anyone of an unlimited number of life circumstances. So the impact is we have stress.
We have anxiety. And of course, as we said earlier, we have those losses of opportunities. All of these things were collectively compounded to hold us back, keep us in our turtle shell, keep us in our bubble, keep us locked away in our closet.
And we no longer recognize. Now, this is important. So listen very carefully.
We no longer recognize who we are. I mean, we are authentic, real people. The talents, the gifts, the abilities that we were born with are suppressed, but they're real.
I mean, they are authentic, but we lose that authenticity. And we lose the potential to embrace reality. And instead, we embrace these false self-imposed self-impressions of ourselves that we impose upon ourselves as we retract back, shrink back into our shells, all because of narcissistic abuse.
And what is the narcissist doing? Well, he is enjoying the supply, feeling elevated because he has kicked us in the shell. Yeah, just kicked us until we retracted in the shell. So life fulfillments are lost due to our surrender.
And sometimes our surrender is absolute because we have no choice. And those fulfillments, you know, I could list a number of them, but they may be economic, they might be social, they might be, well, they definitely are emotional. So we have all these areas of our life where we are losing opportunities.
We are losing fulfillment because we are in a position of narcissistic abuse. Important things to recognize. We tie this together by noticing this fact that if you could be the self you would have been, had it not been for narcissistic abuse, who would you be? Stop and think about that for a second.
Some people phrase this as they use the expression losing your voice. Well, in my case, that's literal. I was out taking a walk, you know, today, doing my three mile walk takes me about an hour.
And typically, you know, you pass other people who are out walking. And I tried to speak to this guy, but nothing came out. Because I was feeling that inhibition, that intimidation that has been imposed upon me throughout my life by dealing with narcissists.
What is that? You know, I'm in my shell. And there's no reason to be there's no threat. But I'm just responding, reacting the way that I've been taught over and over again.
So I try to speak to this person say, Hi, how you doing? I swear that today, whatever small talk you do, what comes out of something that sounds like, well, it reflects that mental garble. In my head, I can't think clearly when, when I'm in the presence of another person. Sometimes that's inhibition.
And it's expressed in the way that I speak literally. And what impression does inhibition make on that other person weakness? And what does that do? Well, that encourages other narcissists to continue the abuse because you're low hanging fruit. So what I have done throughout my years, my 70 plus years, primarily in the last couple decades, is I've worked very hard at overcoming and getting out of my shell and staying out of it.
So here I am earlier today, still having to fight with the consequences of narcissistic abuse. We will see you all next time.
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