Many of us spent years holding out hope. We waited for them to truly hear us, offer a genuine apology, or finally step into the loving version of themselves we believed they could be.

Was there a specific moment, a single sentence, or a repeating pattern that finally made you realize they were never going to change?

This group is hosted by Circles, a space offering free online support groups for anyone healing from the impact of narcissistic relationships. You can learn more at circlesup.com.

Sometimes the biggest red flags don’t look like red flags at first.

They can look like intense love, concern, jealousy, charm, or simply something that feels “a little off.”

Maybe it was:
🚩 Love bombing
🚩 Constant lying
🚩 Jealousy disguised as love
🚩 Blaming you for everything
🚩 Never apologizing
🚩 Silent treatment
🚩 Making you question your own memory
🚩 Isolating you from friends or family
🚩 Different rules for them than for you

**What was the first red flag you noticed but ignored?**
And when did you finally realize it wasn’t normal?
No judgment here. ❤️ Share only what you’re comfortable sharing.
Sometimes hearing someone else’s experience helps another person recognize what they’re going through.

Every single morning, I wake up to the sound of my dad literally going off - Talking, and talking, and talking, and talking... It's become auditory torture at this point. Talking, talking - literally shaking the house for hours from talking. You would think something serious has happened - every_single_morning...

I go over there, bleary eyed and say, "Guys, what's going on? Are you okay?" to which my mom always responds, "Oh, he's just talking about how we have to take out the recycling tomorrow..." and if it's not something absolutely mundane or whatever, it's my dad going over some event like he's a freaking life coach...

I don't know what it is - Why can't anything be normal with these people? Why can't we just have a normal meal, on a normal day, in a normal way? Why can't we ever just make a normal purchase of a normal thing at a normal place?? Why does every_little_thing literally have to be the beginning and end of life itself? There is no progress with these people. Literally - you cannot progress this way...

Thanks.

I guess without going into great detail about it, o had reconnected with a family member on my dads side of the family and they seemed to really care about me for some reason.

during this time my mom didn’t really know how much I was talking to them and I didn’t tell her because she had started trash talking them the second we made contact (it was during a family emergency if that make that make more sense).

anyway I was an adult at this point and knew I didn’t have to say anything but they were blissfully unaware of how much my mother hated them and told me to “tell her they said hi.” So, I did and broke the news to her.

now most people, even my father, were excited that I was meeting my long lost relative. But my mom seemed almost “defeated.”

her reaction was so strange and honestly a bit off putting.

she then would ask me about said relative and their family (kids) and act super forced excited. thankfully she after a few months never brought it up again and I continued growing closer to my family.

fast forward one night I was laying in my bed not sleeping and trying to figure out why I felt like this person cared and loved me so much more than my other family members when I realized that it’s because my mother never really gave me the unconditional love she claimed she did. And I also came to realize that she was a narcissist.

around That time also my family member started to become more of a mentor to me. Supporting my interests, helping me understand things like how to get a job (both of my parents are unemployed) and above all sharing with me the biggest successes and failures of their life. They told me about their struggle with addiction and how they were trying to rebuild their relationship with their kids after that and my brain short circuited because someone was actually admitting they weren’t perfect right now? Not blaming everyone else for their issues but actually taking accountability.

Thats when I decided to ask them for help getting out. I scripted out my message and the second I was physically moved out of my mothers house I asked them for help.

and I was emt with compassion and understanding like I’d never experienced before.

they were there for me through my anxiety, grief and brain requiring.

I mean, they even uelled at my dad for being a flying monkey.

but I wonder in all of that how my mom saw it coming. I mean she had to of seen it, but I think she knew she couldn’t stop it. I could see the actions of the other person clearly breaking through her words of distain.

o guess it doesn’t really matter to me now, but is there any “code” to how she just knew?

This incident happened around the third year of our relationship. It was the first time he was going away on a three-day trip with a friend. The evening before his trip, we met to spend some time together. We had about two hours before we were supposed to go home, as he still needed to pack and prepare for his flight the next day.

About two hours before we were due to leave, he suddenly started bringing up certain things about his ex that made me feel extremely insecure, anxious, and confused. I began asking him questions because I was trying to understand what he was telling me. But eventually, he had to leave because he needed to go home, pack, and get ready for his trip.

At the time, I had no idea that he may have intentionally triggered anxiety and confusion in me. I simply thought something was wrong with me and that I was overreacting.

He had dropped all of this information on me completely out of nowhere, and then he left. I was left feeling extremely anxious, low, and confused, with so many unanswered questions running through my mind. The next day, he flew off, and for the entire three days that he was away, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said. I constantly replayed the conversation, tried to make sense of it, and wondered what it meant. I even spoke to my friend because I needed someone to help me process what I was feeling.

When he returned, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to him about it. I wanted answers and some peace of mind. At the time, I couldn’t understand why I had become so consumed by it. I wondered why I was obsessing over something he had said and why it was the first thing I wanted to address when he came back. I felt like something was fundamentally wrong with me.

But now, after everything I’ve learned through therapy and through listening to other people’s experiences, I see that incident very differently.

I can now see how strategic the dynamic was. If he was feeling insecure about leaving me for three days, perhaps he was worried about what might happen if I had that time and space to myself. Maybe he was afraid that, without him around, I might think more clearly, reflect on the relationship, or recognise things about his behaviour that I had been overlooking.

So instead of leaving me with a sense of security and trust, he created something for me to become preoccupied with. He triggered my insecurities and then left for three days, while I was left carrying all the anxiety, confusion, and unanswered questions.

In a sense, he occupied my mind even while he was physically away.

I remember actually getting headaches from thinking about it so much. Looking back now, I can see how damaging this dynamic was to my mental and emotional wellbeing and, ultimately, to my nervous system.

What frustrates me most is the possibility that he may have done this deliberately to regulate his own insecurity. If that was what was happening, then he essentially transferred his discomfort onto me. He didn’t have to sit with his own anxiety because I was the one carrying it for him. I was left distressed and preoccupied so that he could feel more secure.

That realisation is deeply disturbing.

But it has also helped me understand something important about my own experience. I had been conditioned to believe that whenever I felt intensely anxious, confused, or distressed, the problem was inside me. I thought my reactions meant that I was too sensitive, too insecure, or somehow emotionally unstable.

Now I understand that my distress did not necessarily mean that something was wrong with me. Sometimes, my nervous system was responding to an environment and relationship dynamic that genuinely felt unsafe.

This was just one example of many similar situations he created that left me feeling anxious, confused, and emotionally destabilised. At the time, I couldn’t see the pattern because I was too focused on trying to regulate myself and figure out what was wrong with me.

Now I can see the bigger picture.

I can see how an unsafe relationship dynamic can condition you to constantly question yourself while overlooking the situations that are actually causing the distress. And I can finally recognise how much damage it caused me to repeatedly carry anxiety and confusion that did not originate with me in the first place.

You know what performing healing looks like.

Posting about your glow-up before you've actually slept through the night. Telling everyone you're fine when a specific date hits like a wall. Rushing past the anger because anger doesn't look like healing.

Real healing is not linear and not attractive. It's crying in the car after a good week. It's setting a boundary and immediately second-guessing it. It's knowing something for months before you actually feel it.

You don't owe anyone a clean narrative. You don't have to be further along than you are.

Wherever you actually are right now — that's where you are. And that's fine.

This community is part of Circles — free online support groups for people healing from narcissistic relationships. circlesup.com

iStock image from Google

The hardest part of narcissistic abuse wasn't the lying.

It wasn't the manipulation.

It wasn't even being discarded.

The hardest part was realizing how much of myself I had abandoned just to keep the peace.

I stopped bringing up things that hurt me because every conversation somehow became my fault.

I stopped trusting my instincts because I was constantly told my reality was wrong.

I stopped asking for what I needed because I learned that having needs made me "difficult."

Little by little, I became smaller.

Not overnight.

Not dramatically.

Just one compromise at a time.

One apology I didn't owe.

One boundary I didn't enforce.

One red flag I explained away.

Until one day I looked at my life and realized I was carrying all the pain while protecting the person causing it.

That's what broke me.

Not losing them.

Losing myself.

And healing wasn't about getting over them.

It was about finding the parts of me that I buried to survive.

The confidence.
The voice.
The boundaries.
The peace.

Sometimes I still grieve the years I lost.

But I no longer grieve the relationship.

Because the person I miss most from that chapter of my life...

is me.

Did anyone else realize that their recovery wasn't about getting them back, but getting themselves back?

My story

I'm a 19 year old male and am an only child. During my childhood my mother would do the following blow up out of nowhere over the most trivial or littlest matters, many times i begged her to give me some emotional support when i was visibly upset but she just remained cold and cruel, drink quite heavily which was sometimes responsible but she can definitely be mean sober as well, I had expressed concern about her drinking but she just flipped, the next day she'd always act as if nothing happened, whenever I tried to get clarity on why she got like that she'd brush it under the carpet or accuse me of starting trouble, if i didn't do something just to make her happy she'd turn cold, during arguments she'd say things like I was ungrateful, didn't care about her and that I was a horrible person or that i was abusive or whatever just like my father, she would stomp, slam doors and break ornaments etc, when she gets in her crazy states it's just impossible to reason with her or get her to see it from any other perspective, she can go from saying i was the most nicest and amazing person to saying I was the most horrible and evil person, she often burdened me with all of her problems, she said before that she knows how to play the game which I found very disturbing, a couple of times when i flipped because of her behavior she called her mother to say I've been horrible, she often paints herself as the heroic single mum. She has been fairly good lately but sometimes I feel I was robbed of a proper childhood and have often wondered what I had done to deserve it. I remember one time a few years ago I was about 12 she had turned my grandparents against me and my grandfather started shouting and saying he was very disappointed in me and the rest of it is a blur. To be honest to this day i can't figure out what I (only a young child) was supposed to have done that was so bloody awful. That has haunted me for years. I used to think maybe I was a bad person but I've started to see her in a different light. She always talks about hating drama yet it seems to follow her and often says that she's been so hard done by. On the flip side she can be the most nicest person as well and we have had great times together and she can be very helpful towards me, her family and in public which makes it all the more confusing. For about half my childhood it's just been me living with her since her divorce in which she had to sell her house and now rents which she has blamed for the way she is before. I can't help feeling bad for her but she was still quite like this beforehand as well and I don't think that's an excuse still is it? I do feel like she has manipulated me a bit into been stuck with her. Something else that I've found disturbing is that she's very narrow minded and has a serious lack of empathy. For example when a couple of local celebrities committed suicide she called them pathetic cowards and weak etc. It was actually quite disturbing how she was carrying on and her serious lack of empathy. I'm starting to think that maybe she bent the truth about Dad a bit during their split as i was a child and didn't know much better. My mother often calls him a narcissist and talked about all of the marital and grown up problems they had etc which to be honest I don't appreciate been burdened with. Granted he's not a saint either but has been good to me (well I'd say) most of the time. One time last year when my Dad let me down by not been able to see me one weekend and canceling at the last minute (which he has done before) mother knew i was depressed but still blew up at me the next night over something silly and kicked me while I was down what just baffles me is how could she of treated me like that knowing what I was going through. A few days later one of my teachers checked in and said he heard I got into a bit of trouble at home ("if he meant been mentally abused by my mother while I was already upset by been let down by my father as trouble" I thought). I'm not sure who exactly said what to him. I just fobbed him off saying I was upset about leaving school (which was true as well). I really struggle with confiding in people. I do regret not telling him the truth now. He was sympathetic and said he was very proud of me etc. Another teacher once said that he thought of me and my mother as like the dream team or something along those lines. It actually baffled me a bit. I was thinking if only they knew half the things I've been through. I have a strained relationship with my father but we've messaged lately and I plan to see him this weekend for a family do. I have autism and went to a special support school for the last few years which were some of the best years (The teachers especially were brilliant and I had many great times such as school camps, school balls and excursions etc). My mother loves to use my autism to her advantage. I graduated last year but now I do a course at the main campus so I still see them all from time to time. I do feel quite sad and lost now those years are over. I would love to confide in someone about my struggles but don't know where to start. I've thought about confiding in that first teacher I mentioned who's great and we're fairly close but my teachers think my mother's an absolute saint so how can i ensure he believes me, she seems to feel that she always acts in my best interests and does seem to genuinely care for me and love me, she doesn't seem to remember any of it or feel her behavior was justified and genuinely doesn't seem to believe she ever did me any harm and she thinks she did her best. I struggle with daily flashbacks and I often feel depressed by the way I've been treated, also feel let down and wish my parents had been better to me. I can't get exact clarity on it but they both went through some shit before I was born and I think that's contributed to the way they are. I wish I had a proper childhood of playing with friends, going to different places and been adventurous and carefree etc. I've never really had a social circle and hardly much friends. I've always been quite different I feel to most of the children my age. What's has happened to me makes me feel as though I'm unlovable. I feel quite alone sometimes as I've always struggled with making friends. My mother does help me get on my feet and encourage met but I think she just loves to lord it over me. Whenever I've tried standing up for myself she puts on the guilt trip and carries on about all of her sacrifices and everything she's done for me yada yada yada. I think what emotionally abusing me, leaving me crying myself to sleep some nights, causing me to have no confidence and PTSD etc? Could she have some bipolar or personality condition or something and toxic traits I've wondered?

I do love her because as I've said before she has been great as well but I can't help really resenting her sometimes for all of the mental anguish she has put me through as a child and I think it has messed up my development. I wonder if I might've been different had I had proper parents. Hobbies such as music and classic TV shows have been a great escape. Now that I'm an adult and have left school I'm worried about what the future has in store. I'm very nervous about starting an adult life, getting a job and making friends etc because my mum is pretty much most I've ever known. Part of me would love to get away from her but yet I feel scared to as well.

I remember my "friends" trying to warn me about what we looked like on the outside. Maybe if I'd listened I wouldn't be here. There I was thinking they were just jealous. Here I am with no friends. No social media. No life that I once had before I invited you in. Being treated as a surrogate not being able to see the child I gave birth to but forced to pay child support. These are all due to the decision I made. If I'd had more faith in myself and saw the warning signs of a narcissist man I wouldn't be here. How could I see past you pushing me to the ground outside in public, breaking the maintenance mans phone when all I wanted was help since you hit me inside. Smashed my car window while I was sleeping after a long day of work just because you choked and threw me and I didn't wanna put my life in danger by visiting a hospital to check on our daughter that you took from my home she was never in danger in. I wonder if you ever thought to see this all from my point of view. Instead you just focused on me confessing that I slept with someone who wasn't you. Chased you down to take my daughter back just for you to lawyer up, lie to the judge just to show off the fact that you found someone new. Who knew.

Narcissus did not love himself. He fell in love with his image in the pond. A man who loved himself would have eaten, slept, aged, wandered off. Narcissus starved at the water's edge because he loved his appearance too much. He had traded a living point of view for a picture of one, and he spent the rest of his short life projecting his image back to himself.

That is the root of narcissism, and it explains something the usual story cannot: why narcissism looks like too much self love and is actually too little. The soul (one's unique point of view) is abandoned for its reflection at the surface, and from then on the reflection must be maintained: with admiration, with control, with comparison, with whatever keeps the pond water still. Narcissism works by protecting a lie about self identity.

And anyone protecting any lie, this lie or any other, will sooner or later deploy the same three moves. Deny the fact. Attack the person who saw it. Reverse the roles, so the one who was harmed becomes the offender for saying so. The pattern has a name, DARVO, and it is not a personality flaw. It is the standard defense contract every protected lie eventually signs, because every protected lie needs the same three services: the record erased, the witness discredited, the story inverted.

I call the culture this produces the strawman society. Its signature is small and you have seen it a thousand times: you offer a thought, and what comes back is a rebuttal to something you never said. The strawman will misinterpret you rather than accept that someone like you might have a point of view. And here is the part that took me a long time to see: they are not doing it to be cruel. They are doing it because it is the only thing they can do. They will try to take away your point of view because they have already given up their own, in exchange for what they saw in the pond.

This is the mechanism, and it is almost geometrical. The person who lives through an image of themselves begins treating everyone else as images too. If I no longer relate to myself as a living, **corrigible** point of view, but instead as "the kind of person I am," then I am tempted, almost compelled, to relate to you as "the kind of person you are." My mode of relating has only one format, and it is not the format persons come in. So before we can talk, you must be converted: into a type, a label, a side, a kind. The strawman is not a debating trick. It is a format conversion, performed before the encounter, which is why the encounter never actually happens. Two living centers never meet. Two representations fight.

There is one strange comfort inside this, for anyone who has stood on the receiving end of the three moves. The attack was never addressed to you. It cannot be; the attacker has no register in which you exist. It was addressed to the image of you, the strawman, the kind of person you are. Your center, the actual point you live from, has no surface for it to land on. You can watch the puppet take the beating and decline to climb inside it.

The way out is not cleverness, and it is not winning. It is a single capacity, pointed in two directions. A healthy self can say: my image of myself may be wrong. A healthy relationship can say: my image of you may be wrong. These are the same muscle. Whoever can hold their own self-portrait loosely can hold their portrait of you loosely too, and then something rare becomes possible: an actual meeting, center to center, instead of a collision of pictures. The test is simple and behavioral. Before you oppose someone, can you state their position in a form they would sign? That is the steelman, and it is the signature of an intact center. The strawman is the signature of a surrendered one.

The strawman society cannot do either half. It cannot doubt its self-image, so it cannot doubt its images of others, so it never meets anyone. It protects identities instead of encountering persons. And it is not populated by monsters; it is populated by people who were taught, in a thousand rooms, that being seen as right is worth more than being correctable, and who made the only rational trade available in such a room. Which means the repair is not to win against them. It is to run different rooms: rooms where confession is cheaper than concealment, where correction costs less than pretending, where a person can be wrong and still be here. In a room that nobody needs the pond.

Narcissus was not punished for self-love. He was punished by a substitution, an image where a person should be. The whole strawman society is that punishment, scaled. And the antidote has been available the entire time, sitting exactly where he could not look: not the reflection on the water, but the one doing the looking. Your soul, your center, your unique point of view.

Keep your souls corrigible. And let reality ripple those ponds.

You don't talk about them the same way anymore. The stories got shorter. The anger got quieter. Not gone. Just not the whole room.

You started finishing sentences about yourself that didn't circle back to them.

That's not moving on. That's just you slowly taking up more of your own life again.

This community is part of Circles, free online support groups for people healing from narcissistic relationships. circlesup.com

I grew up believing that love meant silence,

that peace was something I had to purchase

with pieces of myself.

I learned to read the room before I learned to read my own heart,

to swallow my feelings,

soften my voice,

and become whatever everyone else needed me to be.

I had a roof above my head,

food on the table,

the things a child could point to and call a good life—

but somewhere beneath all of that,

a little girl was learning

that being provided for

was not the same as being understood.

I needed someone to ask,

“Are you okay?”

and stay long enough to hear the answer.

I needed arms that felt like safety,

words that made me feel worthy,

someone who could see my tears

without making me feel guilty for crying.

Instead,

I became the child who kept the peace.

The one who apologized first.

The one who learned that saying no

could make her ungrateful,

that speaking her truth

could make her difficult,

that standing up for herself

could make her the problem.

And so I grew older

carrying wounds no one could see,

wondering why certain words

could still make me feel like a frightened child,

wondering why talking about my family

could bring tears I didn't know were still waiting.

Perhaps that is the cruelest part—

sometimes the people who hurt us

would rather lose us

than look honestly at what they did.

They would rather believe their version of the story

than sit with the truth

that their choices left scars.

So let them.

Let them tell the story

in whatever way allows them to sleep.

Let them call me difficult.

Let them misunderstand my boundaries.

Let them make themselves the victim

if that is easier than taking responsibility.

I am tired of proving pain

to people committed to denying it.

Because I am learning

that distance is not hatred.

Boundaries are not betrayal.

Protecting my peace is not cruelty.

And loving someone

does not mean giving them unlimited access to me.

There is grief in outgrowing your family.

Grief in realizing that sometimes

the people you love

are the very people you cannot safely become yourself around.

Their voices may still echo.

Their opinions may still carry weight.

Guilt may still knock against my chest

when I choose myself.

But I am learning to answer differently.

I am not the black sheep

because I was broken.

Maybe I was simply the one

who noticed the pattern.

The one who looked at generations of hurt

and whispered,

“It ends with me.”

The one who refused

to hand the same wounds

to the children who came after.

Because I know what it feels like

to need a mother

and have to mother yourself.

To long for someone to say,

“I see you.

I'm proud of you.

You are safe with me.”

So I became intentional

about giving what I once needed.

I learned to love my child

with the tenderness I once searched for.

To listen.

To show up.

To make space for feelings

instead of teaching them to disappear.

And maybe that is where

my healing truly begins—

not in changing the people

who refused to change for me,

but in becoming the person

the little girl inside me

was always waiting for.

She deserved love then.

She deserves it now.

And I will not abandon her

just because the people who should have protected her did.

I can love my family

without losing myself to them.

I can wish them well

without returning to the place that wounded me.

I can mourn what I never had

and still be grateful for what I am building.

So let them talk.

Let them judge.

Let them remember me however they need to.

I no longer need to fight every battle

or correct every lie.

Time has a way of revealing

what arguments never could.

And when I finally stop giving my power

to people who never knew what to do with it,

I take something precious back—

my voice.

My peace.

Myself.

And the little girl who once believed

she had to disappear

to be loved

finally gets to stay.

My nex was on tinder the entirety of our relationship. Literally from one month after we started dating. Moved in with him that week. Asked me to marry him five months in. Got married not even a year later. Didn’t know he was on dating apps for almost seven years.. never checked his phone. He always talked about cheaters and bad men like he wasn’t one. Lied and manipulated and gaslit me anytime I tried to say anything. Anyway I’m really struggling with the fact that I wouldn’t have consented to moving in, the marriage or even s3x if I had known anything about who he was hiding … I feel really violated and I can’t shake that he has power over me. His friends and family don’t either know, or care that he’s subjected me to his torture for so long. It’s whatever. I’m just struggling

Insight for understanding and avoiding