Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between two or more people. Friendship is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association….characteristics include affection, sympathy, empathy, honesty, altruism, mutual understanding and compassion, enjoyment of each other’s company, trust, and the ability to be oneself, express one’s feelings, and make mistakes without fear of judgment from the friend. – Wikipedia

How many people have had this happen to them: You get involved with someone you like, you’re intimate,

“When it comes to relationships I just have two different people inside fighting for supremacy.”  – Narcissist

One of the most difficult aspects of recovering from Narcissistic abuse, is having to watch the one that hurt you walk away completely unscathed. Many move on and behave like you and your relationship never even existed, while you are still deeply affected by the trauma. What I try to tell people,

If you don’t initially wish your cheating Narcissist ill will after they’ve left you for another, you are probably among the minority. A lot of us struggle with the betrayal and the hurt. Persistent images of the two of them together are normal and so too, is the fear that they will be happy together and that you will be the one, who is left all alone, wallowing in misery and despair.

“When your eye is always searching for the negative you can’t help but miss much of life’s beauty.” – S. Grey

My mother was the daughter of a Narcissistic father, which meant that she was insulted, humiliated, shamed, blamed and belittled on a daily basis. A habitual need to judge and criticize others became her normal, hearing it and seeing it turned into doing it. This is how she was taught to view the world. She believed that

What is normal? What does healthy look like? We talk a lot about being healthy on this site, but If you’ve never seen it, or had anyone demonstrate it to you, how do you know what it looks like?

I’ve spent years trying to figure out what healthy is, because I knew I wasn’t. I always felt that there was some hidden mystery I had to figure out, a secret that other people knew that I didn’t. While I was in the midst of

We’ve all had cringe-worthy moments that we can shelve in the ‘not my finest hour’ section of our memory banks.  These are the moments where we acted in a manner that was beneath us, where we didn’t stand up for ourselves, where we let ourselves be used.

 “You create your own universe as you go along.” – Winston Churchill

Tanya and her siblings were taken from their home when she was just three. Her mother had tried to kill them by starting a fire in the family home and leaving them alone inside. Tanya was later adopted by kind, but deeply devout Jehovah’s Witness parents. Her adoptive parents moved from the UK to North America and she moved across the pond, leaving her siblings behind. She rebelled against such strict religious doctrines as she got older and was rebuked by the church community and her parents for her teenage angst.