The holidays are a great occasion to spend time with family, friends and loved ones, but they can also be a time of great loneliness, emotional despair and temptation.

Watching other couples bask in their festive glow, being merry and exchanging gifts, can be pretty heart wrenching, especially when you are all alone and nursing your emotional wounds.

It’s at this time, that what we want most of all, is to have someone that cares about us and someone to spend the holidays with. Everyone wants to be missed and have someone thinking about them.

A lot of people stay in unhealthy relationships because they have developed a belief that they can’t get another mate. They believe that being with someone is better than being alone, even if that someone mistreats them and adds nothing of value to their lives.

Back in the days of our great grandparents, couples generally tended to stay together. The morals, customs and religious beliefs of their era kept marriages intact. Many women feared having children out of wedlock, causing a scandal, or of being an old maid. Most were uneducated and unemployed, remaining at home to take care of the family. They did not have their own financial resources and quite literally didn’t have any other option.  From a cultural and religious perspective when you made your choice of mate, you were stuck with it, whether or not it was a good one.

A lot of people drift in and out of relationships without any preexisting expectations. Our expectations are our standards and when our standards are low, or we set the bar knee high, then any Tom, Dick or Narcissist can waltz on over and create all kinds of emotional havoc in our lives.

In the biographies of many of the most successful people in the world, most of them talk about their humble beginnings. Some were homeless, or living in their cars and were living way below what they were capable of. It wasn’t until they flipped a switch, or they just said enough, that their lives began to change. What they say that changed for them, was that they began to expect more from themselves and more from others.

A few days ago I had one of those eerie ‘synchronicity’ experiences.  I was contacted by a clinically diagnosed Psychopath and later that same day I turned on my TV and the movie American Psychopath was on. The next day, I went to the book store, to buy a book on recovery from emotional trauma, for research on an upcoming blog.

I found the book I was looking for, stepped over a few feet and propped my elbow up on a shelf, to leaf through it.  As I did, I knocked a book onto the floor. I picked it up and looked at the title – The Wisdom of Psychopaths, by Kevin Dutton. I scoffed at the word wisdom and put it back on the shelf. I walked to another part of the bookstore, with my recovery book in hand and everywhere I seemed to look, I saw the word Psychopath. I looked at a few other books, but I couldn’t ignore this voice in my head that was now screaming – you need to read this book – what else do I have to do, hit you with it? So I bought it.

This past weekend I was driving home late at night. The moon was huge and bright. The streets were quiet and there was barely a car on the road. As I continued on my journey, I felt really good. Really, really good. In fact, I was beaming happiness. I felt like everything in my life was unfolding exactly as it should. I felt entirely stable, at peace, empowered and fully in control of my life.

I reminisced about my past relationships. I’ve been involved with a long term cerebral Narcissist, I’ve had a slew of boomerang somatic Narcissists and even a Psychopath. Never in any of my relationships did I ever feel as good as I feel now.

Around this time two years ago, was my very last Narcissist encounter.  I was struggling to hang on to a boomerang Narcissist. I remember feeling so much heartache. I would wake up hurting. I would hurt throughout the day and I would go to sleep hurting and missing him.  I was desperately hoping for a nugget of his attention, just something that showed me he cared. But as always I’d get a ton of mixed signals, into me one minute and gone the next.

We all have that little voice inside of us that feeds us thoughts about how we are lacking and not good enough.  This voice has become an expertly skilled detective, that is always looking for clues to prove its case.

I get a lot of emails from readers describing how horrible their relationships were, but they are devastated now that their former partner is with someone else.

We always want to know – is he different with her? Does he treat her better than me? Is he happier with her?

We want to know the answers to these questions, because if the answer is yes, then our little detective can put that information in the evidence pile, that it was our fault thus proving that we aren’t good enough.

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I have received a few variations of the same question from readers, “Are Narcissists really aware of their behavior considering they have a personality disorder? Do they know what they are doing is wrong?”

Most people don’t put too much thought into their everyday behaviors. Think about how you behave on a regular basis. You usually don’t stop and think about what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it. You just act or react. Our behavior is generally driven by an accumulation of our emotional state at the time, our self-esteem and our past experiences.

As I illustrated in my blog Seeking Revenge Against a Narcissist, their general default setting consists of emotions such as, anger, smugness, frustration, boredom, obsession and contempt. When these feelings are part of your everyday experience, your brain creates neural pathways, so that when new stimuli comes in through your senses, your brain filters it through these pathways.  The more we think a certain way, the stronger the neural pathway becomes.