Once upon a time you felt like Cinderella. Your Prince Charming made you feel special and so happy, that is until of course, you found out about Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and that trampy blonde Smurf down the street.

It seemed like one minute, you were both consumed and in the midst of a love for the ages, and now he stands you up, ignores your calls and texts and you’re starting to feel like you’re annoying him.

You’ve become an emotional basket case. You’re obsessed and you can’t get him out of your mind. You’re cyber stalking him for any tidbits of information and all you see is her. His new target.

I’ve received a lot of queries lately from people asking how they can get revenge against their Narcissist that left them. When people are angry and hurting and they realize that they’ve been duped, lied to and manipulated, it’s normal to want the person responsible to feel what you’re feeling.

One of the most difficult things to cope with is watching the one that hurt you, trot off unscathed, while you are left writhing in agony.  While it may look rosy from where he’s standing, keep in mind that while you have the ability to grow and become a better person, your Narcissist does not. So before you start plotting out a method of revenge there are a few things you should consider.

“Know thine enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.” Chinese General Sun Tzu.

There is a longing, an aching void that exists deep in the heart of every one of us. We deny it, build walls around it and try to fill it by whatever means available to us.

This void is a hurt that runs deep to our very core. It’s feelings of inadequacy, of not being where and who we want to be. It’s our deepest insecurities and our deepest fears and it exists in everyone. Athletes, celebrities and even the most confident people we know are riddled with insecurity. It is part of the human condition.

But there is a difference between those that live happy, productive lives and those that don’t and it lies in our ability to cope with, acknowledge and heal the causes of this void.

Detachment is the process of letting go. It’s when we start to see things from a different perspective.  When the fears and emotions that have paralyzed us, no longer have the same power and when we start to see things the way they really are and not the way we wish them to be.

If you’ve been involved with a Narcissist, you have likely been doubting what your senses have been telling you. You have invested so much and to walk away without a return on your investment seems unfathomable.

Our egos have an especially hard time processing the fact, that after everything we’ve said and done, all the hoops we’ve jumped through, all the sacrifices and all of the bad behavior that we have tolerated and still, we can’t get this person to love us and give us the relationship that we want.

It’s a lot simpler to accept the idea that there is something wrong with us, than to accept the idea that there are actually people out there that are incapable of love and intimacy.

A few years back, I went through a major life crisis. My mother was fatally injured in a car accident and within a few short weeks of that, I had lost everything. I had no parents, no partner, no home, no car, no job and no friends. All of the things that make a person feel safe and secure were gone and I was in no man’s land. It felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under me and I sank into a deep depression.

During my struggle I travelled alone to South America and I stayed there for a long time. I learned to speak Spanish, I climbed the Andes and I tried to do anything and everything to make the pain bearable. Upon my return I immediately left for an Orthodox Monastery in Michigan and spent a few days with the most holy men I have ever met. Depression was new to me. I’ve always been a happy-go-lucky kind of person, but this experience, as horrific as it was, started me on a path of deep soul searching. I needed answers to how my life got so far off track and why I was so miserably unhappy.

Being caught in the haze of a Narcissistic relationship is being in a state of denial. It’s relative obliviousness to the subtle manipulations of a seasoned predator.

It’s a slow and subtle form of brain washing, where you know that you are unhappy and that feeling in your gut is telling you something isn’t right, but it’s also your lack of willingness to acknowledge it, or do anything about it. This haze makes us catatonic, unable to move and it brings us feelings of powerlessness and worthlessness.

I felt compelled to write on this subject, as I’ve received several emails from women this past week, describing how the light of truth is just starting to dawn on their relationship, how they’ve been caught in this funk for years, decades even, but they’ve been unable to describe it or put a name to it, or even dare to escape from it.

A man with a hard luck story and a broken wing is irresistible to a lot of women. Perhaps, it’s because we are hard wired to be nurturers and caretakers, or perhaps, the broken wing we see in others is a mirror of our own pain and need for comforting.

Not too many people come out of childhood emotionally unscathed. We all have some issue or another that shapes our current perception and behaviours.  Sometimes the dysfunction is overt and obvious and sometimes it takes a while to see it in another. But we can prepare ourselves by understanding what drives and motivates another’s behaviours so that we don’t fall victim to it.