Narcissistic Love & Lies

Description

There is a particular kind of confusion that begins when you love someone who constantly makes you question yourself. You sense that something is wrong, but cannot quite name it. You replay conversations, question your reactions and wonder whether you are too sensitive, too demanding or too emotional. Slowly, you begin editing yourself to keep the peace, until keeping the peace comes at the cost of losing yourself.

This is how emotional manipulation often unfolds. Not necessarily through one devastating betrayal, but through a thousand small distortions. A comment here. A denial there. A reality rewritten so often that you eventually begin living inside someone else’s version of your own life.

This is where narcissism becomes more complicated than the story of one person hurting another.

Sometimes, it is wounded people wounding others. People whose unresolved pain has shaped the ways in which they seek control, manipulate, deny or dominate. Understanding the wounds behind such behaviour does not excuse the damage it causes. But understanding narcissism requires us to look beneath the behaviour without losing sight of its consequences.

In Narcissistic Love & Lies, award-winning psychotherapist Dr Shai C., PhD, MFT, and Clinical Sexologist, draws on extensive clinical experience, psychological insights and authentic case studies to examine narcissism, gaslighting, manipulation, emotional control and the gradual erosion of the self.

Taking readers into the complex psychology of intimate relationships, this book explores what happens when affection is mistaken for love, empathy becomes self-abandonment, and the need to understand another person slowly disconnects us from ourselves.

It raises difficult but necessary questions. How do you recognise manipulation? What happens when you begin to distrust your own mind? Can narcissistic patterns change? And what if we are not as innocent in our relationships as we would like to believe?

This is not simply a book about identifying villains. It is about recognising patterns, confronting unresolved wounds and understanding the roles that fear, power, love and denial play in our relationships.

Above all, it is about reclaiming your sense of self.

Because sometimes, the person you are trying so desperately to understand is not the person you need to save.

It may be you.

And perhaps, after everything, you will finally find the words:

I wanted to be f*ed, not mind-f*ed.