Positive Health Online

I have a confession to make. For years, I kept finding myself drawn to people with narcissistic tendencies. You know the type: charismatic, seemingly confident, but somehow always leaving you feeling drained.

It wasn't until I was having lunch with an ex-girlfriend years after our breakup that it hit me like a ton of bricks: She was a narcissist! And here's the really interesting part: Apparently, everyone except me could see who she was as clear as day.

When I asked my friends why nobody had told me at the time, their response was enlightening: "You wouldn't have been able to hear it."

They were right. I wasn't ready to see what was right in front of me. That's how patterns work: They're invisible until they're not and then you can't ‘unsee’ them.

This realization sent me on a deep dive into my own psyche. I needed to understand why I kept being drawn to these relationships. What had I not yet healed? Is there something I didn't want to see? The answer wasn't what I expected. Under all the spiritual understanding and psychological insight, there was a simple truth: I was afraid of my own insecurities. Being with someone who appeared to "have it all" made me feel better by association.

But even that insight wasn't the whole story. That was more of a mental understanding than a felt experience. When I asked myself, "What am I unwilling to feel?" the real answer emerged: sadness. Deep, core-level sadness about feeling inadequate.

https://www.davemarkowitz.com/

Two figures, one subtly radiant/glowing (representing charisma) and an almost
invisible pull or tension between them. Image AI generated.

The Emotional Component

I have found that there is always an emotional component seeking to be processed. Questioning our beliefs often leads us straight to the emotions we need to process. When we honestly ask ourselves – or are asked in a safe environment – what we've been avoiding, we are likely to uncover the shadow energies and emotions we have repressed.

But here's the crucial part. Answering these questions with your mind will only take you so far. Let your body respond. Let the emotions speak. This might feel uncomfortable at first. That's okay. Discomfort is often a sign that we're getting close to something important.

We engage in or avoid certain behaviors all the time to manage our emotional state. A simple example might be asking myself, "Is there something I don't want to feel right now?" when I pick up my cell phone compulsively. Or when I look in the refrigerator several times within a few minutes expecting to find something different each time. You can laugh, but I'm guessing you've done this, too! These seemingly innocent behaviors often mask our attempts to avoid uncomfortable feelings.

The Path of Healing

Contrary to promises made by many popular healing modalities I've encountered, I've never seen core wounds completely disappear. Through consistent emotional work, we might reduce it (not that it's quantifiable) from a level 10 to a level 3, or lower, but it rarely reaches zero.

That pull towards narcissists is a part of me, just like the aspects of myself I adore. However, its intensity was lessened by allowing the feelings I'd been avoiding to be witnessed with compassion and love. What you own can't own you.

The Sacred Work

Through the sacred work of integrating the feelings we don't want to feel in a supportive environment, we can transform lower-vibration energies into higher ones. This reduces their pull, alleviates symptoms, and minimizes recurrence through root-level emotional healing – the kind that doesn't just trim the leaves of a pattern but reaches the roots underneath it.

Integration reduces the effect of the automated, conditioned responses we learned long ago. These reactions were and are never wrong; they simply no longer serve us.

When we finally allow our emotional pendulum to swing into repressed grief, buried memories, thoughts, and feelings may arise. You may cry as the pendulum moves through various separations and abandonments that come to conscious awareness. Remind yourself that crying is not only okay but healthy. It's our built-in system designed to help us heal from loss. Think of the grieving system as an emotional immune system. You wouldn't consciously tell your immune system to stop working, yet we often unconsciously limit our grieving system's effectiveness by internalizing outdated beliefs that grieving is wrong, ugly, or shameful. This old-school thinking was passed down through generations by people who lacked the time, awareness, or safety to grieve properly.

That's the grief I finally let myself feel. And as I let it move through me instead of pushing it back down, something in me actually did shift. Eventually, I noticed a significant reduction in that energetic pull towards narcissists. It no longer held the same power over me. I could acknowledge without judgment the pull toward women who displayed similar characteristics and consciously choose different interactions with much greater ease. You could say I pulled enough of the weeds of this pattern at their root.