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Childhood Trauma

How a Traumatic Childhood Leads to Emptiness and Taking on Unwanted Roles


In my professional and personal life, I have met and observed an overwhelming number of people who have grown up in difficult environments. As children, all of us have probably experienced some sort of trauma that has had a long-term effect on us. For some, it’s some significant life events. For others, it’s a general, undefined mood that they feel stuck in and are unable to clearly define (, general, chronic anxiety). For many of...

Addiction

Are You Coping and Managing or Healing and Growing?

The most common question I’ve heard, in person and in emails or comments, is this: “I have these serious problems. How do I fix them?” Or a variation of it, like this: “I read your article on [problem X]. It’s very accurate, but what do I do about it?” In today’s article, I will try to explain why it is so difficult to answer this question. We will also look at the various ways people try to deal with their psychological problems, and the core differences between them.

Childhood Trauma

How a Traumatic, Controlling Upbringing Makes You Unmotivated, Overwhelmed, and Empty

In my personal and professional life, one of the most common problems I’ve seen people have is feeling unmotivated, empty, aimless, passive, and selfless. It is usually to the degree to which the person has been raised in a controlling environment, whether they consciously recognize it as such or not. In this article we will overview the most common forms of controlling childrearing and the problems it creates for the person.

General

How Narcissists React to Information About Narcissism




In my article titled How Narcissists Play the Victim and Twist the Story, someone in the comment section asked me about a narcissistic person’s reaction to such an article. Here’s part of the comment:
“Thank you for this article Darius. Spot-on does not describe the article well enough. So, what happens, and I’m afraid I know the answer, when a covert, malignant narcissist reads an article like yours? Do they just...

General

Dangerous Dark Traits Among Narcissists, Abusers, and Toxic People

People are afraid of all sorts of fictional monsters while in reality it's actually humans who hurt others the most. In previous articles we explored how people with strong narcissistic tendencies operate. We looked at how they play the victim and twist the story, how they heavily project, how they hate seeing others happy, how they use verbal abuse, how they manipulate others, how they use various toxic arguing techniques, how they regulate their self-esteem by hurting others, how they act when they feel upset or threatened, and so on.

Childhood Trauma

The Curse of Trying to Meet to Your Parents’ Expectations

“Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents’ needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.” ―...

Childhood Trauma

Personal Boundaries: Key Problems and Solutions

In the previous article titled An Introduction To Boundaries and Why We Need Them, we looked at what boundaries are and why it is important to have healthy boundaries. Here, we will explore the key problems people encounter related to boundaries and look at some solutions that you can implement to have better boundaries.