Poisoning The Well: Detaching From a Toxic Narcissist with Sorcery
If you’re in a toxic relationship, you have to get out. Whatever it takes. No matter how long it takes. Because if you don’t, you’ll lose yourself.
My most recent in a string of toxic relationships started in May of 2011. I fell into bed with him, and then I fell in love with him, and then I married him, and then he wrecked my life.
I went from being on track for a six-figure income in 2011 to struggling to make $20k a year because he took so much energy to maintain.
And yet I hung on.
I hung on through physical, emotional, mental, and financial abuse.
We’d break up, we’d get back together. We’d fight, we’d make up. It was a vicious cycle, a self-feeding cycle.
Narcissists are like vampires.
The words “psychic vampire” get tossed around in pagan and new age circles a lot. I remember in the days of the BB-type forums belonging to a huge pagan forum, and all the discussions about psychic vampires and how to protect yourself from psychic vampires.
Looking back, I realize they had no clue what they were talking about.
If you want to meet a real “psychic vampire” marry a toxic narcissist.
Everything had to be about him. If it wasn’t about him, he’d throw a temper tantrum. He held a knife to my throat one Mother’s Day because it wasn’t about him.
If I didn’t have what he wanted, I was fucking him over. “Thanks for fucking me over again,” he said frequently, usually when I couldn’t afford to buy him something he wanted.
He cheated a LOT. But cheating’s not a dealbreaker for me. I’m oddly pragmatic about it. It happens. We move on. He’d cheat about once a year, every spring and summer. And fall through winter, he’d suddenly be all about me again.
What they don’t tell you is that the toxic narcissist creates a mutual dependency. You start to need them as much as, if not more than, they need you. They like it that way.
The relationship becomes self-feeding after a time. And all it takes is you letting something uncomfortable go just once. The toxic narcissist is a boundary breaker, and for every boundary you let them breech, they’ll keep pushing even further, until you either break down completely, or you fight back.
He almost broke me.
2013. We had a house. I’d gotten a really good job, and then manifested a house. As in somebody decided to give me a house. It was a nice house, with three bedrooms upstairs, two bathrooms, and a fully finished basement. A big fenced in backyard. We didn’t have to live with people anymore, like we’d been doing for the first years of our marriage. I loved having our house. Except that there was no one there but me to keep him in check.
I remember the day I finally fought back. I was getting ready for work. He didn’t have a job. I worked, I supported us. I took care of everything. He stayed home, played video games. Every morning, going to work was a fight. A literal fight. Screaming, crying, me finally getting out the door at the absolute last minute, and then him texting and calling me all day long, because he hated being alone. But I had to work. I had to make money. And I’d had to get a job, because I couldn’t work from home. He made that impossible.
This particular morning in 2013, he started accusing me of sleeping with my boss. Which I wasn’t. And never would. So I was shocked that he threw that accusation at me. Later, I’d come to understand it was projection, he was cheating on me and was trying to deflect attention. I’ve learned his tells since, all the signals that he’s up to no good. He’s obvious to me now, but then, it was still new.
He grabbed me by my coat, and started choking me with it. It wasn’t the first time he’d been physically violent with me. There had been others. The first time he slapped me. The time he threw me around like a rag doll and I ended up in the hospital with two sprained ankles and a sprained wrist. But he always promised he’d do better, and between meltdowns, he was amazing.
That’s how they operate, toxic narcissists.
That’s how they get you addicted to them. They enchant you. They tell you that you’re the most beautiful woman, that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to them. When they inevitably hurt you, they play on your pity, begging your forgiveness. And every time you forgive, it wears you down a little bit more. It pushes you closer to just giving up and handing over your soul.
But this particular morning in 2013, he grabbed me by my coat and started choking me, and kept me pinned to the couch, holding me like that.
A rage like nothing I’d ever felt before flooded up in me.
I was already losing my son. My son was moving to Vegas to live with his biodad, because he wanted to get to know him and his new stepmother and half brother. And he had more opportunities there. And he was tired of watching me get hurt and keep taking the narcissist back.
I was already losing my life, I didn’t want to die, too.
I fought back. I stood up, I picked him up, and I threw him through a wall. It was only the latest in a string of holes in the wall from him punching walls. Punching walls seemed normal to me. My dad punched walls. My first boyfriend punched walls. My first husband punched walls. I thought that’s just what men did when they were mad…
And then I got up and walked to the bus stop to go to work.
I had nearly blacked out from lack of oxygen, and then had thrown my attacker through a wall, and I just got up and went to work like it was just any other day.
This is one of the many reasons women stay with their abusers. The abuse becomes normal.
It doesn’t even phase you after awhile. Yeah, it hurts. Yeah, you know it’s not right. But it is what it is, and you have to go on doing your life, and so you learn to compartmentalize.
He didn’t call me or text until that afternoon. And then he called to tell me that his aunt in Indiana was getting him a job, he just had to find a way to get down there.
I paid someone $400 to drive him there the next time I got paid. I rode the four-hour trip with him on a Saturday. He had this story he kept telling me that he was going to get a job, and get his shit together, and get us a house, and I’d move down there with him. I just wanted him to let me go.
I went back to an empty house and a job that I didn’t really like anyway, and three days later, he called to tell me that he didn’t want to be with someone he couldn’t see everyday and he wanted a divorce. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I decided to give up the house. I didn’t want the memories anyway. I let it go to the county land bank, and it still sits empty to this day.
We didn’t speak for almost three weeks, and then he called me begging me to come get him. He missed me. The job he thought he was going for didn’t exist. And things had gotten ugly with his cousin.
I did. Another $300 for the trip there and back.
The day we got back, I found out things had gotten ugly with his cousin because he’d kissed his cousin’s girlfriend. But he swore that that’s when he realized how much he loved me and missed me. And I really wanted to believe him. I really wanted to believe that things could be better now that we’d been away from each other for almost a month. I’d moved in with our brother-in-law, so now, he’d have to learn to get his temper in check.
And things really did get better after that. We’d found a boundary he couldn’t break when I’d fought back that day, and I spent the next few years building new boundaries and learning more and more how to stand up for myself.
All of these things, or so I told myself, were signs that he was growing up, becoming a better person, and that it was worth saving the marriage.
Except that what was really going on was that he was just adapting so he could keep feeding off of me.
Because that’s what narcissists do. They seek someone that will feed their ego. That will do what they want.
And I was prime target for him when we started dating and got married.
Poor self-esteem. Lonely. Horny. Unsure of myself. Loner. I was doing freelance, and blogging, and doing psychic readings.
He was sweet, and charming, and amazing in bed. The chemistry was explosive. We fucked each other raw.
And I made a lot of money, and I loved to spend it on him. As long as I was spending money on him, he was the sweetest guy in the world.
When I ran out of money, because I’d spent it all on him, he’d flip the switch, but I had a job, and the money was steady, and I got a big promotion, and then the money was really, really good. And so, for the most part, he was really, really good, too.
I even started to ignore the cheating. I stopped checking his phone. I knew I wasn’t actually going to do anything about it, so why make a fight out of it.
2014 I made him get a job. I started saving money and planning and building my business so that I could quit mine, and I needed him to contribute, too. And he grumbled, but he did get a job. He liked having his own money. We’d gotten married when he was 20, which was dumb. He was a kid, only 6 years older than my own son, but gods did he have an amazing dick, and his kisses made me melt.
We were back and forth a LOT. He’d move out, then come back. I even moved out once, but three weeks later, after his daily, “I love you, I miss you, I wish you’d come home, it’ll be different, I know I fucked up,” I decided to go back.
A week and a half later I was so fed up with him, I did sorcery to make him find someone else and move. He did the next day.
Did I mention I’m a sorceress? It’s right up in my bio. Chaos Magic is my game, and Chaos Magic is about whatever the fuck works. And I’ve spent 25 years learning to manipulate energy. Didn’t help that 20 of those 25 years were spent in three toxic relationships.
But fuck. I didn’t expect it to work THAT quick. I mean, seriously, who the fuck meets someone online and lets him move in the next day.
Toxic narcissists do. Because they’re so, so good at turning on the charm.
I checked his messages. And he literally met her on a dating site, and moved in with her the next day.
It was insane.
Two weeks later, I was missing him intensely. And I was horny. So I did some sigil magic paired with solo sex magic and some Return To Me Oil, and the next day, he came back, told me how much he loved and missed me, and could we work on things.
It was like drunk-dialing with magic. OMG what the fuck was I thinking?
But I let him come back. I’d done the spell, I had to live with the consequences. But he had to start paying half the rent. That was one of the conditions, that he had to start paying half the rent, and he had to pay half of the insane amount of money we were already behind on rent to my brother-in-law, who we lived with. He agreed. Progress.
Summer and fall were pretty good, but I knew they were only temporary, and I knew that this was just part of the pattern. I knew that I needed to shift things so that the pattern sent him shooting permanently out of my life.
Because narcissists don’t become better people. They only become better narcissists.
I had to get him out of my life for good, in a way that he wouldn’t sling shot back.
And to do that, I had to break the toxic bond. I had to make him not want to be with me. I had to make sure he went in a way that there was nothing for him to return to.
He was so dependent on me to feed his ego, that we spent all our time when he wasn’t working together. He was working nights on the weekends only, and so all day long all week long, we were together, and even when he was working, he was texting and calling me. Something had to change. I had to break this.
I began by focusing on gradually changing circumstances. First thing, I needed him gone during the day so I could work. Hard to get anything done when your narcissistic husband with violent tendencies wants to watch a movie and if you don’t watch it with him, he’ll throw a temper tantrum.
I began focusing my magic work on a position in his company opening up for a day shift. And one did. At the site where his dad worked even. He got the transfer, and he was working Monday through Friday 10:30 to 6:30. And he couldn’t text and call me all day, because his dad was there watching him.
I had room to breathe. I had room to expand. I began working on further detaching him from me through a process that I now call Poisoning the Well.
You see, when a narcissist attaches to you, it’s to gain energy from you. You feed their ego, and the more they can control you, the more it feeds their ego. He’d had me so locked down, I couldn’t even go for a walk without him accusing me of cheating, so I just stopped going for walks. I used to walk five miles a day. Now, I get out of breath going up and down the stairs.
And I have a LOT of energy to feed on. And he’s never been able to find anyone that has energy to feed off of like me. He drains others in a matter of weeks. I’d managed to hold on for five years. He wasn’t letting go easy. I had to make him want to be gone. I had to make him want to stay gone.
So I began to harden my heart. This wasn’t easy, because I DO love him. I’ve focused on pointing out his negative traits, but he actually has many, many wonderful qualities. Not just his amazing dick, but he’s a really sweet guy, when his Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder are under control.
But I was exhausted from having to stay vigilant to help him keep his disorders under control. I’ve got my own shit to deal with. Major Depressive Disorder, ADHD so bad it makes other people’s heads spin, not to mention being psychic as fuck. Try living knowing when people are going to die. And no, I won’t tell you when you or anyone else is going to die. I dreamed of my grandmother’s death two months before she died, and that was the moment I fell in love with him, because he held me as I cried when the dream came true.
It’s not fucking easy being me, and I was tired of taking care of him to the point I wasn’t even able to take care of me. I’d gained 50 pounds because I’d stopped going for the daily walks that my body loves so much, and I couldn’t even fit into a size 22, the biggest size I’d ever even tried on. I was angry that I’d given up my life for him, and I wanted change, but it couldn’t be like it was all those times he moved out and moved back.
It had to be done.
It had to be clear to him there was nothing left for him in my heart, whether it was true or not.
I began to pull away. I did daily trance work geared at putting up more and more energetic boundaries between us. He moved out of my bedroom into the room across the hall when a roommate moved out. He just wasn’t comfortable in my room anymore, the bed hurt his back, he couldn’t sleep, it was too hot for him.
I continued to work in the subtle realms. Every night, before I slept, I’d continue to do the work right at the energetic level. Shifting things. Tweaking things.
It wasn’t easy. I had times when I let him in again. But I was quickly reminded why I was going through this painstaking process of energetically shifting things to break this pattern once and for all.
Because toxic relationships are the pattern of my entire life, from the moment I was born. This wasn’t even about him. It was about reclaiming a self that I never even knew I had.
He was just another piece of the puzzle. Another lesson towards finding me. But he no longer fit in the puzzle, and I had to get him the fuck out.
It took months. Eventually, the sex started slowing down. From daily, to a few times a week. Then even more days between. THAT was hard for me. I’m hypersexual, physically aroused to some degree 24/7, but I’m really picky about who I’ll have sex with, and he was my ideal lover. I dreamed of him before we even met.
He started talking about the fact he was going to be paid off of what he’d owed my brother-in-law soon. I’d paid off what I owed MONTHS before, because I’d hustled my ass off, but he went at a slower pace, paying paycheck by paycheck. He talked about what he’d do. About how maybe he’d move, since we had decided we were getting a divorce, we just had to work out the money situation, because we both barely made enough to cover our expenses.
And then a few weeks ago, his aggression started to spiral up again. Spring. He was getting restless. I knew. This is when it has to happen. This is when I have to push.
And so I started to distance myself from him even more. I started to ramp up my nightly work in trance and visualization, adding in a visualization of him meeting a new woman, moving in with her, moving on. And she had to have a car. Because part of why he came back last year was because he didn’t have a car and he can’t afford one, so he had to keep driving our brother-in-law’s spare truck to work. And just that one thing there had left an opening for him to come back. A reason for him to see me.
I had to cut out all reasons for him to see me.
You see, I’d tried moving out. But this is my home. I’d lived here BEFORE he barreled into my life, and this is where I’m most comfortable. I have a simple, but good, life here, and I didn’t want to leave it. I just wanted him and his toxic bond away from me.
And as long as he had a reason to come back, any reason, he would.
I got so specific because I’ve gone through this so many times, I know where it goes wrong. So I conjured up a woman that could take him away from me and keep him.
He met her online two weeks ago. He met her in person Thursday. He spent the night with her Monday. He’s been there ever since. He’s getting the rest of his stuff tomorrow. She has a car, and she’s helping him buy a car of his own. And she’s an hour away from here.
And I’ve spent the last six months so methodically detaching our energies, that he no longer has any reason to come back. He gets nothing from me. I’d stopped supporting him, and then I’d conjured what he wanted. Someone else to enable him.
I don’t know how long she’ll enable him. I don’t care.
He’s gone.
I did the work. And it was hard. And now, I have enough proof for my mind of my own power, and I can turn the work on rebuilding my life. Because damn, I’m one bad bitch.
And now for the techniques.
Some of what I did was planned, some was spontaneous, some was accidental, but this is what I’ve learned about how to blend practical and magical techniques into a powerful sorcery that will radically shift your life out of toxicity and into freedom.
- Start with the certainty.
You have to be sure that you want this. Really sure. And I promise you, no matter how sure you are that you want this, you will regret it the minute it happens. - Build a support system.
You are going to need a support system. Depending on how toxic the relationship has been, this might be hard. Five years of back and forth with him had made everyone in my life give up on me. Even now, the people in my immediate life are convinced I’ll let him come back in a few weeks when he inevitably snaps on his new girlfriend or her parents, who he is now living with. Six weeks is the most he’s ever been gone. But I had no real support network then. I didn’t have anyone that I could really talk to. When I told my mother that he slapped me, she said, “Well, just because he did it once doesn’t mean he’ll do it again.” When I told someone he held a knife to my throat, someone else said, “Come on now, that doesn’t even sound like him.” When I told someone that he’d picked me up and slammed me into a wall, knocking me unconscious, they said, “You’re too big for him to have been able to do that.” Most people have NO CLUE how to handle someone in a toxic relationship, so they just pretend the really bad shit doesn’t exist. They know something’s wrong, but they figure if it was really that bad, you’d leave. They don’t understand they psychology that keeps you locked into the toxic patterns of abuse.
The last time I called the police on him, they came and lectured him for two hours about how threatening me was a bad thing, and they could take him to jail, but he gave them a sob story about his life and they bought it, so they told him to go for a walk and cool off, and they left.
I built my support system online. I created a raw and authentic group of like-minded people. I created a tribe on Facebook, and I told them my Truth. That I’m struggling. I’m really fucking good at what I do, at being a psychic and a sorceress, but I’m struggling to escape a toxic marriage. I was brutally honest about where I am in my life. And they encouraged me, and listened to me pour out my heart, and gave me the strength to keep going when things were getting bad. It’s called Why The Fuck Not Today and it’s a bunch of misfits learning how to create the lives they REALLY want. Because it was business my narcissist ignored it. He didn’t think anything of it. Social and friendly stuff, he freaked out about. He wanted me isolated. But business made me money and that he liked. - Educate yourself.
I’m smart. Really smart. Einstein smart. And I still fell for a narcissist so abusive that at times, I was certain I was going to die by his hands.
I don’t care how smart you are, you can fall for their shit. Because they are slick. They are sweet. They are the kindest, most loving people. They will lavish praise on you and shower you with affection. They will sweep you off your feet. And before you know it, you in a corner, in the dark, in the locked bathroom, hoping he won’t actually break the door in, and praying that someone will come over and stop the fight because as you were calling 911 he broke your phone.
Learn the signs of toxic and abusive relationships. Know that even if (s)he’s not hitting you, even if (s)he’s not violent, (s)he might be abusive. Even after the violence stopped, he controlled me with his temper. I didn’t want to make him mad, so I changed my life and kept making changes to minimize his triggers. And before long, there wasn’t any of me left.
Do research. Google “signs of a toxic relationship” and “signs of abuse.” And if you feel like maybe there’s something there, don’t dismiss it. Don’t rationalize it. Because that’s the downfall of the smart ones. We’re really, really good at rationalizing. - Get therapy.
I’m an introvert. Hard core. And my ex works at the only mental health center in the county that takes my insurance. But you can get counseling online. Even if it’s just finding someone to talk to. You can’t do it alone. I tried. That’s why I kept failing. I was trying to do it alone. - Find your center.
Meditate. Ground. Whatever. Find your center. Do this daily. In every moment that you can. It can be hard when you’re walking on glass to keep your mind from shattering, too, and meditation helps, more than I can even describe. Meditate while you’re on the toilet, while you’re in the shower, every spare moment you get away from them. - Craft a vision of your life without them.
What do you want your life to look like? This is going to be hard. You’re going to resist this. You’re going to have to revise it again and again and again. But you need to be so fucking clear on what you want that it’s like watching Netflix on the fastest broadband on Earth.
I have a specific vision crafting process that I follow, and that begins to bring about results almost immediately. If you’d like to work with me, get in touch.
See in your mind’s eye the life that you want. Where do you want to live? How do you want to feel when you wake up? What do you want to do?
I wanted bike rides. I used to go on 5 mile bike rides, until he kept letting the air out of my tires, and finally, one morning, they were popped, and I didn’t have the money to replace them. So getting a new bike became a powerful symbol for my freedom. Focusing on a life where I could buy and ride a bike.
This is important. You need to focus on things that you can only do with them out of your life. Because otherwise, you’ll try to change them. You cannot change a toxic narcissist. You can only teach them how to be a better toxic narcissist. I used to imagine that he’d change and we’d have a happy life together. And that fantasy still creeps in sometimes, but I push it out of my mind, and the daily meditation practice helps with that tremendously. I still imagine that we’ll split up for a year or two, and he’ll get his shit together, and then we’ll work things out. But I remind myself that narcissists don’t get better, they just become better narcissists. - Every night, repeat your visualization of that life without them.
Every single night. Repetition adds power. - If you can, write it down.
Early in our relationship, he was so controlling, I couldn’t keep a journal. He’d read it. Later, as he relaxed his grip and I began to establish boundaries, I started keeping a journal. And then I started using the techniques in my business, creating a Vision Your Life challenge in January, initiating rapid changes in the lives of the participants. Writing it down and reading it again and again and again helps to cement it even more. - Begin to add energy to the visions.
This means learning to work with energy. I’ve been at it for two decades, so I’m really, really good at it. I can be in my center with a thought, and draw energy from multiple energetic sources in an instant. It was not always this easy. Start by learning to feel energy, and you do that by imagining that you feel the energy. Play pretend for awhile. But don’t freak when it stops being pretend.
Use positive, healing energy only.
I’m not against curses. I’m not against hexing. But when you’re in a toxic relationship, feeding negative energy into it only feeds the toxicity more. I learned that the hard way. Instead, focus on filling your visions with the feelings and energy you want to have in your life. - Begin to do lovingkindness meditations on your toxic partner.
Lovingkindness is a type of meditation where you focus on sending only loving energy to a person, no matter how difficult they are. Calm.com has a free Lovingkindness meditation that walks you through lovingkindness for yourself, for a person you like, and for a person you are having difficulty with that is really great for beginners.
My technique in my particular case was to visualize him, ground and connect into Earth, pulling healing energy up through me to my heart center, and then focusing loving thoughts into that energy, and then sending it through the toxic bond between us. As I gained proficiency at that, I began to visualize a woman that would take him, and sent lovingkindess to her, not through me or him, but directly pulled up from the Earth, because I do not want to have my energy connected to her at all. - Begin to Poison the Well.
This is a technique that I use instead of cutting cords. Visualize the bond between you and your toxic partner. Pull up all of the rage that you have for them, every bit of it. At the same time, pull up Fire energy and allow it to mix with the energy of your rage. Rage is not a negative energy, it is a righteous energy that is a powerful tool when wielded correctly. If you work with Lilith, now would be a good time to call on her, but don’t call on her unless you’re SURE that you’re ready for this to be done, and you’ve worked with her before. She doesn’t play games. Visualize the Fire energy blending with your rage at the point where the toxic bond exists, and allow it to begin to flow through. Visualize it beginning to burn that toxic bond to ash. Do this every day for as long as it takes. This is essential for releasing that bond so the mutual addiction can end.
It will be hard. If things start to happen too fast or spiral out of control, and you feel like you need to back off and regroup, that’s okay. Take a break. Take a week or a month or a year. However long it takes. When you’re in an especially abusive relationship, you can only move as fast as you can, and that’s okay.
It takes women an average of 7 times to escape a domestic violence situation once and for all. I’ve learned something new each time.
