Dr. Rita Louise is a gifted empath, a talented clairvoyant medical intuitive, and a best-selling author whose most recent book is titled The Dysfunctional Dance of The Empath and Narcissist: Create Healthy Relationships by Healing Childhood Trauma. She graduated from the Berkeley Psychic Institute, where she studied meditation and energy medicine and learned to perform intuitive clairvoyant readings. After graduation, she returned to school to earn a degree as a Naturopath and a Ph.D. in Natural Health Counseling. She is also a Reiki Master, a Certified Hypnotherapist, a Certified Mindfulness Practitioner, and the Founder of the Institute of Applied Energetics, which trains students in the art of medical intuition, intuitive counseling, and energy medicine plus she has a private practice of her own.
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Dr. Rita Louise: The Dysfunctional Dance Of The Empath And Narcissist: You Can Create Healthy Relationships In Your Life By Healing Your Childhood Trauma
I’m delighted to welcome the very gifted empath and talented clairvoyant medical intuitive, Dr. Rita Louise, who will be speaking to us from Marshall, Texas. Rita is a bestselling author who has appeared on both radio and television and spoken at many conferences. Hundreds of her articles have been published worldwide and she’s produced both full-length and feature videos.
To say she’s a multitasker is an understatement. Her book, which we will talk about, is titled The Dysfunctional Dance Of The Empath And Narcissist: Create Healthy Relationships By Healing Childhood Trauma. To say her offerings are prodigious is an understatement. She’s a graduate of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, where she studied meditation and energy medicine, and learned how to perform intuitive clairvoyant readings.
After graduation, she returned to school to earn a degree as a Naturopath and a PhD in Natural Health Counseling. She’s also a Reiki Master, a Certified Hypnotherapist, a Certified Mindfulness Practitioner, and the Founder of the Institute of Applied Energetics, which trains students in the art of medical intuition, intuitive counseling, and energy medicine.
She has a private practice of her own and there’s more. She’s a professor of Alternative Health Studies at Westbrook University in West Virginia. She’s the Chairman of the Board of the International Association of Medical Intuitives. She served on the Board of Directors for the Holistic Chamber of Commerce. Through her work, she has been recognized in the National Register’s Who’s Who in Executives and Professions.
I’m looking forward to chatting with the multifaceted and gifted Dr. Rita Louise about many things, including how her book titled The Dysfunctional Dance Of The Empath And Narcissist: Create Healthy Relationships By Healing Childhood Trauma was inspired by the insights she gained about her own toxic relationships being rooted in her upbringing and family of origin. The strategies that she devised in her youth to help her overcome her deep shyness and how she helps people to make better choices for their lives through her intuitive clairvoyant readings, medical intuition readings, and spiritual energy medicine healings.
The Dysfunctional Dance of The Empath and Narcissist: Create Healthy Relationships by Healing Childhood Trauma
Dr. Louise is known for working with the whole person, body, mind, and soul, to get to the cause of a person’s concerns. Our bodies, minds, and souls will surely be deeply touched and inspired by these wonderful insights builds interview with her. Rita, a very long introduction but a truly warm and heartfelt welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
It’s truly my pleasure. We’re going to have a lot of fun together. Let’s start by having you tell us about the abuse you experienced during your childhood and how it drew you towards spiritual self-discovery when you were only eight years old and how spiritual pursuits became your lifelong passion.
I don’t know if it was the abuse that drove me to that area. Our family was a sci-fi horror family. We watched things like One Step Beyond, The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, The Blob, and Frankenstein. We were always brought up with looking at things from a different perspective and seeing you’ll resonate with this. When I was a kid, there were two TV shows on. One was The Amazing Kreskin, which if I can get a nickel for every time I say his name, and he had ESP. He was a mentalist and tell people stuff.
There was another series called The Sixth Sense, not the movie. It was a TV series about a college professor who had ESP. I was drawn to that at that age. It became a passion for me, digging into anything that I could find that would give me insight because I had decided that I wanted to become psychic at that point in time.
You weren’t afraid. There are people whose children have gifts and they get nervous so much as I do about it. What is the abuse you experienced? That abuse must have led you towards what you’re doing now with this book and all of that.
I make this a joke but if you can look at it from the outside, it’s a little sad. I’ve been married four times. I had multiple relationships. I do get a little reprieve because my last husband passed away who was the best one of them all.
You got smarter with each choice.
I don’t know. The last couple of relationships I’ve had were not so smart. At this moment, I am ending a relationship with someone, which has been interesting because I feel very empowered this time, as opposed to going into a grief thing. The person I was dating prior to him was very narcissistic but also, either he was a hardcore drunk or had some psychological issue going on and I never could separate.
I told him, “If this is a psychological issue, let’s get you on some meds or whatever,” but the drinking always overpowered everything. He was terrible. Here’s another piece of the story. I’m breaking up with him. You’ll love this story. I took all of his stuff, got a friend to come over, and loaded it in a truck because he was staying about two hours away.
I knew that if I didn’t take the mountain to Muhammad, Muhammad would never come to the mountain. The friend brought me off at a little diner. While I’m sitting in the diner, my ex-husband, the one that I was married to before the one that died. It gets very confusing. His wife calls me and she’s like, “I’m having some problems with him. Can we talk?” I’m like, “What’s going on?” She was like, “He’s a narcissist.” She put a light bulb in my mind because that husband and the boyfriend had a lot of very similar characteristics.
You keep repeating patterns. Was your father or were your parents narcissists?
My mother.
Your mother was a narcissist, so you keep marrying your mother.
I wonder why I have mommy issues. What was interesting is that for how intuitive I am and working with other people, I was blindsided by that revelation. That revelation caused me to go and dig into what’s going on and what I need to do to fix this. I’m going back to relationships, friendships, and my family of origin, and I was flabbergasted.
How you were sitting there before we came on air talking about how Spirit says, “You need to do this or you need to do that.” As I was doing my own self-healing, I got a message because they dump stuff on me. It’s like, “You need to write a book about this.” It’s always very short. I’m like, “Okay,” then I started by taking more notes while I was doing my research. I was like, “I can start putting words on paper.” The message I got was, “You need to tell your story. You’re not going to get any juice from us until you tell your story and publish it.”
That’s like getting naked for the world because you’re going to expose everything that’s happened.
Pretty much but I have to tell you, it was one of the most healing parts of the whole thing because I didn’t have to run away from it anymore. I didn’t have to hide that anymore. It became part of me. I’m very grateful that they forced me into having to do that. You’ll appreciate this and I don’t share this little piece of information on air very often. I was finishing the last chapter, and my mother, the abuser, passed away. One of the things that I had internalized was that I would not publish the book until after she passed away because I couldn’t do that to her. I was finishing up the very last chapter.
It’s the perfect divine timing. She’s probably learning a lot now from the other side and she’s waiting to see what you’re doing. What was your father’s deal with it? Was he the empath?
I’m going to guess so. My dad had a lot of friends. He was socially active but in a more helpful way. He ran the Bingo. He did Meals on Wheels for HIV people at the church once a week. He was the head cook and would make 30 meals for Meals on Wheels. He did that for years. My mom, at one point in time, got a job doing social work and was working at an old age home. My dad was retired by then. He would go down and play peanut but with the old ladies. He was always very involved with people in a helping supportive role.
Here’s your mother, a narcissist and she’s a social worker. I want to say because I’m into this show. I’m encouraging people to go for healing. One of the messages is you also need to be discerning about who you choose as your healer because not all healers have healed themselves. Some of them have their own issues that they continue to work through. I’m passionate about getting people to heal but that’s why I have these interviews. You can learn who these people are and get your own feel for them.
My mom didn’t start doing social work until much later in life. She went back to college at 42 and graduated the valedictorian of her class then went and worked for ten years. I remember her reading all these psychology books. There was some part of her wanting to heal or fix what was going on and that dynamic is interesting. I could see where there was a part of her that was very wounded.
She probably got it from your grandparents. You don’t know. In my family, it was me and it sounds like now it’s you. Someone on the line needs to stop it, heal it, and change the dynamic. Everyone around has their choices of how they’re going to react to that, staying in their own paradigm or moving forward. That generational stuff gets passed down the line until someone says, “It’s enough.” Someone like Rita comes out with a book about The Dysfunctional Dance of the Empath and Narcissist and you go, “Here it is. I have to turn a new page.”
It’s a good book for New Yorkers because it is straightforward and a little on the raw side but it makes you stop and look at yourself. Do an inner inventory of what’s going on inside. One of the most comments I’ve gotten has been, “It made me cry.” I’m like, “That’s good.” That means that you’re feeling, releasing, grieving, and acknowledging it.
You’re acting also as a mirror for them because you’re identifying it so they can see it in themselves. First of all, aside from all of this, I want to talk to you about your story about two things. How did you overcome your deep shyness? That’s great to know in general for people. Also, how do you help people make better choices in their lives with your clairvoyant readings? If someone’s reading and falling in love with you, how do you help people through your medical intuition, spiritual energy medicine, and clairvoyant readings? As a sidebar, how did you overcome deep shyness as a kid? Was that from too many shows with the outer?
I’m sitting there because I’ll talk about that story on the air. I’m like, “I don’t remember putting that in an article or somewhere.” Anyway, I come from a very large family. I am 1 of 8 in a very loud New York-Jewish-Puerto Rican family.
I can relate to part of that.
My birth order was number three. The way the dynamics were, I was considered a big kid but I had all the responsibility of being one of the big kids and in charge. Since I was the youngest, I had no power. I was trained to shut up.
Look at you now.
I know. I’ll tell people, it’s like, “I used to be shy.”
How did you overcome this thing?
When I was nineteen, I left New York.
You were shy all the way up to nineteen. You still hadn’t kicked it yet?
No. By the time I moved to California, I was not in a good place. I had been beaten down very hard and it was all I could do to escape. I went there. Now I’m scrawny but I was overweight and I didn’t like who I was because I didn’t like how I was interfacing with the world and I knew that for me to change that, I had to change me.
That’s a big statement though, Rita. A lot of people don’t realize that. A lot of people want everything around them to change. The core of it is that you have to do changes.
This is going to sound so stupid but it was my life. I would walk to work because I was nineteen. I moved to California with $125, no place to live, and no friends because I was going to go to school there.
Plucky girl, aren’t you?
Cajones, that’s what people say, “She had big cajones.”
You’re courageous.
I got a job within a week. That was within walking distance of where I was living. On my way to work, there was a 7-Eleven and I would make myself tasks. My task for a while, this is going to sound so lame, was going to walk into 7-Eleven and say hi to the person behind the counter before they interacted with me. It was a white-knuckle scenario. It was hard.
I would stop outside the store and it’d be like, “You’re going to do this.” I would go and do it. I would give myself little tasks. I’ve done a lot of wellness expos, whole life expos, and new life expos and I would give myself the task of going up to someone in a booth because I would have a booth, saying hi, shaking their hand, and ask them their name because it was hard. I don’t do that anymore.
That’s amazing that you were that shy. Tell us about how you help people before we start to talk even more about your book and all. You do three main things. You have intuitive clairvoyant readings, medical intuitive readings, and spiritual energy. First of all, define those things and then tell us how you work with people.
Clairvoyant readings are like having a psychic reading although the term is a little more specific. I tend to be a very visual person. If there’s something going on, I will see it in my mind’s eye like you can see your car, your bedroom, or your mother’s face. That’s where I see it. I tend to be a little multimedia. I’m very sensitive to people’s feelings. I have become more auditory where I will get auditory messages.
Have you trained for this?
I went to the Berkeley Psychic Institute. I wanted to be psychic when I was a kid and I’m like, “This is not happening,” and studied with them but after being in the program for three weeks, I came to the stark realization that I had been very psychic my whole life. When you walk up to someone who is out the day before, they have a little Band-Aid on the top of their head. You walk up to them and go, “Where were you? Having them check for a brain tumor?” being a smart-ass and that was where they were. I started going back over my life and these weird coincidences. It’s like, “You’ve been doing this like a long time.” That’s the clairvoyant part.
The medical intuitive is someone that uses their intuition but they talk about health-related issues. One of the things that I discovered was while I was at Berkeley but they didn’t talk about medical stuff. It was very easy for me to tap into physical issues that were going on in a person’s body. One thing that I would love to share with everyone is that just because you’re psychic doesn’t mean that you do everything. I don’t do dead people. I don’t want dead people coming to my house.
Just because you're psychic doesn't mean that you do everything. Click To Tweet
You’re a healer. You’re not a medium.
Many people have the preconception that if you say psychic, that’s also in your bag. I’m more of what’s going on with you on multiple levels.
Can you tell people what’s going to go on with them also?
I don’t do predictions. We have free will and the universe works in a lot of different ways. There are moments where we might get a premonition or something like that. I might be biased here. I would love to meet someone who does give predictions and they do come true. We have moments where we’re giving that very specific message to pass on but if I have a client calling me at 2:00, it’s not like being a channel where you go into your channel mode. There isn’t like, “I’m doing a prediction mode.”
I don’t do that but I will look at the possibilities and the probabilities like, “This is where your energy is and this is the thing you’re trying to do or not do.” What are the chances of it happening? What are the obstacles? Are there obstacles? Are there other people around it? What do you need to do to get to be from point A to point B?
Tell us about spiritual energy medicine healing.
All of this works together. When I work with someone, if they come with a straightforward health issue, then I can look in their body, assess their kidney, and tell them if there’s inflammation or if there is build-up in it and they need to do some cleansing work, getting to talk to them about herbs and supplements that might be helpful for them. Also, in that kidney, they might be having issues on the next level down if they’re working too hard.
There’s someone that’s in their life. They’re with a narcissist. We’ll jump right in there. All they’ve been doing is giving their energy away to this other person but that depletion is showing up in their kidney. I’ll make that communication. It’s like this is being robbed but usually, there’s something sitting underneath that will give information about why it’s being robbed. Why are they choosing to give their energy away? If somebody comes to me with a relationship question, they want to move, or they want information about a job, I’ll talk about pretty much anything except dead people unless it’s a ghost.
Tell us about the ghost.
This was not anything that I plan ever on getting into career-wise but I do a lot of spirit release work with people. I wrote one article. I ended up writing a book about it. There is a phenomenon that revolves around entity attachments. I’m going to give some vocabulary here. I live in a 100-year-old house and there are a couple of ghosts that live here. My house is haunted because I got these dead people that live here and they’re very nice to me. We don’t bother each other.
If you have an entity attachment, its goal is to manipulate you. They are the narcissists of the spirit world. They will attach themselves to you to get you to be in a certain emotional place because that’s the energy that they feed off of. They’re energetic parasites. I work with people to get rid of them but there’s a caveat. People are like, “Get rid of it,” but usually, the entity will attach because there’s something deficit in the person.
Childhood Trauma: If you have an entity attachment, its goal is to manipulate you. They are the narcissists of the spirit world, and they will attach themselves to you to get you in an emotional place because that’s the energy they feed off of.
That needs healing.
Usually, the entity will come in and bother the person because now they’re triggered. It’s opened the door to the entity. Regardless of the work that I’m doing, intuitive work, there’s always the opportunity to do energy healing, a reiki type.
Someone comes to you and you see that they have this attachment. How do you get it out of them?
It’s a process. How’s that?
Does the person have to take a proactive stance with you to do something?
Most of my clients want me to fix it, which makes it take forever. I have been working with one woman who has been very proactive and I’ll say, “This is what it’s attached. This is another angle on it or this is some part of you that still needs healing.” She has gone off and done stuff.
To get rid of it? I’ve heard about those entity attachments and I know healers who also, like you, are able to help people get rid of them and they can screw up a person. You don’t know why you’re all having all these problems.
Entity attachments come from a couple of standard places from trauma or drug and alcohol abuse and I’ll disclose this here. The reason I know about entities is because I had one. I worked very hard to get rid of it.
Entity attachments come from trauma or drug and alcohol abuse. Click To Tweet
Where did you decide to launch?
I know that I had it my whole life. I would assume from the trauma. I experienced some very core trauma at about three years old.
Can you talk about it or would you rather not?
I was three. There was a lot of stuff that went on during that period of time but not necessarily like specifically for my mother. As an example, we lived on the 14th floor in the Bronx. My brother and I were racing down the hall from the elevator and I was beating him. He was older. He tripped me. I banged my face on the floor and had to have my two front teeth removed.
There’s trauma over there.
There was that part but then, there is, for two years, them singing, “All I want for Christmas are my two front teeth.” That was a bigger trauma. I’m going to tell you a true story. I’m getting little goosebumps. This was a number of years ago and my mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I said, “I want my two front teeth.” She sent me a box because she saved our baby teeth. She sent me two front teeth. It makes me even want to cry, sharing that story because it was like, “I’ve been waiting for this since I was like three.”
These were your baby teeth. Your adult teeth eventually grew in.
I was almost six before they grew in.
You had to go through all of that. When I was researching your book, they talked about how a Facebook survey of people who self-identify as being empathic revealed a startling insight that over 80% of the 1,300 respondents disclosed they had suffered from some form of abuse or neglect during their childhood. Please tell us, why does that abuse or neglect lead to a person becoming either an empath or a narcissist?
I’m going to start with the empath and it’s interesting because people that would tune in to a show like this are people that tend to be more empathic. They’re interested in self-growth and self-discovery much more than a narcissist would ever be.
If they’re married to a narcissist or living with a narcissist, this is going to help them identify that.
They’re probably the empath.
Why does an abuser neglect a person?
Imagine this. You are five years old and mommy and daddy are fighting. You’re in the other room but you’re already sensitive. Children are sensitive in general, so you’re feeling the anger or the hostility or you’re hearing these bad sounds. You go hide and wait for the energy to change to know that now you can relax. Daddy’s an alcoholic. The door opens up. You sit there and put your antenna out. It’s like, “Is he drunk? Is this a safe place to be?”
Children are sensitive. They're feeling the anger, the hostility, or you're hearing these bad sounds. They will find a safe environment. Click To Tweet
They grow up with years of practice feeling into their environment to make sure it’s safe. I was like, “That totally makes sense.” A narcissist, on the other hand, also comes from places of trauma. There is a psychological condition of narcissistic personality disorder. I’m going to make the assumption that there’s a certain chemical piece tied to that as well but that’s at the very far end of the spectrum of people. They experience this trauma but they don’t want to heal it. My base feeling about it is they lose hope. They give up. Instead of sitting there, coming back, and praying that it’s going to be different.
Are they even aware that they have a problem?
Not necessarily as an adult. As a child, they won’t re-engage or they’ll put on what’s called the false self, which is like a mask. Even though they’re scared of mommy, they’re going to act like mommy’s little helper, take all the things that they’re feeling, and then stuff all of that hurt and pain down inside of them, whereas an empath wants to get rid of it. They want to understand that they want to change it. The narcissist is like, “There’s nothing there. I don’t hurt. I’m just going to shove it over there.”
They spend years working on this camouflage. This is what I present to the world but this is what I feel on the inside because what I present to the world is what they want to see. This is what they think is healthy. It’s like the preacher. Everybody loves the preacher but then he goes home and beats his kids. People are shocked. It’s like, “It’s the preacher. He’s the most loving and kind person.” Maybe on the inside, he’s not.
What you’re saying is the empath, in a way, is more authentic of a person than a narcissist. The narcissist deals with all of this pain, stuffs it, creates a camouflage with it, and never faces it. He’s busy beating everybody up with his pain.
He puts that mask or camouflage on but he can only sustain the image for so long. You hear a story. My late husband whom I mentioned earlier, I was wife number six for him.
Let me ask you a question. You’re such a smart lady. Wouldn’t you say there’s a heads up here if the man’s been married five times before?
He was a kind person and he came from a family of trauma. I met his dad. We stayed with his parents for a few days and there was something that happened with the dog. He got upset and this man’s eyes turned red as he was getting warmed up. I saw that and I’m like, “That’s what you had to grow up with?” There was like a demon that would go into that man and he caught himself. He turned it off because that was the mask.
His comment when we got married was, “I’m waiting.” This is it. I’m a one-size-fits-all type of personality and he goes, “I’m waiting.” I’m like, “Waiting for what?” He goes, “I’m waiting for you to change.” I’m like, “Change to what?” He goes, “That’s happened. In every one of my other marriages, as soon as they said I do, they became a different person.”
Did he become a totally different person?
He was pretty consistent. He was a great guy.
You ended up changing too because you divorced him too.
No, he died.
This is the one who died.
It was like, “I finally meet a good one.” People will say, “He was your soulmate.” It’s like, “Screw you, Universe.”
Another thing I read about when I was researching this was that you talk about, in your book, different parenting styles that lead to healthy or unhealthy adults and the primary attachment styles for each. I’ll bet a lot of people reading, Rita, would love to learn about that because they’re raising children or have grandchildren. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
It’s not something that I talk about a lot. People are like, “Why did you put that picture on there?” I’m like, “If you’ve suffered from abuse, you can’t talk. The shame keeps you silent.” That’s why I put that picture on there.
You’re often afraid to tell other people that you had a less-than-perfect childhood either and people hide that too.
You don’t want people to think less of you.
People have that tendency to judge. I was very curious because you talked about the primary attachment styles for an empath and a narcissist. We’re talking about the fact that the empath is scouting out everything as she or he walks into a room. Her or his attachment style is different from a parenting style that nurtures a narcissist.
Their attachment styles can be the same. There’s a secure attachment style, where you’re feeling loved and nurtured by the parent. There are other attachment styles where you get hot and cold messages from your parents like I love you but then not so much. They become very fearful and end up growing up with certain characteristics. They tend to be clingy. They don’t know what’s going on.
That’s because they don’t have a secure attachment.
They don’t have a secure attachment but when they do have an attachment, depending on where they are, they can perceive it in different ways because they’re internally not functioning necessarily correctly. Your parents are your primary connection. What you learn over time is, “I can’t trust them. They’re not safe. Can I believe what they have to say?” It can manifest in different ways. They try to get their needs back but usually, it has to do with being very fear-based or having a lot of anxiety.
Where does control come from? For people who are very controlling, what is the parenting style that leads to that?
That would be like an authoritarian parent. They tell you, “This is what I want and this is how I want it.” If you step outside the box, you’re corrected. I used to salute my mom and call her Sir because she was very authoritative with everything that happened. There are some things I can recognize and this is going to sound silly.
In my adult life, I don’t even want to say I like being a certain way but I get triggered if it’s not a certain way. For some reason, I have been using this story lately. My mom had this weird baseboard issue. If you cleaned your room and you did a good job, instead of saying, “It looks good,” she would always find something that was not done, and then make you fix it. There would be countless times that she would come into my room where I had to clean a second room in the house. She would be like, “The baseboards aren’t clean.”
You can never satisfy her.
Now as an adult, if I have company, I have to clean these baseboards. I don’t clean them every day or every week but If I’m having company, I’m having clean baseboards. My baseboards are eight inches tall. There are a lot of them but I have clean baseboards because that means you did it correctly. You grow up in that and that becomes that mindset of, “This is how the world is.” In our formative years, we come in like a blank slate. Our life experiences are what creates the programs that we’re operating on.
Until we heal them then maybe we can change them.
That’s where I was going to go. If you think about it, those patterns are like a path in the woods. If something happens, our natural inclination is to go down that well-worn path because it’s familiar. We know where it’s going to go. When we start to make changes, we are cutting a new path. I’ll go back to my saying hi at 7-Eleven. That first time, going and saying hi to the guy behind the register at 7-Eleven was like, “I am in the thicket and I have a machete. I am cutting the path.”
Childhood Trauma: If something happens, our natural inclination is to go down that well-worn path because it’s familiar. We know where it will go. When we start to make changes, we are cutting a new path.
As I did it more and expanded it, still addressing that fear because a lot of our programming is fear-based, it made the path bigger and bigger. There are times when I’ll be in situations where I don’t talk that much. I don’t know if it’s me or if I get overwhelmed by the energy. If it’s a group situation, I sometimes get overwhelmed. I haven’t quite figured that out.
Tell us about what choosing self-worth, self-love, and happiness have to do with ending this dysfunctional dance of the empath and narcissist.
I’m going to even characterize that differently. Out on the planet, there are a number of unhealed empaths. They came from a family of trauma or have experienced difficulty in their lives. They’re the ones that tend to be the narcissist magnet because they go through life as people pleasers or they learn to be codependent because if I do what you want, then the vibration in the room and the dynamic between us is calm and all I want is calm. I will do anything I can to have it be calm.
As they sit there and start working on themselves, one of the main things is creating some boundaries and saying, “This is what’s important to me.” With that, also recognize that they might experience that not calm from the other person but it’s still to their benefit. Again, cutting that new path because if you tell somebody no, they maybe don’t like it that much.
They’re taking a big chance because if they’re married to the narcissist, they’re finally setting a boundary. That person’s not going to like that. They’ll be the right connections for that.
It can be hard. We were talking about me talking. I still have some issues in expressing my inner needs and I remember in this relationship, telling him something that I needed but it was on a deep soul level thing. I remember going into the room and white-knuckling the chair. This wasn’t even that long ago. I think of two pieces because I know we’re coming to an end here. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we’re happy. No one else can make us happy. We’re walking around every day miserable, then we’re not happy. The person that you’re with might be happy because you’re taking care of all their stuff but you’re not being happy.
It's our responsibility to make sure that we're happy. No one else can make us happy. Click To Tweet
Being authentic is making yourself happy. There’s a big difference because the other ways are hiding behind other behaviors but it takes a lot of courage to become authentic. I like to be happy. What would you like to tell everyone about your book? Let it rip. Why should they all buy your book?
I mentioned this before. The book is broken up and it’s a three-section book. First, I tell my story. It’s a little long but I’m going to tell you because it’s fourteen pages long. It covered the surface. For example, talk about trauma. This is going to sound so weird. I have an older sister, whose name was Rita, who was stillborn and so they buried her. It’s like, “How can you name me after some dead sister baby thing?”
Tradition? In the Jewish faith, they named someone after someone who’s passed.
It’s not a sister.
I don’t know but that’s what they did.
I would never name a new dog the same as my old dog.
I hear you. At least change the first name or something.
Anyway, again fourteen pages long but it gives you my story so you can understand me. It’s not like, “I didn’t get the red bicycle when I was six when I asked for it and now, I have all this trauma.” It’s a pretty in-depth story but again, skimming the surface. It goes into doing this self-assessment. It talks about attachment styles. Was I abused? Where was your place in the family dynamic? All of these things have an impact on who we are because, in those formative years, that’s where all the programming was created. There are a lot of people that will sit there and say, “My childhood was good.” They have this Pollyanna attitude toward it but when you drill down into their story, not so much.
It sounds to me like people who are wondering are not totally happy. We need to figure out if they need to go for healing or if they need help. Your book is a perfect book to read to find out if you’ve got some pieces that need attention.
Let me quickly go over the other parts. That self-assessment is the second part. It looks at the empath and nice narcissist relationship because usually, the most unhealed empaths will attract the most toxic narcissist. That’s why it’s a dysfunctional dance. They feed each other in a very unhealthy way. It talks about what it is to be an empath, what it is to be a narcissist, and this dance that they have with each other.
Childhood Trauma: The most unhealed empaths will attract the most toxic narcissist. That’s why it’s a dysfunctional dance because they feed each other in a very unhealthy way.
If you think you’ve experienced narcissistic abuse, it covers a lot of information. There’s one chapter called The Life Cycle of The Narcissistic Relationship, which takes you through these stages. I’m telling you, when I was working on this book, I’m sitting there and I’m reading stuff like gaslighting, love bombing, and word salad. I’m reading this stuff in articles as part of my research and I was like, “Oh, my god.” There’s even a word for it. They’re very consistent. They have a pattern of what they do. It’s a matter of recognizing the pattern as early as possible.
Get the courage, too, if you feel that you’ve got to get out. Do you give advice in the book for where people can go if they identify, “I’m in this terrible marriage. I realize that now after reading this book more than ever. Now, what’s my next step to get out of here without being killed?”
It talks about exit strategies but it also provides information on healing. It talks about mindfulness, journaling, how to work on healing the body, or grounding, which is an energy medicine technique. It gives you some tools to work with, to start that healing process because sometimes the healing process has to begin before you even leave the relationship so that you can get that strength. It also talks about, “The love and thrill are gone. What do I do next?” and offer some practical advice for people to exit the stage left safely because, in some situations, it’s not safe to get out of the relationship.
Why is it important for a person to heal? Instead of sitting in their swamp and doing this, why should people think about this, get a book like this, and try to improve their lives before they cross over?
You’ll have to come back and do it again but no. If you point the finger and go, “They did this and that,” and you don’t do anything to change yourself on the inside, you are going to end up attracting the same person with a different body again. The details might be different but you’re going to stay stuck in that pattern. The only way to get out of the pattern is to change yourself. I don’t know if you’ve had other people on here that have taught that a person has done healing on themselves or they roamed within themselves then they find that all of their friends drop off.
We talk about that all the time. You’re a chafing. You’re not a vibrational fit for these people anymore.
If you use that same mentality as you heal yourself, those lower-level, yucky narcissistic people aren’t going to be attracted to you anymore or they’re going to be attracted to you like a moth to a flame because your light is very bright. You would have more tools to recognize it early on and be like, “Thanks, but no thanks. Got to go.”
They’re reading your book and they’ve decided they want to go to you for an intuitive clairvoyant reading, a medical intuition reading, and a spiritual energy medicine healing. How can they get a hold of you, Rita?
My website is SoulHealer.com. I recommend to people, use the contact form on the page because I’m not as good at answering my phone because of all the spammy stuff. If you write an email that says, “Hi,” in the subject line, I have a very heavy delete finger. If it comes through that contact form, I always read them and respond.
The books are on there. There are a ton of articles. I have a healing trauma. This was talking about healing more childhood-type stuff, even though a lot of the techniques are the same. I have fairly released a healing trauma series that talks about stress response and dissociation. It’s a series of about fifteen articles.
What is the Rita tip for finding joy in life?
The Rita tip for finding joy in life is to monitor what’s going on inside. If you’re not happy, grounded, or content and you discover that you feel that way more days than not, we all have bad days. In a relationship, you have bad days but if every day is a bad day or if most days are bad days, then you need to stop and evaluate what’s going on and make a decision about what needs to change in your life so that you can get back to that place of wholeness that feels so good.
Monitor what's going on inside. If you're unhappy, grounded, or content, you will discover that you feel that way more days than not. Click To Tweet
Rita, The Dysfunctional Dance Of The Empath And Narcissist: Create Healthy Relationships By Healing Childhood Trauma is a very timely and insightful read that helps people gain the insights they need to heal their toxic upbringings and improve their relationships with themselves and with others. I personally relate to your book because we spoke about this from my own life journey and I appreciate the ways you’re helping people to heal and find rebirth via all the things you do.
Thank you from my heart for this incredibly wise, insights-filled, and thought-provoking interview and for all you do to help people heal and therefore have happier, more fulfilling lives. Thank goodness. Here’s a reminder, everyone. Make sure to follow us and like us on social at @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and especially on YouTube. Like, subscribe, and hit notify to make sure you’ll get these inspiring interviews coming your way. Thanks so much. As I like to say, to be continued, many blessings, and bye for now.
Guest Links:
- Dr. Rita Louise’s book: The Dysfunctional Dance Of The Empath And Narcissist: Create Healthy Relationships By Healing Childhood Trauma
- Berkeley Psychic Institute
- Institute of Applied Energetics
- Dr. Rita Louise’s Website
- Check out Dr. Rita Louise’s Blog
Host Links:
- IreneWeinberg on Instagram
- Irene Weinberg on Facebook
- Irene Weinberg on Twitter
- Irene Weinberg – Grief, Rebirth + Healing Podcast on YouTube
