Why Empaths are Targeted and the Shamanic Healing Techniques that Release the Trauma and Restore Your Sovereignty.

If you have ever been intimately involved with someone who suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), you know how painful and disorienting recovery can be. If you have ever been the target of gaslighting, psychic attack, or the slow erosion of your boundaries inside a toxic relationship, you understand the particular confusion that comes from having your emotional and psychic sovereignty repeatedly violated. After enough of it, it becomes easy to believe that your needs don't matter — and, by extension, that you don't matter.

You do. And there is a path to recovery.

Talk therapy can help you understand what happened. But narcissistic abuse leaves a wound deeper than understanding can reach — an energetic and spiritual injury that calls for a different kind of healing. Let's look at narcissistic abuse from a shamanic perspective: how the dynamic unfolds, what truly motivates the narcissist, why some people are far more vulnerable than others, and how shamanic healing restores what was taken.

Narcissistic Motivation: Feeding on Life-Force Energy

First, we have to understand what makes a narcissist or sociopath tick — what they are really trying to achieve through their abusive behavior. From a shamanic viewpoint, a narcissist's primary motivation is to feed off the life-force energy of other people. Their core strategy is to attack the emotional vulnerabilities of their target and open holes in that person's energy field — holes that then provide an ongoing source of "nourishment."

Healthy people draw their spiritual and energetic nourishment from their connection to source — to Creator and to Mother Earth. Between emotionally healthy peers, energy flows roughly equally in both directions. At times one person needs more support and the flow tilts their way for a while, but over the long run, in a healthy relationship, it balances.

With a narcissist, it never balances. A narcissist insists that energy flow toward them almost exclusively. When energy does flow outward from them, it is usually bait — an attempt to hook and capture more energy in return. If the narcissist senses their food source restricting the flow, they escalate, acting out in more aggressive or outlandish ways. When the target begins to pull back and set boundaries, this is experienced as a genuine threat to the narcissist's emotional survival, and they will try to blow through those boundaries to restore their supply.

This is why negative attention serves the narcissist just as well as positive attention — both keep the energy flowing. The one thing a narcissist cannot tolerate is being marginalized and ignored. So desperate is this hunger that narcissists will commonly feed off the life energy of their own children, which often shows up later in those children as anxiety disorders or PTSD. Narcissism is a learned behavior, passed from parent to child: the child learns that feeding off others is how emotional survival needs get met, agrees to the pattern unconsciously, and — unless it is uprooted at the core — carries it into adulthood.

Why Narcissists Target Empaths

Narcissists and sociopaths tend to select empathetic, kind-hearted, generous, over-giving, altruistic people as their targets. As masters of deception, they often play the victim while they are in fact the abuser.

As long as the narcissist is receiving the "energetic nourishment" they want — with the empath cast as "rescuer" and the narcissist as "victim" — life proceeds relatively smoothly, though in a deeply imbalanced way, with the target slowly drained over time. Eventually the target realizes the dynamic is unsustainable, simply too draining, and attempts to set a boundary.

Almost immediately, the narcissist reacts — often with aggression and fury — to the threat of losing their supply. Having studied their target closely from the beginning, they know exactly where the pre-existing wounds and sore spots are. And that is precisely where they strike.

The Strike: Gaslighting and Psychic Attack

When the narcissist strikes, they aim for a family-of-origin wound, then gaslight the target into believing that because of that old wound, it is the target — not the narcissist — who is somehow deeply flawed, and therefore at fault. The aim is specific: to force the trapped emotional energy from that wound up to the surface, where it becomes available for consumption.

Once that energy surfaces as tears or anger or both, it is a feast — and confirmation to the narcissist that they are an "important person." Remember: to the narcissist, negative attention beats no attention, just as, to someone starving, bad-tasting food beats no food at all.

Soul Stealing: The Intentional Taking of Life Force

After the initial strike, a hole is opened in the target's energy field. At that opening, the narcissist's psychic tentacles attach and insert their suckers, pulling energy from the target. Once those tentacles are deeply implanted in the target's wounds, the ongoing gaslighting and defamation serve two purposes at once: they create fresh hurt (releasing more emotional energy to feed on), and they disorient and un-ground the target so they remain unaware of the trauma unfolding.

In shamanic terms, this dynamic is called Soul Stealing, and the narcissist is a Soul Thief. It is different from the Soul Loss that occurs as an unintended byproduct of ordinary trauma. Soul Stealing is the intentional taking of another person's life-force energy. Recognizing it for what it is — not a personal failing on your part, but a deliberate energetic theft — is itself the first step toward freedom.

The Path to Healing

Once a narcissist has hooked into a target this deeply, it takes real effort to remove their tentacles. The first step on the road to freedom is to understand the dynamic described above. The second is to change the dynamic itself — to remove the feeder tentacles, reclaim your spiritual sovereignty, and quarantine the narcissist so they cannot re-infect you with their emotional poison.

Shamanic Healing Techniques for Trauma and Narcissistic Abuse Recovery

In a shamanic healing session, several techniques work together to support recovery:

1. Extraction. Cut all unhealthy cords with the narcissist cleanly and completely, remove the intrusions and tentacles, and stop engaging in the behaviors that let them re-attach.

2. Uncover and uproot the old agreement. On some level, often unconsciously, we agreed to allow the attachment — we gave a kind of permission to be treated this way. This is not blame; it is where our power lives, the part of the dynamic we can actually change. These agreements were usually formed in childhood, where we had little choice and gave away soul parts or made unhealthy bargains simply to keep the peace or survive an emotionally toxic environment. Over time they sink beneath awareness and quietly run the show — leaving the opening through which a narcissist could attach. Healing means finding that agreement and the moment it was made. This step is the heart of my work — a method I call Commanding Your Dreaming

3. Soul Retrieval. We recover the soul parts lost at the time the old agreement was formed, along with the parts being held by the narcissist — and often others, related to the same agreement, that are ready to return from how the pattern has echoed through other relationships.

4. Install a new agreement. We ask to receive a new agreement to replace the one that made us vulnerable. For example, an old agreement of "I trade my sovereignty for security and companionship" might be replaced by "I keep my light and my truth, and I trust that all my needs will be met as I walk in right relationship." Often the new agreement can only be installed once the soul parts have come home.

5. Power Animal Retrieval and sealing in the healing. Sealing the healing is essential — it's what makes the change enduring rather than temporary. Sometimes a power animal returns as well, adding a layer of protection for the newly recovered soul parts and the new agreement. What's needed is revealed in the journey work itself.

One Session — and the Deeper Work of Self-Healing

Narcissistic abuse can be profoundly damaging. There are usually multiple agreements and a great deal of soul loss gathered across many events. Recovery means both healing the trauma already experienced and rewriting the underlying pattern — to the point where you can hold clear boundaries and keep your life free of narcissists, sociopaths, and other deeply draining people, especially in close relationships.

A single shamanic healing session can be profound, and can give you the ground to take real action in ordinary life — setting and holding new boundaries, even in the face of the backlash that comes when someone loses their energy supply. For many people, that is exactly what they came for.

But where allowing narcissistic people into your life has become a long-standing pattern, the most lasting freedom comes from learning to do this work yourself. That is the methodology I teach in my courses: in Level 1 you learn the foundations of journeying and first meet your own agreements, and in the levels that follow you learn to rewrite them in full — to find a limiting agreement, journey to it, and change it yourself, for the rest of your life.

True healing means freeing yourself from an intricate, tightly spun web of deception — and self-deception — often aimed at your most vulnerable wounds. It is absolutely possible, and I would be honored to help you walk it.

— Scott Silverston