My Review:

I’ve followed Dr. Ramani’s YouTube channel for awhile now and was happy to support her book.

She’s helped me see the truth about antagonistic personality types and feel empowered to set boundaries, acknowledge my guilt, and practice radical acceptance.
This book focused more on the lion than the hunter.

In recent times there’s been so much focus on the abusers and why they do what they do and less focus on the survivors and who they are.

I like how Dr. Ramani focuses mostly on moderate narcissism, avoiding mild narcissism (Histrionic) and severe narcissism (malignant).

She refers more to antagonistic people who consistently try to control, bully, and demean others. Basically, these are the emotionally abusive people in our lives.

Dr. Ramani goes into more detail about the types of narcissists we’ll normally come across in life, including the classic “grandiose narcissist”.

She acknowledges narcissism can be wrongly applied to people, sometimes even targets of abuse can be called narcissists, but she clarifies what is commonly acknowledged by psychologists as narcissistic behaviour which goes beyond mere attention seeking and posting selfies. Some might debate if posting stuff about yourself online is narcissistic when you’re doing so to promote your online brand or business. And let’s be real, genuine narcissists are more likely to be irritated by those innocently promoting their work online.

She claims that people with mild narcissism can be annoying, but not harmful while those with severe narcissism are close to the psychopathic spectrum.

In this book, we learn mostly about moderate narcissists that we would most commonly interact with.

We go deeper into why many targets of abuse feel guilty for their negative feelings towards the narcissist – the abuse many narcissists themselves have received. We often hear about their sob story and why they are the way they are.

Ramani digs deeper and shows that abuse alone doesn’t create narcissists. Many people survive abuse with their emotional empathy intact.

She also points out that humans aren’t bots who flee the moment someone shows a red flag. Our ability to empathize is what keeps us in unhealthy relationships. Anybody is vulnerable, even people who grew up in a happy and healthy family.

This is because abuse isn’t about the target, it’s done by the perpetrator. The lion did nothing wrong to attract the abuse, the hunter only knows how to hunt for prey and they use various tactics to go in for the kill.

There’s many great chapters in this book that go deeper into the process of love bombing and how to set boundaries with the antagonistic people in our lives.

(A snapshot from a part of Dr. Ramani’s book)

Finally, the book focuses on healing and shows the real possibility of survivors finding their true voice and moving on to the live the life they’re meant to.

Wonderful book!