I think it all comes down to removing every influence on your sense of self that simply is not you. You don't make yourself into yourself, you just get rid of all the backseat drivers, bullies, malcontents and parasites that have found their way into your thoughts. 90% of my recovery is going to be down to getting out from under these outside voices and accepting that I am more than enough as I am, was, and will be. It's an odd truth, well it is certainly so in my case, that the loudest voices undermining me were also the most flawed. In the final reckoning, I am looking back on some very broken people who needed to extend their influence to feel that they mattered at all. That is the definition of a narcissist, an angry nobody who is terrified of the world and needs a trapped audience for their desperate ranting. They chose us. Taking apart the insecurities and working out who the voices belonged to has been epic for me. So much of what I thought was flawed about me were often strengths and those that were flaws are just that, flaws, like we all have, to err is human. We are no less or more than anyone else but for a narcicist, only diminishing others will make them bigger, "for me to win someone else must lose."
The sheer normality of us is the cure really, there is nothing wrong with us, and never was. The injury we carry belongs to others and to escape it, we have to snip, snip, snip at the spider's web until we are no longer connected.
