Reading with Heavy Heart

This is indeed a valuable book, which I have not yet finished. I know I'll repeatedly return to it in this very difficult time in my life. Divorced after eight years, with two beautiful children, I hope to derive some healing and strength from it.^M

Life-changing

This book changed my life. If you have a relationship with someone and they are like Jekyll and Hyde, you're confused, you are depressed--Buy this book. You will understand more after you read it. It has helped me to end 10 yrs. of pain, being told that it was all my fault when I knew I was emotionally sucker-punched on an almost daily basis-just didn't know why. This is the first time that I really believe it has nothing to do with me. He is sick. I have tried everything I knew to do to make things better-it never worked. Now I know it can't.^M

An excellent, truly helpful book

I'm not a big fan of the self-help genre in general, but The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists really struck home. I recently broke up with a narcissist for whom I was the codependent, and at a number of points in the book I just had to put it down for a moment and have a "Wow" moment. Not only Payson's descriptions of narcissistic traits (which made me a little uncomfortable, since I recognized some of my own behavior in them) but also her descriptions of the dynamics between narcissists and codependents have the ring of authentic experience; that's really what it's like being with an NPD sufferer. She also made me wonder: was this last one just the tip of the iceberg? Were there more before? Will there be more afterward? Some of this stuff gets pretty scary, but I really couldn't put the book down.^M