Dealing with toxic people such as narcissistic personalities is extremely difficult. They find the individuality, independence and identity of other people extremely threatening and may relentlessly attack these things in an effort to eliminate the threat. Because of this, people can start to lose their sense of who they really are. It's time to start rediscovering that.

In this exercise, we are going to work on defining ourselves for ourselves. It's important to understand that your definition of yourself is really the only one that matters. It affects our entire personality: all of our thoughts, feelings and actions. So many of the things we believe about ourselves, other people and the world around us are not actually our beliefs. They are the opinions of other people that we have internalized. It's time to start defining you for yourself.

Remember that this exercise is about seeing how you define yourself, not what other people believe or have said, and not what's “right” or “wrong.” If you can't come up with 5 traits or words right now, that's OK. Just do as many as you can. You can always work on this again later.

As you are coming up with your answers, think about why these things are important to you, where they may have come from and how they came to be. We are not only exploring who we are but why we are who we are.

**Traits can be thought of as things you have, and words can be thought of as things you are. But don’t stress too much over “doing it right;” the most important thing is to come up with 10 things that you feel define you.