If you are reading this, it is likely that you have just completed a divorce with a narcissistic partner. You may have even suffered custody loss or loss of your marital home, finances, and belongings. The narcissist often takes a lot of things with him when he goes. But, alas, he leaves you with your freedom. Freedom to do whatever you darn well please with your time without catering to the likes of him; congratulations!

But what should you do with your free time? There are many things that you can do! We will cover the tentative post-divorce bucket list of things you’re now free to do in lucky book #13 (insert sarcasm here). It is no doubt that you have been isolated so long that you lost all your socialization skills (if you had learned any from your parents to begin with - maybe you were always slightly shy - nonetheless). You’re in luck.

We will teach you in this book how to make friends post-divorce. Hopefully, we will do it in 20 minutes (and then you’ll have time to do all the things on your new bucket list with those new friends!).

In this Divorce Court series, our other books will help you learn how to handle the personalities that you will come across, how to become more likable to the other people in the courtroom, how to soothe the stress you are under during and post-divorce, what relationship complex PTSD looks like, what feelings and emotions you experience when going through the court process, how to cope with losses, and learn the strategies that the narcissist is going to use against you that you must be ready for.

Listen to this book, then listen to the other books in the series for a full spectrum strategy in dealing with the narcissist in and out of court. This book refers to the narcissist as a "he", but the narcissist in the relationship and divorce proceedings can also be a "she". The pronouns are interchangeable for the purposes of this book.

Recognize the purpose of small talk

Many shy people don’t realize this, but small talk has a purpose. The purpose of small talk, also referred to scientifically as phallic communication, is to groom one another and to bond. When you go on a date (especially with a narcissistic person or an extroverted person), you will notice they talk on and on about a whole lot of nothing. The weather, what they had for lunch, the dog they used to have, what their parents do for work. They gossip about their coworkers or their family members. Or, they talk about popular culture (probably quoting the last movie they saw several times and laughing to themselves about a particular scene.)