Dark Contracts: Breaking the Nex of Narcissistic and Psychopathic Control is a clinically informed and psychologically incisive guide for those impacted by individuals with Dark Triad traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. For those currently enmeshed, recently disengaged, navigating the aftermath, or working in therapeutic settings, this book offers a penetrating look at the unconscious contracts that bind victims to disordered personalities. It explores how trauma, attachment, and emotional manipulation form a "Nex". A covert system of control that distorts reality and erodes the self. Written by Deirdre Rolfe, a trauma specialist and psychotherapist with 30 years of clinical experience and a focused expertise in personality disorders, this book brings together theory, lived insight, and practical tools to help readers reclaim autonomy, restore clarity, and sever ties that were never truly consensual.
Some bonds aren't relationships. They're psychological contracts, unspoken, coercive, and invisible to the outside world. Dark Contracts is Part One of a complete therapeutic system designed to illuminate, deconstruct, and ultimately heal the invisible damage caused by narcissistic, psychopathic, and coercively controlling personalities .
This book introduces the concept of the Nex as a parasitic psychological tether formed through gaslighting, trauma bonding, emotional deprivation, and the systematic dismantling of a survivor's truth. These contracts are not chosen; they are conditioned, and this book shows you how and is the map toward navigating your way out.
Blending clinical frameworks, attachment science, psycholinguistics, and trauma-informed neurobiology, Dark Contracts provides a foundation of understanding for survivors and clinicians alike. It decodes the behaviors of Dark Triad personalities, explains the mechanisms of psychological entrapment, and offers a path back to sovereignty through truth, language, and embodied awareness.
This book is the education and foundation of a larger healing model:
Part Two, The TR6 Model (forthcoming), maps the progressive emotional shadows and survival states trauma survivors often get stuck in such as rumination, re-injury, and rage and offers a structured therapeutic framework to dig deeper for valuable shadow work in order to process and climb out of them.
Part Three, TraumaCode, is a 96-card healing deck with guidebook and online training program designed for both personal use and practitioner integration. It offers a daily reflective and ritual-based practice that deepens healing through metaphor, symbolism, rituals, somatic awareness, narrative repair and evidence-based practices.
Together, these three works form a complete therapeutic system for survivors ready to heal, for professionals ready to support them, and for anyone seeking to name, unbind, and transform their trauma into power for a life of meaning, purpose, on your terms.