Healing after narcissistic abuse.
When you’ve been in an abusive relationship with a narcissistic person, you lose so much of yourself, including your identity.
Self-identity is just a normal human day to day adventure that you slowly grow, learning about your likes and dislikes, building on your hopes and dreams. Learning things from different activities and experiences.
This shapes who you are, how you express yourself, and what your beliefs and boundaries are.
When you’ve been in any kind of a relationship with a narcissist, they slowly take you apart little by little, so they become your life, they become your self-identity, and they take all your identity.
You might have been left with anger and resentment, and you are not alone in this.
Regaining your self-identity is a step by step process, but you will come out stronger, happier and more assertive than you were before.
Understanding about narcissism can help you with all those answers as to why? At the same time, work on your own journey of rediscovery.
The narcissist doesn’t actually have a self-identity. They change themselves to who the person that they are trying to manipulate by mirroring them. If you’ve spent a lot of time around a narcissist when the narcissist is around other people, you’ll have noticed the different stories they tell other people. This is because the narcissist doesn’t know who they indeed are. They just get short term gratification from people, then when their needs are no longer being met, they move onto another, changing who they are to exploit the new person.
Peoples attention, energy and emotions, are the narcissist highs, although a lot of them have an addiction to substance abuse also.
A narcissist gets their identity from manipulating people.
Narcissists subtly chip away at your mind, heart, intuition and soul over time, as they circle between treating you so well, then so horrible, it’s a confusing place to be.
You believe they are just unhappy, misunderstood people, who just need your love and your support, you don’t understand or know what they indeed are, that they can not care for others in the way those who empathise with others can. The covert narcissist will play the victim of their terrible past. The overt will just charm you in. Both will lead you to believe you’re the one causing problems within the relationship, so you keep changing yourself to suit them, all the time losing another piece of your own self-identity. They will continuously chip away at you and how you’re not good enough.
Once you are out and realise what they are and everything they do, you still might question yourself about why you didn’t see it happening? Why didn’t you stop it? And why you allowed them to do this to you? Leaving you with anger and resentment. You are not alone in this. Without knowing what a narcissist is in the first place, you’ll not know what’s happening while it’s happening.
You may also now be isolated from your friends and family. Trying to process everything that’s happened and having no one around for support. Then if you do have some friends or family left for help, they don’t understand the depth of what you have been through.
You may also be left in financial difficulties, having no home and no income coming in.
The narcissist will try and steal everything from you.
Narcissists put you into a trance. Leaving you with learned helplessness. Reliant upon the narcissist for everything and the narcissist having full control over you. You become completely dependent on them and lose all your self-identity.
You might be left, depressed with anxiety or CPTSD.
All relationships require that give and take. With a narcissist, you give it your all, while they slowly take everything from you.
Most people don’t have a strong self-identity to begin with, making it easier for the narcissist to destroy you.
To heal from identity loss, you need to.
1. Learn your beliefs and values. Set boundaries and stick to them.
2. Ban, block and cut toxic people from your life. If you have children, grey rock.
3. No contact and no response is far from easy at. First, you may slip from time to time. That’s ok just start again, it gets easier, and you will get to the point you no longer want to communicate with them anyway.
4. Surround yourself with supportive people.
5. Surround yourself with as many positive people as you can.
6. Go and talk to friends and family, that you were cut off from, sometimes this means swallowing your pride, most will be supportive as they will have known something was off with your ex.
7. Start to join new activities where you’ll meet new people.
8. Start doing some of the things the narcissist always said you couldn’t, or didn’t let you do.
10. Take it at your own pace, you might find it hard talking to others at first, join support groups, with those who’ve been there and understand, what you been through, you’ll have lots of similar story’s.
11. Working on exactly how you talk to yourself, consciously pulling yourself up when talking negatively to yourself and, look at how you can treat yourself better, Abuse becomes a pattern and long after we’ve left our subconscious can talk to ourselves in the wrong way.
Boundaries.
No contact.
Click on the links below to join, Elizabeth Shaw – Life Coach on social media, for more information on Overcoming Narcissistic Abuse.
The online courses are available by Elizabeth Shaw.
For the full course.
For the free course.
Click here to sign up for the free online starter course.
To help with overcoming the trauma bond and anxiety course.
Click here for the online course to help you break the trauma bond, and those anxiety triggers.
All about the narcissist Online course.
Click here to learn more about the narcissist personality disorder.
The narcissists counter-parenting.
Elizabeth Shaw is not a Doctor or a therapist. She is a mother of five, a blogger, a survivor of narcissistic abuse, and a life coach, She always recommends you get the support you feel comfortable and happy with. Finding the right support for you. Elizabeth has partnered with BetterHelp (Sponsored.) where you will be matched with a licensed councillor, who specialises in recovery from this kind of abuse.
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You can, and you will heal from identity loss.
Detaching your thoughts.
Overcoming Anger and Resentment.
Overcoming anxiety.
Rebuild your self-esteem.
