Category: Narcissist Abuse Recovery

It’s been nearly one year since I went no-contact with my ex-boyfriend. After narcissistic abuse, nothing feels normal for a long time. I remember the end and what precipitated it and I remember the gravity of knowing in those last moments we were speaking to one another that it would be the end. I remember the swirling mixture of relief, fear, anger, emptiness, anxiety, and, mostly, disbelief that it was really over. Dissociation threatened to drown me. I felt as if I had thrown myself off a cliff. I don’t know the exact date I went no-contact. I could try...

Some people say survivors are narcissist abuse are codependent. In this article, I will disagree and explain why. Yet if you have benefited from the term “codependency” and feel it does a proper job explaining your situation and helping you move past the relationship with the narcissist, this article is not meant to deter you from using it or to downplay the assistance you have received. Rather, I’m speaking out for my own confusion and frustration about how the term is used, as well as for what I’ve heard from others about how it can also have negative consequences if...

Step into the funhouse. The key feature of narcissistic abuse that distinguishes it from other types of abuse is the narcissist’s intricate construction of a false reality to manipulate people in social and romantic relationships. In the funhouse, when you catch a glimpse of yourself in one of the mirrors, you will recognize yourself, and yet you will look nothing like the person you once were. You recognize the illusion for what it is, you see the distortion staring back at you, and yet it’s not your universe and no matter how many mirrors you stare into, none of them reflect...

Where are you in your relationship with a narcissist? Are you in a half-alive state in that shadowy area beyond the relationship periphery, slowly smothering in their death grip where they won’t release you and give you back your life but neither will they reel you in and breathe into you the golden spectacle, the private delusion that existed only for the two of you? Are they killing you by putting your own hands around your throat and telling you it’s for your own good? Or is it all over– and are you shivering in the aftermath, trying to understand...

One of the things that helped me the most in the aftermath of the long, strange, exhilarating, painful relationship I had with my ex-boyfriend was learning to think as he did. It’s not easy and it’s not pretty, but it has been crucial in my recovery from the relationship. At first, it made me literally physically sick and I rejected the reality of what I learned because it was too horrible to consider even when the truth of it was standing right in front of me screaming in my face and all I had to do was accept it. Then,...

Elinor Greenberg, a psychologist who specializes in Narcissistic Personality Disorder and has a strong understanding of what motivates narcissists, wrote a very good article on recovering from narcissistic abuse recently. In it, she describes an exercise that survivors of narcissistic abuse can take to start healing from it. The main premise behind the exercise is that we must stop isolating the good times and our positive view of the narcissist from the abuse that occurred. This has been my view all along, as well. We cannot merely go no-contact–that’s only half the battle of recovery; we must also stop romanticizing...

Not long ago, I went skydiving for the first time. The whole ordeal included a long, shaky ride in a tiny plane that zig-zagged 10,000 feet into the air. I had about twenty minutes to contemplate my stupidity as I watched the earth flattening out below us from the clear door shuddering next to me. But really, I felt not stupid– just accepting of the fate I had chosen for myself. My body intermittently thrummed with danger, then flooded with waves of endorphins that numbed me into solemn silence at what was about to happen. As my instructor opened the...