How long does it take to achieve emotional healing after narcissistic abuse?
Perhaps you’ve been sitting around, asking yourself the following questions…
“Why does it take so long to heal from this heartache?”, “Why can’t I stop thinking about the person who treated me like crap?”, “Why do I still love them after what they did to me?”, “Will this pain ever go away?”
Obsessing over an emotionally abusive relationship is draining, and often so detrimental that many lose their jobs, homes, and even custody of their children. In severe cases, suicide is attempted and sometimes successfully carried out.
There are many elements involved in healing from narcissistic abuse. Just as with any loss, there will be periods of grieving, denial, anger, and depression. However, unlike a typical break-up where you would eventually get to a point of acceptance, many victims of narcissistic abuse stay fixated and obsess about their abuser, often suffering as long as ten years or more post-breakup.
Why does this happen and what can you do in your journey of emotional healing after narcissistic abuse?
Following are the top six tips for emotional healing after narcissistic abuse…
1 – Learn grounding techniques and self-soothing methods
The secret sauce that you won’t find in many articles regarding healing is the importance of learning to ground yourself – a.k.a. self-soothing. Whether you do this is a good indicator of whether or not you will truly begin to heal.
Narcissistic abuse is an emotional trauma. It targets your primal abandonment wound. When you feel betrayed, rejected, and abandoned by the narcissist, your amygdala hijacks your rational thinking and sends you into fight-or-flight mode. You have a thought (I’ve been rejected because I’m not good enough), you experience an emotion from that thought (panic, sadness, depression), and then you run with it like a Running Back on crack with blinders on.
Yeah…you’ll want to stop doing that.
There’s not a lot you can do to prevent this from happening completely, but practicing self-soothing methods and grounding techniques will help damper this emotional hijack if repeated consistently. The best techniques are the same ones used to help with PTSD triggers and emotional trauma.
Learning to self-soothe is the critical first step because otherwise, any activities you engage in to heal and move forward will be drained away by the emotional hijacking caused by your amygdala.
2 – Allow yourself to grieve and be angry
Many victims of narcissistic abuse have a false perception that since the narcissist was a fraud and the relationship was one-sided, that they shouldn’t allow themselves to grieve or vent their anger. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not allowing yourself to process these feelings often leads to detrimental outcomes at a later point in time, such as getting stuck in emotional, or spiritual levels of bereavement. This typically manifests in symptoms such as:
- Staying stuck in a sad, angry, or depressive state, or often feeling emotionless
- Signs of suppressed anger
- Prolonged exhaustion, depression, or indifference
- One or more addictions
- Repeated avoidances
- Some type of chronic pain or illness
- Obesity and/or eating disorders
3 – Seek professional help if you believe you may suffer from any form of psychological neuroses, such as complicated grief
Complicated grief is a severe and long-lasting form of grief that takes over one’s life. This is very common in the aftermath of abusive relationships because victims never get the validation they wished for, nor do they get a sense of closure.
Following the end of an abusive relationship, a lot of business is left unfinished, including unsettled disputes, the discrediting of your character, questions unanswered, and unrequited love. You’re left hanging, unable to complete your relationship with your abuser and feeling stuck in the pain of your grief.
What makes this type of grief so excruciating is that you must grieve twice – once for the person who love-bombed you and for whom you fought to bring back amidst soul-shattering abuse, and you also grieve the end of the relationship.
If you believe you might be suffering from complicated grief, please seek the services of a licensed therapist who specializes in emotional abuse/trauma. It may be necessary to go on medication, but inquire about non-addictive ones that you can use on your most difficult days.
(Please note – complicated grief used to be attributed strictly to bereavement, but medical professionals now agree that it can apply to any type of traumatic loss).
4 – Make sure you’ve implemented No Contact in its true form
Many victims of narcissistic abuse prolong their suffering by leaving a window open in the event the narcissist decides to reach out. Across the forums and chat rooms, countless victims describe how they’ve been “No Contact” for such-and-such amount of time, but then receive a call or email from their ex. If the narcissist has a way in, then No Contact hasn’t been properly executed. This is the primary cause of not being able to heal because as long as your abuser has a way in, true healing cannot take place.
Once the narcissist successfully reaches out and provokes a response, you’re back in the thick of the abuse. (If children are involved, a very strict plan for modified contact should be legally documented, entered, and enforced).
Remember, narcissists are smug in their belief that you will surrender to their manipulations. Not going No Contact only strengthens their feelings of entitlement and perceived power and reduces your chances of emotional healing after narcissistic abuse.
If you need help and encouragement with emotional healing after narcissistic abuse, The Break Free Program can help.
5 – Stop researching Narcissism 24/7
During the phase of discovery, educating yourself about narcissism is essential in understanding the traits of the disorder and helps you recognize the dynamics of abusive relationships. However, when it’s time to truly heal, your focus should then turn to healing methods, self-care, and narcissistic abuse recovery.
Constant research on the traits of narcissism keeps your focus on them, not on you or your recovery. Remember the old saying, “What fires together, wires together”? Each time you repeat a particular thought or action, you reinforce the connection between your neurons, turning those thoughts into a way of life, and thus influencing your day-to-day reality. Implementing self-care patterns that are positive and healthy may be difficult at first, but with practice, they too will become habitual and will help you recover faster.
6 – Work on your self-esteem
The number one, most important thing to realize is that the perceived rejection from your abuser is an illusion. Their primary goal is to make you feel invalidated, invisible. What that means is that even if they secretly think you’re attractive, successful, fun to be around, or the best partner they’ve ever had, they will NEVER admit to it, unless they are trying to keep you in the queue.
Narcissists strive to take away every last shred of your self-esteem because that’s how they keep you hooked…to keep you thinking, “I am damaged goods. Better to have someone who treats me like crap than no one at all”.
Remember, most of what comes out of their mouth is a lie, including the negative things they say about you.
3 Habits to Avoid During Emotional Healing from Narcissistic Abuse
While healing is different for everyone, there are particular things we do that hinder healing, and can even reverse any progress we may have made. Ironically, these are activities that every person coming out of a toxic relationship does, and further, ones which we are innately wired to do!
Having gone through these experiences myself, I do not come from a place of judgment, but rather, I hope to save you time (and more heartbreak). Below, I share the top three behaviors that hinder emotional healing from narcissistic abuse and often keep survivors from ultimately making it over the threshold to the peace that awaits on the other side.
1. Reading an inordinate amount of material relating to narcissism.
When you first began researching reasons why the narcissist behaves the way they do, the discovery that they may be narcissistic probably felt validating. It helped bring clarity to their behaviors, as well as your reactions to those behaviors.
However, there comes a point where further reading on the topic of narcissism becomes moot and even destructive. Moot because having a Ph.D. in narcissism won’t change the outcome of the relationship. Destructive because it keeps your focus on the narcissist, the abuse, the trauma, and, more importantly, it keeps you from focusing on healing your own wounds.
I’ve worked with coaching clients who have been out of the relationship for years and still read about narcissism for hours a day. I can say with confidence that this is a substantial reason why they haven’t moved on.
A healing alternative: True healing begins with looking inside to your own inner, wounded core. Nothing outside of you will help you heal because your emotional injuries are within. Instead of researching how the narcissist became a narcissist, the type of narcissist they might be, and where they lie on the narcissistic continuum, turn your focus onto healing your damaged self-image and healing the toxic shame that the narcissist cultivated inside you in order to keep you dependent upon them.
What fires together, wires together. Meaning, whatever you feed your mind on a daily basis is what determines your baseline thought patterns. Limit your consumption of material on narcissism to about 90/10 (90% healing, 10% narcissism).
“A person in pain is being spoken to by that part of himself that knows only how to communicate this way.”
~ Malidoma Patrice Some
2. Believing that time heals all wounds.
Aside from my own discovery that time alone most certainly does not heal all wounds, there are thousands of examples all over the internet that disprove this myth. If time healed wounds, there wouldn’t be people who are still suffering five and ten years after their relationship ended (sometimes longer!)
Time doesn’t heal, it simply passes. Emotional healing after narcissistic abuse has everything to do with what you do with that time.
The key to recovery is action, not time.
The subconscious mind is impersonal. It will work to achieve whatever goals you set before it, whether good or bad. Present it with goals of healing and recovery, and it will work to help you achieve those goals. The same goes for presenting it with goals for figuring out the narcissist. It may aid you in gaining knowledge about the narcissist’s condition, but that only leads you back to the inevitable outcome, which ultimately leaves you with nothing to show for all the hours invested in such an undertaking.
A healing alternative: If you’ve just discovered you are dealing with a narcissist, it’s only natural to want to analyze their motives, actions, and behaviors. That’s what our brains are designed to do. However, to expand on topic #1, when you get to the point where you are consistently reading information that you already know, that’s a good point at which to end your research on narcissism and turn your focus onto your healing.
When you do begin your healing work, keep in mind that in order for your subconscious mind to heal, it must experience healing events. Specifically, you may find some very good videos, books, or other written material on the subject of healing, but acquiring information through reading is passive. In other words, you must actively engage in the suggested healing activities in order for new neural patterns to form in your brain…a good rule of thumb is to choose a healing habit and practice it every day for at least 21 days.
It won’t do much good, for instance, if you only read books without putting into action what you have read. For example, studies have shown the powerful effect that writing has on the recovery process. It helps to form new neural pathways, whereas when you read or watch videos, your brain actually filters out most of what you consume! This is why there are various writing activities inside my therapist-approved program for narcissistic abuse recovery.
“People are healed by different kinds of healers and systems because the real healer is within.”
~ George Goodheart
3. Piece-mealing information together from hundreds of different websites and forums.
I learned the hard way that more information is not always better. There is an inherent risk involved in taking to heart everything one reads on the internet, especially when it involves healing from narcissistic abuse.
It’s tempting to get into the habit of collecting information from numerous sites, but then you run the risk of becoming so overwhelmed with the gargantuan mountain of data that you simply freeze, unable to form an actionable plan.
Healing alternatives: Try to stick to a handful of authors whom you have grown to trust. Stop simply collecting information and, instead, begin the programs that are suggested or created by the authors whom you admire the most.
It’s also prudent to stay away from sites that only bathe in trauma, going on and on about narcissists and their dirty, evil deeds and post photos that traumatize the subconscious mind. Instead, follow ones that offer perspectives from the target’s point of view, as well as ones that suggest different healing modalities.
Please know this about healing from narcissistic abuse…
It’s never too late to reclaim your life – to find yourself on the path towards your soul’s true healings and cravings.
You have it in your power to survive tough times – and come out stronger, better, wiser.
I know this personally. It can be your story, too.
If you’re ready to break free and get started on the stages of healing after narcissistic abuse NOW, there’s only ONE way to do it: Let me show you how to forget the narcissist and move on.
