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Most people who experience narcissistic abuse have difficulty getting anybody to understand what they are going through. People understand physical abuse. They understand verbal abuse. They understand very controlling behavior, but they don’t understand the subtle, crazy making, type of slow destruction that results in complex post traumatic stress disorder.
It is like someone who has a physical issue and goes to one doctor after another and when the doctors don’t find anything wrong they suggest it is all in the patient’s head. There is an extreme invalidation in a situation like this, and it happens all the time.
The reason victims of narcissistic abuse are so overly sensitive, reactive, and wanting to hide away from society, is due to the complex PTSD. Abusive behavior is one thing, but the PTSD is quite another.
You can tell someone who doesn’t understand “I am suffering from PTSD as a result of a narcissistic relationship,” and most people will roll their eyes and think you are being overly dramatic.
I’ve had clients break into tears when they talked to me, because I was the first person who really understood what they were going through. They had been to doctors, psychologists, family and friends and nobody “gets it.”
First of all, the narcissist is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and can look very good to most people. They can be good looking, charming, charismatic, successful and put on a great show, but underneath the calm exterior is an ego maniac who goes through great lengths to control and dominate his closest relationships through sinister practices like gas lighting, pathological lying, undermining, downplaying and many other emotionally destructive methods.
We live in a society where appearances are everything. People put more weight on how things look on the outside then how they really feel on the inside and how they really are.
If we see a shiny sports car driving down the road we don’t think to look under the hood. A narcissist is that shiny red sportscar, with a very poor engine that runs on stolen gasoline. All people see is the tanned, good looking guy driving down the boulevard in his shiny red car. They don’t see him out at night siphoning the neighbors gas tanks so he can be out in the day impressing the neighbors.
Imagine that you are the prime target for the siphoning that is happening at night and you were very confused because each morning your gas tank was near empty, even though you filled it again last night. You might tell the other neighbors about it and they blow you of and say something invalidating, like “maybe you only remember that you filled it but you really didn’t.” Because the neighbors can’t wrap their mind around it.
Finally one day you decide to fill your tank and camp out in your car all night and sure enough, here comes Mr. wonderful in his shiny red car, pulls up next to yours, gets out the hose and begins to siphon your tank. You are now witnessing it and know what is happening.
“Oh that explains everything” you say to yourself. But when you tell your neighbors that it is Mr. Wonderful, they invalidate you even further. “He could never do anything like that! He is Mr. Wonderful. He drives a shiny red car.”
You confront Mr. Wonderful and tell him you saw him siphon your gas tank and he denies it was him. He says “Lady, you must have me mixed up with another guy in a red car.” Mr. Wonderful is so convincing that you begin to question what you saw. This dynamic begins to break down your trust in yourself and also your trust in others, who still need to see Mr. Wonderful as….well, wonderful.
Complex Post Traumatic Stress is the result of an extended period of trauma, or repeating trauma over a period of time. Where regular PTSD is the result of one specific traumatic event, complex PTSD is typical of domestic violence victims, concentration camp victims, war victims and so on. This is a serious disorder and has pretty profound effects on the victims.
Many victims of narcissistic abuse don’t realize they are being traumatized until it is too late. It is much like the story of the frog who when put in a pot of boiling water will immediately jump out, but when put in cool water and the heat is slowly turned up he will cook to death.
A narcissistic relationship begins in cool water and the heat is slowly turned up to the point where the majority of victims don’t really grasp how confusing and disturbing the behavior is. My clients describe the early warning signs as confusing, causing them to question and doubt themselves. They don’t see the behavior as necessarily abusive, but awkward, strange, disturbing, disrespectful and confusing.
It might be that the new relationship starts out like a dream come true and a few months down the road the victim begins to suspect some unusual behavior between her new partner and another woman he is in contact with. It may even be an ex wife or girlfriend. When she questions him about this unusual behavior he redirects the attention to her suspicions and jealousy. The new girlfriend says to herself “well I am feeling suspicious and jealous, so maybe he is right. I will try to be less suspicious and jealous.”
She tries to curb her own suspicions and the self doubt that keeps plaguing her and is successful at keeping her feelings at bay for a few more months. But the behavior of her boyfriend and the ex girlfriend seems to be more “in her face.” She ends up grabbing his phone in the middle of the night and goes through the text messages between her boyfriend and his ex and finds a string of flirtatious, suggestive messages ending with “I love you” or “I miss you.” She I so disturbed by this, because she gave him the benefit of the doubt and took responsibility for her feelings of suspicion and jealousy only to have her suspicions confirmed in these text messages. But now she has to tell him she looked at his phone, which is completely against her normal mode of functioning. She doesn’t see herself as the type to be suspicious and break into another persons privacy, but this was driving her crazy.
She is so upset she can’t sleep and finally wakes him up and asks him outright if he is having an affair with this woman. He immediately calls her crazy and reminds her how jealous and suspicious she is and how he just won’t tolerate this kind of behavior in her. She asks how long it has been since he talked to her and he lies, telling her several months. She calls him on his bluff and tells him she looked at his phone and they just talked yesterday and he told the ex girlfriend he missed her.
Suddenly another redirect happens and he says “I can’t believe you went into my phone. You’re crazy. I don’t have any privacy with you. You are so damn suspicious, always reading into things, when there is nothing going on. I can’t trust you anymore. I’m finished with you!”
He grabs his belongings and leaves the house in a huff and she is left feeling lost, guilty, embarrassed, deeply confused and both emotionally and physically abandoned. She figures he will cool down and she will hear from him the next day, but the next day comes and goes and she doesn’t hear from him.
She starts to feel more guilty and finally picks up the phone and apologize to him on his voice mail, because he didn’t answer the phone. She still doesn’t hear from him. She sits in the silence feeling that she has sabotaged the relationship and had she just kept her suspicions to herself and kept her mouth shut he would still be here. The self blame begins to escalate.
Then she begins to stalk him on Facebook to see what he is up to and her heart drops when she sees smiling photos of he and his ex girlfriend at a beach party. He didn’t even look back.
She catches wind that he is telling people that she is really insecure, needy and jealous and he couldn’t deal with it. She begins to believe her insecurity is the reason they broke up. Well, it wasn’t even officially a break up. He just walked out the door in a huff and never came back.
Some of you may think I am telling your story….but don’t worry. I’m not blowing your cover. I have heard similar stories so often, it is common for this type of crazy making abuse.
Most people who go through this crazy making dynamic feel powerless. They have lost their sense of power and in some way have given their power away to the narcissist. This powerlessness lends itself to the trauma as it can seem impossible to reclaim one’s sense of power and control in their own life.
Narcissists need to control your reactions and responses, and even your sense of reality. They decide what you are going to think and believe and you slowly give away your own grasp on reality. You begin living in the narcissistic reality, which is very warped. You begin to believe what the narcissists believes, including that the problems in the relationship are all your fault.
In the scenario I gave you earlier, the narcissist is maintaining an intimate relationship with his ex girlfriend and keeping it a secret from his current girlfriend. He needs to keep it a secret because if she actually knew he was still seeing his ex, she wouldn’t be interested in being with him. So he convinces her that there is nothing going on, (pathological lying,) while focusing on her insecurity, jealousy and suspicious nature as the source of the problems.
The real reason she is feeling insecure is that her boyfriend has another girlfriend and she is being gaslighted and kept in the dark about it. When she begins to “intuit and feel” that something is wrong and confront him about it, he spins the story and focus’s on her behavior instead of his own. If he can focus on everything that is wrong with her, it takes the attention off what is really happening and what he doesn’t want her to know about.
Narcissists don’t believe you have the right to the truth. Narcissists operate in the dark and therefore they need to keep you in the dark too. If you actually had the truth you could make an empowered decision, but instead there is a ton of deception. Narcissists gain a sense of power and control by deceiving others.
When we are deceived and manipulated to the point where we turn against ourselves, we are traumatizing ourselves, unknowingly. We turn against ourselves because we don’t trust ourselves and what we are intuiting and feeling. We agree with the narcissist that the problem must be our own insecurity and jealousy, rather than aligning with our intuitive, knowing part, which, by the way, is also the feminine aspect of our nature. Whether you are a man or a woman, involved with a narcissist, this is a case of the masculine qualities of intellect, squashing the feminine qualities of intuition. Because intuition is an inner knowing and there are no facts to back it up, it is easy for the logical, rational, masculine energy to invalidate your intuitive knowing.
You can feel and sense that something is wrong but can find no facts to back up what you are feeling. This is why so many people involved with narcissist start fact finding. This is what leads a woman who has never invaded anyone’s privacy in her life, suddenly pop out of bed at 3am and looks at her husband’s phone. She feels that something is wrong but doesn’t know what. She has these intuitive hits but her husband keeps denying what she is feeling. She begins to feel like she is going crazy, and he confirms this for her. This kind of dynamic lays the groundwork for complex post traumatic stress.
When the relationship finally ends, for the majority of victims of narcissistic abuse, the trauma escalates into high gear. The narcissist is no longer attached to keeping the relationship and so no longer tries to hide anything. It is like the lid coming of Pandora’s Box. Suddenly the truth, that the victim and her captor has been suppressing comes flooding forth. Suddenly she learns she was actually right about her husband. He really was having an affair and living a double life, all the while convincing her that she was the one going crazy.
This means the narcissist was fully aware of what he was doing, which means he didn’t really care about her or believe she had any rights. Now that she knows the truth, he just cuts off from her, moves in with the other woman and won’t talk about anything with her. He continues to suggest she is crazy, because by now she is so angry at him for misleading her, lying, cheating, taking years of her life and callously discarding her in the end.
She doesn’t feel she has the right to have her feelings about how he treated her either. If she has feelings about his cruel, uncaring and deceptive behavior, he uses her feelings as evidence that she is an emotional basket case.
Meanwhile he has picked up with the other woman, without skipping a beat. Life just goes on for the narcissist. He continues to go to the same job, go out with the same friends and do the same social things he has always done, only now the new woman is at his side, and he seems very happy about it, in his facebook photos.
The narcissist may tell your social group of twenty years that you have emotional problems and although he tried to work it out, it just didn’t work. He tells them you are in counseling for your little problem and he wishes you the best. The social group accepts the new woman into your place with open arms and you are quickly forgotten. If you see one of your old friends on the street, she gives you that “look” of pity that says “I know about your little problem, but I’m not going to bring it up.”
More trauma!
You try and tell your family about what is happening and because of your PTSD you are hyperfocused on the narcissist and his new woman. Your family tell you “honey, maybe you are over reacting. You have been very sensitive lately. In fact you have always been a little too sensitive. Maybe that is why he left.”
You find yourself being invalidated by your family, friends and even the family therapist you went to.
More trauma.
You may have the experience of not being believed.
Sometimes the worst trauma is after the relationship ends. Before the ending you may have been blissfully ignorant, or at the very least, in denial and numb to the truth.
Now that the truth has hit you in the face, the trauma is awakened in full force. You may be asking yourself questions like “How could he do this to me?” “How can he be so uncaring?” “Did he really never love me?” “Does he really love her?” “Why does he treat me like I don’t exist?” “Maybe he is right about me. Maybe it is all my fault. After all, I am the one who is struggling, hurting, falling apart, emotionally fragile, lost and alone, and he is the one who just kept going as if nothing ever happened. Perhaps this is proof that I am the one with the problem.
We all get caught up in who is the ONE with the problem. The answer to that question is “you both have a problem. He is a heartless, uncaring narcissist and he brought his narcissism into your relationship. You are an empathic, codependent who ignored your own wants, needs, desires and inner knowing in order to gain his love, approval and acceptance and keep your fears of abandonment at bay.
Okay, now this isn’t the case with everyone, but it is the case more often than not. An empathic codependent will take on the disowned emotions of the narcissist and believe they are hers. She takes on the projection of the narcissist and believe they are hers. The narcissist cuts off from her, dumping his disowned crap onto her and leaving her to believe it is her crap.
Our desire to make a relationship work, to stay committed and play the role of the good wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, son or daughter, causes one to try harder, when the narcissist doesn’t really try at all. The narcissist may even make it look like he is trying, but not really.
In the end you go through so much pain, heartbreak, confusion, gaslighting, frustration, anger and fear that your nervous system goes on overload. The nervous system on overload results in the PTSD symptoms like fear, panic, nervousness, anxiety, agoraphobia, isolation, obsessive thinking, insomnia, and inability to function or cope in normal situations like work and social functions.
The longing for or craving the narcissist is a symptom that is more like the Stockholm Syndrome, then love.
Most people believe that when they crave the narcissist, it is because they are so “in love” with that person and just want to be with them. But this is a trick of the mind.
The Stockholm Syndrome originated with a bank robbery hostage situation in Stockholm Sweden, where a group of men held a group of hostages. The threat of death loomed over their head for hours. Instead of despising their captures, several women fell in love with their captors and even defended them in court.
So let’s get a clear picture. From what I read, some of the hostages had explosives strapped to them and their capture held the detonator. The captors held the lives of these women in their hand and the only control these women felt they had was to bond with their captors. They had a belief that if they could bond with and get in the good graces of the man who held the detonator, they would be spared. They were trying to appeal to the humanity in these men. This need to get into the good graces and gain positive favor with the captors, equaled survival!
The one thing I probably hear more than anything else among those who crave the narcissist is “I want him to see that I’m a good person; that I’m not all those horrible things he thinks I am.”
If you have been devalued by a narcissist, it probably felt a lot like you were being destroyed, torn apart, ripped down to shreds, because this is how the narcissist devalues. It is done with such emotional intensity that those cruel words go directly to the subconscious and makes a lasting impact. You could also say that this experience activates core shame in the one being devalued. The resulting belief is “I’m not good enough for the narcissist, therefore I am unworthy.”
Suddenly you are living from this place of emotional devastation, deep shame and despair.
Although you learn through research that the narcissist is only projecting his disowned dark emotions onto you, emotionally you can’t rectify it. By the time you have learned this information, the deep subconscious impact has already been made. This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. You know on a mental level he or she is a narcissist and that person is projecting, none of it is true. But on an emotional level you feel completely worthless. On the one hand you hate his guts and on the other you would do anything to get him back.
Our cognitive dissonance drives us even more crazy. “How can I be completely devastated by someone and want to still be with him?”
This is the fallout most people experience in or after a relationship with a narcissist. The emotions are so charged up and one is so hypersensitive because of the PTSD that their whole world revolves around seeking relief from the insanity they are feeling.
One often believes that the very thing that caused the insanity can cure it so there is a draw to bring the narcissist back in, just to get a moment of relief. This drive to have contact with the narcissist can be so strong that it over-rides the reasoning part of the brain. It is like the addict in his quest for the next fix.
So, you see, most of the symptoms you are experiencing as a result of narcissistic abuse are complex PTSD symptoms. They are very complex indeed and it can take some time to unravel the mess.
Some people find relief with different methods to treat PTSD, but there are few highly effective methods out there that bring immediate relief.
In my experience, talking it out and using hypnotherapy have the greatest effect, but it takes about three months of hard work. Hard work means, working on a very deep emotional level. It is a bit like cult deprogramming. You have to continue to hear the truth over and over from different angles and directions and you have to find ways to relax your body.
You also need to do physical exercise to release some of the fight or flight anxiety in the body. Running, biking, jumping on a trampoline or any activity that revs up your heart beat will help to discharge that energy; especially if you are right in the middle of a panic attack.
Eating healthy is important too. Lots of fresh organic fruits and vegetables. You are healing trauma and dis-ease in the body. You need to give your body the proper nutrients to heal. Fresh fruits and vegetables also will help increase your energy. You have gone through an experience of energy vampirism.
Most people are energetically depleted after narcissistic abuse. You need to work to get your energy back. Feed your body well, exercise, get out in nature, and take salt water baths.
Whatever you do, don’t give up on yourself! You are worthy! You do matter! You are enough! And maybe the greatest gift that will come of all this is a much stronger belief in yourself and your worth and value in this world. Because inevitably, it is in finding your worth and value that you truly heal.
Tools to help
I put together a package of three audio hypnosis programs for you that are available as mp3 downloads so you can start listening right away. Hypnosis is one of the most powerful ways to program the subconscious mind and listening on daily basis can have excellent results. You can achieve results right away in the form of deep relaxation, which is always good for healing PTSD.
This package includes:
Self Worth Audio Program, which both relaxes you and gives you positive suggestions to rebuild your sense of self worth.
Shamanic Journeys Soul Retrieval, which guides you through the symbolic process of calling back your soul, your power and your energy from the narcissist. It can be very effective.
Psychic Cord Cutting is two separate audios that guide you through the process of cutting the psychic cords to the narcissist.
What I would suggest you do with these programs is do one in the morning upon waking up, and one in the evening before going to sleep. Self Worth would be a good bed time audio because it is passive, requiring no activity. You could alternate the Soul Retrieval and the two different Psychic Cord Cutting audios in the morning. A good way to empower yourself to start your day!
If you would like one-on-one support you can book a counseling or hypnotherapy session with me.
