Why You’re Not Ready to Admit You Were Abused by a Narcissist
Going through a painful breakup and trying to make sense of it all is not for the faint of heart. It’s even more devastating when your partner has a variation of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). They have likely not given you any closure about why the relationship ended, they may have blindsided you by either withdrawing attention and affection for no reason, or by completely cutting you off the day after telling you they love you.
The natural thing to do if you find yourself in the situation is to hit Google and start searching for terms related to what has happened and what they did to you. You’ll probably come across a lot of material on attachment theory and presume your ex is some type of avoidant. However, you may also come up with some results indicating they might be narcissist. This term gets thrown around a lot these days, but there are significant implications if your partner truly meets the diagnostic criteria and is more than just an emotionally unavailable jerk (you can read my article HERE to see if your partner might fit the bill for NPD). But you brush it off because the thought you might have been involved and fallen in love with a narcissist is just too painful to bear.
The problem with this is, if you don’t properly identify the disease, you can’t start to treat it and hopefully cure it. Recognizing that you were a victim of narcissistic abuse is a type of trauma no one should have to go through. However, becoming self-aware and realizing what you’ve gone through is the first step to healing and eventually becoming emotionally healthy. Here are some things to think about if you’re hesitant to consider that you were abused by a narcissist.
You can’t believe people like this exist
Humans are hardwired to care about others and form relationships. Loving people and wanting to spend time with them is instinctual, both for comfort and survival as a species. However, people with NPD are wired very differently. The disorder hasn’t been studied very extensively, and there is some disagreement about what causes some people to develop NPD. It appears to be a combination of severe childhood trauma and a hereditary component. Their brain matter is structured differently, and their scans show up differently on MRIs. But you can read all the science you want and still have trouble believing there are people who truly don’t care about anyone, are completely incapable of love, and don’t feel any guilt or remorse when they hurt someone else. It might be easier to understand when you look at people like Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer. But this is someone you were in a relationship with, and you saw what you thought were many good sides of them. Because you project your goodness, kindness, empathy, and love, you expect others to have the same emotions and neurological wiring that you do. Sadly, that’s not the case when it comes to narcissists.
The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming
At the beginning of a relationship with a narcissist, they make you feel like the most amazing and loved person in the world. The love bombing phase is intoxicating, and you feel like you’ve truly met your soulmate. They praise you, adore you, give you all the attention and affection you’ve been lacking and desperately wanted and needed. You feel respected, championed, supported. You see them as confident, loving, charming, intelligent, funny, generous, and kind. But by the end, you have no idea where this person has gone. You spend months or years sacrificing everything to try to get back to that person you fell in love with. Even when your head finally accepts that this person never existed, that it was all a lie, a mask, a persona designed to hook you, your heart still can’t reconcile the person you thought you loved with the person they really are. Cognitive dissonances the inability to believe that two opposing things are happening at the same time. It is the inability to accept that the monster you see now is the same person as the Prince Charming you met at the beginning that keeps you stuck in the cycle of abuse, and prevents you from leaving and going no contact.
You don’t want to feel shame and guilt for staying
When you emerge from a narcissistically abusive relationship, it’s so easy to blame yourself. You ruminate over all the details, remembering so many instances where you ask yourself, Could I have done or said something differently to achieve a better outcome? You start seeing so many of the red flags and problematic behaviors you overlooked, and feel ashamed that you ignored them or explained them away and stayed. Admitting you stayed with an abusive narcissist means you have to now look within to find out what it was about you that led you to accept their abuse. You look back and remember all the times you lacked boundaries or did things you normally would never do just to hang onto the narcissist. You want to believe they loved you and appreciated you for all these things you did for them, all the sacrifices you made. Realizing you did these things out of a trauma bond rather than healthy love can be devastating to your self-esteem.
You have to acknowledge they never cared about you
People with narcissistic personality disorder are physiologically and emotionally incapable of feeling true empathy. They are literally missing the section of gray matter in their brain that is responsible for empathy. As such, they are utterly incapable of truly caring for anyone or anything outside of themselves. They are also emotionally stunted at the age of a toddler. And just like a small child, they are more focused on what their caregivers can do for them, like feeding them, giving them toys, giving them comfort, making them feel safe, as opposed to loving them for who they truly are as people. Accepting this means acknowledging that they didn’t mean it when they told you they loved you over and over again, everything they said or did was to manipulate you into giving them what they wanted, and they never cared about you at all. All of the intimate eye contact, the adoring gazes, the loving caresses, the cuddling and intimacy, all of it was a performance that meant nothing to the narcissist. Hearing, understanding, and believing this is crushing even to the strongest of people.
You don’t want to dig up your past trauma
It takes a lot of time, outside help from a therapist, and a lot more pain to truly process and recover from narcissistic abuse. It digs up a lot of past trauma from childhood that many people are not ready to face. It’s easy to blame toxic partners and say that the relationship failed because of only their actions. The truth is, you would never find yourself in narcissistic or toxic relationships for so long if you had healthy emotional boundaries and coping mechanisms. It’s incredibly hard to admit that we have our own negative relationship patterns, that we have reasons why we’re attracted to narcissists and stay after the first signs of abuse. It’s even harder to get into therapy and commit to it consistently for what could be years of healing and recovery. Part of that recovery often includes letting go of friends or family members who you start to realize are also toxic and/or abusive. It can be a very isolating experience to heal and become emotionally healthy for the first time in your life, so it’s easier to just take a little time and move onto the next relationship with what will likely be similar results.
You’re not ready to let them go and go no contact
Any psychologist, counselor, or narcissistic abuse expert will tell you hands-down that the only way to truly start the healing process after narcissistic abuse is to go completely no contact with your abuser. However, you really don’t want to do that, and you know you have to if you admit they’re a narcissist. This means blocking them on all social media, blocking them on your phone and email, avoiding seeing them in person, not allowing them any access whatsoever to your life. This is easier said than done. You are trauma bonded to your abuser, meaning that you are chemically addicted to the highs of dopamine and lows of cortisol that are part of being in a relationship with them. After the breakup, you're more obsessed with them than ever, and are compulsively checking their social media accounts to see what they’re doing and who they’re doing it with. You also want them to see you living your best life, hoping they’ll feel jealousy or remorse or regret. Even after everything they did to you, you’re still hoping that they have feelings for you, miss you, or will want to return. Going no contact would be a slap in the face, and you feel guilty about possibly hurting them — or worse, hurting your chances of reconciling with them. Spoiler alert, staying in contact with them only leaves the door open for them to emotionally abuse and manipulate you even further, and seeing them on your feed will continue to pick at that scab as long as you allow it to happen.
It means giving up all hope
After a breakup, many of us fantasize that our partners will come back to us, brimming with apologies and promises to change. We hope that they still love us and miss us, want to be with us again and make things right. We need to believe that they cared at least a little bit about us. Most narcissists do come back after they discard you, but it’s not for the reasons you might think. They become the person you fell in love with at the beginning in an attempt to get you back under control. Going back to them after the discard will almost guarantee they will treat you worse during each subsequent cycle of idealization, devaluation, and discard. Admitting you were dealing with a narcissist all along means giving up all hope that things will get better, that you’ll get back together and live happily ever after. It means that you absolutely have to walk away because you finally know things are truly over forever, and you have no choice but to start the painful process of letting go and moving on. Getting to this point can be so devastating, but it’s absolutely necessary.
What to do next
The most important thing you can do if you suspect you’ve been abused by narcissist is to become educated on NPD. There are a few different types of narcissism, but the two most common are overt/grandiose and covert. Their pathology is the same but they present very differently, and it’s important to understand what kind you’re dealing with so you know how to manage them after the breakup. Go on TikTok and YouTube and Facebook and do searches for narcissism so you can better understand their behavior during the relationship, the abuse cycle, and post breakup. Read as many articles and books as you can on narcissism and how to break free from the trauma bond, a process that has been said is more difficult than weaning off of heroin.
Surround yourself with a strong support group who believes you when you talk about your experience. Healing from narcissistic abuse is incredibly isolating because it’s almost impossible to believe or understand unless you’ve been through it. Share videos or articles with them to help explain what you’ve been through.
Find a good therapist who is well-versed on narcissistic abuse, as it will be almost impossible for you to heal from this on your own. Start a journal where you can write out everything that you’re thinking and feeling so you can go back and see how much progress you’ve made.
Focus completely on yourself, and wipe your life clean of anything and everything that reminds you of the narcissist. This may be the most painful step of all, and will take you the longest time to be ready for. It means deleting all their photos, their text messages, and possibly upending your social life by avoiding places where you might run into them or be reminded of them. As you learn more about NPD and accept that you were abused by narcissist, you’ll understand that this is crucial to keep them from maneuvering their way back into your life to abuse you even more.
