It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People

by Ramani Durvasula

the promise is never kept, and you can’t get that year back.

If you grant a “second chance,” the cycle invariably restarts.

Or you feel a loyalty to people you love and don’t want to impugn their character by labeling them or the relationship as toxic (so you end up blaming yourself).

Perhaps the hardest work of all is actually understanding who you are and giving yourself permission to show up as that authentic self. Part of this process is understanding the concept of what authenticity really means. To be authentic is to be genuine, honest, and comfortable in who you are and what you are about. That is hard for most people to do under the best of circumstances. It can feel painfully difficult for people in narcissistic relationships who have to go back to the beginning and figure who their genuine self actually is.

Healthier people tend to be humble,

a person, and undervalue healthy “credentials” such as wisdom, kindness, respect, compassion, empathy, humility, and honesty.

Curiosity. Narcissistic folks may be overwhelming in how interested they are in you. In the early days of a relationship, they may ask lots of probing questions to get to know you when what they’re

really doing is getting information that will be useful for them down the line, like your assets, connections, vulnerabilities, and fears. For people who have rarely felt heard or seen, the na...

maybe you are in therapy or watching videos and reading books and wanting to step back. This can then create new chaos in the relationship as the narcissistic person not only may respond angrily to your perceived rejection, distance, and indifference to their baiting, but may also try to draw you back in (more confusion!).

During the discard phase you may experience an escalation of abuse, unmasked contempt, and more severe gaslighting.

live in a world that is never enough for them.

If you try to hold the narcissistic person accountable for their behavior in the discard phase, they will likely gaslight you.

Narcissistic folks are invested in their public image

There may be apologizing, begging, and appeasing from either side.

You may try eleventh hour strategies like couple’s therapy.

Narcissistic people don’t just hoover romantic partners; they also hoover adult children, extended family, former colleagues, and anyone they feel is out of their web of control or has something they need.

Or they use their own victimhood to play upon your guilt (“My mother abandoned me, and now you are leaving me, too”). They also use pseudoapologies (“I’m sorry you feel that way”) that never reflect any acknowledgment of their role in your hurt.

to change, to empathize, to just be aware, until one day you give up. And then the narcissistic person—with their sensitivity to abandonment, distaste of losing, and need for control and good optics—will make you the promise you have been asking for: “I will change.”

hoovering is where future faking is deployed as a tactic to draw you back in.

You may also be giving the narcissist enough supply if you remain in touch with them via occasional text messages or social media.

Not being hoovered is like going cold turkey—it hurts initially, but it’s essential to healing.

If you have any empathy, have normal cognitive functioning, and were shaped by societal and cultural norms and realities, it is not surprising that you would get stuck.

The narcissistic relationship is like a riptide that pulls you back in even as you try to swim away. The

The narcissistic person controls the “emotional thermostat” for the relationship, so if they are having a good run or trying to win you over, you may have weeks or even months of good days, and then when they don’t feel validated or safe, the relationship falls into an abyss of invalidation, anger, manipulation, and gaslighting.

Unfortunately, that also means that the good days are paired with a sense of dread, knowing that it is a matter of time before the other shoe drops.

Childhood with a narcissistic parent means unpredictability, confusion, and conditional love. The narcissistic parent is simply not attuned to the child as a distinct person with needs, identity, and personhood separate from them, and these are not things a child can ask for directly.

Children in trauma-bonded relationships learn to justify and normalize their parents’ invalidating and unattuned behavior, can’t process or acknowledge it as “bad,” keep secrets, blame themselves, deny their own needs, and idealize their parents in order to survive (since children can’t break up with their parents and can’t survive without them).

they will often find themselves feeling abandoned or guilty when the parent either gives them the silent treatment or behaves like a victim. Then these children find they are in the caregiving role of having to attune to the bruised parent’s needs and silence their own.

creates a relationship template that consists of hoop-jumping to earn love, feeling guilty for expressing your own needs, and believing that abuse and invalidation are a part of a loving relationship, as well as having the fear and anxiety that arise from not being able to foster healthy attachments.

also that self-blame for those cycles is carried into adult relationships.

visceral sense of panic at the thought of the relationship ending or somehow losing them.

whereas for those with trauma-bonded cycles that began in childhood, deeper trauma-informed therapeutic work is essential.

Hiding your feelings and needs. Rationalizing the relationship to

Feeling pity and guilt for having bad thoughts about the relationship.

Fearing conflict.

All of this results in cycles that confuse us.

Narcissistic abuse can leave you believing that there is something wrong with you.

Survivors of narcissistic abuse ruminate about similar things: maybe they are right; maybe this is my fault; maybe it is me.

That constant anxiety or depletion isn’t a weakness in you or coming out of nowhere—it’s a result of the inconsistent and emotionally abusive behavior you have been enduring.

it may manifest as shifts in your view of yourself and your abilities or even how you talk to yourself;

it influences your emotional reactions,

physical ...

The stress of narcissistic abuse changes you and your worldvi...

survivors, I have seen that most people improve significantly once they finally receive validation about the toxicity of the behavior in their relationship, at which point we can start to nudge away the self-blame and begin to heal.

You may even feel guilty about feeling bad or angry because of how someone close to you is behaving. That’s how deep the trauma bonding can go—as though you are a bad person for being anxious because someone is raging at and manipulating you. The

Then the slow devolution begins as you attempt to make sense of the relationship without a framework.

healthy parts of yourself—empathy, accountability, and your drive for attachment and love—get undermined by the toxicity and control of narcissistic relationships.

You may call the narcissistic people out on their behavior or argue with them about taking responsibility.

You may not be able to reconcile why sometimes you really enjoy being with the narcissistic person and other times it is simply treacherous and hurtful.

You may start to blame yourself because they gaslight you and tell you there is something wrong with you, and it feels a tiny...