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

by Ramani Durvasula

The more invested you are in this relationship, the more you stop pushing back on their behavior.

The gaslighting and invalidation are starting to catch up, and you experience more anxiety

you feel as though you may be in part to blame.

spend more time r...

You may also try to change yourself to make the relationship work, largely by appeasing the narcissistic person, detaching from your own needs, and giving in.

At this phase you may have given up on yourself. You blame and doubt yourself, have difficulty making decisions, and may even find that depression and anxiety are now taking a significant toll on your life.

sadly, other people may have pulled back their support or have fallen out of your life.

You are very isolated in this stage, and even if you are spending time with people, you worry they may not understand the full truth

You may completely blame yourself or simply may not be able to...

In this phase, you may be experiencing panic and other patterns we observe in post-traumatic stress, including avoidance, nightmares, and hypervigilance.

Narcissistic relationships get stuck in your head and pull you out of your life, and this is captured in the 3 Rs: regret, rumination, and (euphoric) recall. These

Regret can be linked to self-blame (Why didn’t I pay attention to the red flags? Why didn’t I try harder?), to circumstance (Why did I have parents like this?), or to time (Why did I stay so long? Why didn’t I see it sooner?).

Missing out on a happy childhood Effects on your own children

That you didn’t do more to “fix” it That it ended

Narcissistic behavior is so confusing that you often get stuck in rumination “thought loops” or cycles to make sense of these relationships.

The more gaslighting that occurs in a relationship, the more you ruminate about it when it ends, especially when there are significant betrayals.

Not only are you uncomfortably ruminating about an “unfixable” issue, but you are also distracted from the good parts of your life, such as your family, friends, hobbies,

Ruminating in narcissistic relationships means replaying conversations, rereading emails and text messages, thinking about different things you could have said or done, and focusing on “mistakes” you believe you made.

Second, if you still have a relationship with this parent or family system, then you may also ruminate on current conversations and real-time gaslighting and invalidation.

Rumination can contribute to the “brain fog” that

which is the cherry-picking of the good memories and events of the relationship.

Euphoric recall can make healing from narcissistic abuse difficult because it can impede you from seeing the relationship in a balanced manner,

which can result in you gaslighting yourself and second-guessing your own reality (Maybe it wasn’t really that bad and I’m making too big a deal out of their behavior).

families, euphoric recall occurs when you want to remember your family and childhood in an idealistic way, perhaps painting your family as close-knit, remembering childhood camping trips or one afternoon spent baking, and overlooking the manipulation and chronic invalidation.

Euphoric recall represents a hybrid of denial, hope, justification, and distortion. Recalling the good moments isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless it is keeping you stuck in toxic patterns and cycles of self-blame.

“Is it me?” is the mantra of almost everyone experiencing narcissistic abuse.

Self-blame is a crossroads of many dynamics—an internalization of the gaslighting, an attempt to make sense of what is happening, and an effort to get some sense of control (If it’s my fault, I can fix it).

The answer is yes to all the above. If you experienced childhood narcissistic abuse, self-blame was a survival strategy, a way to maintain an idealized image of the parent and meet essential attachment needs.

Basically, a person experiencing betrayal blindness may see the incriminating text on a partner’s phone, may even confront them and be gaslighted, and then just go back into life and not integrate that problematic text because to fully see and consolidate it means you have to shift your perception of them.

This is even more pronounced in the betrayal trauma children experience, when seeing the parent clearly would be catastrophic for a child who must maintain a distorted and idealized view of the parent to feel safe and attached.

In its simplest form, betrayal blindness allows us to maintain attachments and connections to people we love.

Before that collapse, people who are “blind” to the betrayal experience will blame themselves (Maybe I am not an attentive wife; maybe I am a bad kid) and alongside that will experience all kinds of other negative psychological patterns like anxiety, panic, isolation, and confusion.

As a result, they are emotionally investing far less and deriving much more.

In childhood situations, the parent exploits the child’s attachment needs and willingness to internalize the parental guilt and shame (It’s my fault, Mommy, I’m sorry), and over time the child detaches from their own needs and becomes a de facto babysitter of the narcissistic parent. From there on, internalization of shame and blame and taking responsibility for others become reflexive in all relationships.[4] Children cannot divorce their parents, so they must adjust to the antagonistic conditions, and that adjustment looks like self-blame.

This is all my fault. How can I be better? Maybe I am not saying things clearly enough.

environment to please the narcissist (e.g., obsessive housecleaning).

Shame is the self-blame being made public, the belief that the world is judging us for what we are already judging ourselves for.

secrets and lies proliferate, and isolation is common, shame sets in at a very early age.

This shame dynamic can also play a role in how you get trapped in adult narcissistic relationships. There is the shame and subsequent self-blame about the relationship not working, the shame of staying in a relationship that is so dysfunctional, and the shame of leaving

Most of you have probably asked yourself What is happening to me? I feel crazy.

confusion will become your new normal.

The confusion largely stems from not being able to conceive of another person having so little empathy; of going from telling you that they love you to invalidating you or disappearing; of taking advantage of you even when you had their back; of good days and bad days all mixed together; of understanding their histories and having compassion for them but still having them rage at you; of simultaneously struggling with...

There is a complicated dance of denial that you must perform in these relationships.

good at behaving as though all of what is happening around you is normal, and the narcissistic people and enablers expect that from you.

You were flexible enough to make this work, but the dark side is that this expectation or your ability to show up like everything is “fine” means that even the good people around you often have no idea how bad it was or is for you.

Gaslighting and future faking both contribute to confusion. You may find yourself poring over old messages, making sure you heard them right and feeling confused that maybe you didn’t. Their lying also contributes to your confusion. Then there is the confusion that comes from triangulation, which is a form of manipulation that involves pitting people against each other and using indirect communication, such as talking behind people’s backs instead of communicating directly with someone.

To slowly realize that the person you love or believe you were supposed to love doesn’t have real empathy, doesn’t appear to care when you are hurt, and will always put themselves first is a bleak realization.

sadness, helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness, fear,

There is no way to fix the situation, make it better, be seen, or receive empathy. No matter what you say or do, nothing changes. Regardless of the type of narcissistic relationship, the recognition that

it cannot change creates a sense of dread and unf...