Do you find yourself feeling low or down after periods of feeling good, proud, or effective? Do bouts come over you where it feels like you’ve done or are something wrong even though you can’t point to anything? Do you carry around a sense that the other shoe is going to drop? It’s a matter of when not if? Many …
I recently saw the comic Bill Burr perform – pre-Omicron days – and he talked about being on mushrooms with his friends. Now if you know much about him, he alludes to growing up in a family where yelling and unpredictable outbursts of rage from his father were just a part of growing up for him. I don’t know if …
Do you find yourself finding excuses not to do things that you know you enjoy? Does anything that’s not work or school feel like something you shouldn’t be doing? Is it strange to see depictions of people having fun in movies or tv? Like how is it that they are so happy? Is it hard to enjoy activities that don’t …
If saying you’re sorry – and rarely hearing it – feels like an all too common part of your experience, then you may have had to survive narcissistic abuse from a parent or partner. A big part of this abuse may have also been an absence of protection from it by anyone else. When you are selected as the scapegoat …
Have you found yourself working hard to convince the person who narcissistically abused you that they were wrong to do so? Has the effort to tell and convince them of how unjust they were to treat you this way felt consuming? Have your best arguments and points as to why you deserve better seem to fall on the narcissistic abuser’s …
I talk a lot about the process of narcissistic abuse and how a child is often selected and treated as the scapegoat for the narcissistically abusive parent. The question may remain of how exactly a narcissistic parent gets the child to identify with the role of scapegoat. When a child is selected as the source of all the family’s problems …
I think there’s an idea in the world of recovery from any sort of trauma – narcissistic abuse included – that it requires revisiting the feelings that were felt during the abuse and that if those feelings are felt and those experiences re-examined properly then the survivor will be released from it all. Although that may work in some cases, …
One of the most challenging aspects in recovering from narcissistic abuse is the task of putting psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical distance between yourself and your narcissistic abuser. I’ve talked about the guilt and ambivalence that can sometimes emerge when beginning to separate from a narcissistic family or partner. Questions can arise like: “Am I making all this up?”, “Am …
Did you tend to feel any of these ways with a parent or a partner? Never sure what to expect from them? In certain moments they would seem thrilled with life and you but at other moments would treat you with such hostility, contempt and rage such that they could seem like two different people? Caught up in the drama?…They …
Cinderella might be thought of as the story of how a woman survived and recovered from narcissistic abuse. Here you have a very kind and beautiful woman who’s scapegoated and treated like the scourge of the earth by her narcissistic stepmother and stepsisters…forced to clean up after them all and deserving of nothing good in return. It’s clear in the …
