You Can Thrive After Narcissistic Abuse by Melanie Tonia Evans

Author:Melanie Tonia Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

Mourning the Significant Losses

It is time to consider the next Step of your healing journey. This next stage, Step 3, is a powerful shift for breaking out of the victimisation mode that can otherwise hold us hostage indefinitely after narcissistic abuse.

Losses are synonymous with narcissistic abuse and one of the hardest things with which to reconcile ourselves. Even after we have shored up our original traumas through Step 2, addressing whatever it was that the narcissist wasn’t providing us with in our life, we still have horrific losses to grieve. In many ways these losses can feel as impactful as experiencing a death.

As Norman Cousins, an American political journalist, author, professor and peace advocate, said: ‘Death is not the greatest loss in life. What is the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.’1 When we have experienced narcissistic abuse we may feel like a part (or many parts) of ourself has died, because so many of the things we thought represented ‘us’ are gone: many people who suffer narcissistic relationships are robbed of not only their support networks, family and close friends, but often their capacity to work, as well as their money, possessions, previous investments and property. These individuals may feel like they have taken a step backwards and fallen years behind in regard to where they thought they would be; their losses may be so extreme that many feel they will never recover what they have lost. You personally may have lost everything you’ve worked for; or you may have had your family and friends turned against you; or you may be experiencing severe debilitation of your health or even have lost custody of your children. Maybe you have suffered all of these things and more; lots of people have.

Significant losses are incredibly traumatic to come to terms with. Certainly, one of the hardest things for me was trying to accept that everything I had worked so hard for all my life – all the things that I thought defined who I was and my worth – was now gone. And it wasn’t just about possessions, as you may have experienced too. The losses on a personal level were enormous as well: friendships and connections that it had taken me decades to establish – all smashed to pieces by narcissistic smearing and drama.

What is also devastating is the hindsight and the knowledge that there were so many times when our inner voice was screaming ‘warning, warning!’ to us about the narcissist. We know we should have taken more notice of what was going on, trusted our inner voice more, left the relationship earlier and got off the ship before it sunk completely. But we didn’t; we stayed, we rationalised away what we were feeling, and we were too worn out and beaten down to do anything about it anyway. We were barely surviving, let alone dealing with what was going on.

Nancy wrote this to me: ‘I really believed Dean was the love of my life, and after marrying him I thought I was doing the right thing by standing by him.

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