4 Pillars for Recovery After Narcissistic Abuse
The 4 Pillars for Recovery After Narcissistic Abuse and how they show up in your life
In order to work on the 4 pillars of recovery after narcissistic abuse, it’s helpful to look at what the opposite looks like, which is probably what you’re struggling with after narcissistic abuse. You’ll notice that it shows up in your behaviors. There are some basic practices you can do to focus on growing in these areas.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is about supporting yourself. It’s about taking control of yourself, of your mind, of your body, of your behaviors. It’s about self-perception, how you see yourself. It’s also about the effect that you have on the world around you.
Are you having a positive effect in the world around you, in other words, are you receiving positive feedback of your actions or is it negative?
Do you feel like you don’t have an effect on the world around you or that when you do try to do things, it just doesn’t go well?
The opposite of self-esteem will show up in self-sabotage and self-destruction.
You might notice that you do things to sabotage your success, to sabotage your happiness, to sabotage opportunities that you have. It’s like you just give up, maybe even right at the last moment.
Self-destruction is when you’re talking horribly to yourself, when you’re doing things that aren’t good for you because deep down you have some self-hatred. Maybe you’re abusing substances or you’re doing something else that’s really unhealthy for you or for some aspect of your life. It could even be something having to do with finances for example, like spending lots of money, which is having a negative effect on your life.
The lack of self-esteem will also show up in behaviors where you just don’t try. Sometimes you might give up before you even started. It’s the learned helplessness where you’d rather sit around and complain and sulk or have a pity party for yourself and just not try.
You just don’t want to try anymore because every time that you tried in the past, especially when you were with the narcissistic person, you can just keep trying forever to fix things with that person, to try to have some kind of positive effect on that person, yet it will never happen.
It actually has nothing to do with you but unfortunately you’ve taken it personally so your self-esteem has plummeted and then that makes you not want to keep trying in other areas of your life.
A lack of self-esteem also shows up with giving up. You just give up on yourself, you give up on your dreams. You give up on bringing a hundred percent of the best of you in every moment and you’re gonna hear thoughts like, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. “
The practice to rebuild your self-esteem is to get back in the game. You gotta get up and get back in the game. You’ve got to start trying again.
A helpful question is something like what’s one thing that I can take control of right now?
Decide: I can take control of (this) right now. And start with something really simple if it’s early in the healing process. Maybe you’re in the early stages of the PTSD crash where you can barely get out of bed. You can’t even take care of your hygiene. So what can you take care of right now? It’s gonna be baby steps. It’s gonna be getting yourself into the shower today. It’s gonna be brushing your teeth. It’s gonna be washing all of the dishes that’s been piling up in your kitchen.
Do something little, feel the sense of accomplishment and making a difference for yourself and your environment, and then as you progress through the healing stages, the stakes of accomplishment and effectiveness will be bigger and bigger. You will be challenging yourself more and more. Maybe now taking control is, ‘all right I’m fed up with this job and this narcissistic boss so I’m gonna get my resume together, I’m gonna start interviewing, I’m gonna start applying for jobs and I know I’m gonna get a good job’ versus totally opting out of that challenge and just keep taking it from that that boss or that work environment without making a plan or effort to change it.
Self-worth
Self-worth is about valuing, respecting and knowing your worth. It’s you valuing yourself. It’s about you respecting yourself, knowing who you are and what you’re worth.
The opposite of self-worth will show up in shame and unworthiness.
This deep sense of shame and unworthiness is a huge theme after abuse.
You’ll hear thoughts like, ‘I’m not good enough.’
The lack self-worth will show up in behaviors like value-compromising. Say you have a certain value but you compromise that value in order to stay in connection with someone because you’d rather have the connection with this toxic person who’s actually hurting you, than to risk being alone and maintaining integrity with your value.
A lack of self-worth will show up when you’re ashamed to speak up, to speak up about the trauma, about the abuse that you went through, or even just little things like you’re in the grocery store and someone cuts in front of you and you don’t speak up. You just let the person go ahead. But then inside you’re talking down to yourself, telling yourself how weak you are and how awful you are and telling yourself the story of how everyone treats you like you don’t exist or you don’t matter.
Self-worth is about speaking up for your little rights too. It’s about just knowing your worth as a human being, ‘hey I was in line first you can wait behind me, there’s a line here’.
A lack of self-worth also shows up hiding. Maybe you just hide away from life. You just don’t put yourself out there. You hide away at home. You don’t want to get out there again because you don’t feel worthy of whatever it is that you really want, you feel like you aren’t good enough for it.
A lack of self-worth is what’s stopping you from meeting your basic self-care and hygiene.
People that I work with in coaching sessions will often tell me things like, ‘I just don’t know why I can’t even get up and brush my teeth today, I don’t know why I can’t even get in the shower.’ I tell them that’s about the shame. Usually that’s a moment where that person just starts crying because they know how true it is and they know how deeply that sense of shame is affecting them at that point in their life.
The practice for rebuilding your self-worth is focusing on courage.
Courage means you’re taking small risks with your heart little by little. Even when you’re afraid. Even when you have fear but you really want that thing, whatever that is… applying for a job, changing your job, getting accepted to a school that you’ve always wanted to go to…
It could even be the courage of going to networking events, meeting new people and being around all these people now after having been through a lot of social anxiety in the earlier stages of healing. It could be the courage of getting out and meeting new friends. It could be the courage of dating again after you’ve been in a romantic relationship with an abusive person.
Another practice to grow your self-worth is to identify and live by your values. First you’ve got to know what your values are in order to live by them. That’s why you want to do an inventory on your values. Identify what they are and then start living by them, by setting standards and boundaries to protect those values.
If you have a value about a certain thing you need to have a protection system set up around that. As long as you have standards and boundaries set up for yourself and you can count on yourself to enforce those boundaries when pushed, then you will be protecting your values and feeling more worthy. Once that protection system is set up, it’s going to be easier to have the courage to get back out there and to do it again.
Self-trust
Self-trust is about knowing and believing. It’s knowing yourself and believing in yourself.
The opposite of self-trust shows up as self-doubt and fear.
This can be the kind of fear that just plagues you from doing anything, from taking risks in life, from connecting with people because you’ve been through so many horrible experiences so you’re afraid they will repeat again.
A lack of self-trust shows up by second-guessing yourself.
Say you have this idea. You have this feeling. You have whatever that you want to say or do or share or create but you just keep second-guessing yourself. You don’t trust yourself that you can do it or that you should do or say it. You might even doubt that you know how to do it, that you’re capable.
Another way a lack of self-trust shows up is indecision. This could be noticeable in the little things but it can also be really paralyzing. It could be you’re at the grocery store and you just can’t decide between this and that, this brand or that one. Or you got to buy a certain dress or some kind of clothes for an event and you just can’t decide what to buy. Or maybe you open your closet and you can’t decide what to wear so you take out piles of clothes and end up feeling awfully confused about what you want. Maybe you’re standing in the kitchen and there’s all this food there but you just can’t decide what you even want to eat. Maybe somebody calls you and they invite you to go do something and you kind of want to go but then you kind of don’t want to go and you can’t just make that decision
That indecision is gonna really keep you stuck. You’re gonna feel a sense of paralysis. When you don’t have self-trust there’s a sense of stuckness in life because you don’t know what to do and you don’t trust yourself enough to commit to something.
You don’t trust yourself that you can figure it out, whatever life throws at you. A lack of self-trust is gonna show up as a lot of insecurities. It could be physical insecurities. It could be insecurities about your financial situation, your relationships, about your ability to do things.
The practice to rebuild self-trust is to listen to your intuition.
It’s important to connect to your intuition daily, constantly, all day long checking in, how do I feel right now? What am I feeling right now. How do I feel about that person. What do I feel about that idea, and really letting that feeling come to focus in your body, noticing where is that in your body and what does it feel like.
That’s one of the easiest ways to connect to your intuition through the body at a gut level. It’s tangible, it’s more physical than some of the more subtle forms of intuition. The idea of intuition just sounds so unreal because you can’t see it, you can’t touch it but your body, that’s real. Your body will send you gut feeling intuitions and then you’ve got to act on that intuition.
That’s how you rebuild the self-trust through acting on that intuition. Your intuition only goes wrong when you don’t listen to it and when you don’t listen to your intuition that goes back to number one which ends up eroding more and more of your sense of self-esteem because you don’t believe you can do it.
Rebuilding self-trust also comes through taking action in 100% integrity. That’s where your values are in alignment with your actions. When you are in a hundred percent integrity that is also going to rebuild your sense of self-trust because you trust yourself to set the boundaries that protect your values and to take action that’s in alignment with what matters to you in life.
Self-love
Self-love is about caring and nurturing yourself. It’s about treating yourself well and accepting yourself.
The opposite of self-love is self-judgment and self-denial.
When you don’t love yourself, you’ll notice how you do a lot of people-pleasing. You sacrifice your own needs for someone else. You abandon yourself in order to stay in connection with others.
You’ll notice your lack of self-love through your self-talk. When you have a lack of self-love you’ll hear this in your Inner Dialogue. You’ll notice that you’re constantly putting yourself down. You’re treating yourself poorly, not just in your mind but in life, like you don’t take care of yourself in a way that would honor yourself. You don’t eat when you’re hungry or maybe you eat too much even when you’re not hungry. You don’t drink enough water. Maybe you’re drinking lots of sugary drinks or way too much alcohol.
Maybe it’s just the little things like you’re tired and you need to go sleep but instead you’re pushing yourself to do something else, to get something done that really doesn’t need to get done right now. Or maybe you’re compromising what you want to do for what somebody else wants to do when it really doesn’t feel good to you. Sometimes we can make compromises on things because it’s not a big deal, but when it is a big deal, when you’re compromising your integrity, health, peace, sanity or wellbeing, then you have to choose you or you will sacrifice your self-worth.
A lack of self-worth will also show up in talking to yourself poorly. It’s like you’re abusing yourself or you’re neglecting yourself. Maybe you do something and it doesn’t go well and you tell yourself ‘idiot, dumbass,’ or maybe you hear yourself saying things to yourself all day like, you’re ugly, you’re old, you’re… whatever…or maybe it sounds like, ‘you’re never gonna find true love or have a sense of family.’
The practices to rebuild your self-love come through self-care on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels of your health and well-being.
Part of self-love is working on what you can change in your life, recognizing what it is that you have control over. You can change and focus on those things and then for the things that you can’t change, like something physical about your body such as your height or characteristics, you have to work on self-acceptance. It’s the self-acceptance of just learning to love that thing.
A lot of the women that I work with have some sort of body issue and usually that’s because their mother or their father or some partner that they had as an adult shamed them over that part of their body or put them down or something horrible like that. Maybe they said you needed to get some kind of surgery because they didn’t like that part of your body or that something about your body was just awful and they weren’t attracted to it. Maybe they told you that you weren’t feminine enough or in the case of men, that you weren’t masculine enough, because of that thing that was “wrong” with your body.
Those things that you can’t change, you’ve just got to work on drowning out those voices. Recognize when you have internalized the voice of the narcissist. Stop talking to yourself like the narcissist talked to you. Work on what you can change about yourself that you don’t like and focus on self-acceptance for what you can’t change.
For those kinds of issues that you can’t change, often what I recommend is standing in front of the mirror and looking at that part of yourself and learning to love it. Really learning to love it. Start finding something you’re grateful for about the part that you’re learning to accept. Start telling yourself new stories about it so you can change how you feel about yourself and how others perceive you because they are subconsciously feeling how you feel about your body. If you treat yourself well, you’re showing others how to treat you.
