The Lingering Symptoms of Narcissistic Abuse
These long-term effects are not your fault. Healing them will take time.
The scars are mostly invisible, but they’re there. For partners of narcissists, you can even recall the person you were before. For the children of narcissists, there was no before. Survival and self-contortion was your entire existence until something happened to clue you in that not everyone lives like you.
Normal people aren’t afraid of showing their happiness for fear of a narcissist tearing it down. Normal people aren’t afraid of sharing their passions and joys. They don’t need to hide parts or the whole of themselves because those parts have been deemed unacceptable.
Awareness and self-compassion are absolutely needed for survivors as many of their struggles are actually the long-term effects of an abusive environment. And there is often a cluster of symptoms that come from narcissistic abuse.
Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome
This is a non-medical term describing a set of specific, severe, and long-term effects of narcissistic abuse and manipulation. These are the ones that can be especially debilitating:
