Narcissistic Abuse Recovery: The Survivor’s Burden
Discarding erroneous beliefs can greatly help in recovery from abuse
One of the main horrors of narcissistic abuse is that the victim becomes dependent on the abuser. This is due to chemical changes brought on by the abuse. The victim reveres and loves the abuser because any minor relief that she gets in her life is because of the abuser. He is the one who enables her to experience some relief by momentary cessation of assault on her emotions. Thus, the abuser holds a lot of importance in her life.
If you suggest to the victim to leave the toxic relationship, she will not listen to you. Let’s suppose she does follow your advice and leaves the abuser or the abuser discards her after exhausting her resources. The victim does not walk away as a healed person. Instead, she brings with her a heavy load. This is a survivor’s burden.
This burden usually manifests as deep depression, suicide, and relapse. It is commonly trivialized and poorly understood.
Here, I explain this burden in more detail:
Unresolved mental damage. The victim’s sense of self has been destroyed by the abuser. It required tens of thousands of little transactions, each of which was damaging in some manner. Individual transactions frequently seem innocuous but the cumulative effect of these negative transactions is considerable and devastating.
Loss of Power: During abuse, the abuser isolated the victim socially. Though now she has left the toxic relationship but her social isolation continues. The survivor feels weak and vulnerable when she is alone but She also dislikes and mistrusts social interaction. She remains inside her home and avoids meeting new people. She fears running into another vampire on every corner and has nightmares about it. She could live for years or possibly the rest of her life with this fear.
Economic harm. The victim’s financial resources were plundered by the abuser. Her ability to take risks has significantly decreased because she has no savings. She does not care about utilizing fresh opportunities. Debts incurred by the abuser must be repaid by her. She could experience true poverty and its horrible repercussions.
Emotional instability: Her emotions are all over the place. Often, she has rage attacks and it is difficult for her to control her anger. Her fits of rage scare her and she wonders if she really is a horrible person, unstable and crazy. Sometimes she feels numb or emotionally dead this makes her want to do something even if it's destructive that would make her feel more alive.
Spiritual harm: She has difficulty believing that good actions produce good results. By spending a lot of time in the company of the abuser who consistently returned evil for good her faith has taken a serious blow.
Nightmares. She has difficulty falling asleep, even when she is asleep, she often has nightmares that shake her out of her sleep.
Blaming the victim. When she shares her story, people explain her trauma through her own upbringing or mentality. They keep blaming her for the abuse. She learns ‘’you sought it’’, ‘’You could leave but you chose to stay,’’ they say. She agrees with the majority’s opinion that she chose her suffering.
Failure to externalize: The abuser repeatedly told the victim that he was the victim and she was the guilty party. Even after escaping the nightmare, the abused victim carries this reality with her. She never realized how the abuser controlled and manipulated her. She acknowledges her flaws and then projects those flaws onto any future relationships she tries to build.
Survivor’s guilt. The survivor is aware that although she “escaped,” the abuser (now her ex-partner) continues to harm others. She feels responsible for the horror and agony of fresh victims. She has recurrent cycles of feeling humiliation, remorse, and self-hatred. She struggles to form new relationships and is thus always alone herself. She is still prone to using drugs and committing suicide.
Shame and a bad reputation. During and after her relationship with the abuser, the victim’s actions bother other people. She is needy and insecure, worried and sad. He’s accused her of so many things and revealed graphic details of her real or perceived misdeeds in public that people believe she has very poor character.
Loss of Memory and Focus: The trauma has caused her serious short-term memory loss. Most of the time her mind is on autopilot. She has lost the ability to multitask. Finishing a small task requires all of her mental and physical energy. Her life is in tatters but she lacks the will, energy, and focus to rebuild her life. She feels like a failure.
Fear of Change: Any change in life is interpreted as danger by her overactive nervous system. She spent so much time in a warzone where unpredictability and horror reigned.
Absence of alternative social connections. By requiring exclusivity and attacking alternatives, the narcissistic abuser isolated the victim from other people. Besides losing friendships and other close relationships, she may also have lost her job. The shock of being left alone leaves the survivor predisposed to seeking a replacement for what she already knows, which is another emotional vampire.
Relapse risk over a lifetime. Drug users and abuse victims are very susceptible to relapsing. The Survivor may spend years searching for another emotional vampire and continues to believe that she is unworthy and that he (the abuser) is the only one who has ever loved her. she has fantasies about the high the emotional vampire made her feel.
These all add up to the same thing. The survivor is in serious long-term danger, and not many people can save her. If she’s fortunate, she’ll come across a therapist who is familiar with the pain and trauma pattern that abusers cause. Nobody holds children responsible for their violent parents or victims of assault and robbery. Finding that compassion is still more difficult for victims of emotional abuse.
Unloading the Burden
Some harm is permanent. Opportunities, money, and lost years may never be recovered.
But some harm can be repaired. Among the many factors mentioned above, the one that fuels the others is the failure to externalize. The reason the survivor is in such danger is because of her own interpretation of what happened. This failure to externalize is the crux of the problem — the root of all the other factors, which feed off one another in a vicious cycle.
So let’s dissect this. What are the mistaken beliefs the survivor has about her relationship with her ex-partner (the abuser)?
· She wanted it, and she made it happen. She, therefore, has a strong need to be with abusers.
· People despise her for valid reasons, and her ex-partner is the only one who accepted and loved her. She, therefore, favors the past over the present.
· She failed to help her ex-partner and maintain a working relationship. She, therefore, failed to achieve the fundamental objective of her relationship.
· She is foolish, scared, weak, and needy. She will therefore struggle in any future partnerships or projects.
· She is a negative person and has trouble controlling her emotions. Thus, she will forever be unhappy.
· Good deeds and fairness do not produce good results. Thus, by becoming more like her ex-partner or abuser, she may succeed in life. In other words, she thinks she needs to be more aggressive, dishonest, and manipulative.
Discarding these mistaken beliefs will cause a drastic reduction in the survivor’s burden. Other effects of abuse like brain fog and nightmares go away on their own once the survivor has passed enough time in a safe environment free of toxic people.
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