I just finished a Narcissist Personality Disorder series, but I felt that there was something missing, which is help for the victim. Once victims have had their sense of self conditioned out of them, they have to rebuild it again, in order to recover fully. There are lots of trap doors that slow down the healing process. Here are 5 tips to speed up the process of healing from Narcissistic Abuse.
5 tips for Healing faster from Narcissistic Abuse
Change your environment
Go no contact. You hear this all the time, but there is a reason. You cannot heal if you are still in the cycle of abuse. The cycle of abuse is destructive rewards and punishments. How exploitation works is that the rewards start decreasing and the punishments start increasing. This means the narcissist gets his or her needs satisfied and you don’t, just like a slave. This kind of abuse increases your risk of cancer, dementia, and stroke.
Your hippocampus, which deals with short-term memory, is being destroyed and this affects your ability to guide your life. Going no contact allows you to heal and then start conditioning yourself. When you are conditioned by others, your desire and stress impulses are being controlled by others. Your impulses, desires, needs and wants is what the self is. That means your self is being exploited. Instead of others controlling rewards and punishments, you need to guide them yourself. That’s how you start to reclaim yourself.
Shame
Don’t use food, sex, alcohol, and drugs as a replacement pleasures. A lot of substances are supposed to be recreational, but are often crutches. Substances are only short-term, and your PTSD will continue. Instead look at the emotional wounds that make you feel ashamed. Start healing them.
One way is meditation. The reason why meditation is so useful, is that most healing requires you to have the ability to direct your attention span. Meditation lets you see clearly the mental movements of your mind. These movements are quick, so there needs to be consistent concentration. The concentration is to see how those movements interrupt your will power to stay present. For example, have you ever decided you would do something but found you did something else instead? When you go for some addictive substance, use your attention to notice the emotional pain disappearing temporarily, right when you take the substance. You can feel the tension and relief, because your mind is attacking itself with shame. In the end substances do not provide long-lasting pain relief.
You have to teach yourself not to attack yourself. This is the main part of self-parenting. Catch something that causes you shame, based on what the narcissist made fun of and criticized. Then realize that these are unrelenting standards the narcissist put on you. They have unrelenting standards and negative voices inside their minds all the time. Like a predator looking for weakness, narcissists test you by throwing criticisms at you to see which ones cause the most shame and stress. Your cringing is food for them, and their sense of winning. Weakness is how they choose their targets. Your PTSD attacks will show you your sore spots. The bite marks. You can feel them in your body.
Once you discover the sore spot, then you need to read as much psychology as possible about this particular topic of shame and learn how normal a lot of it is and how it is related to unrelenting standards from the narcissist. Permanently relax those standards for yourself. They are perfectionist and inhuman.
When people say “talk nicely to yourself”, that is not the direction. That strategy won’t work unless you believe what you are saying to yourself. Everyone has a different shame topic, so all healing is personalized. Learn as much as you can. On the plus side of shame, if there is a weakness you can deal with, then taking action on it can also reduce the shame. Learn to like some of the shame, because shame, when it’s healthy, can be used as a motivation to change something. Embrace the shame, and be happy that you aren’t a psychopath with no shame. Shame means you actually care about consequences. Shame loses some of its sting when you don’t resist it. Just embrace it and let it be a helper to guide you back to your values.
When we were conditioned by other people we were conditioned to value what others value, and it was often self-serving. Start researching what values you believe in, and use shame as a guide to stick to those values. When you finally get through this work and the topic doesn’t cause you shame attacks anymore, then future criticism won’t hurt. When there is less pain, there is less need to self-medicate. This is your test for healing. The brain naturally lets go of what it doesn’t need. Then when you meet other narcissists, you will see that you don’t react anymore. They can’t get their hooks into you. You’ll also detect who the toxic person is much faster.
Anger
You may have grown up in a family where expressing anger was punished. If so then you developed a fear of healthy anger. Often victims end up with homicidal anger with daydreams of dispatching the narcissist in gruesome, and sadistic revenge. This anger scares victims, but they need to know this is a part of the healing process. You don’t have to act on it, but you need to understand it. Part of the anger is at yourself for not defending yourself further. Look back to the abuse you tolerated and realise that it often went too far from the very beginning. You just were too afraid to put limits on the abuser at that time.
Abusers are always testing people to see how far they can go. Abusers are competitive 100% of the time, and externally motivated. They use constant punishment on people who allow it.
Whether it’s contacting police or escaping to a shelter, you need to use your anger to assert your rights. If you don’t know your rights, then get help from a distress line and link up to professionals so you know what you can do. Throughout history rights had to be fought for. Our freedom came at the cost of war. This hasn’t changed, and will never change as long as there are predators.
The problem today is complexity. We are afraid of asserting our rights because we don’t even know what they are. We may go too far and end up incarcerated. Learning what your rights are from professionals, like counsellors and lawyers, will give you more confidence that society has your back. This will alleviate much of the anger.
For any residual anger there is another method. You have to imagine yourself as the abuser enjoying that you are still stuck in anger. That can snap you out of it. Your pain is their pleasure, so when they are not around your guidelines are to live your life as if they didn’t exist. Also imagine your abuser being angry at your enjoyment of life, and how each improvement you make irritates them. When the abuser is affected, then they don’t find you fun anymore. They will have to find another target. Just like in a game, you can enjoy winning. Have you ever seen a person only enjoy playing a game when they are winning, and quit when they are losing? That’s them.
Projection
Realize that you were projecting empathetic qualities on people who don’t have much empathy. What was missing in them was filled out by you. Learn to look at people, and judge by their actual behaviour. Just like they test you, you can test them. Talk like an empathetic person and look at their facial expressions. Read them. Don’t ignore what you see, and what emotional deficits are showing up. Many abusers have rigid personality disorders that PhD’s cannot cure. That means you, as an amateur, will never cure them. When you see these signs then just move on. This is healthy discernment. Use this method to judge people who you want to be close to. If they are a covert narcissist you can always drop them later when their mask falls off. You are allowed to change your mind about people at any point.
Culture
Study unrelenting standards in your culture. A lot of personality disorders are supported by our culture. Look for advertising that feels wounding, or family and social circles with unrelenting standards. Happiness is getting your needs met. Some people can get them met without such high standards. If you can do this, then you have achieved the happiness this life has meant for you.
The unhappiness comes from constant comparison to unrelenting standards. If you put people on a pedestal, the pain and shame will come back. Narcissists only get pleasure from advantageous comparisons. We can get caught in this conditioning illusion, that he grass is greener on the other side. When you get caught in envy, you are actually feeding these narcissists. Know that if you have good relationships, food, health, and an interesting job, you actually have enough.
How we grow in our success is at our own pace. This is why so many emphasize enjoying gratitude, because it is an inoculation against envy. It also frees you from the narcissist’s game. That’s why narcissists and psychopaths brag. They are testing your capacity to ignore envy. If they want, they can go play their game elsewhere. You don’t have to buy what they are selling. What makes these tips help you heal faster is by preventing you from beating around the bush. Go directly to the problem, heal it, and then learn to detect and avoid this problem from happening again. If you don’t guide yourself, others will.
https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2017/171120_Suffering_Comes_from_What_You’re_Doing.mp3
The Royal We – STRESS AND ANGER AFTER NARCISSISTIC ABUSE. Resolving Your Anger Within: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3zt9T2t_ic
Quick Tips: https://psychreviews.org/category/quicktips/