Recovering Me: Healing After Narcissistic Abuse

Why people treat you the way you allow them to was a truth I avoided for a long time. Not because I didn’t understand it — but because accepting it meant facing my own silence. For years, I believed kindness meant flexibility . I believed love meant patience without limits . I thought being “ easygoing ” made relationships stronger. So I bent when something felt wrong. I excused behavior that hurt me. I swallowed discomfort to avoid conflict. And slowly, something inside me disappeared. No one ever told me my needs didn’t matter. Instead, I taught that lesson myself — every time I stayed quiet when I wanted to speak, every time I said “it’s fine” when it wasn’t. I didn’t realize I was training people how to treat me. What finally woke me up wasn’t a dramatic breakup or betrayal. It was exhaustion. Emotional fatigue. The quiet resentment that builds when you keep abandoning yourself for the sake of harmony. That’s when I began to understand: boundaries are not walls . They are s...

  Introduction You deserve clarity, not confusion in relationships , yet for a long time, I didn’t know that. I mistook manipulation for love. I confused chaos with passion. I accepted inconsistency as care because it was familiar, not because it was healthy. After narcissistic abuse , confusion can feel normal. When affection is followed by withdrawal, when promises dissolve into blame, and when emotional safety is unpredictable, the nervous system adapts. You stop asking for clarity. You start managing uncertainty instead. I learned to read moods instead of listening to my needs. I learned to wait instead of expect. I learned to explain myself endlessly, hoping clarity would come if I tried harder. It rarely did. What I didn’t realize then was that confusion is not a sign of depth. It is a sign of emotional instability . Healthy relationships do not require constant interpretation. They do not keep you guessing. They do not drain your energy in the name of love. Healing taug...

  Introduction Reconnecting with your intuition is revolutionary , especially after narcissistic abuse . For years, I ignored the quiet inner nudges that tried to guide me. I second-guessed every choice, questioned every feeling, and looked outside myself for permission to act. Over time, that disconnect became normal. I didn’t realize I was slowly being trained not to trust my own voice. Narcissistic abuse doesn’t just harm relationships. It erodes the relationship we have with ourselves. When someone repeatedly dismisses your feelings, rewrites reality, or punishes you for independent thought, intuition begins to feel unsafe. Eventually, instinct feels unreliable. Silence feels safer than knowing. However, healing changes that landscape. As I began recovering, I noticed something surprising. The more I listened inward, the stronger I felt. Small moments of intuitive action—saying no, pausing instead of explaining, choosing rest—felt radical. They weren’t dramatic, yet they we...

  Introduction Accepting your emotional complexity was not something I learned naturally—it was something I had to relearn after survival. For years, I believed certain emotions were dangerous. Anger meant I was ungrateful. Fear meant I was weak. Sadness meant I was failing. In codependency, emotions become liabilities, not signals. You learn to mute them to keep peace, to stay safe, to stay loved. But emotional numbness is not peace—it’s absence. And eventually, absence becomes unbearable. Recovering from narcissistic abuse forces a reckoning with everything we were taught to suppress. I didn’t lose my emotions because I was broken; I lost them because I adapted. That distinction matters. Accepting your emotional complexity means understanding that every feeling once served a purpose. It protected you when boundaries were not allowed. It kept you alert when reality was being distorted. This blog is not about emotional mastery or positivity. It’s about permission. Permission to f...