What Happens When You Leave Your Narcissistic Relationship
As someone who suffered from Narcissistic Abuse, I have to say it has been the worst experience of my life. I don’t know for sure but it seems to me that narcissistic abuse must be the worst kind of abuse.
Narcissistic abuse encompasses abuse on all levels including emotional, physical, sexual, and mental abuse. It made me feel like I lost myself, my confidence and even caused me to question my own sanity.
Those of us who have suffered narcissistic abuse often end up with PTSD or appear like we even narcissistic traits of our own, however, this is because we are literally at war with our narcissistic partners. It is being under attack all the time with no time to heal, no letting up of the abuse, and no way to defend ourselves. Narcissism is like a disease that contaminates every person it touches in some way or another.
This episode is about what happens after you get out of the abusive situation, what do you do? What can you anticipate and how will you cope?
How Abuse Affects Our Mind and Body
So it is important to know that it takes your mind and body a few days to process each stressful incident that happens to us. We never have time to recover when dealing with narcissists because the abuse is ongoing and often on a daily basis.
It takes a considerable amount of time to recover when the actual abuse is happening to you. In fact, it takes the body three days to recover from a physical incident of abuse and the reactions that go with it. If you’re being physically assaulted every day, there is no time to recover but even if it is not physical assaults you suffered because he did not hit you, emotional, mental and sexual abuse will also require time to process and the effects of all abuse can remain stuck in our bodies. All of that is still in there, needing to be processed and in time healed, and in time it will be.
Recovery Begins When The Relationship Ends
So just remember that recovery does not end when the relationship does. It begins with the ending of the relationship. Healing takes place after the recovery begins.
Emotionally, we’re likely to be very confused initially after our relationship is over. We hate our narcissistic partner for what they have done and I remember being very angry but I also felt that I loved him on some level. We also may need to grieve our relationship.
Although our relationship may not have been what we thought it was it still deserves to be grieved. We lost something important to us, and the fact that it wasn’t real, but fake and to a narcissist, it doesn’t even matter. It was real to us. It was important to us. Let yourself grieve as it will help you heal. It’s even okay to say “I wanted to be with this person. I loved this person.” I even thought he was my soul mate and in a very real way, it was a big loss.
Allow Ourselves to Feel
In narcissistic relationships, when we realize that our partner and the whole relationship was not even real, it feels like a death. Allowing ourselves to feel the feelings and grief is one way our healing can begin. This grief is a process and will take time to work through and it will not start until we realize that the relationship is over.
Grief can be complicated by things though. The first thing is that it may take time to recognize that the relationship is finished for good and to let it go. We may have become chemically bonded with our narcissist in what is called a trauma bond.
Trauma Bonding
Trauma bonding is extremely powerful. As the name implies, it is the bonding of a person to another person through abuse or some other type of trauma. It is both emotional and biological. This kind of bonding has nothing to do with affection, love or trust but can feel very strong, even though there is a desire to get back together with our narcissistic partner. With a healthy bond to a partner, however, love and affection grow greater over time despite your actual feelings.
We can have a traumatic bond with a person we don’t even like, which makes us feel we can’t let go of the relationship or even feel we can’t leave even though our narcissistic partner abused us terribly.
These trauma bonds can often be what causes us to stay in all types of relationships even though everyone is miserable. The intermittent sweet behaviors then the cruel actions of the narcissist cause this dynamic.
This is how it is formed, your mind and body are in an elevated state, hormones and chemicals are released during one of the frequent arguments with your narcissistic partner, then everything calms down and different hormones and chemicals are released.
Our body and mind become used to this roller coaster over time and eventually we begin to crave it, even though intellectually we may hate it and the anxiety and stress that it is causing us. Our narcissist partner craves it, too because they suffer from chronic boredom and feelings of emptiness. This is one reason they intentionally provoke fights and cause problems. My narcissistic partner was a serial provoker and now I know why. Without all that drama and fussing, they just don’t feel alive, plus it is also about their need to control us.
So when we both are, stuck in this cycle that we may not even recognize because of trauma bonding and enmeshment, it is very difficult to walk away from these relationships, even when you truly can’t stand this person and even recognize the relationship is empty, pointless or abusive.
This is why being discarded is so painful. Not only is the relationship that we put our heart into is over and our dream is totally shattered – which is horrible in itself – but now we have a war within ourselves. Our body and mind are addicted to that cycle and when it gets broken, it’s extremely hard to deal with.
Breaking trauma bonds can be very difficult, but it can be done. I am living proof and I have personally helped others break their trauma bond. But once we break it, we can still be left with all of these conflicting feelings and grief.
Letting ourselves feel all of it is normalizing and it’s how we get through it.
After the trauma bond is healed, we may find that we are still very angry and we have every right to be. Our narcissistic partners abused us, treated us terribly and hurt us.
How Anger Helps Us
Anger can be pivotal, though, as a catalyst for us to leave an abusive relationship and to maintain NO CONTACT. But holding on to anger or hatred for too long is damaging. It may seem safer to be angry because anger feels strong, but in the end, it is actually making us more vulnerable, not less by holding on to it.
We deserve a break. We have been through enough. The good news is we do not have to carry around this hate and anger.
If anger is recognized and processed, it will work itself out naturally but if we hold onto it will keep us stuck, plus on some level maybe it continues to feed their narcissistic supply. There are many ways to work through our anger and one of them is to understand what happened to us. Our emotions can cloud everything. They may make things much harder to see and deal with. Sometimes emotions can make things hard to understand.
It is hard for us to understand that the abuse inflicted upon us is not personal but in reality, it is not about us at all.
This one thing really helps us be less angry: understanding that this is a sick, disordered and truly miserable person who hurt us for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with us. We couldn’t have changed it and we didn’t cause it. There was nothing we could do. We were unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time, and when the danger revealed itself, we did not recognize it because how could we? Narcissists are masters at deceit and deception and easily trick and fool their targets.
Anyone who has not dealt with this kind of abuse can not understand it. But being angry at the narcissist doesn’t hurt them. It doesn’t punish them. It does nothing to them because they could care less about how you feel. That’s part of their disorder.
It only hurts us and in time we will find that we are tired of hurting and we will let that anger go as it serves no purpose for us.
Healing Starts Here
Once we’ve dealt with the recovery and all of these emotions, healing can begin. These things are very important to the healing process and if they do not take place, healing will be incomplete or may not occur. We might see incomplete healing; people say they are healed and believe they are healed, but they are still so angry, or so hyper-vigilant in relationships. This, clearly is not healing.
Probably one of the most important functions of healing is to learn why things happen and accept your role in what happened. Of course, you had no role in the narcissist’s abuse but you can learn, as explained earlier, why you did not leave the relationship when the abuse became apparent, or why you became addicted to the abuse cycle in the first place so that you can prevent this from happening again. That is true healing. It’s an ongoing process but it’s absolutely possible.
Narcissists cannot heal, they cannot admit their responsibility in any situation and they cannot learn from mistakes. You can.
I have healed. It has taken time and work but I have. You can too.
Much love to you
Debbi