Why I Found It So Hard To Leave My Narcissistic Partner
Please listen to this video on some information about why I found it so hard to leave my narcissistic partner. I hope this will be of some help to you to know and understand why you stayed in an abusive relationship. Know that you were not responsible for staying in your abusive relationship and you can heal from the abuse.
If you would like to read the video transcription please look below the video.
Why I found it so hard to leave my narcissistic partner?
This question came up for me so many times. I struggled with wondering why it took me so long to end a relationship with my abusive partner. No doubt my own empathy, my compassion, and my willingness to see the good in people kept me in this toxic relationship. All the qualities that my abusive partner saw in me that he did not have.
Knowing myself helped me to find the answer to this question. I recognized in myself that I was a loyal person and this prevented me from cutting ties in both friendships and relationships, including the one with my narcissistic partner. He knew that once he had me, he had me. It is all part of the idealization phase in the relationship.
In most relationships, the narcissist is the one who ends the relationship and moves on to a new narcissistic supply but in my case, it was me who left. After telling my friends what was going on in my relationship and going to a very good therapist, I finally saw who he was and that I needed to leave for my sanity, survival, and safety.
I later learned that he had a new supply but that took years for me to figure this out and why he gave me up so easily.
It did not matter that I was a mental health clinician for years or that I was intelligent, it was horrific for me to learn that he was abusive and that I ended up feeling worthless because of the abuse he inflicted on me.
I have since healed from these feelings. He did not have the ability to ruin my life.
There are many very successful people like Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Rihanna who have been the victim of abusive partners.
It does not matter who you are the effects of abuse on anyone are indiscriminate in spite of how strong, smart or confident you are. It does not matter if you are a celebrity or if you are old or young, rich or not, You, like me, can be broken down and made to feel nothing like you did before you met the narcissist.
In fact, they are attracted to us- the empathic ones, in the first place because we are all they are not. We are kind, empathic, loyal, and compassionate. Narcissists have no ability to feel anything except anger and rage.
I have to say I have been in other relationships and have broken up with them when things did not work out and although I felt sad or upset for a while, I did not feel the way I did when I broke up with my narcissistic partner.
I continued to feel like I was walking on eggshells long after the relationship with him was over. I worried that he would lie and smear me to others because he threatened to do so or he would ruin my career because he said he could or that he would take my child away because he said I was an unfit mother.
All those lies he fabricated, were absolute nonsense, which is easy for me to see now what they were but at the time I felt afraid and confused. It was like I could not even trust my own thoughts and mind. He had controlled me for years. I know this now and understand my staying with him so long had to do with the trauma bond I had to him.
The powerful trauma bond I had with my narcissistic partner made it impossible for me to leave him for many years. This addiction to my narcissistic partner was not logical and was actually a deep cellular physiological process. Not only are the trauma bonds difficult to break, but they also cause a great deal of cognitive dissonance in order to reconcile the brutal reality of the abuse with those who were once our greatest confidante and mine who I thought my soulmate.
The biochemical bond often called a betrayal bond or trauma bond made it so difficult to leave and to have no contact impossible for me which caused me to suffer relapses on my road to healing.
I believed that no matter how toxic the relationship became, I could not leave. This was because I had already formed a special bond with my abusive partner. This bond felt so intense that relationships with other people – even close friends – paled in comparison. This traumatic bond felt like an addiction to me although I was not aware of this bond. I did not know I was bonded to him.
One of the most important things that I learned was that in order to heal there needed to be a space to heal for myself. It was so difficult to detach from my abusive partner, but more really mean that I would actually detach.
What this means is to take the focus off what your narcissist partner is doing or not doing and put our attention fully inwards to heal ourselves.
Critical to our recovery is to leave and to have no contact or strictly modified low contact if you absolutely have to. By not having contact with my narcissistic partner it sabotaged my chance of true healing. It was vital to my healing to understand that in order to recover and then reattach to my narcissist was as harmful as it is for an alcoholic to drink again, even if it is just a little.
When healing from narcissistic abuse most importantly is to break the addiction to your abuser and to allow yourself self-value and self-love so that you will no longer be continuously be hurt by them.
Going NO CONTACT means we stop hurting ourselves.
We can’t change a narcissist and the more we try to control them the more it is us who are changed and controlled.
It is only through control of ourselves that healing, sanity, and peace will come back and that is by leaving our abuser.
I will explain No Contact and Low Contact clearly and the vital importance to you this is and your healing by doing this for yourself, in another post.
I hope as always that this is helpful to you. Remember you are not alone on your path to healing. Reach out to me even if it is to just say hello.
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With Love
Debbi