As I coach people through narcissist abuse recovery, I see a behavioral and emotional trend occurring about the third week in. It typically happens after an abuse victim is feeling pretty good about having little or no contact with the narcissistic abuser. Emotionally, the victim becomes confused and can no longer differentiate between the feeling of normal break-up sadness and the sensation of having second thoughts. Behaviorally, it often leads to major self-sabotage.
This trend of self-doubt causes me much angst because I remember my own behavior with the narcissist and if I had known then what I know now I would have never succumbed to the false feeling. I would have checked myself with the calm understanding that my logical head, in all traumatic situations, always impatiently waits for my heart to catch up with it. Impatience, however, is never a virtue. Inevitably, it becomes the most detrimental obstacle to recovery from emotional – and often physical abuse – at the hands of a narcissistic partner.
About the third week into recovery, even as we talk everything through, all of the awful memories of the narc’s chaos campaign begin to fade away. I recognize this all too well. We miss this person so much that we contemplate not living. The narcissist, of course, is living just fine as he or she always has because moving on is what they do best. The problem is that we turn our sadness into something else…something it is NOT. We associate sadness with feeling “wishy-washy” and this is anything but logical. I was guilty of this myself and it was my downfall. However, now that I guide people to recovery, I realize how big an obstacle this confusion really is.
One woman that I speak with regularly and love dearly is having second thoughts about her divorce from a man that I believe is probably one of the worst narcissistic abusers that I have ever known about. I told her that his moving out was going to bring some very sad moments and this was normal. We are NOT narcissists and therefore we need time to heal. We simply cannot flip a switch. Out heart needs to catch up with our head and this is no easy race. We want so much to find a quick fix for recovery that we inadvertently misread our own feeling and sabotage the journey. We confuse our post-breakup sadness with being “wishy-washy” and since our response to that wishy-washy feeling throughout the abuse has always been to find our way back to the narcissist, we automatically – and out of habit – turn down that same damn road. In essence, we give up too quickly. Think how crazy this is….we know damn well that we do NOT want to be with this person yet if we linger a tad too long in the post-breakup sadness, we somehow think that going back to the monster is the answer. It makes no sense
To recover from narcissist abuse, we have to learn to trust ourselves. We must literally ignore the heart because the heart – in these types of relationships – will always try to trick us into taking the path of least resistance. Just when our head has finally convinced us to go down the right path, our heart does a 360. Humans are so fearful of the unknown – even when they know that the unknown all but guarantees a brighter future – that they stupidly return to the abyss for another round. The place of abuse actually becomes comfortable because at least we know what the future brings. In light of the fact that we only get to live once, to back slide is doing ourselves a great disservice.
I hear this statement many times a day: I do not want this person back yet I miss him so much. What the fuck is wrong with me? My response, in turn, is the same every time: Nothing is wrong with you. You are normal. You bleed. You feel pain. This too shall pass. You will get better but you must be patient. We are all grown-ups here and a grown-up should know that a full recovery takes time. While it certainly possible for someone to wake up the day after a break-up feeling awesome, I would have to say that this is the exception to the rule.
Allow yourself time to grieve the loss of love. Stay self-aware. Learn to recognize normal feelings of sadness and avoid knee-jerk reactions to it. Give yourself a chance at happiness within an unknown future. Consider that the end of the path appears blurry because the future is still to be created and not because something bad awaits you. Have faith that your personal and emotional freedom from narcissistic abuse is absolutely the right thing to do.