How to Heal from Narcissism Abuse
Rebuilding self-trust after a relationship that taught you not to trust yourself
You Are the Cake
If you are partnered — or have been partnered — with someone who made you feel small, this is a trauma.
Pop culture has finally given us language for it. Gaslighting. Coercive control. Love bombing. And for a lot of people, that language landed like a door unlocking: oh. That was a real thing that happened to me. I wasn’t crazy.
Here is what makes it a trauma rather than just a bad relationship: it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens one moment at a time, until you don’t trust yourself at all.
You think you understand a moment. You think you’re moving through your life like a reasonable person. And then you’re told you’ve got it wrong. Your thinking is wrong. Your perspective is wrong. Your clothes, your decisions, your reaction, your tone. You get talked into remembering things that you’re not sure ever happened — and the not-being-sure is worse than the accusation, because now the shame is coming from inside the house.
That’s the damage. Not any single fight. The end result: you no longer know which way is up, and you start to believe you need this person — or some person — to get you through your life.
The good news is in your wiring
The same thing that got you here can get you out.
Your nervous system learned this. It learned to scan, to second-guess, to check someone else’s face before checking your own gut. That learning is neuroplasticity — and neuroplasticity doesn’t only run in one direction. The wiring that was built can be built differently.
But nobody is going to reach in and rewire it for you. You pull yourself out, one tiny moment at a time.
You notice the people who genuinely like you. You notice the decisions you’ve made that served you well. You let yourself be proud of the parts of you that you’ve brought to your life — to your work, to your friendships, to the people you love. Small, unglamorous, repeated. That’s how the new wiring gets laid down.
Now the harder part
You were making decisions the whole way through.
I can feel the rage coming up as you read that, so let me be precise about what I mean — and what I don’t.
I don’t mean you caused it. What was done to you was done to you, and no choice of yours made it okay. Full stop.
What I mean is this: there were choices along the way that were made out of your old wiring. The wiring that said I need this person in order to have the things, the feelings, the life, the security I want. They filled a void. And the story that told you it was safe to land there turned out not to be true.
I’m not pointing at that to assign blame. I’m pointing at it because it’s the place your power actually lives. If the choosing was yours, the choosing can be yours again.
So name it. What did you believe this person could give you that you didn’t believe you could give yourself?
Financial security. A family. Self-esteem. Value. Co-regulation. Fun. Feeling wanted.
That list is normal, by the way. Why would we partner with anyone who wasn’t adding something to our lives? The problem isn’t the wanting. The problem is when the wanting outsources things you’re actually able to source yourself.
What the feeling is really asking for
You can validate your own feelings. Nobody else needs to tell you what you feel or what you need. But that only works if you know yourself well enough to name it accurately.
Here’s what I mean.
You’re angry that your partner is too busy with everyone else. That anger is real — I’m not taking it from you.
But underneath it, the actual message might be: I want to feel like you’re around. I want to feel like you enjoy me and want to be near me.
There’s nothing wrong with that need. Nothing at all. The work is asking, before you speak: what is this feeling actually about? Because “you’re never here” and “I miss you, and I want to feel wanted by you” will land in two completely different places in your partner’s nervous system — and only one of them tells them what you actually need.
One person can’t be all of it
Our partners cannot fulfill everything we need. That’s not a failure of love; it’s math.
Some of it we do ourselves — setting limits, making hard calls about where our life is going, listening to a need and then actually meeting it. Some of it belongs to other relationships: family, friends, community, the people who get a different part of you. We’re wired for connection, plural. Putting all of it on one person isn’t fair to them and it doesn’t work for you.
Run a bath. Call a friend. Decide not to attend the family event. These sound too small to matter. They’re not. Every one of them is a deposit into the account marked I can trust myself.
You are the cake. Perfectly made, baked exactly the way you were meant to be.
Anyone who comes into your life is the icing. Icing is wonderful — but it has to make the cake better. Not sit on top of it as a sloppy mess.
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-Dating
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and more coming soon!
With you in it,
Miran Dalley, LCPC Healing Hearts Wellness Center HealingHeartsLove.com
