Narcissistic Abuse Recovery
Everyone encounters narcissists at some point in their lives- however; those of us who stay around long enough for abuse have typically been conditioned to such relationships in childhood. Therefore, connecting the past with the present is a crucial part to changing patterns, working on yourself, and recovery.
If you have a narcissistic parent and/or have been in a long-term relationship with a narcissist, you have likely experienced complex trauma: prolonged, systemic, and targeted neglect and abuse. You also may have been traumatized by others who fail to understand or denied the realities of what you’ve gone through.
These experiences set you up for self-deprecating beliefs that can affect every aspect of your life-your self-esteem, your health, your relationships, and even sense of identity. You may be feeling vulnerable, hyper-vigilant, and avoidant. In the end, to feel so unwanted to someone you put so much personal investment in- leaves you feeling devastated and confused as to what to do next.
Being rejected and discarded by someone you love and trust is one of the most traumatizing experiences one can ever face. It can be felt as such a difficult loss as it involves crippling experiences of betrayal, abandonment and replacement. This pain of personal rejection can cause profound hurt- hearing from someone you trust that you are unacceptable.
You also may be experiencing...
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people-pleasing tendencies
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confused relationship boundaries
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compulsive guilt and shame
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self sabotage
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poor self-care
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panic attacks
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nightmares and flashbacks
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chronic sleep disturbances
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unexplained chronic pain/illness
I can help you...
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Understand narcissistic personality disorder and its effect on others
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Change personal patterns and establish healthier boundaries
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Recognize narcissistic patterns in families and relationships
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Understand attachment and attachment trauma
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Process grief
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Build emotional resilience and self-esteem
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Recognize patterns of complex post-traumatic stress
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Validate your experience
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identify your feelings and triggers
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Discover coping styles
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Interpret narcissistic motives and how to behave
Trauma Bonding
Trauma Bonding is a form of manipulation characterized by repeated behaviors where the narcissist operates within a cycle of abuse, resulting in a trauma bond that is strengthened with every repeated wrongdoing.
Bad times bond people as strongly as good times, maybe more so. It’s important to know that narcissists don’t reserve their behaviors only for romantic relationships. Trauma bonding can happen in any adult relationship including a boss and subordinate, professor and student, amongst co-workers and parent-to-child relationships, as well as other family relationships, and impacts both children and adults.
Strangely, growing up in an unsafe home makes later unsafe situations have more holding power. This has a biological basis beyond any cognitive learning. It is trauma or developmental trauma in one's history that makes for trauma bonding.
Have you ever stayed in a relationship that you know you’d insist your friend get out of?
It’s exhilarating in the beginning.
When a rush of early feelings come on fast and furious for someone new, the excitement can be all-consuming. But, when that wave of chemistry starts feeling more like a giant tidal wave, it’s important to know how to get back to safety.
This can happen so fast that a person fails to see they’ve even been swept up in a narcissist’s storm. What is it about these toxic individuals that makes them just so... magnetic and hard to break a bond with people like this?
The distinctive feature of trauma bond is amplified rumination about the past that can take up near 100% of your brain’s real estate and hijack your nervous system for months and even years. When such relationship ends, it is usually at the painful stage, or a deep low. There is no more up, no more high. It leaves you in deep pain, craving the antidote, all the while you know you need to walk away. You seem unable to detach even though you can't trust them or may no longer even really like them. Victims stay because they are holding on to that elusive "promise" or hope.
When separated from the intense partner, the urge to make contact is usually intense because it is a stable feeling memory that makes separation from an important other person tolerable in any circumstance.
The more we educate ourselves about narcissistic personality traits, the more we can understand the psychological reasons people stay in unhealthy relationships.
Betrayal Trauma
Betrayal traumas occur when someone who we depend on and are significantly attached to betray our trust and lets us down in a critical way.
This can result from significant episodes of broken trust and violation in the relationship- such as pornography, emotional affairs, sexual affairs, sex addiction, lying, manipulation, gaslighting, emotional abuse, and/or narcissistic traits.
It affects us in every single area of our life with over 70% experiencing PTSD symptoms that accompany the emotional and physical shock. A few include:
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Anxiety
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Feeling overwhelmed
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Confusion
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Difficulty concentrating, "Brain Fog"
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Deep sense of loss and grief
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Shame and guilt
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Headaches, tremors, etc
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Hypervigilance
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Withdrawal and isolation
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Feeling fearful and unsafe
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Difficulty regulating intense emotions
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Sleep and appetite disturbances
Or you may be feeling lonely due to your partner's intimacy anorexia. You have nothing to be ashamed of, this is not your fault.
Are you ready to feel peace again?
Focused betrayal trauma treatment includes:
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Authenticity–living out your true self whether you stay in your relationship or leave
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Managing the Relational/betrayal trauma symptoms
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Understanding Sexual addiction
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Identifying patterns in relationships
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Creating a healing plan
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Establishing healthy boundaries
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Understanding intimacy anorexia
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Control
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Self Care
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Overcoming fears
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Forgiveness
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Empathy
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Goal setting
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Understanding interdependency
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Addressing Anger
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Communication strategies
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Disclosure
As a trained Partner Recovery Coach, I will help you find your inner strength in order to live boldly with joy, intention, and confidence. A new future feeling worthy, whole, cherished, peaceful, with radical self-love.
You have most likely been giving all of yourself to your spouse and family, now it is time to give back to you! I put your emotional, physical, and sexual safety first, help you to start your journey of healing, and stop recycling the abuse over and over again.
You will experience a safe place to voice your questions and receive feedback, validation, and encouragement. I will listen without judgement and help you make meaningful progress and decisions based on your values.
Trauma
(+ Developmental Trauma)
Trauma is when we have been stretched beyond our ability to rebound. Anything that overwhelms our capacity to cope and respond, and leaves us feeling helpless, hopeless and out of control. It’s that primitive alarm part of the brain.
We get sucked up into the vortex or black hole of trauma. One of the ways people deal with trauma vortex is avoiding, as soon as they feel anywhere near it they run to the degree that their life force is tremendously diminished and turn to using substances and other ways of coping because they don’t know the rest of the story.
Trauma is not what happens to us, it's how our body internalizes the experiences and the story we create about ourselves.
What happens to us is stored inside our bodies if not processed properly. If it is not attuned properly, and if it’s stored in our body it becomes stuck energy which has a compact effect into multiple diseases and issues.
Healing is about feeling safe.
Trauma impacts all areas of life including how we see ourselves, others, and the world. It impacts our personal sense of safety in relationships and in the world- how we think, feel, respond and relate to others.
It impacts how we feel in our bodies and express emotions.
Trauma is a dysregulation of the nervous system. Part of the work of healing trauma is supporting your nervous system to come into regulation. This is how we begin to reshape it.
TRAUMA DEMANDS ATTENTION!
If there's been developmental trauma in infancy, it could have an effect on the hippocampus. It can also carry on throughout life, even at 50 yrs old and beyond.
In trauma, being happy is not important to us anymore, nor is connection. We are preoccupied with the stress of all the physical and emotional areas we are being affected by. Their body doesn't lie. When we are in a state of acute trauma or sustained hyper-vigilance, it will leave the body in a sustained state of inflammation and can lead to great vulnerabilities in many areas of our health.
When we feel threatened, our defenses go up and our ability to regulate our nervous system seems to go out the window - as a result, our trauma responses can get stuck in our bodies. Polyvagal theory helps us understand the ways trauma shapes our nervous system - and, therefore, see the pathways that can lead us back to healing.
There are internal parts of us that take on the burdens of the trauma and will do everything they can to not feel the trauma again to protect us. They try to manage your life so you don't get triggered and/or don't get too close or distant to people.
Shame always accompanies trauma.
The moment of the trauma is the moment of shame. Shame is a deeply physiological response. It’s understanding what happens in our nervous system, the head goes down, the body towers over. It’s about learning what is happening so you don’t shame yourself in the shame. The shame is much more cognitive than the trauma, it set you up for shame. The shame freezes you and being frozen shames you. The shame usually comes later after the trauma.
Attachment Research
So many people with significant trauma particularly developmental trauma get stuck with a particular type of identification. I am shame worthy, I am bad. There is no curiosity, no options they’re just certain that they are not good enough, that they failed and can’t get better. That’s one of the most torturous places. The belief is the reason I’m not getting what I need is that I’m defective. That is the best we could have done as kids. Rather than doing what kids can’t do, thinking you know, “I’m a good person, I’m not getting my needs because my parents are not reliable”.
Letting go of the shame is inviting you to realize something that is very difficult. That I was in a condition with parents that I couldn’t rely on, and realize that this shame was just an adaptive belief that actually is false, means that I actually have to feel the terror of being a child. That’s a memory of the terror with parents that couldn’t protect me, to keep me safe, to see me, to soothe me. All these S’s are about ”security”. The fourth S of attachment of being secure. I got shame in order to keep me sane. A brilliant move that you now don’t need anymore. When you drop into the plane of possibility where there is love, connection, and awareness you tap into this place of, “Oh wow, I am apart of this connection, this family and to God."
I will help guide and educate you with the goal of helping you understand the recovery process, reconnect with yourself and the world, regulate your nervous system, repair attachment wounds, resolve trauma and feel safe in your body and relationships while using your strengths to build a life you love living.
With Trauma Coaching I can help you with...
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Increasing your self-awareness
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Feeling safe, supported, encouraged, and resilient
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Becoming cognizant of the neurobiological imprint trauma can have on you
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Decreasing anxiety and create peace within yourself
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Developing self-compassion
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Identifying triggers and appropriate responses
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Regulating triggering and emotional experiences
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Attachment and inner child work
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Releasing built-up trauma and become more embodied
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Learning to use somatic tools to regulate your own nervous system
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Establishing healthier boundaries
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Widening your window of tolerance
Anxiety
Whenever we feel fearful of something, are tense or worried, this is anxiety. Usually, we feel anxious about something that’s about to happen or something that we think could happen in the future.
Sometimes we feel anxious about past events, for example, ruminating on conversations or events and worrying that we did/said the wrong thing.
While unpleasant, anxiety is actually a very normal and human response to threat and its aim is to keep us safe. When we evolved, our brains developed a mechanism to release certain hormones (like cortisol and adrenaline) when it feels under threat. These hormones help us be more alert and make our blood rush to where it's needed the most.
This is what’s known as the fight, flight or freeze response because the hormones help prepare us to fight, run away or stay very still. When this response first developed, it was incredibly helpful and kept us safe from predators.
We ALL experience anxiety- it's part of being human.
A few of us experience anxiety as panic attacks, we may even struggle to get out of bed or leave the house.
Some of us experience anxiety as a shadow that follows us around all day. We feel like we are white-knuckling through life, everything has a scary spin to it - staff meetings at work, lunch with friends, or taking a trip.
Many of us more subtly. It is only obvious during seemingly stressful times or big life changes: final exams, sick parents, divorce, a new job, or moving.
We all experience anxiety, but if you feel weighted down, limited, or hijacked by that anxiety, then I'm here to help you move through anxiety and toward a place of health and wellness.
Identity Coaching
Life is about understanding who you are and why you’re here. Your career, what you earn, your material things in life- are not your identity. Stop trying to fill the voids- the misery and angst you feel- through outside things.
When you finally discover your inner identity, you then stop pursuing other people’s goals. You no longer feel the need to seek approval and thus are at peace with yourself.
Identity coaching helps you move away from all the self-doubt. Instead of believing you can't do something, you can learn to self-accept, to embrace, and to love every single part of you that has been judged and criticized your whole life. Learn to know your identity- apart from behavior and performance.
You must acknowledge and identify your systems of self-protection without condemnation, shame, or denial- and know to stay present so that your needs can be met.
Believe and rest in what God says is true of you so that you can experience peace and joy in any circumstance.
Through our work, I’ll help you discover the self-awareness needed in order to escape the boundaries that keep you stuck in who you’re “supposed to be."
I want you to live a life that is balanced- where your internal identity matches your external one.
Identity Coaching will teach you how to live freely and organically connect with those around you. When you discover your true identity, you will:
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Feel confident and self-assured in your own skin
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Heal from past trauma
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Stop apologizing for who you are and instead embrace your true self
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Find purpose in life and have deeper and more meaningful relationships
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Set healthy boundaries
Identity Coaching is about commitment and a willingness to change.
