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Transcripción del video

. Let's take a moment to remind ourselves of all that we are and have in our lives we can be grateful for, that we can fill ourselves up with. 

Firstly, find a quiet place where you can sit and reflect. If you like, bring your hands over your heart and take a deep breath. Allow your mind to settle down and appreciate the experience of coming to rest. Bring to mind an intention to spend the next several minutes focused on gratitude for the people, experiences, and things in your life.

Start by taking a few breaths to appreciate you. Thank yourself for making time and space for this practice. Extend this positive feeling even further by appreciating one aspect of you: maybe your legs for carrying you through the world, your smile, or an act of compassion you offered to another.

Part II is for someone else in your life. 

Turn your mind to a person or people who have been kind to you, and take a deep breath into your heart. Maybe you think about a relative who helped care for you, a neighbor who is always willing to lend a helping hand, or even a stranger who performed a random act of kindness. Take a deep breath as you give thanks for someone who made a difference in your life.

Turn your mind to one thing you appreciate in the world around you. Perhaps you focus on feeling grateful for the home in which you live. Maybe you focus your attention on something in the natural world that you are thankful for, such as the beauty of a sunset, or trees that bring us shade, or the earth that holds us all.

Take as long as you like, repeating all three steps as often as suits you. When you are finished, take a final few moments to consider how you feel before stepping back out into the world. Perhaps you notice feelings of warmth or positivity; however, if you are not feeling grateful, it’s important to know that you are not failing at this practice. Make space for whatever you feel. Attending to your authentic experience is the most important part of the practice.

 in this session. Click the link and you'll be taken to our SoulMedicine website, where you'll find a full written version of this course. 

📚 Book: Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson. 

This book identifies different patterns of emotional immaturity in parents, and this can affect our sense of self growing up and beyond. It also addresses how we heal from these relationships - how we can set the boundaries that are meaningful to us and allow us to experience the fullest version of ourselves in relationships. 

Cualquiera puede vivir abuso, y nunca es culpa de la persona sobreviviente. En este curso, discutimos las tácticas abusivas, el ciclo del control coercitivo, la ciencia del trauma, y como el abuso puede afectar nuestros límites, relaciones, y mecanismos de afrontamiento. Nos empoderamos para construir autoestima positiva con herramientas como la escritura en diarios, la práctica somática y la comunidad.

Recuperándonos de las relaciones tóxicas y abusivas

Week 1: Anyone can be abused

Week 2: Why we stay — the mind and body in abuse

Week 3: Discovering our self

Week 4: What abuse is really about

Week 5: Difficult emotions

Week 6: Staying, leaving, coping, and what happens next

Week 7: Relationships and reflections

Overview

We take a deep dive into narcissistic behaviour and its involvement in abuse, look at different abusive tactics in relationships with a narcissist, and examine the role of early experiences in forming relationships. 

Narcissism, attachment, and relationships

Hi everyone! It’s Flora and Dina here. Welcome to Week 3 of the course! Wow! How are you feeling?

This week, we’re exploring ourselves. After all, building up ourself is one of our greatest tools in recovering from the trauma bonding and manipulation of an abusive relationship. But to do that, we need to understand a little bit more about how this sense of self might have been damaged or changed by experiencing abuse. That’s why today, we’re talking about narcissistic traits and how they can manifest in abusive relationships, and how this can influence our sense of self, and our early attachments. 

But first, as always, we do a grounding exercise. 

Today’s grounding exercise is...Today’s grounding exercise will be...

another exercise with our feet, like we did in Week 1! For 1 minute we’re going to focus on our feet. Where are they placed right now? Are you sitting, standing or lying down? What can you feel with your toes, the sole of your foot. Pay attention to any sensations there.

What is a fruit or vegetable that other people seem to love, but you don’t really understand?

Hmm, I'm trying to think! Weird fruits... I like most fruits! What were you going to say, Dina? 

Mine is tomato. Ah. I hate tomato. I don't touch it. If it touches anything, I won't touch it. And I don't understand how people like it. And I know its like the most commonly loved food, but. 

Do you like it cooked, or it's just raw that you don't—? No, none of it. Oh, wow, okay. 

I could accept it as tomato puree where you can not see any, it's like just a paste, maybe, but other than that. 

Fair enough. Yeah I don't think, I think I like pretty much all fruits and vegetables. Maybe.. lychees I get a bit freaked out by 'cos they just remind me of eyeballs, they're very slimy and weird. But then if I wasn't looking at it, I'd still think it tasted nice. So yeah, there we go.

Yeah, that's fair enough then. We would love to know which kind of fruit or vegetable that you don't like, and that other people love. Now we're back to our content. 

We ended the last session talking a little bit about traumatic bonding, and how we all tend to seek out what is familiar to us. We are creatures of habit, so it makes sense that we seek familiar ways of relating, familiar dynamics and familiar roles. For many of us, feeling confused, helpless, powerless, and hopeless is familiar because of our earlier experiences.

In today’s session we will build on this idea by exploring earlier dynamics that make us more sus-se-ptible to be trauma bonded with an abuser and discuss what it is like to be in a relationship with someone who has narcissistic traits. 

It is important to state that this exploration and reflection in no way suggests that we should blame ourselves for the abuse or that we have brought it upon ourselves. Hopefully, this session will help us understand even better why that is true. It is one of our four main truths, after all - it’s never our fault. 

Many of us find ourselves in repeated cycles of abuse and feeling the same way each time. We might have felt used, torn and unsure of ourselves. Or, we might have caught ourselves thinking: “If only I did this differently, they would change” or “maybe I deserve to be treated this way” or “when we move house, or have a baby, or get married, things will change”.

If you are currently in a toxic or abusive relationship, you may feel torn between how you feel and what you know. We want to acknowledge that leaving a toxic relationship is incredibly difficult, and there is no shame in taking time to figure out our feelings and trying to fully understand what is happening before making a decision. We trust that you know your situation and circumstances better than anyone else. We’ll be going more into this decision in Week 6. 

For those of you who have ended a toxic relationship, some days you might miss the good, tender, loving bits of that relationship. That is also okay and completely normal.

 how we got into toxic relationships, what kept us there, and what might have stopped us from moving on

. So, we invite you all to take a few minutes to wonder: what is love? Note down the first five words that come to mind. Try not to overthink it. If you want to, you can pause this video and come back. 

Are you back? Great! So for most of us, what we’ve written down will be words that are synonymous to warmth, fuzziness, excitement and happiness – in short, a very romantic version of love; the kinds we’ve read about in folklore, fairy tales and watched in cartoons and movies.

However, our actual experiences of love might be very different from this. 

Now, let’s take a few minutes to wonder: How have I felt in my relationships? When answering this, this is not by any means limited to romantic partnerships, it applies to family, friends and any other relationships we have been in. So, note down the first five words that come to your mind. Again, you can pause the video and come back, if you want to write it down in your thought diary. 

Now have another look at these words. You will find that the answers to this question offer a clearer picture of how 

 have felt and been made to feel in relationships. 

·  Hypervigilant/always walking on eggshells

·  Bad about ourselves/ Diminished self-esteem

More often than you haven’t in a relationship, there is a high chance your partner has or had narcissistic traits.

Notice how many of the words in the list we just read aloud are the same as or similar to words that you listed a few minutes ago in response to the question about how you’ve felt in relationships. Are there any words on the list that resonate with your experience that you hadn’t thought of previously? 

When we think of narcissists, we think of someone with very high self-esteem, a lot of confidence, self-assuredness and charm. We tend to think of narcissism as a harmless obsession with one's looks or their achievements. 

In fact, the word actually comes from “Narcissus”. In Greek Mythology, Narcissus was the son of Sisyphus (the river god) and Liriope (a nymph). He was blessed with exceptional beauty and upon discovering his own reflection in the water, he fell in love with himself and eventually died because he could not look away from his own image. Our understanding of narcissism as a simple, harmless self-obsession with one’s outwardly appearance might come from this myth.

While some of these things are true, contrary to popular belief, a narcissist is deeply insecure and unsure of themselves. Being raised by, or being in a relationship with one, can leave us feeling:

·  Doubting our own experience – we will expand on this later

·  Constantly feeling responsible for the state of the relationship

narcissists lack the ability to empathise or see experience through the lens of another person

. Their own childhood wounds usually leave them with such poor self-esteem that they repeatedly seek, fish out and elicit validation and reassurance. There is a constant need to be praised, admired, looked up to, validated, applauded and sometimes, even feared.  This is called 

What is that? Well, most of us enjoy being told that we look good, are nice people, and have accomplished something admirable. There is nothing wrong with seeking and wanting validation, and it is only natural for a compliment, praise, or a nice comment to make us feel good about ourselves.

 is different. What makes it different, and harmful, is that  for narcissists, this kind of validation is the 

 of all relationships and interactions they have. If they are not constantly told how great they are, they might present with explosive rage and tantrums. 

They also see every person in their life as an extension of themselves. For instance, it might be really important for a narcissistic man to have a beautiful, accomplished partner because it makes 

 look good. Similarly, a narcissistic mother might be very preoccupied with her child’s performance at school, because she sees the child as an extension of herself and the child’s achievements serve as narcissistic supply. Other times the narcissist might only want to go to the best clubs, universities and restaurants because by association, it makes them look powerful and accomplished.   

It’s important here to acknowledge here that there is a difference between having some narcissistic traits, what we often in casual conversation might call simply ‘being a narcissist’, and having Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is a mental health condition. While some of the same psychological processes are involved, like a general focus on the self, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is ultimately a mental health disorder, involving many other processes like how emotions are regulated and difficulties forming a cognitive concept of the self.  Having this condition, or any mental health condition, does not make anyone abuse someone else; after all, having a mental health problem is not a choice, in contrast to abusing, which is a conscious decision someone continuously makes - however much they might deny it. 

Finally, who is the main person who suffers as the result of a mental health problem, who experiences the most distress because of it? The person themself. The same is not true of abuse - abuse is about one person or people manipulating another person. It’s that long-term harm we talked about in the very first sesion. So when we talk about someone being ‘a narcissist’, we’re talking about someone with a collection of narcissistic traits, NOT someone who has the diagnosis or condition of a personality disorder. 

So, back to the main content. When we are in a relationship with a narcissist, it can be almost impossible to see it as abuse because we are so deeply in it. Especially because most of these types of relationships start off with a lot of intensity, excitement, and 

During the loveboming stage, it often feels like we are being seen, understood, admired and valued for who we are. Lovebombing can look like constant text messages, repeatedly being told we are loved, or grand romantic gestures that sweep us off our feet. And it can involve validation of different parts of our self; maybe the person relates to a really important personal experience we’ve had, disclosing to us much earlier in the relationship that they’ve had the same experience than anyone else we’ve ever known. They build a huge foundation of trust and intimacy in a very short amount of time. And that is exactly what makes it so hard to identify narcissistic patterns in an intimate relationship. 

It is important to note that while lovebombing is a common feature of toxic relationships and perhaps one that many survivors have experienced, it is not limited to narcissistic abuse. Many survivors of non-narcissistic abuse also experience it. However, it is almost always present at the start of relationships that turn into narcissistic abuse.

We keep thinking back to how great it was once, and how it felt like a dream or a fairy tale. Even when we are feeling manipulated and confused, we hold on to the hope that things will go back to the way they were. A part of us believes that if only we did things differently, if only we worked on ourselves, if only we paid more attention to their needs, if only we watched the same shows as them or liked the same sport as them, they might love us the same way they did at the start of the relationship.

Many people who have experienced narcissistic abuse in an intimate relationship often report that they felt “completed” by their partner. It is also what makes it so hard to leave such relationships. 

We fear that if we leave, we will be not good enough or incomplete in ways that we cannot change without this person. 

If you feel like this or have ever felt like this, know that it is a normal part of this experience. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with how narcissists make other people around them feel.

We may find ourselves thinking “how did I get myself into this?” or “things like this do not happen to people like me, I’m a strong, independent person”. The truth is, anyone can find themselves in one or multiple relationships like this.

 There is no profile for a type of person who experiences abuse. It can happen to anyone, regardless of our values, privilege, financial status or qualifications. 

This is one of our main truths - abuse can happen to anyone. 

That said, it is also important to acknowledge that sometimes systems of power and oppression can perpetuate narcissistic abuse and make it harder to leave the abuser. For instance, you might know that leaving the relationship could mean that you do not get custody of your children together, or you risk losing custody altogether. Sometimes, leaving may not feel like an option if the abuser alone brings in and controls the finances. Other times it might feel too unsafe to leave because it could put us at risk with our families or society in general.

Remember that nothing is more important than your safety and wellbeing. And, the decision that is best for you might be different from a decision that is best for another individual in the same situation.

It can be especially hard to leave a narcissist because often, they present a very sunny, charming face to the rest of the world. Friends, family members and peers on the outside may not believe our experiences of the abuser as a partner because it does not align with the façade the abuser has presented. This can of course, be a deeply painful and isolating experience. 

Remember, how you feel or have felt is valid and real. 

The risk of doubting our own experience is especially high if we have experienced narcissistic abuse. This is because 

 is a very common strategy used by abusers, especially narcissists, to keep us in the relationship.

Being gaslighted means we are repeatedly made to doubt our own thoughts, feelings and experiences. We might be told “that never happened” or “you imagined it” or “I never said that”. Sometimes it can look like being told that “you’re overreacting” or “you’re just too sensitive” or “it’s not that big a deal, get over it”. Do any of these examples resonate with your experience?

When we are repeatedly and habitually made to question our realities and experiences, it can be incredibly hard to see abuse for what it is. We might think “oh he’s not so terrible” or “he loves me he’s just overworked” or even “maybe it really wasn’t that big a deal, and I did overreact”.  However, sometimes there is a mismatch between how we 

How much attention we pay to our feelings or what our bodies are telling us depends on our earlier experiences and what we learnt in our early relationships. The connection between experiencing it, and allowing it into our active awareness, is key. If our connection to our feelings, sensation, and the truth of our experience didn’t form in our early years or has been damaged by bad experiences, the abuser’s repeated gaslighting may feel familiar. So, we’ll constantly feel like they know better than we do.

Gaslighting is in itself a form of abuse, but it also sets the tone for other types of abuse. And we can be especially susceptible to this if we have been raised in a family where this was a regular occurrence. Even well-intentioned, loving parents can sometimes subject their children to gaslighting. But this is why now, we want to take a moment to talk about how our early experiences can influence our experiences in relationships later on in life.

When a child’s reality is repeatedly and regularly denied from a young age, they are primed to accommodate someone else’s reality over their own.

 This happens in so many complex ways, from our smallest interactions to our largest experiences. But let’s discuss some broad categories of experiences that lead us to not trust our internal systems of knowing - such as bodily sensations and intuition-  and result in a shaky sense of self.

1- As children we repeatedly got into trouble and were emotionally or physically abused for things we did not realise were wrong.

If as a child, we had repeated experiences of feeling ambushed or being told off for something we did not realise was not allowed, we are likely to have internalised that the world is unpredictable, and we cannot keep ourselves safe.

This is different from doing something that feels like a calculated risk- such as skipping class or eating too much dessert. For instance, a child might light a candle and run around with it because they did not know it was dangerous or a fire hazard, only to have a parent/caregiver hit them and take it away before scolding them.

Since the child did not know it was a risk or what they were doing was dangerous, they might feel like something is terribly wrong with them, or that they themselves are very bad. 

In their own reality, the child was doing something fun and exciting, however, the parent’s response might make them feel like they are at the mercy of the parent’s reality. This can be especially damaging because as children, the way we perceive power is very skewed. We are essentially at the mercy of the adults around us, and these types of experiences might leave us very scared of authority, feeling helpless, and like our safety is not in our control.

2- We were exposed to different levels of abuse and told that 

If as children, we found ourselves repeatedly being told that we are scolded or hit because we deserved it, we are likely to internalise the idea that we are treated badly because we have done something wrong.

Sometimes parents displace their own stresses and anxieties onto children. For instance, let's imagine a parent who came home after a rough day at work, and discovered that their child had not yet done their homework. Upon finding out, they yelled at their child and then punished them by making them do extra work or house chores. They told the child they warranted that punishment.

The child on the receiving end of this experience would believe they deserved this disproportionate bad treatment and abuse, when in actuality, the parent was largely displacing their own stress onto the child. These feelings of believing that we deserve to be treated badly are often carried into adulthood, and can make it hard to see future relationships as abusive, because on a much deeper, unconscious level, we feel like we deserve the poor treatment.

3- We were repeatedly told how we think and feel is not okay

If as a child, we constantly heard things like:

We might find it hard to see our own experiences and feelings as legitimate and valid. We might also feel like we are not allowed to feel or express any intense emotions because they upset people around us. This can prevent us from developing an internal system of awareness and regulation. And then as adults, we might experience crippling self-doubt, intense bouts of shame, and a frequent sense of emptiness.  

Because like we were just saying, very often, relationships with narcissists start with a period of lovebombing. This phase can make all of these feelings go away for a small time, because it makes us feel complete and admired. We may spend many years chasing the high that initial period brought, either in the same relationship or other relationships, because it made us feel that our feelings were good and that we were accepted and wanted. 

 4 - Difficult conversations that needed to happen were not had

Sometimes parents believe that hiding harsh truths about life can protect children and keep them safe. For example, if a parent or both parents are unemployed, a family member is very sick, or the parents are going through a break up – many parents might choose to gloss over these realities and tell the child “everything is fine” or ”we’re okay”.

In fact, it is much healthier to have these conversations in an age-appropriate way and explain to children what is happening. Children are incredibly perceptive and are likely picking up on whatever tension is going on within the family. By not having these difficult conversations, we as children learn that we cannot trust our inner body, and just need to rely on an intellectual kind of understanding. As adults, this can look like trying to intellectualise our experience in abusive relationships even when it doesn’t feel right. Or, to just trust what we’re told - to ignore our perception that something is off, something doesn’t feel quite right, because someone in our life is telling us that actually “everything is fine”.

Let’s just take a moment to break. Actually, why don’t you pause this video and take a few minutes to think about your own childhood. Did you experience any of the categories we just discussed?

So, to bring all of this material together. We started today’s session by talking about our need as humans to seek out what is familiar to us. 

Sometimes we find ourselves in repeated cycles of narcissistic abuse because we were raised by someone with narcissistic traits

For many of us, being raised by a narcissist means that our normal or default setting is being overly attuned to the needs of another person and not having healthy boundaries, because we have always been an extension of someone else. 

So, this early template of relationships and how we should feel in them can play a role in keeping us from leaving toxic relationships. 

Also, children of narcissistic parents are likely to:

How many of these feel true for you? Take a minute to reflect on your own experience of being parented. Do it first with one parent and then the other. This can feel really painful, and like we are betraying our parents, especially if they are no longer with us. If this feels like too much and too intense, do not push yourself. Just notice the sensations in your body. 

Wow, today has been an intense session. Lots of difficult and complex feelings might have come up — I know they have for me just reading it. Remember that you do not need to make sense of it all just now. These exercises are for you to think about in your time, as suits your recovery. You may relate to them a lot, or not at all - both of those situations are normal. Just let yourself sit with the information as you process what is and isn’t useful to you personally. If you want more information on boundaries in the context of our relationships with our parents, our ‘Creating Boundaries’ course has a lot of useful information. 

a gratitude exercise. Relationships with narcissistic people can leave us feeling empty, like we’re just a vessel for whoever they are. So today, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of all that we are and have in our lives we can be grateful for, that we can fill ourselves up with. 