Feeling Alive Again After Narcissistic Abuse

Narcissistic abuse only takes place if you can be convinced to rewrite the script in your mind about who you are and what your life is about.

We all live with a personal myth; a set of beliefs which outline how we should live, why we should live, and who we are in the scope of society. We usually source this from our family and the world at large.

As children, we possess an overabundance of aliveness, and it is the role of family and society to teach us which impulses are allowed, which we should dampen, and which we should outright kill off.

In a free, empowering family or society, we are given plenty of space and opportunity to express our passion, dreams and energy. We can chase goals, speak up for what we need, make noise, take up space, dance, and more. This is the essence of aliveness; feeling that you have a right to spontaneously express your life energy on your terms.

A narcissist interferes with this process for two reasons:

1. Your spontaneous aliveness makes you powerful, and therefore difficult to control.

2. Redirecting your aliveness away from life and toward the narcissist makes you a much more efficient source of narcissistic supply.

The narcissist rewrites your script by engaging you and bombarding you with alleged ‘facts’ about yourself in the form of shaming and fear-mongering. They tell you everything you do wrong, question every decision you make, and ridicule anything that does not fit the myth they have for you. If you do not comply, they give you the silent treatment, triangulate or threaten to leave.

And what is this myth exactly? Simply put: You are a worthless, incompetent person who needs a capable, superior person like the narcissist to direct your life — otherwise you are nothing.

Any person in their right mind would laugh this story out of the room. But the narcissist does not betray their plan in such words. Their narrative consists of thousands of threads spread throughout countless situations and interactions.

The narcissist gives potency to their strategy by activating your sense of shame and fear. These powerful emotions have the capacity to overwhelm you and temporarily overwrite your ability to reason. When they are incited for long enough, the threads weave together and overwrite any previous belief you had about who you are. If the narcissist can succeed in isolating you from your friends and family, this process accelerates considerably.

The worst part of this ‘killing’ process is how it deadens you if you stay with the narcissist, and if you leave.