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:
Your spontaneous aliveness makes you powerful, and therefore difficult to control.
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.
Death By Staying
If you remain locked in the narcissist’s dystopia, they will cut off all avenues to spontaneous life. Narcissists villainize the outside world, including your family and friends. They despise animals, and might try to stop you from getting a pet to love. A life away from the narcissist is a threat. Your hobbies are ridiculed. Your capacity for independent thought is broken down via continual judgements and watching everything you do.
In short, the narcissist does not want you ‘alive’. They want your behaviours and beliefs programmed purely for one purpose: to provide them narcissistic supply. You are only ‘alive’ to them insofar as you are at their disposal.
Death By Leaving
Walking away from the narcissist also produces death, since leaving means a complete collapse of the ‘self’ you have come to know.
Recall that who you are has been wiped clean, and replaced by the narcissist’s selfish mythology. Who you are has been rooted in the whims of a paranoid, traumatised person. Your emotions, your psychology and your life energy have been flowing through the well-oiled machine the narcissist wove together. The loss of this creates a psychological death. Without your old identity, you have no ‘self’ left, and you are thrust into the abyss.
Many who have ended a narcissistic relationship can attest to this state of ‘hell’. It is the reason they stayed in the first place. Better to be someone who is ‘alive’ as supply, rather than be ‘nobody’ and dead as a result.
Many also tell the story of how they navigated through this terrifying state, creating a new, more well-rounded myth about who they are, based on self-love, openness, spontaneity and loving community.
Above all, those who recover and heal from narcissistic abuse discover a sense of identity rooted in their True Self. Wisdom, intuition, strength, optimism and life all spring from this infinite well. The narcissist ‘killed’ you by disconnecting you from this flowing river, and then redirecting it toward themselves as narcissistic supply.
It takes so long to rediscover this river of life because, like a plant blooming, you need to go through countless sunrises and sunsets, countless dark nights and confusing days before you have a cohesive psychological structure to call ‘Self’ again. You have the source of life within you; you only need to create the river bank for it to flow. That is the essence of recovery.
If you maintain faith and accept the period of darkness that comes with narcissistic abuse recovery, then the river of life inside will flow again. The threads of life will be re-woven into a powerful Self, this time not by a narcissist, but by you.
It is a paradox, as to embrace life is to first embrace death. Waiting on the other side is a life worth living, along with the opportunity to become who you were destined to be.