Emotional and psychological harm

Being subjected to narcissistic abuse

A relationship with someone whose need for control, admiration, and superiority came at your direct expense. Cycles of idealization and devaluation. Being made to feel special and then disposable. Having your reality consistently rewritten to center them. Leaving feeling like you lost yourself somewhere along the way.

Being adored and discarded in cycles by someone who needed you smaller leaves a specific disorientation, a grief for the person they pretended to be and for who you were before. Survivors often leave these relationships fluent in someone else's needs and strangers to their own. Reintroducing yourself to yourself is the work, and it goes better witnessed.

What can follow an experience like this

No two people carry the same experience the same way. These are some of the effects that people with this experience often describe. Having some of them, all of them, or none of them says nothing about how real what happened to you was.

C-PTSD When trauma happened repeatedly, over a long time, or at the hands of people who were supposed to care for you, the effects go deeper than a single event. Trust issues Trust that was broken, repeatedly, by people who were supposed to be safe. Shame Not guilt about something you did. Depression Not just sadness. People-pleasing Anticipating what others need before they ask. Identity disturbance Not being able to answer simple questions about yourself. Anxiety The background hum of dread that is always there. Fawn response When the nervous system learned that the way to survive threat was to appease it, some people learned to become whatever the threatening person needed them to be.

Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and nothing here decides what is wrong with you, because nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. This page exists so that when you are ready, you can find people who understand it from the inside.

You do not have to carry this alone.

Bridge of Hope Recovery is a free, anonymous, peer-led fellowship for trauma survivors. Meetings run throughout the week by phone, by video, and in person. No cost, no waitlist, no one asking for your real name.

Find a meeting Join the fellowship

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