Life after the narcissist – regain your confidence and self-esteem.
Do You comprehend why you were targeted by a narcissist in the first place? That should be your number one priority. Why did they pick you? What is it about you that they felt they can manipulate and take advantage of you. Are you investigating this question now for yourself? That’s an important issue because you want to regain your confidence and self-esteem.
The second step that you owe to yourself is to fix your inner wounds.
Before your last experience, you have thought therapy was a joke. You can go to multiple therapists, and they can tell you they don’t know how to help you. It can really cost you a lot before you find a therapist who has specialized in narcissism with experience. A therapist will tell you that you have wounds that have never been addressed right.
You can have buried pain your entire life.
It makes you a scapegoat for narcissists. You have to overcome your pain. Remember that you have one of the biggest hearts you will ever see. Don’t put everyone else above yourself. That is like striking gold for a narcissist.
You can’t kill yourself trying to make your last Narcissist happy. If you have a narcissist in your life, they are not only sucking the life out of you. They are also making you sicker and depleting you financially. And what will you do? Keep giving? Do you see the problem here?
Your brain had been programmed at childhood to accept abuse and reward it.
Did I know I was programmed like that? No. The therapist pointed it out for me. So, the moral of the story is that all of us narcissist survivors have our own inner wounds. That is what gave us the big heart that we all have.
We did not become what we were enclosed within childhood. Instead, we became the opposite. This change made us very loving and giving individuals.
For general background on the relationship between distressing experiences, emotions and bodily responses, you can read ** The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It adds depth to the topic of understanding the effects of past experiences. These book links are affiliate links: a purchase may earn us a small commission, at no extra cost to you.
In theory, you get what you put out in the world.
But that could not be further from the truth. So, you have to master that you do have value and purpose. You are no one’s doormat. You do not deserve abuse. There is a special need to regain your confidence and self-esteem.
Once you learn why you were the target of the narcissist, you will begin a journey to healing. You will start understanding your value and self-worth.
There’s an online program, “Life after the narcissist.” It is all about addressing this question. This is an excellent program. It focuses on what’s of primary importance to recover from narcissistic abuse.
For further background, see our page on committing to your recovery.
The narcissist has trained the abuse victim to focus their lives on the abuser.
You can use self-guided meditations which are directed at abuse victims. That can be helpful for you because the reflections can take your mind away. The techniques to speak to the brain to enhance self-esteem and valuing self are very useful too.
It can be difficult for empathetic people to give themselves the OK to focus on themselves. Just knowing it’s OK and essential for recovery. Think of things you like to do, that make you happy, and do those things. To explore which habits, needs and choices reflect your own priorities, you can also read ** How to Do the Work by Nicole LePera (English edition). It fits this focus on making room for your own everyday life.
For a broader framework on rebuilding self-trust and daily life, see the Dutch-language central guide to recovery after narcissistic abuse.
Gratitude is extremely helpful to regain your confidence and self-esteem.
There’s a lot of brain science dealing with how beneficial gratitude is. It can be difficult for an abuse victim to feel grateful, but it’s possible.
For many, although, the abuse is horrific and painful. Your situation can help you learn more about yourself. It teaches you what’s important in life. It also helps in developing friendships with friends and loved ones who have stood by you in crisis.
Just being alive, and in health, are things to be grateful for. You can be thankful for having escaped from narcissistic abuse is a big one. To rebuild the devalued and abused self, it’s important to build supportive relations with friends. Having friends or loved ones who will support and confirm you are helpful.
Doing something you’re good at is a good way of constructing self-esteem.
It will take some time to find yourself again. There will be a process of grieving, not just for the end of craziness, but for yourself as well. Typically, the individual has sustained much damage. This is not something you can coast over.
In a narcissist relationship, the empath has been so depreciated that the empath doesn’t recognize their own value. The bond was disturbingly dysfunctional.
The healing process will be unlike the healing that one goes through when a non-narcissistic relationship comes to an end. The mind f***s a person sustains from a narcissistic relationship can be surreal, utterly damaging.
A narcissist does not want your love.
Intimacy absolutely disgusts and repels them. Love is really not something that a narcissist desires or want to be within a hundred-mile radius of. They want to avoid considering the possibility that they’re adorable, either.
All of that would mean authenticity. It involves dropping the mask of the false ego. This mask holds their crushing inner shame at bay.
Love is a threat to the integrity of that psychological defence.
So love can’t change the narcissist, no. Unhappily not. If any change occurs due to your love of them, it will be most decidedly negative, defensive or hostile.
A narcissist wants your supply, and that is all.
The only love you can get is from some of your friends. You can start to give the love you need to yourself. Although in the beginning, it will be bizarre to give it to yourself. For further reading on self-criticism and treating yourself with greater kindness, ** Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff fits this effort to rebuild a more caring relationship with yourself.
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Toxic people and their organizations cause great damage to society. Everyone is subject to it and our society is increasingly moving towards even more narcissistic anti-democratic tendencies. That’s why we give you the growth tasks for free. They are full of self-care tips, self-healing tips and options for trauma processing so that you have more opportunities.
Thank you so much for your support!
For further reading on self-awareness and relationships: ** How to Be the Love You Seek by Nicole LePera (English e-book).
You can translate all the text: Are you taking a step forward today with a growth task?
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Liefs,
Annemie en Johan Persyn-Declercq (auteurs)
update : 09102026
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