Until you learn how to defend yourself against narcissistic abuse, you’ll never heal from it.

You have to understand that narcissistic abuse is at least one of the worst and most severe forms of torture known to mankind ever, if not the worst and most severe of all already. As you already know, you cannot fully heal or recover from a traumatic event without you learning what needs to be done so that this kind of trauma never happens to you ever again. If you thought why me, why did that happen to me in particular, me of all people, you will end up adopting a narrative that exonerates you of any necessity for learning anything new from that traumatic event, except what can serve as proof that you were right about being helpless, hopeless, useless, and worthless, and that there’s nothing you can do to have a normal life, like everybody else. You will then be consumed by a narrative around your situation in life that is disempowering to you, and only helps to further deepen how pointless it is for you to even try. Which makes you give up. Which makes you fail. Which makes you depressed. Which makes you never reach anything good. Even if you are right about how hopeless your situation in life is, and even if it is fact that there’s nothing that you can ever do to make your suffering stop while you’re still alive, without you losing anything of value in the process. Even if it really is pointless for you to even try to make anything better, even if you’re right about that, that still doesn’t change the fact that you are not becoming better because of that kind of attitude towards your situation. Again, even if you’re absolutely right about being helpless, and in an absolutely hopeless horrible situation, that still doesn’t change the fact that such negativity won’t change anything about how bad your situation is. Even if your negativity cannot possibly make anything worse, because it is already the worst. What you’re going through and what you’re suffering because of cannot be made worse by negative thinking, because your situation is absolutely the worst suffering you can possibly imagine for a human being like you. It cannot get worse, no matter what you do. And I am not denying that this could be true, or invalidating any of how you feel about your situation, because what you feel about your situation could be factual, and not just your own subjective experience or opinion. I understand. The fact remains though, that if you didn’t learn all there is that could be learned from a traumatic experience, the flashbacks and the traumas are going to haunt you for the rest of your life, adding to your currently existing suffering considerably. Adding to it a perpetual form of torture of a special kind, a special nature. One that is repetitive, intrusive, persistent, and insistent upon showing up during any moment you seem to be enjoying yourself in peace and having what could be considered a glimpse of what happiness looks like. Any time you are stuck with yourself, without doing something that distracts you from your own thoughts nonstop, you will find yourself going back to the traumatic experience or event and reliving it as if it happened yesterday, or is still happening now. That is torture. And it certainly isn’t positively contributing to the quality of your life. What are you going to do about that? There’s no escape. This follows you wherever you go, and forces itself to take place no matter what you’re doing at the moment. And the only way you can make it stop is to learn all there is that could be learned from such a traumatic experience or event, no matter what. It is not possible to say hey, I’ve learned a thing or two from that traumatic event or experience, am I now off the hook? Am I free? No, you have to leave nothing behind. Nothing whatsoever. Here, gratitude won’t be of help. Gratitude won’t save you this time. Gratitude will not work. You have to be insatiable. You have to learn it all, as is, without leaving anything behind. Leave no stone unturned. If there’s a single lesson that could be learned from such a traumatic situation, experience, or event, that you didn’t learn yet, you have accomplished nothing. You are as good as you were back then when you were still fresh out of the traumatic event. It doesn’t matter whether or not it was your fault that this traumatic thing happened to you. What you care about is making it impossible to happen again, because life with the possibility of this happening to you again is impossible. Is unbearable. You cannot go through this twice, much less more than two times. This cannot keep happening to you again and again and again. This has to stop, not just stop happening only, but stop being possible to happen to you ever again, no matter what. This has two components to it. One is making sure that doesn’t take place ever again. And the other, what are you going to do should that happen to you again, through no fault of your own. Since you took care of the first part or component, it is then supposed to be something that is impossible to happen to you ever again anyway, but theoretically speaking, let’s assume you got stuck in such situation again, what are you going to do? If the answer is I don’t know, then you are still as helpless as you were at the time where the traumatic event was still taking place. Even though you made sure that this kind of traumatic experience, event, situation, or thing is impossible to ever take place ever again, and is impossible to happen to you ever again. Even if you did everything in your power to make that the case, to make that a fact, you still haven’t dealt with the aforementioned second component. You still have no idea what are you supposed to do if something like that happened to you again. You are still as helpless as you were during the traumatic event. Even if taking care of the first component means that this could never happen to you ever again, which means learning what you need to know in order to be capable of saving yourself next time when that happens will be for nothing but theoretical purposes. Just for the sake of the argument. Hypothetically speaking. It’s like learning how to deal with an imaginary problem. Food for thought. Nevertheless, it is no joke. If the answer is a blank space, if the answer is I don’t know what to do in this case, you are absolutely helpless in the face of such traumatic thing, and you will never heal or recover from the trauma fully or completely. And I think you will achieve no healing whatsoever until you do. Until you learn how to make it stop happening to you, and also how to deal with it and make it stop if it ever happened to you again, theoretically speaking, of course. Not even partial healing. Why is that a problem? The problem is that whomever thought that hitting both components is the only way to go did not have narcissistic abuse as the mother of all traumatic experiences in mind. They didn’t see that coming. Because if they did, they would’ve just said there’s no such thing as healing from traumas or trauma recovery. It’s easier, because if you add the trauma of narcissistic abuse to the equation, everything falls apart. Not because the equation of healing itself is wrong. But, let me explain to you why. In narcissistic abuse, you’re supposed to not engage. Everything you say is supply for the narcissist, which would make them gain more energy, whilst yours is being drained. Everything that you say to the narcissist is fuel that increases the chances of them winning the fight, it makes them happy, not feel pain. It makes them feel alive. Like when a vampire feeds. It makes them feel good, really good, like no other. And you said what you said to make them stop. Good luck with that. They don’t want it to stop, they just want it to keep coming. You were told that the best course of action, the wisest and most beautiful of all courses of action in this scenario is to not engage, but instead, just walk away. Master the art of walking away. During the argument, during the conversation, right in the middle of the fight. Yeah, it means you made sure it never happens to you again. It doesn’t render you any less helpless when it does happen, though. Exposure response prevention is at the heart of psychotherapy for a reason. If you do not become strong enough to handle it next time it happens, you have learned nothing, and you are still helpless. If all you do is avoid snakes and being anywhere where snakes are likely to be found, you are still helpless when snakes show up. You still have a phobia of snakes. You’ve accomplished nothing. Every single psychologist knows that. The same could be said about healing and trauma recovery. But you still think healing is just a natural process that is all about forgetting what happened to you and moving on. Just taking time to cool off, and heal your wounds. Until the pain goes away. And you say I’ve been healed, even though it’s the narcissist within you that has taken possession of your body that says you’ve been healed, because they want you to waste your life thinking this is all there is when it comes to healing, this is as good as it can get, and that you’ve completely recovered and healed, even though you haven’t made any progress whatsoever. The narcissistic abuser dwelling inside you controlling your thoughts, actions, behaviour, decision making, and every movement you make, is the one that is convincing you that you’ve healed and recovered. Is the one who says so, not you. Insofar you haven’t learned what to do when exposed to narcissistic abuse, except the first component, making it impossible to take place ever again, not what to do when it happens to save yourself next time, if it happened to you again by mistake, which is the second component. Going no contact means you will never be exposed to such traumatic stress, experience, event, situation, or thing ever again. Means you are finally safe from narcissistic abuse. That is great. But I’m afraid, my friend, that this is not good enough. At least it’s not good enough for healing and recovery from the traumatic effects of narcissistic abuse. You don’t know what to do when it happens. You are still helpless. And that helplessness will extend to every other domain of your life, until it consumes everything. I’m not saying that going no contact is wrong. I’m not saying that you should go and face your abusers every now and then to practice how to face narcissistic abuse and win every single time instead of just hiding from it. They are right to tell you that you can’t win. You are dealing with absolute vacuum that doesn’t exist. Emptiness. A black hole. You cannot win that. Which means don’t waste your life. Don’t engage. Leave. Walk away. Don’t try to make them stop, change, or feel bad. Go no contact, and never look back. That is the only answer, and they are right about all this. I am not here to tell you otherwise. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either an abuser themselves or someone who has no idea what they’re talking about. You see why there’s a problem here? What are you going to do next time when the abuse happens? Yeah, yeah, I understand that I should’ve went no contact when I had the chance, but what if I met another narcissist, or a psychopath, or a sociopath, or an antisocial, what am I going to do? What if I’m stuck with them for quite some time until I have the chance to escape and go no contact? What am I going to do to make them stop? Everybody just says don’t respond, don’t engage, basically go grey rock, until they leave you alone. What if they kept hurting you until you were able to leave? Does this mean that I should just be okay with getting hurt and doing nothing about it over and over again for the rest of my life every single time I run into one of those people through no fault of my own? And I don’t mean the same abusers, but new ones I never knew existed? Never met before? And it doesn’t stop here, there’s the fact that if you went back in time and faced the same situation, could you have saved yourself, given you know now what you know, or are you just going to stand there and suck it all up until it’s over, and then go no contact? If faced with the same situation, are you going to get maximum trauma from it, and then go no contact? If the answer is no, of course not, you have to be able to face it and save yourself this time without getting hurt or traumatized at all this time around, how could you do so when anything there is that you can ever do except no contact will serve as fuel for the narcissist, making them more capable of abusing, hurting, and traumatizing you even further, and even harder? Which means you shouldn’t try to do anything whatsoever, except going no contact. Which means you are still helpless. You still don’t know how to save yourself from the abuse or the traumatic event itself once it happens, or once it had already started. You only know how to avoid its occurrence altogether from the start, before it even begins, before it could ever take place. You only know how to avoid the abuse or traumatic event. You only know how to not let the abuse or traumatic situation, experience, event, or thing happen ever again in the first place. You have no idea what to do if you’ve found yourself in that situation ever again where the abuse or traumatic thing, event, situation, or experience is already taking place or has already started happening to you again. And that is at the core of why you are failing to heal. That is why the trauma is still haunting you. Because you have learned nothing.