Living with Narcissistic Abuse

Lauren was in her mid-50s when one of her closest friends unexpectedly died. Her death was a wake-up call to the reality that life can end at any moment, and looking back, Lauren was saddened to realize just how many opportunities and dreams she’d passed up due to the fallout of narcissistic abuse—the interpersonally harmful, deceitful, and invalidating pattern of behaviors observed in any relationship with a person who has a personality style characterized by narcissism or antagonism.

Lauren grew up with a malignant narcissistic father, and she spent most of her life trying to please him. She paid off her parents’ house, delaying purchasing one for herself as a result, and would do anything so they would see her as “good.”

The grief for Lauren hit home when she recognized that she’d never received the life lessons that many people get from their families of origin: being seen, witnessing a loving and respectful marriage, feeling safe enough to ask for guidance, and feeling valued. Without those experiences, she didn’t feel able to pursue an intimate relationship and instead had a string of invalidating and narcissistic partners. She blamed herself for being socially unskilled and emotionally unintelligent, when in actuality she’s warm and has a lovely sense of humor and deep empathy for others.

Despite taking more chances in her life now, Lauren is grieving the loss of time; a childhood marked by fear, invalidation, and anxiety; wasted hope on her father and a series of toxic partners; a financially successful but spiritually empty career; and waiting for her family to see past themselves and actually see her. She grieves not having learned about narcissism earlier so she could’ve made better choices. In essence, she grieves herself.

The grief raised by narcissistic relationships—whether with a parent, an intimate partner, or in any other system—is an experience you can’t outrun. It doesn’t follow a schedule. It’s a process you may cycle through for years. At some point, you can get to the other side, but you may also carry some of it with you for a lifetime.

The grief of narcissistic abuse is consistent with disenfranchised grief, which is grief that’s not acknowledged by others or socially sanctioned and supported as a loss, especially if you don’t end up leaving the relationship. The ambiguity and the marginalization of your grief experience or hearing that you’re simply having “relationship problems” only magnifies the experiences of shame, grief, guilt, and self-blame.

Identifying this experience as loss helps you understand and experience the profound impact it’s having. You should also navigate your grief through therapy, support groups (ideally ones for survivors of narcissistic abuse), mindfulness, and meaningful activities. Don’t rush the process, stay with your uncomfortable feelings, and give yourself permission to experience them without judgment.

Ultimately, after defining yourself by the narcissistic relationship for so long, the hard work is experiencing yourself outside of it. Writing down your experience allows you to track the small shifts in yourself as you slowly process the losses of being in the relationship. Work on understanding your values, preferences, joys, and wants outside the relationship. There will be good days and bad days, but over time you can witness the improvement, and it can substantiate your commitment to growth and individuation.

If You Stay . . .

It’s easy to feel that by staying in the narcissistic relationship, or even just remaining in contact with the narcissistic person or people, you’re doing something “wrong.” But your reasons are yours, and these relationships entail enough shaming that continuing to invalidate yourself because you stay can impair the process of healing.

You may stay because you’re fearful about being alone or you feel guilty for leaving the narcissistic person to care for themselves, a dynamic that may be quite pronounced in relationships with vulnerable narcissistic people. You may stay for practical factors, including children, money, and housing. You may stay because of cultural pressures, a sense of duty and obligation, and biases against divorce, familial estrangement, or relationship dissolution. You may stay because the limitations of systems in place—family courts, human-resource systems, or civil and criminal justice structures—mean that you have little recourse, and leaving can put you at even greater risk. This risk is magnified if you have less societal power because of factors including ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or social class.

Staying is a choice, and seeing it that way is powerful. Just be mindful about the way you choose to stay. If it’s for children, then be fully present with them, infusing their lives with empathy and emotional awareness. If it’s a toxic workplace, remain aware of what can be derived from the job, such as benefits or retirement plans. Being shrewd can leave you feeling less passive and more strategic.

The truth is, healing is more important than leaving. You can still heal and not make the massive leap of leaving the relationship, disrupting contact, or upending your life. Healing is about taking back your power, even if you stay. Just be aware that living with or regularly interacting with a narcissistic person is like living with a person who smokes cigarettes. Even if you have air filters, open the windows, and keep the house clean, you will still get a little sick over time.

In most cases, there’s no way to fully “work it out” with a narcissistic person. The person will not change, and your body and mind will not adjust to their impact on you. It’s important for you to know these limits because if you don’t, you can once again fall into the patterns of self-blame. Remaining in a narcissistic relationship requires awareness, clear expectations, and self-compassion. Let’s explore what this looks like.

Depleted Bandwidth. Once you see and accept the narcissistic person for who they are, you may find yourself having to manage the situations created by their behavior: hurt children, angry family members, frustrated colleagues, upended plans. All of this depletes your bandwidth. Simultaneously, you may have to engage in behaviors like appeasing and avoiding: I can’t mention this; I won’t tell them I had this good thing happen; I can’t let them know we have to fix this mistake.

Your bandwidth also gets depleted by scarcity. If food is scarce, your entire focus goes to food; you aren’t thinking about your process of individuation or life goals. A very similar process happens when you’re in a narcissistic relationship: healthy emotional behavior and mutual regard are scarce and every day becomes about trying to get through, which makes it difficult to focus on higher-order growth or other relationships and may also culminate in burnout and illness.

To replenish your bandwidth, you need to engage in what I term realistic self-care. This isn’t spas and massages and positive affirmations; this is recognizing when you’re feeling depleted—when you have fatigue, brain fog, physical exhaustion, self-doubt, difficulty making decisions—and then giving yourself a minute. It may mean that you put down your email for a while, order in for dinner, take a walk, go to bed early, let the dishes sit in the sink, or call a friend. Wherever possible, turn to spaces in your life where there’s empathy, rationality, and kindness.

Not Feeling Like the Same Person. You may not like who you are with the narcissistic person. Your daily thoughts can be uncomfortable. You may find yourself envying people who are in happy marriages, or have nice parents, or work in collaborative workplaces. You may experience empathy fatigue or become numb. You may think mean or vindictive thoughts that are not your norm and are at odds with your self-concept as a decent human being.

First, it’s crucial to recognize that these relationships require you to reshape your identity to survive. Then, work on pulling back on the self-judgment and consider the idea of multiple truths: You can be happy for a friend and envy them.

Being Mean to Yourself. If you choose to stay, reflect on how you talk to yourself and view yourself. The ways you value yourself have probably been mocked by the narcissistic person, and your self-talk may mirror that.

This exercise is a cold splash of water in your face to help you treat yourself with kindness and nurturance: Find a picture of yourself as a small child and, just one time, imagine telling that little you that you’re foolish, or too sensitive, or damaged, things the narcissist may have said to you.

This will not be easy to say to an image of a small child. That little you is the same spirit as current you—when you speak badly to yourself now, it’s as though you are speaking to that child. Catch yourself when you do this and keep that picture of little you at easy access. The narcissistic people will still invalidate you, but it’s time for you to learn a new vocabulary and stop doing their dirty work for them.

Setting Boundaries. In a healthy relationship, you can set boundaries, and when someone violates them, you can communicate and, gradually, they’ll acknowledge and shift their behavior. Boundaries in narcissistic relationships are an exercise in hypocrisy. While narcissistic people will expect you to honor their boundaries, they won’t respect yours. The key is to remember that boundaries are an inside job. It becomes less about you waiting for the narcissistic person to honor a boundary and more about you setting one for yourself that you can honor. It’s a slow process, gradually disengaging from sharing important things about yourself and avoiding sharing feelings, aspirations, or negative moods with the narcissistic person.

You also need to be clear on your nonnegotiable boundaries, like cheating or physical violence. If these are breached, you may feel empowered to get out. However, in many moderate narcissistic relationships, there may not be the “big” breach (an affair, an arrest), but rather thousands of cumulative indignities.

Setting boundaries under these more subtle circumstances is much more difficult and requires being clear on your fears. Ask yourself, What am I afraid of if I were to set a boundary? Anger, the relationship ending, guilt, the silent treatment? I’ve had numerous clients be completely clear on what their boundaries were, but the fear of being shamed or raged at for setting the boundaries was too overwhelming. Understanding your fears may help you recognize the barriers instead of just assuming that you are bad at boundaries.

Waiting for a narcissistic person to finally honor your boundaries is like waiting for a submarine to show up at a bus stop. Recognizing that this is a process internal to you can transform boundary setting from a hopeless endeavor into a process of empowerment.

Never calling them out as a narcissist. Many of us who finally have a name for the patterns we’re experiencing want the narcissistic person to know that we know who they are. But do not call them out. You may be thinking, Why do they get to get away with it? It’s not fair! None of this is fair. If you do engage with them about their narcissism, it won’t change the situation, but it may end with you being called out as narcissistic, and there will inevitably be rage.

Soul distancing. It may not feel good or authentic, but you can ostensibly be in a relationship and try to keep your soul out of it. I worked with a woman who’d tell her narcissistic husband about a new idea or good news, and invariably he’d half listen, ask her how much her “crazy idea would cost” him, or imply that any successes she did have were due to luck. She didn’t want to leave the marriage for a range of reasons, but we worked toward making it less of a soul-crushing place by teaching her to stop allowing him to be her first stop when she wanted to share something good. Over time, she recognized that this sharing of good news felt like a fawn response, and an attempt to win him over, much like she tried with her parents when she was a child.

Soul distancing may entail protecting your vulnerabilities, your dreams, and your hopes. It means saving your depth for the people who reciprocate. When you’re attempting to soul distance, envision yourself sitting in a cloud of light, a sort of gauzy boundary between you and the invalidating behavior of others, as a way to foster serenity in this space.

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From It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People by Ramani Durvasula, PhD, published by The Open Field, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Ramani Durvasula.