In our previous posts, we explored the Power and Control Wheel and Narcissistic Abuse patterns that can leave someone questioning themselves in a relationship. But what happens when you begin to recognize these patterns and realize how much they have affected you?
You might find yourself asking:
Why do I still feel guilty when I know I didn't do anything wrong?
Am I crazy?
Why is it so difficult to say no?
Why do I keep questioning my own judgment?
Why do I miss someone who hurt me?
Why do I react so strongly to situations that seem minor to other people?
How do I learn to trust myself again?
These experiences can be confusing, especially when you feel as though you should have moved on by now.
Healing isn't simply about leaving a relationship behind. It can also involve understanding how your experiences have affected the way you think, feel, respond to others, and relate to yourself.
How Can Therapy Help After Narcissistic Abuse?
When you've spent time in a relationship where your feelings were dismissed, your boundaries were ignored, or you were repeatedly blamed for someone else's behavior, it can become difficult to trust your own perceptions. Responses that once helped you navigate a difficult situation may become less helpful when they continue to influence your relationships, decisions, and sense of self.
Therapy can help you begin recognizing these patterns without judging yourself for having them.
Rather than asking, "What's wrong with me?" you can begin exploring questions such as:
What experiences may have contributed to this response?
What am I feeling, and what do I need?
Am I responding to what's happening now, or does this situation remind me of something I've experienced before?
What would it look like to respond differently?
How can I take care of myself without feeling responsible for everyone else?
Therapy can provide a space to explore these experiences, develop practical skills, and begin building a healthier relationship with yourself. Approaches such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) offer different ways to understand emotional responses, navigate difficult situations, and work toward meaningful change.
*It is important to note that every person's experiences and goals are different. The therapeutic approach should reflect your individual needs rather than follow a one-size-fits-all process. DBT and IFS are just 2 examples of modalities that can complement one another and support healing after emotional abuse.
Using DBT Skills to Manage Emotions
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an approach that teaches practical skills for navigating emotions, tolerating distress, and managing relationships more effectively.
After experiencing emotional abuse, you may find that certain situations bring up intense emotional responses. Criticism, disagreement, or the possibility of disappointing someone may leave you feeling overwhelmed.
Below are a few skills for navigating these experiences:
Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation involves understanding your emotions, recognizing what influences them, and learning how to respond effectively.
For example, imagine someone disagrees with you about something relatively minor. You understand that disagreement is a normal part of relationships, but you suddenly feel anxious. You begin questioning what you said, wondering whether the other person is angry, and trying to figure out how to make things right. You may even apologize when you don't believe you've done anything wrong.
If you've experienced repeated criticism, blame, or unpredictable conflict, disagreement can feel more threatening than it otherwise would. This doesn't mean your emotions are wrong or that you need to convince yourself everything is fine. Emotions provide information, but they don't always tell the whole story. Learning to understand them can help you make decisions that reflect both your feelings and the circumstances you're facing.
Skills such as Opposite Action, Checking the Facts, or Labeling the Affect can be effective in regulating intense emotions.
These skills allow for space between the emotion and the reaction, at times providing clarity and a different response.
Distress Tolerance
Sometimes, the hardest part isn’t tolerating the conflict itself, but tolerating the feelings that come afterward.
You might tell someone you cannot accommodate a request and they become defensive. You then feel your body reacting to the situation; you become hot, your heart starts racing, maybe your mind goes blank, and you struggle to find the words to respond.
Distress tolerance skills can help you navigate these moments without needing to resolve the discomfort immediately. Their intention is to help you ride the wave of the feeling without immediately avoiding or ignoring it. This can be particularly important for survivors who have learned to prioritize other people's reactions over their own needs.
Skills such as TIPP, Urge Surfing, Radical Acceptance, or ACCEPTS can be useful for learning to sit with and tolerate intense emotions.
Learning to tolerate discomfort can help you make decisions based on what is healthy for you rather than what will immediately make the anxiety go away.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Interpersonal effectiveness focuses on navigating relationships while communicating your needs, maintaining self-respect, and considering your goals. Even after leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, you may still need to communicate with the other person. Co-parenting, discussing splitting assets, or even talking to shared friend groups can mean a need for these skills.
For example, you might struggle to say no, over explain your decisions, or feel responsible for convincing others that your boundaries are reasonable. With effective communication skills, you might learn to express a need clearly without apologizing for having it. You might practice asking for what you want, noticing when a conversation is no longer productive, or deciding how to respond when someone does not respect a stated boundary.
Establishing boundaries does not mean controlling another person's behavior. It means recognizing what you are comfortable with, communicating your limits when appropriate, and deciding what actions you will take to protect your well-being.
Skills such as DEAR MAN, GIVE, and FAST can be particularly useful when navigating these relationships.
These skills can help you build relationships in which you can express yourself without feeling that you must abandon your needs to keep the peace.
Using IFS and Parts Work to Understand Your Internal World
Conflicting feelings can be frustrating. One part of you might know that a relationship was unhealthy, while another misses the person and remembers the good times. One part might want to trust again, while another is determined to prevent you from ever being hurt in the same way. You may wonder why you can't simply move forward or why you continue to struggle with something you understand intellectually.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers a way to explore these experiences with curiosity and compassion. It looks at specific protective parts called Managers and Firefighters. Their goal is to either handle or extinguish Exiled parts such as fear, humiliation, and despair.
Understanding Protective Responses
Some parts are looking to protect us by managing our responses; some parts are looking to protect us by drowning out the feeling altogether. They may have developed in response to difficult experiences or situations in which the person felt they needed to protect themselves emotionally. While every person has parts regardless of their history with trauma, we are looking at this modality from the lens of surviving an emotionally abusive relationship.
For example, consider someone who learned to monitor a partner's mood to anticipate whether an argument was coming. Even after leaving the relationship, that person might continue paying close attention to other people's expressions, tone of voice, or changes in communication. A short response to a text message might lead them to wonder whether they've done something wrong. They may become frustrated with themselves for being so anxious.
Parts work offers an opportunity to approach that response differently. Instead of asking, "Why am I like this?" you might begin exploring what makes uncertainty feel threatening and what the part of you that monitors other people's moods is trying to accomplish. You can allow that protective part of you to exist without letting it control your responses.
The goal isn't to assume that every protective response comes from abuse or that every response needs to change. It's to understand your experience and explore whether your current ways of responding are helping you live the life you want.
Making Room for Conflicting Feelings
One of the difficult aspects of recovering from an emotionally abusive relationship is that your feelings may not seem to match what you know about the relationship. You might know that someone hurt you and still miss them. You might feel relieved that the relationship ended while also grieving the future you imagined together. You may feel angry about what happened and still care about the person. These feelings can coexist.
Missing someone doesn't mean the relationship was healthy. Feeling guilty doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong. Struggling with a decision doesn't automatically mean you've made the wrong choice. Parts work can help you explore these different experiences without requiring you to dismiss one feeling in favor of another.
Rather than criticizing yourself for missing the person, you can become curious about what you miss. Is it the companionship? The good moments? The future you hoped to have? The feeling of being loved during the beginning of the relationship? Understanding these feelings can help you make sense of your experience without using them as the sole basis for deciding what is healthy for you.
Developing a More Compassionate Relationship With Yourself
IFS emphasizes developing a different relationship with your internal experiences, including the parts of you that may respond with fear, shame, anger, or self-criticism. Instead of fighting these responses or blaming yourself for having them, you can begin exploring them with greater curiosity and compassion.
You may start recognizing that the part of you that avoids conflict isn't necessarily trying to make your life difficult. It may be trying to prevent an experience that feels threatening. The part that criticizes your decisions may believe that constant self-monitoring will prevent future mistakes. Acknowledging and learning about these parts can allow them to exist in harmony with the intense emotions they may be trying to “manage” or “drown out”.
Understanding these responses doesn't mean you have to agree with every thought or continue every behavior. It gives you an opportunity to explore what is happening internally and consider whether a different response might better support your well-being. Over time, this process may help you respond to yourself with less judgment and greater understanding.
You don't have to hate the parts of yourself that struggled to survive a difficult relationship in order to grow beyond the patterns that no longer serve you.
You Deserve to Rebuild Trust in Yourself
Narcissistic abuse can leave you questioning your judgment, your boundaries, and your understanding of your own experiences. If you've spent a long time prioritizing someone else's needs or questioning your own feelings, learning to reconnect with yourself can take time. You don't have to understand every part of your experience before you begin healing. You don't have to stop feeling angry, guilty, or confused before you deserve support.
Therapy can provide a space to explore what happened, develop practical skills, and better understand the thoughts, feelings, and protective responses that influence your life. Whether you're learning to regulate difficult emotions through DBT, exploring your internal experiences through parts work, or using other therapeutic approaches, the goal is to help you develop a healthier relationship with yourself and make choices that reflect your needs and values.
You are allowed to have boundaries. You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to experience difficult emotions without treating them as evidence that something is wrong with you. You are allowed to build relationships in which you don't have to continually question your worth or abandon yourself to maintain a connection.
Learning to trust yourself again takes time. You deserve the space to understand your experiences, practice new ways of responding, and move forward at your own pace.
