Has narcissistic abuse left you feeling that there is something wrong with you?

You feel it don't you. That deep uncomfortable, cringeing awareness that bubbles up inside. The feeling you have been keeping a lid on. That despite your smiles, despite small sucess stories and 'having a good time', that the thin veneer that holds it all together is the shame that somehow, for some reason, there is something deeply wrong with you.

When you talk to others or even just walk past them in the street it is as if you are somehow naked. And on display is your true ugly self, the one you tried to hide. You crease yourself up into distorted shapes that you hope will make you more palatable., easier on the eye, easier to be around. Yet no matter how hard you try it never works. That feeling of unworthiness seeps out and lies like a puddle besides your feet for all to see. You become exhausted trying to bend, contort and appease.

You eventually lose the ability to try and when you are just about to give in, something else inside you stops you from sliding. Lifts you up when you want to lie down like a dog. A still small voice that was barely audable begins to gnaw at you from inside. You start to feel angry, become aware of injustices against you. You see that all the perfect people around you, people you loved and thought loved you, are not so perfect after all. In fact they are deeply flawed. You start hear all the unkind things they say to you and wonder why you didn't notice them before.

 Then the insight dawns on you that perhaps it is not so much that there is something wrong with you, but that those around you had actually caused you to feel that. It feels familiar, abuse, you get used to it, normalise it, make excuses for it. Then one day you rise up and start to realise what is happening to you, how others are treating you is not right. So you fight back and talk back but that doesn't work either. You try everything and eventually see that those around you are never going to change. BUT YOU CAN!

 Those people who you once looked up to start to appear as someone you don't want to be around. As you start to change they push you back to where you were, under their thumb. They hate the new you. So you try to go back to who you were but it deosn't work anymore. There is nothing to do but to leave it all behind, everyone you knew, and start again. To at least create distance in whatever way is possible right now.

It is not easy but as the days go by and the gap between you and your abusers widens, you see with startling clarity how bad it actually was. How much you suffered and how much abuse you took. At that point you become aware that it wasn't you that was flawed but the narcissistic people around you, who had used you as a scapegoat, projected all their feelings of inferiority upon you. Stood on your head so they could appear taller. That was the and is the moment healing begins.When you see that it wasn't your fault.

This realisation that it wasn't your fault grows and grows until you start to see yourself as not having something wrong with you but in having a lot right with you. A rightness that needs to be encouraged and nurtured. You can't change others but you can change yourself. And those parts of yourself that you can't change, you learn to accept them because you ok as you are, you are enough. You always were but you didn't know it because those around you told you otherwise.

It is time to stop believing the people of the lie = narcissists. Time to go no contact in any way you can with them and make contact with your self once again. That amazing person they tried to hide from you. Your authentic self.