Healing from trauma, dysfunctional thinking and faulty mindsets that originate from negative childhood experiences to narcissistic abuse as an adult can be a long, hard, intense and overwhelming journey. Sometimes you feel like just giving up! I can definitely speak on that. I always here about self love coming first before anything else but my problem with that is this: How does that work? What’s the process? Where do you start? I mean, if you’re someone who has always felt ugly, unworthy, devalued, not good enough, unimportant and basically just worthless no matter what you’ve accomplished or how much others have seen things in you that you don’t, then where does that person even begin to find value in themselves? I’ll be honest – affirmations and mantras don’t work for me. They are nothing but words coming out of my mouth that I don’t absorb nor believe. Words on repeat like a broken record. I can tell you though that reading the right books on healing and listening to podcasts has helped me TREMENDOUSLY. I don’t think I’d be as far along as I am if it wasn’t for those two mediums and the help of my higher power.
Yes, part of the process of healing is surrounding yourself with non- toxic, supportive people and people who are just overall contributors to your life as opposed to those that take away from it. Also known as Energy Vampires, Narcissists, Sociopaths and the list goes on. However, it dawned on me through my own crazy logic and maybe even a touch skewed that in addition to me probably getting ready to say something that’s been said before but just in a different way, that like it took a person or group of people, a situation or multiple situations or a combination of all the above to have created your issues and faulty mindsets at an early age, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the same holds true for the reverse? Yes, you do need to work on seeing value in who you are and acceptance of yourself in the moment but I believe that doing that can only get you so far. Just like it took external factors to create dysfunction, I believe that a person also needs external factors in order to create optimal healing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you need to rely on external factors to find worth and value in yourself, that you need to rely on other’s opinions about you or that you need to live up to someone else’s standards in order to find your identity. I just believe that part of the healing process is surrounding yourself with people that can validate and support your positive thinking about yourself. You see, it’s easier to perceive negative things about yourself at an early age because you don’t know any better. The events that happened to you and the people that you’re around are what you rely on and see as your reality. Once becoming an adult you have the option of seeing things differently because now you don’t have to depend on anything or anybody to tell you who you are – YOU define and determine that!
My take away is this: work on yourself, come to value and appreciate all that you do have and all their is to you. Whatever makes up YOU. Even if once upon a time you were like me and could list a lot of things about yourself that you appreciated and held in high esteem and knew were valuable characteristics to have but, because you were in a long-term relationship with a narcissist you allowed yourself to throw everything away that was valuable in your eyes and probably a lot of other people’s eyes because you convinced yourself that even though you knew these things were valuable about you, you didn’t have the things that he or she found appealing, beneficial and important in his eyes about someone. I have good communication skills, I’m articulate, I’m very loyal, I’m empathetic, I’m not an Einstein but I was in the gifted program in elementary school and according to my mother I taught myself to read so I think I am somewhat intelligent and I’m a Capricorn! All of these things I know are good qualities to have and all of these things I know our marketable when it comes to finding a partner and cultivating healthy, meaningful friendships. However, none of these things meant anything to the narcissist in my life. I mean, they did as long as they served him some purpose and benefited him or made him look good in front of others but I guarantee you that someone else who had, and I’m just going to get specific here, more sexual endeavors, to put it mildly, in the bedroom and was willing to do a little more than I was and someone who had more material things and financial means that he could manipulate and benefit from always always outweighed the positive things about me because that’s when the scales slowly began to tilt and I slowly but surely started falling from his superficial grace. From that pedal stool he once had me on for so many years. That was just the nature of the beast I guess. Thank to God, LITERALLY, I was eventually able to tip the scales in my mind and come to accept that what HE placed value on was nothing but superficial qualities and at the end of the day they were qualities that don’t define a person and they aren’t qualities that make a relationship. So to that person who used to be in my life suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, to you I say: Have at it! Continue to bed hop, be emotionally unable to give or receive sincerity and true love and continue to be that empty shell of a person that will constantly have to come up with ways to reinvent yourself and keep the mask from falling off because I’ve moved on, made progress with my healing, my childhood wounds and have the peace of knowing that I will never ever again go through what I went through with you and be treated the way that you treated me because I am over allowing toxic people come into my life and have a lasting effect on it!
Amen.
trainerchick 