I wanted to share in this article information that may really help you with your process of recovering from narcissistic abuse.
It’s to do with the uncomfortable feelings we may have in regard to being vulnerable with ourselves.
The reason why we can inherently struggle with vulnerability is because so many of us received the message in our childhood ‘It’s not okay to be vulnerable’.
Many of us can relate to being told to ‘snap out of’, ‘don’t cry’, and ‘just get on with it’.
Or maybe we were even punished for being vulnerable. If that was the case then the internal message escalated to ‘It’s not safe to be vulnerable.’
Because we grew up with these messages, we became very hard on ourselves emotionally, which meant that it was really difficult to acknowledge our vulnerabilities.
Which made it especially difficult to be present with ourselves to soothe our vulnerable emotions.
The ‘Match’ Of Struggling With Being Vulnerable
A ‘block’ that I have found to be very consistent with the people I work with in this community – is the difficulty to soothe ourselves when feeling vulnerable.
This was a difficulty that I also used to have.
Negative self-talk is disastrous. All that does is further embed the wounds, causes you to disconnect from loving and trusting yourself and makes you needier to ‘get’ love and approval from outside of you.
We all know how painful it was to receive devalue and discard messages from narcissists, and how that destroyed intimacy, trust and connection.
We need to ask ourselves “How much do I do that to myself?”
Internal disconnection from one’s self drives both narcissists and co-dependents to create unhealthy relationships. The conscienceless narcissist manipulates to extract narcissistic supply (attention and significance) and the co-dependent will tolerate abuse to try to obtain love and approval.
Not acknowledging and soothing your own fears is also disastrous. This leaves you all alone out on the raw and ragged edge of negative emotion. This is akin to being ignored by a parent when you were a child requiring emotional support.
The fascinating part of this is that the ‘struggle to be vulnerable with ourselves’ is yet another ‘match’ for narcissists. Narcissists have a dire difficulty in accepting their vulnerabilities. In fact the entire disorder of narcissism is the intense defence mechanisms to avoid being vulnerable at all costs.
I have found that people who don’t get ensnared with narcissists, and who would never stick around to tolerate abuse, often have the following in common – they had a nurturing loving parent (generally mother) who was available to support, soothe and love them in times of emotional pain.
These people have the natural learned ability to talk themselves into better thoughts and feelings.
These people know automatically how to emotionally support themselves.
Co-dependents did not have the privilege of an emotionally supportive parent, and therefore do not naturally have the ability to grant emotional support to themselves.
The issue with ‘being vulnerable with ourselves’ is this – if we didn’t learnt how to accept and then be emotionally supportive with our own fears and insecurities then we can do one of two things.
Try to be ‘better’ (fix it / stop it) in order to be acceptable, or look for someone or something else to fix the emotional pain for us.
Then true to Law of Attraction the people who we choose are as unavailable as the original childhood source, and the ‘things’ to soothe the emotional pain only perpetuates more disconnection from ourselves.
The bottom line is – deep within we did not believe we were loveable and acceptable with our inner wounds.
Is The Shift Work The Entire Answer?
Many people like myself are very committed to their personal healing journey, and work hard at releasing unhealed wounds to reconnect back to being a healthy Source to themselves.
Committing to this path requires becoming very honest with ourselves, which means acknowledging we have unhealed emotional inner parts which require our attention.
The true work on our ‘damaged’ and ‘abused’ inner identities can be achieved powerfully by doing the inner shift work – and the proof is indisputable, that this does create incredible results.
But what happens when we can’t get to a healing space, or we don’t have the time to address releasing our inner wounds?
We may be out and about in life at the time, or we may have a pressing engagement. We may randomly experience a sudden hit of the feelings of unworthiness or insecurities about ourselves, life and our future without being able to access the space to immediately release it.
When our inner wounds get triggered we feel emotional pain, and if we are not conscious, before we know it, our mind can grab hold of these painful feelings and start concocting a ‘story’ around it. A ‘story’ that certainly doesn’t improve the way we feel.
Our mind if unchecked generally makes a mess of emotional pain. The reason is the cellular addiction we have within our subconscious mind (the cellular network throughout our entire body) likes to keep feeding from the emotions that they have had a regular and powerful peptide hit from.
If we remain unconscious we can easily start thinking the thoughts of powerlessness and unworthiness which keeps creating painful peptides, and keeps the painful victimisation cycle going.
Recovery from narcissistic abuse is all about breaking this peptide pain cycle, in order to make ‘space’ from the pain, feel the relief and have access to better thoughts in order to create our New Self.
When we understand the peptide cycle, and how to break it, it is natural to want to keep shifting our pain out with healing modules regularly.
But is this the complete answer?
Trying To Fix Ourselves As Quickly As Possible
If we are on a committed inner healing journey, we certainly aren’t denying our internal wounds – but we can have great difficulty in accepting their presence.
Even for the firmly committed Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program members this can translate to ’I need to fix this negative emotion as soon as possible in a Healing Module’.
Yes, that is the ultimate answer to reprogramming our inner programs, but by simply wanting to fix ourselves we are missing an incredible opportunity to know what it is to truly connect to and cherish ourselves unconditionally when we feel vulnerable.
If we simply jump into ‘fix it’ mode, we have robbed ourselves of deep abiding feelings of genuine self-love.
Balance is the ultimate key. Be dedicated to your inner healing, and be just as dedicated to taking any opportunity you can to soothe, support and love yourself with self-talk.
In order to do so there is a total necessity to acknowledge your vulnerabilities, and then step in as the loving, supportive parent for yourself that you didn’t have access to in childhood.
Within my narcissistic abuse recovery, I was very pro-active with healing shifts, and in doing them I was able to recover from the hooks, addiction and pain powerfully. However for a very long time I missed the essential message of unconditional self-love because I was in ‘fixer’ mode working healing processes on myself daily.
My Huge ‘Ah-ha’ Moment
One day it occurred to me how my moment to moment self-talk wasn’t up to scratch. I Knew I wasn’t self-condemning, but I certainly was not stepping in with loving, supportive purposeful thoughts immediately either.
The realisation came to me when driving in the car with a girlfriend. I was thinking about her earlier that day. She is not an abuse victim, yet has had an incredible number of challenges in her life. I wondered how on earth she could be so calm.
Another girlfriend and I commented on how incredibly centred she was, and how we couldn’t have handled her life with such emotional ease.
The pressing question was “How do you stay so calm?”
Her answer was “I talk myself around with loving and supportive thoughts.”
So this is what I discovered – that as soon as she feels fear and anguish she invariably is immediately on the job of soothing herself emotionally.
My friend doesn’t beat herself up as being ‘defective’ or ‘not okay because she is hurting’. She truly has this part of her emotional management nailed.
Interestingly though, she doesn’t work on herself at an inner identity level, and as a result many of her issues haven’t shifted.
This is why I see the total value in getting both sides of our personal growth sorted. Yes, do the inner re-programming work, but also make sure your ever day life incorporates loving yourself unreservedly.
The True Power of Affirmations
We are not able to be in the healing space every minute of every day. In reality we also need to be in life, and creating our life.
This is where the use of affirmations can be vital.
I now think of affirmations as so much more than just words to create better feelings in order to create a better life.
To me now, the TRUE benefit of affirmations is to demonstrate and experience unconditionally loving, accepting and supporting ourselves.
Now I totally understand that practicing affirmations grants the ability to recognise our vulnerabilities and step up to the plate to ease, soothe and love ourselves.
It Wasn’t Just That Simple
After I received this huge epiphany I decided to really step up for myself. I chose affirmations that were full of love and support and mindfully decided I would implement them in everyday life when I needed to.
What happened was then a shock to me. I found the affirmations really hard to do. My mind would wander, and they didn’t hit the spot powerfully – and I wanted to jump straight into a healing shift instead.
Something was clearly amiss.
So I did what I always do, which I know works – I felt deeply into the block to find the belief systems that was stopping me achieve a desired goal.
What I found really didn’t surprise me. It was all to do with believing my wounds were unacceptable and needed to be sorted out as quickly as I could possibly do so. It was a belief that I couldn’t be loved and accepted whilst I had these wounds.
It’s no wonder I was SO adamant about doing so much inner self-work!
Connecting to Myself With True Compassion
A huge shift occurred when I shifted those faulty beliefs, and a whole new world opened up to me.
I still do regular inner work, but certainly not at the frantic pace I once did. I was able to easily accept that I was suffering emotional insecurities and that I felt vulnerable as a result. I was then easy to start thinking and supplying myself loving and supportive thoughts.
My focus was on love, ease and support rather than fix.
It was only the big persistent things that required inner work that I needed to ‘fix’ after this time.
The best part was I could feel an indescribably powerful feeling of love for myself that I had never imagined feeling before.
I can only imagine the feeling of total support, love and comfort is what a child feels with a totally present, emotionally supportive parent.
It’s the feeling like ‘someone’ totally has your back, that life is going to be okay, and no matter what you are worthy, loved and accepted unconditionally anyway.
Wow! Truly words can’t explain how good that feels when you really anchor into it.
I know I wouldn’t have been able to anchor in so lovingly and believably to myself without having done the amount of inner work I had done, and affirmations on their own would not have healed me – but truly this everyday component had been missing.
I had unknowingly still been acting out the ‘hard on me’ childhood scripts.
Truly when you start looking at and relating to yourself through the eyes of Source (total unconditional love), a huge shift happens with the way you view the world and other people.
You stop judging people’s wounds and you start accepting and loving life and people unconditionally. This of course would never mean that you tolerated abuse or enable it by staying attached to it – rather it means you have a completely different perspective on woundedness and defectiveness.
You acknowledge it exists but it doesn’t carry the painful emotional charges or victimised feelings that it once did.
Opening my heart up fully to me catapulted my ability to open up my heart up fully to other people and life.
When I fully connected to my own vulnerabilities with loving support it was quite emotional – in fact incredibly so. The love and relief I felt in regard to being unconditionally accepted by myself at first was quite overwhelming.
It didn’t take long, however, before the self-talk support felt like a secure beautiful, loving and natural cuddle.
Some of my most favourite affirmations when I require my own emotional support are:
“Melanie I love you with all of my heart”.
“Melanie I adore and accept you unconditionally”
“Melanie I commit to you fully with all my love and support”.
“Melanie I cherish you eternally with all of my being”.
At your times of emotional pain, if you stop doing negative self-talk, ignoring yourself, or being hellbent on fixing the pain – and step up to fully allowing and support your vulnerabilities – you will experience a profound connection to yourself.
You will know what it is to truly connect to yourself with love and compassion.
Unconditional love and compassion starts from within. You are the creator of your entire life script, and you do have the ability to internally experience the wonder of real love and compassion, and then open your heart to give it and receive it in your outer world.
In combination with working on your inner belief systems this is a powerful formula to becoming Who You Really Are – a being living your life through the eyes of Source.
I hope my personal experience has inspired you to create this self-loving balance in your healing journey, and I look forward to answering your questions and comments.
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