But truly, is it enough to just know this? Is this enough for us to heal and move forward and know you will never have to experience an abusive, agonising relationship ever again?

It certainly is not.

Recovering from narcissistic abuse allows you to move out of powerlessness and into a new perspective where you recognise that you are in control of your life. You have the power to create a life that contributes to your happiness and say ‘no’ to anyone or anything that doesn’t. But in order to do this you must recognise the following…

All of the relationships we have in life are exposing us to our own unhealed parts.  At first that could seem like a bitter pill to swallow, it could seem like somehow you are accepting blame for what happened to you by embracing this theory.

If you look deeper you will understand a vital truth of life, which is: If I had something to do with this, then I have the power to change it. Whereas if you believe you have nothing to do with it, then you have no power to change it, let alone create a life where it could never happen to you again.

That is horribly disempowering…

We Attract What We Need to Heal

Like attracts like, but that certainly does not mean you are a narcissist. What it does mean is that anything you have not healed, that you are not aligned on – such as fear of abandonment, criticism or abuse, or you have confusion on ‘what is real’ or ‘what can I trust’, are powerful emotional vibrational attracters to receive more of this from life.

These negative belief systems / emotions are not the way our True Self wants to live. They are not the pure state of who you really are, and because of this, your soul will keep dragging them into your experience, and make them hurt until you liberate, heal them and change your belief systems.

The narcissist is a ‘catalyst’; the narcissist is a ‘vehicle’ to show up our unhealed parts in fully blown technicolour. Up until this point, we have been able to get on with life, we have been able to function despite the pain, disappointment and setbacks – yet this time as a result of narcissistic abuse, the pain and the horror was so significant that we simply could not pick ourself up off the floor, dust off and keep moving.

Originally this feels like total devastation, destruction and helplessness. It seems our entire life is shattered and any faith we had in life and ourself was crushed forever.

Is that a bad thing?

When you understand what is really going on you realise that it isn’t.

You realise that finally you have been brought to a point where you can no longer ignore your unhealed parts because the pain is too immense to do so.

The Shift From Outer to Inner

You realise that no longer can you continue to get by, by putting your focus on the outside world and gaining things outside of yourself in order to feel whole, such as the gratification of people approving and loving you, or gaining material possessions.

In order to get through this and heal, you need to put your focus on the inner you, and you have to do the work on your being.

The problem is when you are stuck in the illusion that your identity is based on achievements, things and other people – you didn’t learn to accept and love yourself for just being you.

When you are narcissistically abused, everything suffers, everything crumbles and you look around at the shattered mess. Almost everything you thought ‘is my life’ is most likely gone.

You are left just with you.

Your are left in a frightful state, such a frightful state that no matter what you grab to try to fix your state from the outside, you don’t have the sanity, energy or the drive to make it work. It gives you no peace. No happiness or fulfilment comes, and nothing seems to work.

You are left with yourself with no outer relief.

The purpose in all of this, is for you to come face to face with establishing your True Self (if you are new to the blog my definition of True Self means being aligned and living the way our soul intended us to) and you start to realise the deepest spiritual and soul lesson of all – and that is ‘There is only you’.

This is certainly not the grandiose false version that the narcissist upholds, that it is all about him or herself, rather this is in the authentic version of self-creation – which is I am the centre, the director and the creator of my entire life experience.

This truth sets us free because we can finally embrace the purpose of the narcissist, that this person was in fact attracted into our experience as the perfect match to make conscious what fears, pain and confusion we needed to square up within ourself.

And if we didn’t experience this, we may never have been able to create the authentic life that our soul always wanted to live.

Victimhood or the Gift

There are two ways to view narcissistic abuse, and that is from the victim perspective – which is ‘Someone did this to me, my life is ruined because of that, and I will never, ever recover because of what happened’, or from the mindful and empowered perspective ‘This was meant to happen in my life. My soul drew this experience to me to finally heal and create myself as an authentic self, and walk forward into creating my life authentically without pain, confusion and fear.’

The life with the narcissist was never meant to work, it was meant to wake you up and heal you.

As you know the narcissist is not real, the life of glamour, hypocrisy and hubris is not real, and your existence in this false life was not peaceful, fulfilling or solid. It was an emotional, physical, spiritual and often financial ‘house of cards’ that was drowning in quicksand and ripping you apart on broken glass.

Authentic realities are not like that.

The goal of all of this is to be healed enough to create a life, like what you thought it would be with the narcissist, but this time at a real, authentic level.

Then you can have the love, the achievements and the fulfilment as a supportive, safe, durable and solid reality.

The truth is you might not have got to that level if the narcissist hadn’t presented in your life. He or she was a necessary stepping stone to your more empowered graduation.

The illusion is, if we could just change the narcissist’s nasty and destructive ways that the dream of this ‘real’ life could be with him or her.

But if we stay stuck in this, we truly are missing the point and the healing opportunity – which is I am the creator of my reality, and it’s not someone else’s job.

When we understand that no-one is responsible for our fulfilment, safety and wellbeing other than ourself, we start rejecting anything and anyone who is not that truth or match, because we are empowered enough to know that we create reality by being aligned, and we have all of the resources and possibilities of life to call forth the match of our reality.

The incredible gift of creating the new us – the real us, is we get to let go of the illusions of life which have made us precariously attached to external situations and people, and we begin to feel genuinely comfortable on the inside.

Shifting From Limited to Unlimited

We previously believed that we are limited, small, dependent, and that we don’t have enough self-value or self-worth to say ‘no’. We didn’t know that we don’t actually lose by letting go, or that when we shut one door we allow the true and the real ones to open in their place.

We believed that if we didn’t hang on, fix, and make it work that we may never have a similar opportunity again.

We believed ‘I’m too old, I’m not smart enough, I’m not attractive enough’ or we believed ‘All the good ones are gone’ or we thought ‘Where am I going to meet the right person?’, or ‘How could real love happen for me?’…or ‘I know of people that have been single and lonely for 10 years I don’t want this to happen to me’….as well as countless other limiting beliefs that held us back.

In short we believed all the limiting fears about ourself and life that are not in alignment with creating what it is that we really want to experience.

Our focus has been on ‘Why Not’ instead of ‘Why YES!’

We were not taught about the creative power from within.

We are subject to our past history, other people’s versions, or what our parent’s did – if we choose to limit ourself by hanging on to these limiting beliefs…

Not enough has been taught about letting go of these beliefs and then purposefully choosing the beliefs that do serve us, in order to create our outer experience from an inner power.

Narcissistic abuse has allowed us to realise that when we change these beliefs within ourself that powerfully our outer world will follow.

Then and only then do we STOP keeping ourselves limited and small by hanging on to and putting up with second best, let alone abusive, disempowering situations which are destroying us.

We also don’t keep hanging on to the pain, the obsession, the resentment and the regrets.

We realise that narcissistic abuse was in fact a spectacular gift in order to finally realise, embrace and release what hadn’t been working within ourselves, in order to become the conscious co-creator with life that we were always meant to be.

Have you recognised the gift of narcissistic abuse? What does it feel like to you?

Or if you are still in the early stage of recovery can you now see the goal you are aiming for?

Please let me know in the comments.