Have you left the narcissist in your life, but you don’t know how to define yourself anymore because your whole life was defined by them?

Perhaps you are feeling stuck or haunted by memories? The narcissist may not be stealing from you physically anymore, but perhaps they are still stealing from you in your head. How do you cope with that?

In this blog post, I’ll explain why it is so difficult to move on after a relationship with a narcissist, even if you recognize that it was toxic and terrible, and I’ll share five things you can do to accelerate your healing and recover your identity. Read through to the end, where I have a special announcement for you. 

Breaking free from a relationship with a covert narcissist is a uniquely complex process because, unlike other types of relationships, it affects you on a physical, cellular level and also on an emotional, psychological, and spiritual level. Breaking free requires healing on all those levels. Give yourself time, lots of self-compassion, and grace to move forward and rebuild. You can’t afford to be hard on yourself. This is not the time to be cracking a whip on yourself, but to be your own best friend in this season.

On your own, this can be daunting, but if you have put your trust in God and made a decision to trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, and if you have invited Jesus to be in the driver’s seat of your life, then you have access to God’s supernatural strength and resources. There is hope for you to come out of the fiery furnace and not even smell like smoke. That is God’s heart and promise to you.

Three Reasons It Is Difficult to Move On

There are three big reasons why moving on from this type of relationship is especially difficult:

1. Spiritual Confusion

If you have been dealing with a covert narcissist who professes to be a Christian, moving on can be difficult because of the amount of spiritual confusion that is caused in the relationship.

The religious covert narcissist most likely twisted all kinds of scriptures and religious teachings to control and confuse you. They may have found ways to condemn you or make you feel guilty in order to keep you entangled in the relationship. It’s possible they exploited your sense of moral obligation and desire to please God, to make it difficult for you to factor in your own health and well-being in your choices, and distract you from the fact that God’s destiny for you does not include the detrimental effects of a spiritually, emotionally, psychological destructive relationship. 

3. Dependency

The second reason why moving on from this type of relationship is especially difficult is because of dependency: By setting themselves up as the center of your world, narcissists are often able to make you so dependent on them that it is difficult to function without them in central stage, even as much as you wish they were not so all-consuming. They may have isolated you from family or friends or other life-giving relationships. This isolation further intensifies the fear of being separated from the narcissist because there aren’t other relationships in your life. 

While you might have been conscious of being isolated from others in less visible ways, narcissists almost invariably erode the self-esteem and sense of identity of those closest to them. So when the relationship is over, you are not alone in struggling with feelings of worthlessness and finding yourself having a hard time moving forward in life without the narcissist’s approval, advice, opinion, and validation.

3. Trauma Bonding

A third major factor that makes it difficult to recover after a narcissistic relationship is trauma bonding. If you aren’t familiar with this term, “trauma” and “bonding” might seem contradictory, but let me explain: Trauma bonds are a unique type of bond that forms through a combination of intermittent reinforcement and manipulation. In other words, intermittent reinforcement happens when a narcissist alternates between being affectionate with you one moment and then completely switching and becoming abusive. The chemicals that are released when you are experiencing the emotions of being love-bombed or abused are what can cause a deep and intense connection (the “bond”) to the narcissist, making it difficult to break free even if you recognize the destruction in the relationship. So, the alternation between inflicting trauma and then offering a reprieve from that trauma creates ends up creating a strong bond which we call a trauma bond. If you want to understand more about how to break free from the trauma bond of the narcissist, watch my video called “How to Break the Trauma Bond.”

Where you are now is not permanent. This isn’t your destiny. God has healed from each of these dynamics. Here are four simple steps you can take to accelerate your healing.

Five Steps to Healing

1. Process and Grieve

Taking time to process and grieve is a critical step to your healing. Journaling is a powerful tool to do this. As you journal, invite God into the process, and be careful to have a healthy balance and not to get pulled into rumination over the past. To go through the processing and grieving effectively requires a lot of reframing, and journalling is a wonderful way of articulating and remembering those new perspectives. 

As you journal through this stage, it’s normal to find there are cycles of grief as you process the loss of the person you thought you were in a relationship with and the future you ought to have had with this person. In some ways, it is harder than death because the person you are grieving did not actually exist. It’s as if a fictional character appeared and then disappeared in your reality. What you thought was your reality wasn’t. When that line between reality and mirage becomes blurry, it is inevitably disorienting. Don’t rush yourself to heal faster. Allow yourself the time and space to grieve, and be good to yourself in the process. Even if it was a miserable relationship and abusive, and even though you might feel that there isn’t anything to grieve, there were reasons why you stayed as long as you did, and those might be the things to grieve.

2. Create the Conditions to Heal: Spiritually, Mentally, Emotionally, and Physically.

You can’t heal in the same environment that caused the damage. Just getting out of a toxic environment is a huge first step in giving yourself a chance to start detoxing and healing. 

Give yourself space. Beyond just leaving the toxic environment where your relationship with the narcissist was centered, you can also give yourself more space and quiet by getting off social media and using other means to create space and set boundaries between yourself and anyone that the narcissist may be using to inflict more trauma or pain. You may even need space from those who aren’t able to understand your healing journey. These people probably mean well, and you still love them; in this season, you need to take space to heal and tend to yourself. 

Take care of your body. Your body and physical health have gone through the wringer because of being in long-term flight or fight mode. You may find yourself time to sleep and rest. Eat nutrient-rich, dense foods as much as you can, and drink a lot of water. Don’t expect to be at full capacity and running as you were doing before when the adrenaline was still there. Be patient and kind to yourself. Create the best conditions you can to be good to your body and nurture it, so that it can heal. 

Do the same for your emotions. Cut out of your life unnecessary stress. That might include unhelpful or toxic people that are adding stress and anxiety rather than being supportive. Create a spiritual environment for healing. Listen to things that are going to build up and strengthen your spirit. 

Seek community. Surround yourself with people who are caring, nurturing, encouraging, and supportive – even if they are few in number. Go to a God-loving, Bible-believing church or community, even if it is small and intimate. It may be difficult to go to an actual church but find a few people that you can pray with and read the Bible with.

3. Get in Touch with Old Friends

After having your social life controlled by the narcissist, getting back in touch with old friends is a powerful act of autonomy. Finally, no one is controlling who you can be in contact with. Old friends know us for who we were and not who we shrank to be under the heavy hand of the narcissist. They know who we were when we weren’t walking on eggshells trying to please someone else. They knew us before we started diminishing ourselves.

Getting back in touch might be scary. Maybe it would mean asking for forgiveness, which isn’t always easy. But if they are open, asking them to remind you of who you once were can be an interesting exercise. Old friends can help us recover parts of ourselves that we feel we may have lost. They can call those parts back by their mere presence in our lives. And they know those parts of us that were diminished and repressed.

4. Make New Friends

We can’t know ourselves or God very well in isolation. As the scriptures say, it is not good to cease meeting together (Hebrew 10:24-25). Putting ourselves back in a social context can be a powerful accelerator of healing. Granted, the process of finding the right people can be complex, so it is totally ok to take your time and proceed with caution. After being shut down for a long time, we have to be careful about how much we share and what we share with whom, but we have to start somewhere. 

5. Get Professional Support

One of the most powerful tools in accelerating your healing is finding a coach who knows God and who also understands narcissistic abuse, someone who can help you get unstuck and get vision and move forward. Inner healing programs and support groups can be a valuable source of support and encouragement. Sometimes we need an external force greater than ourselves to help overcome the inertia, pull us out of the sadness and confusion, and guide us back to the person God created us to be so we can move forward with our lives. 

For me, finding a coach was the single most important step I took in my healing journey. That relationship was a lifeline for me. My progress revolved around that 1 hour phone call once a week. I was able to discover who I was as a person, separate from the narcissist, and also to gather the courage to try something new. Eventually, those steps became led to my creating a youtube channel, which has kept growing into a ministry that includes this blog. If I didn’t have a coach walking alongside me, who was encouraging me to step into my purpose, I don’t think I would have had the courage to start this work.

I know that for many of you reading, your identity, gifts, talents, and personality have been undermined by a narcissist (or many narcissists) for so long. Now, with the relationship having ended, you may feel like it’s been too long, that you are a lost cause. Maybe you don’t even know where to begin to recover your identity or how to move forward with your life. You might have lost touch with the fire inside you. This is a time to invest in yourself and get the help you need. We weren’t created to do it all alone. Part of self-care and creating the conditions for healing is to invest in healing.

Maybe you have a coach or counselor who understands narcissism and the effects of narcissistic abuse and who also knows God and the Bible and can coach you from that Biblical perspective. (If so, please help connect me to your coach/counselor so that we can refer others to them!)

 Related Resources:

To watch a video version of this blog, click here.

Covert Narcissists:

• The Addiction of Religious Covert Narcissists
• Am I Being Abused by a Covert Narcissist?
• 5 Signs of a Covert Narcissist

Trauma Bonding:

• How to Break the Trauma Bond
  
• 12 Signs You Are Trauma Bonded
• How to Break the Unique Soul Tie with a Narcissist

Find more resources in our topic-based catalog

Downloadable Resources 

• Signs of Spiritual Abuse or Cultish Environments Checklist 
• 20 Signs that You Might Be Experiencing Narcissistic Abuse
• How to Pray for a Narcissist Guide
• Healing from Gaslighting