What a victim/target of emotional and psychological abuse experiences! A great reference list.

From my Book – From Charm to Harm and Everything else in Between with a Narcissist! @http://www.amazon.com

 

These are some of the things that may be cycling through your thoughts and mind. These disabling thoughts are directly related to the managing down, manipulation, and the negative messages from the abuse. These are the very things that you must conquer or extinguish because if not you will be imprisoned by these messages forever. Becoming healthy again is replacing these distorted messages with the reality of returning to the healthy you that existed before the abuse. The most important thing here is learning to trust yourself again and return to those old belief systems and that happens with self-compassion and understanding that most if not all of these distorted thoughts came to you from a dysfunctional person – the two go hand in hand.

 

•constantly hearing that internalized and critical voice from the negative messages that were implanted into your head and heart from your abuser

•wondering why you are not feeling happier now that you have moved on and away from the abuse as you believe you should be feeling

•feelings of insecurity concerning how you appear to others, or feeling a need to always explain yourself, or just uncertainty of how you fit into this world

•feeling angry, suffering anxiety and depression and sometimes questioning your own sanity

•the feeling that time is passing you by and you are missing out on many things in your life or basically you are stuck in a dark and ominous void

•a strong feeling that you don’t want to be the person you are or overly sensitive to your situation

•feeling hesitant to accept your own perceptions about things as compared to before when you were very decisive about most everything

•a feeling like you want to run away or completely escape your present situation

•a sense of worthlessness and failure where before you felt confident with your abilities

•a loss of enthusiasm and spontaneity and trust of life

•living in a perpetually guarded state or always protecting yourself from being hurt through avoidance and isolation

•thinking and feeling that something is wrong with you

•constant soul searching and reviewing past incidents in the hope of determining what went wrong, even obsessing

•a strong loss of self-confidence compounded by a growing feeling of self-doubt and always feeling the need to apologize for who you are

•living in the future instead of the present, believing everything will be good when this, that, and whatnot happens – but you also feel it is not happening and you feel your life is basically over as it concerns finding true happiness again

•having a distrust of people, future relationships and settling that you may be alone because you are unlovable or don’t offer enough for another person to love you, or that you are worthless

 

This abuse doesn’t stop the very day you walk away from a psychologically and emotionally abusive partner. It more than likely may continue to affect you long after you are out of the relationship until you completely educate yourself about this abuse or what psychological and emotional abuse is! It is unfortunate that you and I have had to experience this and are left disabled and damaged by our abuser BUT we can’t allow it to affect and destroy the remainder of our life by staying imprisoned with these thoughts. You were an amazing person before the abuse and you are going to be more than that when you recover and become a survivor with new boundaries and a new perspective when you get back to life and living again.

 

This abuse keeps you hyper focused on the past by only viewing the present and the future through the negative perspective of the abusive relationship or those negative messages that were forced into your head and heart. When you’re in an emotionally/psychologically abusive relationship, the Narcissist always reminded you of everything you have ever done wrong and basically told you that you will never change. They do this with the constant managing down with something new or old and remind you of it constantly. There was never much that was ever directed at you in a positive manner either, instead everything you did was devalued where you continually strived to do better in response to the devaluation and that became your normal with them. What did this make you feel like? Worthless! Basically, it is the devaluation stage of the abuse and that is where these negative messages became imprinted on your mind through the manipulation that the Narcissist made you believe FIRST – and that was they LOVED you and you could trust them implicitly! It is insidious and sadistic or dehumanization of a human being.

 

Psychological and Emotional abuse basically brainwashes you into accepting whatever negative things your abuser said about you as real undermining your reality and worth as a person. They make you so vulnerable through the devaluation process that it confuses AND disables your reality which in turns undermines your own opinion of yourself AND then you believe they must be right because they are so relentless and angry about these so-called things you do. The Narcissist is HEAVILY invested in their agenda to devalue you so they can maintain their power and control over you! Their attacks are traumatizing.

 

With psychological and emotional abuse, you are never really sure that it is actually abuse, because he/she is not being physically abusive or hitting you where you can say that this was/is an ASSAULT (some Narcissist do get physically violent too though)! You can’t be sure that what your partner says counts as abuse or not. So, you defer or justify the situation because you are invested in this relationship because of your emotional bond and you take it all as if the Narcissist is just telling the truth as it concerns these things you do wrong! You go on to justify it by thinking perhaps that you are too sensitive, demanding, jealous, or have issues like he/she may have said or a hundred other things. This happened to me in a manner that I tried to justify and fix these ‘off the wall’ crazy making efforts from my Narcissist because I thought it would somehow change in the future if I worked through this. I even had a perspective that my Narcissist had issues that needed my support and love and made it OK or allowed it to continue and only enabled more abuse. YES, my Narcissist had many issues, but none of which I could ever fix and I only ended up coming out of the relationship needing fixed instead! The process involves reversing the negative conditioning and desensitizing the horrendous messages that stole your reality, self-esteem, feeling of worth, and goodness. This all starts with no/minimal contact to achieve this clarity once more by ending the cycle of abuse with this Narcissist! Greg