CBT for Later Stage Recovery
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How Combining Contemplation Practices With Cognitive Behaviour Therapy can Help Us Understand the Narcopath and Heal Our Own Unhelpful Automatic Thoughts
This blog is written for female survivors of male perpetrators.
Being victimised by a narcopath can be a hideously painful experience. Their profound lack of empathy and covert vindictive nature (in some) drive behaviours that are worse even than your average domestic tyrant. A proportion of survivors will go through a lengthy trauma recovery season that resembles that of survivors of rape, torture, harmful cults and crimes against humanity. This is not my exaggeration. It’s in the trauma literature. (See Judith Herman). Whilst our culture and, possibly, people around us minimise or victim-blame, it is important that we don’t do the same to ourselves.
Understanding the distorted thinking of a narcopath can help us recognise and heal our own distorted thinking. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) provides a grab-bag of thought distortions that are easy to see in others, but not so visible in ourselves. When contemplating these distortions, it is essential that we apply kind and gentle curiosity towards our own way of being in the world. Post-traumatic growth from narcabuse is an opportunity to get to know and care for ourselves more than we ever did before.
Trauma feeds the tendency towards distorted thinking leading to emotional disregulation. The antidote is in mindful awareness (being able to notice our thoughts and tolerate our emotions and choosing self-compassion and the Middle Way (from Buddhist Psychology) instead.
Here are some thought distortions suggested by CBT:
Catastrophising: allowing our thoughts to habitually take us to the worst case scenario despite no evidence or even evidence to the contrary.
Binary thinking: seeing every situation as a case of two opposites. Good: bad, black:white, evil:good, always:never. Our direct experience of evil can easily take us through a door so that we see everything through a trauma lense that doesn’t allow for shades of grey.
Magnification and minimisation: we have experienced the narcopath amplifying our personal flaws and minimising by denial his abusive treatment of us. That picture is so clear that we can use it as a mirror to reflect the ways in which we magnify our own flaws (I am a bad person because I did a bad thing) and minimise our achievements or good qualities (I am never good enough).
Acute trauma and an overloaded pain body can also distort our thinking and make us magnify every painful experience or minimise positive experiences.
Personalisation: another trauma sensitivity, this describes those thoughts that tell us things like, “the flight is late because this always happens to me when I travel”, or “the reason that person spoke rudely to me is that they think I’m a [insert preferred derogatory term]”, or, “I am the only person who has suffered in this way – there must be something really wrong with me”.
Projection: a huge distortion in narcabuse. We see how the narcopath accuses us of doing to them what they are in fact doing to us (reverse attribution). The crazy person the narcissist describes in smearing his victim is nothing like the person we really are, but his projection still makes us doubt ourselves.
Projection works alongside denial. If we humans refuse to be accountable for poor behaviour (denial), we can easily wriggle out from under any blame by projecting this disowned mental material onto the very person we have harmed.
The antidote is in radical self-acceptance. We ‘own’ everything about ourselves. As we do this, changes to old habits of distorted thinking happens incrementally and naturally.
(NOTE: For victims of narcabuse, the problem often isn’t outward projection, but self-blame and self-criticism.)
Denial: denial protects us from pain. We have seen the super-human extent of the narcopath’s denial. He simply refuses to acknowledge any abusive behaviour on his part, projecting it outwards as blame. In a sense, it was our own denial that played a huge part in us getting caught up in the cycle of abuse. Every time we caught a glimpse of the monster, we denied and justified it to ourselves.
Kind and curious mindfulness of our own thoughts will help us to recognise and tolerate the pain that surfaces when we face the things we formerly denied.
Mind reading: Often accompanying personalisation, this is believing we know what other people think – including what they think of US. Quite simply, we don’t! What other people think of us is really none of our business. The modern obsession with our individual public images via anti-social media is more insidious and dangerous than we all yet realise.
Dread or negative prediction: a common trauma symptom. This feeling can be the result of purely somatic impulses (a hyper-active autonomic nervous system pumping out fear hormones etc), or it can be simple pessimism. If we can survey our surroundings and establish a feeling of safety, we can then entertain more positive and realistic ideas about the future.
There is an irony here with vengeful psychopaths, because if we fear that they will try to destroy our very lives (safety, livelihood and reputations), we are probably right! In which case, we must learn to accept and defuse the uncomfortable feeling of dread. Attend to the emotion, not the thoughts.
Blame: a manipulation tactic used on us by the narcopath, this can get really complicated in recovery. Over time, we unravel causation from blame at a really deep level. Narcopaths blame everybody and everything but themselves, and survivors of narcabuse can be accused of unfairly blaming a perpetrator who dishonestly plays the victim in the Aftermath.
Reactive abuse, for example, where we are blamed for reacting overtly to the first punch thrown covertly by the narcopath can make us suffer this injustice again and again. The antidote? Look for genuine cause while refraining from articulating blame out loud (it just makes us look bad to people who don’t understand covert domestic abuse).
Disqualifying the positive: ruminating on the one thumbs down on Facebook over the 150 likes. In recovery, it is incredibly important to concentrate on gratitude for the tiny shoots of growth in a damaged life or we will be dragged under by dismissing these things as insignificant compared with the devastating loss.
“Should” statements: these are distorted attempts to motivate oneself or others by applying the force of guilt or emotional blackmail. Classic ‘shoulds’ of narcabuse recovery are that we ‘should be over it by now’ and that we ‘should have seen the red flags and got out earlier’. Learning self-compassion and the radical self-care of letting ourselves off the hook will help us find the middle way. When we let ourselves off the hook for, say, resting or meditating, (or not being able to get out of bed due to mental illness), we simply ask ourselves honestly: “are we procrastinating? Are we being lazy? or are we just being kind to ourselves?”
“Was I stupid and weak for believing all his lies, or would anyone have fallen for love-bombing and future-faking like that?” Only you know the lengths he went to to ‘win’ you, but let me assure you – anyone would have fallen for it!
“Should I have trusted my instincts more and left the marriage after everything changed the night of the wedding?” Let yourself off the hook. Of course not! You had just made vows you intended to keep for life. Love is blind, but you could not have predicted the lengths this man would go to to control, exhaust, brainwash and destroy you.
Antidotes for Distorted Thinking
Two antidotes from Buddhist Psychology that are helpful in many instances of distorted thinking are these:
Don’t believe everything you think. Contemplation practices help us slowly to become aware of our own conditioning and unconscious biases. As we develop the Observer Self, we can see our tendencies to fuse tightly with thoughts and opinions. Defusing these strong beliefs and opening to the possibility that our automatic thoughts could be a distortion of reality brings us closer and closer to what is really true.
Real but not true. Particularly when in a heightened state such as anger or fear, something can seem incredibly real to us in these moments, when in fact it is not true. Recognising that our thoughts are not true can only occur when our nervous system is reasonably relaxed, we feel safe and we have trained our Aware self to notice our Thinking self.
The two-faced nature of domestic abusers – the Dr Jekyll mask that disguises the Mr Hyde character disorder, along with a long-term diet of lies and gaslighting – leaves survivors wrestling with their own memories and cognitions. Childhood abuse survivors in particular, can doubt their own memories. Survivors can ruminate on all the ways in which they can change the past so that the abuse never happened in an attempt to ease their own pain.
Acceptance is the key to discerning what is true. Without self-compassion, acceptance can be incredibly difficult. Self-compassion helps us deal with the pain of Truth. “It happened, I didn’t deserve it, it wasn’t my fault, I am so sorry this happened to me, I give myself the compassion and loving-kindness I need right now in this moment” or, “I made a terrible mistake, I did something I wish I hadn’t done, but I am only human and I can forgive myself for doing that silly thing under immense pressure and undertake not to do it again. I can’t change the past but I can put my intentional energy into changing old patterns and becoming the person I really want to be.”
©Margot MacCallum
Recommended Reading
CONTENT WARNING: (Not recommended for Survivors in Early-Stage Recovery)
Judith Herman, M.D., (2015). “Trauma and Recovery”, Basic Books, New York.
