Education & Awakening
NOTE: This article contains both Professional opinion and Lived Experience advice.
Unpacking Shannon Thomas’s Theory of Staged Recovery from Narcabuse (A Long Read)
This blog is written for female survivors of male perpetrators.
(Shannon Thomas) Education: learning the specific methods of psychological and emotional abuse.
Education.
A serious and painful study.
Coming to terms with the fact of Dark Triad humans (Cluster B anti-social and narcissistic personality disorders). Usually instantaneous recognition of our partners as one of these types.
Caution. This stage can take a long time (years), and be extremely triggering, running parallel to phases to come. Tread carefully. If you visit Youtube or social media, avoid reading the comments – they are filled with the rage of other victims and nasty trolls trying to inflict further pain on people who are already suffering.
I strongly advise refraining from making comments too – this is a sure-fire way of gaining abusive or offensive retorts – sad, but true, no matter how tactful you are.
Take care not to become addicted to feeding your pain with overdoses of research. You already have a somatic addiction to frequent pain doses from your ex-partner. This addiction to pain can be hard to break, if you have it. (I know it’s weird, but the research supports this – it’s called Stockholm Syndrome, or in milder cases, trauma-bonding)
Greater commitment to our own wellbeing.
If the betrayal trauma, shock and grief are so overwhelming that we can no longer cope with day-to-day life, we really need to seek professional help – starting with our GP. We want to avoid further hurt, as we have already reached our pain threshold.
This state is not permanent. It is not who you are. It will pass. You will heal. Bones knit together stronger than before and psyches can mend too, if we do the internal work. Accept that spiritual practices such as mindfulness, meditation, prayer, radical self-care require more of your time and effort than you have ever awarded them before.
Medicate for temporary symptom control if necessary. Beware of creating a new addiction, or self-medicating with alcohol. Instead of “I can’t cope with this”, start convincing yourself you can find a way to handle it. It’s not logical, it’s chemical now. It’s in your body. Your rational thinking is compromised.
You can’t think your way out of trauma, much as you’ll be wishing you could stop your mind from thinking! You are temporarily trapped in the trauma vortex – the compulsion to return to the abuse story (lies, intermittent reinforcement, gaslighting and broken promises) so as to accept it really happened and figure out how to make it so it didn’t happen. See? Not rational.
Start training in mindfulness to ease your stress symptoms.
2. (Shannon Thomas) Awakening: awareness that other people have had the same experience and recovery is possible.
Search for the truth in your case.
By now, at least a part of you recognises that you have been scammed – the victim of abuse, even if there was no physical violence. You were just a means to an end for him/her. You invested everything. He/she took it all, possibly convinced you to give up your independence and then abandoned you. The reason you feel victimised is because you have been.
Do a bit of detective work. Find proof of the suspicions you long denied. The other women. The misappropriation of money. The malicious slander (the smear campaign). The fake life story. The truth about his 'crazy' exes. The lies behind any myths in the public domain (his professional reputation). The reasons why your friends and family are blaming you. People who were too chicken to tell you bad things about him will come forward with what they know.
Don't ask him directly. He will lie, deny everything, gaslight you and make you feel even crazier and traumatised.
Understanding the legacy of abuse. Loss of innocence.
Making sense of all the cruelty, lies and broken promises, the manipulation, the exploitation, the Dr Jekyll/ Mr Hyde discrepancy between his/her public benevolence and domestic tyranny. What many talk therapists don’t understand is that the suffering in the aftermath is a thousand times worse than the suffering in the relationship. They assume that we must feel relief and start to feel better as soon as the narcopath has left, but the experience for victims is actually the reverse.
Divorce is stressful and painful. Narcissistic divorce is devastating. The pain of Truth being revealed to us at last is shocking and feels overwhelming. It can be a case of, ‘it gets worse before it gets better’. Knuckle down to radical self-care and radical self-acceptance.
Focus on getting to know this new me-after-abuse person you are now carrying around. Tell yourself it’s okay to be you. Mourn the loss of the old you and believe that a stronger, more resilient you will be the result of all this loss.
The comfort of shared human experience.
Realising that many others have suffered as we have can be hugely comforting. It can also be horrifying and stir a deep compassion and a strong will to help or warn others, including his next victim. Whilst there is some evidence out there that doing so has helped save the next woman from victimisation, most of the literature (and my own experience) describe outcomes that mostly include vicious vengeful vitriolic (covert) revenge by the psychopath.
Having their domestic tyranny revealed makes destroying you their new secret purpose. There is nothing practical we can do to protect others from him/her at this stage of our recovery. We are habituated to give huge amounts of care to our abuser. We like caring for others. It fulfills us.
Now we need to turn that care inwards towards ourselves. You really need to be your own best friend now, and without compassion for yourself, your compassion for others is incomplete. Finding a replacement object for your love and care can also be helpful: focusing on your children, getting a pet, volunteering.
Settling the matter of why me?
We crave closure. We need to take responsibility so we can avoid the same mistakes again. Recognise that the more decent, more honourable, more reliable, conscientious and honest you are- the more likely a target you were for a narcopath, who envies or despises and is motivated to destroy these things.
The narcopath chose you because of all the things that are great about you. You made them look good, alongside their false persona. Your empathy, honesty and diligence made up for their lack of those. Stop blaming yourself.
But if there are other issues, like weak boundaries, blind trust, insane loyalty, martyrdom or idiot compassion (neglecting yourself while giving everything to others), start the process of self-change without beating yourself up about the need to change. It might be too early to believe in silver linings, since the enormity of loss is so great and creates rage in a survivor. But if you can start believing that other survivors experience post-traumatic growth after abuse, you at least have a working hypothesis to hold onto.
Integrate cause and effect.
Accept that PTSD is a pervasive persistent moral injury. The pain might be getting worse, not better, as by now, we have a new addiction to the ‘trauma vortex’ – revisiting the same thought scenarios in an effort to think our way out of the pain (rumination).
The past has a strong grip on our psyches, and we struggle with shifting to a positive present or future focus. It feels like it’s in our heads, but it’s in our bodies now. Our amygdalae are pumping out fight /flight signals even after the threat has gone and our hormones and neuro-chemicals are hooked on preparing us to ‘get outta here’.
In fact, we need to stay with ourselves. Grieve over our loss of innocence. The loss of the person we were before we were torn apart and left reeling in shock. The person we were before PTSD. (If the anxiety and rage has persisted beyond a couple of months, trust your own judgement as to what your cluster of symptoms really means. It’s accepted fact for many US psychologists, but Aussie shrinks are only just starting to accept that domestic psychological abuse causes psychological trauma and many don’t understand Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome. It’s not in their manual. Yet.)
Acceptance.
The abuse happened, and we are now in post-trauma, struggling with moral injury. (How could anybody treat someone the way he treated me? And then flip the blame? How could he swear an oath of truth to so many lies? How could he leave me on my knees after all the love and care I gave him? It’s all so wrong!).
We need to stop going over and over the story, trying to solve the conundrum with our minds, and attend to the suffering in our emotional bodies by allowing the pain to be there. “This is a moment of suffering. May I give myself the compassion I need”.
We might cycle back and back into disbelief for a time, as the fallout from re-traumatisation hits us. Continually befriending and soothing the pain will build our tolerance for suffering. We might have tried reaching outwards for help and support for emotional pain.
Our friends don’t know how to help (unless they’ve been victimised themselves). Now is the time to learn how to be our own best friend, take our pain in our own loving embrace, and start to heal ourselves. It’s time to DO THE WORK OF LETTING GO OF THE STORY.
It will take time.
Awakened Compassion and Self-Compassion.
It was our good hearts and our belief in the good in others that led us into the narcopath’s snare. It wasn't about our vanity or weakness or stupidity. It was about allowing ourselves to love and the vulnerability that brings.
Our love and vulnerability meant nothing to someone who treats precious hearts with callous disregard or sadistic cruelty. Start working on compassion for yourself for believing all the lies, the promises, the vows. The false Dr Jekyll persona.
Forgive yourself for reacting to cruelty defensively. You are human. Why shouldn’t you be angry? Fear and anger are long-known symptoms of trauma. You will find the right path when you first forgive yourself.
Don’t put pressure on yourself to forgive others. Pressure from ourselves or others to forgive is a huge mistake at this early stage. Traumatised people who are still highly reactive and suffering deep shame only make their suffering worse struggling to forgive their abuser too early.
This stage will pass and forgiveness might come, but much later than right now. People who are able to instantaneously forgive their abuser/rapist/scammer have a completely different resilience background than yours. Don’t compare yourself to them. Invest in becoming that strong person.
Managing rage.
Rage is a common explosive stage of recovery, particularly for survivors who have a history of abuse. Nightmares or daydreams about revenge for the devastation to our lives. Fury at victim-blamers. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Take care not to express your rage to people you think should understand it. People don’t understand. They think what they are seeing is the reason the narcopath left. Only you know the rage is the result of what happened to you and not ‘who you are’.
The energy of rage is very off-putting to others (I don’t need to tell you this). Express the rage in letters you send only to yourself or in a journal. Get it out of your system. Better out than in. If ritual is your thing, write the letters expressing rage and then burn them. Write the names of the person or people who provoked it and burn that. Teach yourself to take a deep breath or count to ten when rage arises in public. If you have explosive rage, know that this season will pass and just hang on for the ride.
Join your own self appreciation society.
Self-focus is a normal and natural human reaction to trauma, depression, grief or anxiety. Guilt, shame and remorse are new evils that raise their ugly heads for victims of abuse once the acute reactive stage has waned.
Victim-blaming is a pervasive ‘thing’, and what we seriously don’t need is to be reframing what happened by blaming ourselves for either our abuse or our ‘hysterical’ post-abuse behaviour.
Even if you're still a mess, give yourself credit for coping as well as you have done. Even if you collapsed into a quivering heap, asking for support from anyone and everyone, or lashed out at your abuser, notice how far you've come already.
List the little tiny things you're grateful for. A flower, a washing machine to do your laundry, a friend's roof over your head, your dog, your fabulous new figure now you’ve been unable to eat for six months! The fact that you told the truth when you could have lied. Hold your head high.
©Margot MacCallum 2021
