How To Realign With Your Core Values
Image by Borna Bevanda
Returning to Basic Decency
The empirical evidence is there in the online narcabuse recovery fora. The targets of narcopaths are, by enlarge, highly principled and conscientious people of integrity. Living unaware with a manipulative exploitative character-disordered other whom we love and trust can cause repetitive injuries to our core values: moral injuries.
Discovering we have been living a lie (believing the promises and oaths from the narcopath’s false self) when we deeply value honesty, for example, can seriously undermine our own solid sense of who we are. Being gaslighted when we value accountability creates cognitive dissonance.
Deep recovery implies unpacking and getting back in touch with our core values – then taking action in our lives to re-align our shattered souls with our ‘true’ self. This deep contemplation of what really matters to us most will bring up lots of little voices that try to sabotage this re-alignment. “I don’t have time for this. I don’t know what I really value. I don’t want to think about it. I’ll do this later. It’s my values that got me into trouble with the narcopath! But my values contradict each other!”
But if we stop procrastinating and just get down to the task of considering what our values are, we can gain a really solid sense of purpose; a reason for being; an appreciation of people whose values resonate with us. Knowing our values helps us narrow down the field of experimentation in re-building our shattered lives again from our scorched-earth, post-abuse position.
https://liveboldandbloom.com/05/values/list-of-values is a really great place to find a list of values to start your thinking off. Or work with an ACT therapist to get help with rediscovering your values.
You might find that since you have woken up to narcabuse, some of your values have been the source of a lot of pain. But even then, these values still resonate with you and maybe there are other important qualities you can cultivate to support others. I’m thinking of a few of my own here: honesty and accountability, for example. Well, being honest and holding ourselves and others to account can lose us a lot of friends and win us a lot of enemies!
Many of us are the types who formerly held ourselves accountable for stuff that wasn’t even ours (family scapegoats who took the blame for ‘everything’, making us easy to manipulate). As we build better boundaries and our discernment grows, we gain a better perspective over who is accountable for what. If such values are important to us, but we crumble in the face of the defensive, aggressive or abusive retorts our values evoke from the narcopath and others, we might decide to adopt the cultivation of courage, calmness, compassion or intuition as an internal support for the inevitable social backlash.
Our values are unique to each of us. In contemplating our values, we also need to sort out those that are conditioned in us that we never chose, or that are now no longer really supportive of our recovery. Trust is perhaps the most obvious of those. We might decide that trusting others at face value doesn’t really work for us any more! Loyalty is another value that might have got us into a lot of trouble with abusers in our lives – staying loyal and protective of someone who is covertly using or undermining us.
Sacrifice is another value that probably needs some tweaking after narcabuse. So many of us believed in sacrifice or compromise as a necessary part of loving relationships and now find ourselves with nothing, having been coerced into sacrificing all for the sake of someone who gains power and gratification from destroying lives.
We might also find that things we never before valued have risen in value to us, as a direct result of waking up to narcabuse. For example, our own character as a highly sensitive, intuitive or empathic person. Whilst before we might have wished we could toughen up, grow a hide as thick as a rhino to save us from the inevitable pain of sensitivity, now we might realise the value of being open and empathic to the pain of the world since it is a necessary part of being receptive to beauty, joy and expansiveness.
“Know thyself” is a fundamental part of living a purposeful, meaningful life. For those of us who made serving our narcopathic partner our ‘purpose’, it is essential to get back in touch with what we really value. This awareness can help us escape the trauma-bonding, co-dependency and cognitive dissonance and stand solidly inside our own power and worth as human beings (even with PTSD in remission).
May you find a path out of pain, discover the power of your own inner guiding light and deep calm. 🙏🏻
© Margot MacCallum
RECOMMENDED READING
"The Happiness Trap", Russ Harris, Robinson, 2007, 2008
