The Stages of Acceptance

Why Recovery From Narcissistic Abuse and Love-Fraud Takes So Long….

This blog is written for female survivors of male perpetrators.

If we try to answer this question through the lens of Buddhist psychology, we could distil the answer down to one word: resistance.

These break-ups are very different from those with neuro-typical or ‘normal’ individuals. Of course, every break up implies change, and aversion to change is hard-wired into the reptilian parts of the human brain. Change sets off the amygdala, and our bodies deliver us into the fight/flight/freeze reaction.

In every instance of change where this happens, the amygdala (which is our emergency response mechanism) sends a message to our hypothalamus (which evolved later and might be thought of as the less impulsive response system). The brain sorts through the external and internal stimuli to assess whether the threat is immediate, real or has passed. If the threat has passed, this little gland then instructs the body to reset our body to normal: slow the pulse, stop the blood pumping to the limbs in readiness for escape, de-escalate fearful emotions and so on. With PTSD, this process fails and we get stuck in high alert.

Recovering from narcissistic abuse almost always involves realisation after realisation that we have been lied to, stolen from, used – not only financially, but emotionally, socially, professionally and psychologically. In the aftermath, it slowly dawns that our finer human qualities (kindness, generosity, loyalty, trust) have been distorted and used against us in order to destroy and discredit us. We have been involved with a human parasite who slowly starves and kills its host.

If our abuser was a psychopath, we still have more covert vengeful destruction ahead of us after the immediate break-up. In this instance, we may find that the change in our lives is so great that we have lost everything it takes to make a life – our homes, our jobs, our social and professional circles, our innocence and our reason for being.

So, if it is normal and natural for humans to resist change, we are faced with change so huge that it will break some of us. Some of us will collapse into a screaming heap of stress and anxiety so enormous that we are unable to even function in a normal way (breakdown). Due to the stigma against mental illness and victimisation in those who surround us, we might then have to struggle with even more resistance (to our own breakdown). By reason of conditioned resilience or brevity of the abusive relationship, some survivors will still have a few lifelines intact, such as jobs, homes, family or social support, or a degree of insight into the nature of reality outside their personal bubble. For almost all of us, the crisis is not only circumstantial but existential. We have lost our innocence and woken up to the fact that the world (including humankind) is not the way we thought it was or the way we’d like it to be.

Change + resistance = struggle.

Aversion

In order to reduce our own pain, we must begin to accept all the change that has been forced upon us by narcabuse. Buddhist wisdom offers insight into the journey of acceptance by using the analogy of the unwelcome guest. We feel deeply violated and possibly complicit in our own violation as we have invited into our lives a dangerous fraudster posing as our soul mate – the predatory wolf disguised as the harmless sheep. We feel deep and vast aversion for the whole experience, as it belies everything we ever believed to be true. This aversion to the truth of what happened to us is extremely painful.

Isolating Self-Protection

Our natural human response from the moment we realise we have had an unwelcome guest in our home is to put up our emotional force field. This defence mechanism may be helpful to us in times when we genuinely need to protect ourselves. But closing the door, putting up the force field, donning the armour against our enemies every day also keeps our allies at bay. If we resist for too long, resistance can become habit. To prevent this, it’s essential to spend a little time each day alone or with ‘safe’ people around whom we can dissolve the force field and discard the armour.

Toleration/Allowing of Pain

This stage of acceptance is also extremely painful. Avoiding facing it, struggling to reframe things so that this devastation never happened – searching in the rubble for scraps from our former lives, distracting ourselves with consumption, trying to bury the truth back down at the bottom of our psyches are all normal and natural defence mechanisms. Facing the fact that the happy, secure, stable, loving relationship we signed up for was a delusion right from the start, closing the door on a significant chapter of our lives and (in some cases) accepting that we have lost everything we devoted our lives to building would be daunting for anyone.

But what happens next is that we naturally turn inside in search of a solution, since we have exhausted our external circumstances, circling over old ground to the point of exhaustion. We come to a point of tolerating this unwelcome guest that has tricked his way into our home. New stirrings of courage and belief in our ability to cope with the truth of this unholy battle rise from within. We find the strength to endure the war in our psyches, and begin to apply kind curiosity to this unwelcome guest and tender self-compassion to our own experience of him.

We have been thrown in the deep end and from the struggle not to drown comes the self-taught ability to dive deep. We question everything – our own strong emotions, the nature of reality, the function of good and evil in the world, our own purpose on this earth. Subsequently, whether we have trained in mindfulness or not, the time will come when we return to living in the present moment. We are not only tolerating our unwelcome guest, but we are becoming okay with the fact that such ugliness has come to stay in our home. We allow our strong emotions. We develop a kind of friendship with our own changed inner and outer landscape, and towards all our unwanted guests. We give them the key to our door and permission to come and go as they please, because we have the inner strength and commitment to handle it.

Softening into Our Own Lived Experience

The very resistance itself becomes our friend instead of our enemy. Resistance becomes a big red flag that warns us of a boundary violation in the very moment. It helps us to skip through the stages of acceptance straight to standing up for ourselves. We have changed our own conditioning. Generations of women have been trained never to say ‘no’ but now we have found our own unique way to do it – to close the door if we need to.

Insight and Wisdom

We even start to see the benefits – the silver lining - in the traumatic experience of losing everything to a human parasite. We can feel pride in our own growth in compassion and insight. We have reached a kind of maturity that is simply not available to people whose lives have not been turned upside down by trauma; people who have never opened the door to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. For many of us, we have literally had to rebuild our lives from the ground up with worn-out tools and broken support systems.

Personal Power – Standing Alone in the Wilderness

We have travelled a long bumpy ride down the path to acceptance of change, aided by the deep insight that the impermanent nature of existence is a fundamental truth. Our engagement with our fledgling new life is more profound, insightful, grown-up and solid than before the trauma. Our inner child has been re-parented and her deep wounds integrated with warmth and tenderness. Any disowned parts of ourselves are well on the way to being welcomed, along with all our unwanted guests, into the authentic new homes we have built for ourselves.

We now have the power to open or close our door as and when we see fit. Our tolerance (resilience) has grown, our insight (wisdom) has grown, our ability to greet every kind of guest with less fear, aversion or delusion has grown (equanimity). We have a greater sense of our own meaning and purpose, and a fresh understanding that making another person our reason for being is a first-class ticket on the Highway to Hell. We have discovered the power that was our birth right – the power that our whole society conspires to hide or steal from us as women.

One day, we reach a place of acceptance where we find that narcabuse was actually an opportunity for personal growth! It wasn’t the end. It was the beginning.