Time Does Heal
Name withheld
When my abusive marriage ended on a very bad note after more than 35 years, I thought I would feel relieved. In some ways I did but mostly I felt lost as friends went by the wayside one after another and I moved to a new town for a fresh start.
People talk a lot about surviving or leaving narcissistic relationships and how you can lose your identity but actually going through it is even worse than how they describe it. I’d spent three decades being told, directly or indirectly, that my feelings were wrong, my instincts couldn’t be trusted and my version of events wasn’t quite accurate. In the end, I had become a stranger to myself and I had to fight hard to see even a fraction of who I used to be before I met him.
I remember standing in my kitchen one morning after he’d moved out, making a mug of tea and feeling completely overwhelmed by the fact that nobody was there to criticise how I was making it. It sounds ridiculous now, but I put the milk in on top of the tea bag before pouring the water into the mug – exactly the opposite of what I was told to do for so many years.
That’s what recovery looked like for me in the beginning; rebelling in pretty mundane ways because I wasn’t constantly looking over my shoulder. I even threw an egg at the wall once just to make a mess and clean it up when I was ready!
The things that helped were surprisingly simple. I started walking every day, partly because I needed to get out of the house and partly because it was the only time my mind seemed to quieten down and put things into perspective. I learned some breathing exercises from a YouTube video and used them whenever anxiety crept in. I spent time in my garden with my shoes off, feeling the grass under my feet and reminding myself that I was here, present and safe.
None of it felt life-changing at the time but healing was a gradual process and I think being consistent with these things meant I overcame the narcissistic fallout quite quickly because I took control and put my wellbeing first instead of sitting feeling sorry for myself.
And that’s really why I’ve written this – to reassure people who’ve suffered narcissistic abuse, however that looks, that you can get over it and that you’re worth fighting for. Another reason I’m writing this is because I see so much of my own journey in yours, Cookie. I know there are days when it feels as though progress is painfully slow and you wonder whether you’ll ever fully recover from what you’ve been through. From where I’m standing, a few years further down the road, I can tell you that you are doing exactly the right things to help yourself long term. The walking, breath work, grounding are not small things, they are the foundations of wellbeing.
The other thing I wanted to say was that I was wrong thinking that I needed to see the me I once knew again. I thought healing meant getting back to the person I was before my marriage but what I’ve discovered instead is that I’m becoming someone entirely new and, much to my surprise, I rather like her.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that is is reassuring to whoever needed to see it.
