Beyond Reacting: Your Path to True Indifference After Narcissistic Abuse.

Stop fighting their ghost. Your freedom isn't in forgetting them, but in mastering your inner landscape.

Photo by Ryan Moreno on Unsplash

You’ve broken free of the relationship — maybe by choice, maybe by involuntary discard.

You know the relationship was killing you, killing your soul.

And yet you’re struggling to let it go.

• You’ve been told to stop thinking about them, to move on. Yet you think about the narcissist all the time — simply unable to get them out of your head.

• You’ve been told to become a gray rock and not react to the narcissist’s tactics. Yet they make you so stinking mad.

• You’ve been told to go no contact, to not respond to their attempts to re-engage you. Yet you find it impossible to not respond.

• You’ve been told to not only act indifferent, but to become indifferent. You’re wondering, “How the hell do I do that?”

Move yourself out of harm’s way

Take the mental and physical action to get into a physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually safe space. This means leaving the relationship, separating your physical space.

While you may feel you have reasons to stay, you will not be able to heal to the extent that you become indifferent while living with a narcissist.

When you’re in the middle of the hurricane, you have no idea how much the narcissist’s behavior is impacting you. With a covert narcissist, some of the subtle ways they sabotage and undermine you may not become apparent until years after you’ve left.

You will not find clarity in a place of continuing abuse.

Without clarity, you cannot discern what is yours to handle and what is theirs. You internalize their words and actions. You’re trying to drive with a muddy windshield.

Notice how you are traumatizing yourself

The part of you that internalizes the narcissist’s behavior is traumatizing you.

Every thought, every action based on that internalized belief re-creates the trauma — only now you’re doing the narcissist’s work for them.

• You ask your friends if you are too controlling.

• You read and reread an email you sent to see if it could have come across as rude.

• You hold back from speaking up at a meeting, because you believe you should be seen and not heard.

• You skip your award ceremony, because you believe it’s undeserved.

• You fight back tears to avoid being the drama king/queen.

• You perseverate and avoid making even minor decisions.

• You work really hard to avoid being seen as lazy.

• You amp up your people-pleasing to avoid being difficult.

• You say “yes” when you want to say “no.”

• You shy away from setting boundaries.

With each thought and action, you are telling yourself

• I’m not good enough.

• I can’t trust myself to make good decisions.

• I don’t deserve good things.

• I need someone else to think I’m okay. My opinion doesn’t matter.

• I don’t deserve to be heard.

• My emotions are bad or make me weak.

• My worth is defined by my success.

• I have to make others happy or else I’ll be alone.

• I deserve the shame I feel inside.

Now you may be saying, “but that’s true!” to one or more of these statements.

That’s evidence of you recreating the trauma. None of them are true.

Commit to rewiring your neural pathways

Awareness is the first step. Shining a light on your subconscious emotions, thoughts, and scripts brings them out into the open to be examined thoroughly.

Only once you see them, can you rewire them.

The process is challenging, but simple.

Every time you become aware of a thought, urge, or action that you know will be harmful — for example, thinking about the narcissist, calling them, or looking at photos of the two of you together, take a conscious pause.

Consciously stopping the thought process or behavior takes strength. The next step takes even more.

Turn your attention inward. Examine what it is you are feeling that is making you think or wish to behave in this way.

Thought: Endless replay of the end of the relationship — what you said and did, what the narcissist said and did

Focus inward: You discover you feel and believe …

• Something is wrong with you.

• You made a mistake.

• The relationship wouldn’t have ended if you were a better person.

• You are unsafe.

• You aren’t worthy of love.

• You’ll never be able to trust anyone again.

• You don’t know how you could have been so stupid not to see the signs.

You focus on the feeling or belief that rings true for you, realizing every person is different.

Urge: You feel an uncontrollable urge to confront them in public

Focus inward: You discover…

• You feel a tremendous amount of rage in your body.

• You want to hurt them like they hurt you.

• Your anger is in response to the depth of your hurt.

• You want to protect others like you wish someone had protected you.

Again, focus on the emotion inside of you, without giving in to the story you’ve created about it. If you’re feeling rage, really feel that rage. If you’re feeling fear, really experience that fear. Allow it, accept it, give it a welcome space.

Giving your emotion attention and focus allows it to resolve. Its message has been received.

Think of a child wanting attention when you’re on the phone. The child interrupts, tugs at your sleeve, pokes your leg over and over as you motion Shhhhh. If you pause for a moment and give the child attention, often they wander off happily. If you don’t, their desire for attention becomes more insistent.

Resolve your triggers

Though the narcissist has harmed you in more ways than you can count, your triggers are yours to resolve.

An emotional trigger is a reaction, rather than a response. It’s a decision made, or action taken by your emotional brain, long before your rational, thinking brain even knows there’s an issue. This reaction is driven by an existing neural pathway.

You may have been taught to identify, then avoid triggers in therapy. While this survival-based strategy can be helpful at the beginning of the healing journey, you quickly discover it’s holding you back.

Once you realize triggers are a gift – a message from your body shining a spotlight on a terrible lie you believe about yourself, you feel blessed for the opportunity to rewrite that false belief. This is something I love helping clients do!

Consciously choose how to move forward

After completing the four foundational steps, this is the cherry on top.

If you have truly embraced and completed the first four, you are no longer…

• Ruminating

• Fighting the urge to stalk their social media

• Wanting to create an opportunity to tell them off

At this point, you no longer care. You’ve truly become indifferent.

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Embrace the process

In the beginning, this process will need to be followed for everything — likely several times per day.

It doesn’t have to take hours. Even if it does, it’ll save you the hours you lose if you don’t follow it and remain emotionally attached.

• You wake up and want to reach out to the narcissist? Do the process.

• You feel the urge to stalk the narcissist’s social media over lunch? Do the process.

• You hear from a friend that the narcissist is talking trash about you? Do the process.

• You eat dinner at home alone and feel yourself sliding into a pit of despair, wondering about what could have been? Do the process.

Over time, you’ll notice you’re triggered less often. Your thoughts and urges last moments instead of hours or days. You’re able to complete the steps more quickly.

With continued practice, you’ll discover the old neural pathways no longer exist. You’ve created new ones, healthy ones.

You embody indifference.

.Originally published on Medium.

Disclaimer: This answer is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical or legal advice. It’s a recount of how I’ve been able to help myself and others heal from narcissistic abuse and how it may be helpful to you.

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Dr. Melissa Kalt, M.D. is a trauma, covert narcissistic abuse, and rapid narcissistic abuse recovery expert who helps Soul-driven leaders transcend their past narcissistic abuse to create greater impact and fulfillment while they change the world.