Narcissism: How to Heal in the Aftermath — Part 1: The Log

You wake up in the middle of the night and its pitch black. You blink a couple of times and rub your eyes and then you reach over to where your lamp is in order to turn it on so you can actually see something. As you swipe your hand back and forth in the air you pause, you feel puzzled and you sit up. You reach over again and swipe blindly some more, it’s like your night table is gone?

You see your pants still draped over the side of the bed at your feet so you grab them and fumble through your pockets to grab your phone. Still bewildered and half asleep you turn on your flashlight and look over at your night table and its gone. Shocked you pan the light around the room and you feel a jarring moment of pure fear. You realize, you aren’t in your room.

For anyone that has slept away from home and woke up in the middle of the night confused and startled because you don’t know where you are, you have a very rough idea of what its like to be gaslit by a narcissist. Sadly, in the aftermath of a breakup it is similar to that experience but multiplied by a thousand. It truly is one of the most jarring experiences that you can have because your false reality comes apart and your new reality is very different.

Confused, bewildered, scared, and feeling like you woke up on the dark side of the moon because what you knew to be true a day ago turns out to be a complete fantasy reality that you lived in for years. Survivors find themselves questioning everything, they don’t understand how they couldn’t see what was happening. They couldn't see that this person was telling them one thing and feeling and doing completely the opposite.

It is one of the most disorienting experiences that a person can have because you literally find out that things you would have bet your life on with certainty a day before, are now all established fiction. The problem is that it is a long journey out of the fog — you don’t get to wake up and see the real world fully. It has the hazy ‘still asleep’ look to it.

Survivors are blinded by their own memories. For whatever reason, for many survivors its like they suddenly can’t recall all of the bad times; or if they can, it is such a minor footnote that this new reality seems even more disjointed because of it. Why would they do this when things were going so great? Can’t he/she see how much I love them and don’t they remember how much fun we had all the time?

Your own past trauma and your brain’s defense against that trauma have blinded you. You cannot see things fairly yet. The first thing you have to do is accept that what you remember as being the golden times and the great period you’d give your right arm to go back to — you aren’t seeing the horrible parts that are there the way you need to be. It will come in time — unfortunately, your brain has been programmed since you were a kid to suppress the bad and focus on the good.

The trauma of the breakup and the pain it causes puts your brain back into safety mode for your own good. Only in this case, it doesn’t help actually help you it makes it worst because you can’t see a fair picture of what this person was really like. All you see is these good times. As you start to process the pain the bad stuff will start to come back.

So, step one for making it through this breakup is for you to get a realistic vision of what has happened. You need to sit and write down every time you have a bad memory triggered about this person — write it down in a log book. Write them all down. Then when you get that flood of ‘I would do anything to get that relationship back’ read your log book. Write with brutal honesty. You will likely need this book. It will be an important part of your survival kit for the aftermath. One of the biggest risks for you will be the fact that all they will have to do is come back and snap their fingers and you’ll forgive everything they have done, just to get rid of that emotional pain you’re in. This can become a deadly cycle.

Homework Assignment: Start a log book of all of the horrible things that your ex did while you were together. Write it all down in brutal honesty. If your book gets full, get another one and fill it up too. Writing these stories down will help to anchor you back into reality of this world you are in now and it will pull you out of their world where you will have nothing but pain and desperation trying to get them back. This book is critical. You will see what I mean the first time you read through it and feel rage instead of longing.