Unique Aspects of Healing From Narcissistic Abuse
There is a particular kind of disorientation that comes with realizing, sometimes years into a relationship and sometimes only after it has ended, that what you lived through has a name.
Narcissistic abuse.
The phrase can feel too clinical for something so intimate. It can also feel strangely relieving, because it finally gives shape to an experience you have spent a long time trying to explain to yourself.
If you are here because you are starting to wonder whether this applies to your relationship, your dating life, or your relationship with a parent, I want to say this clearly: the confusion you feel is not a flaw in your perception. It is often the direct result of a dynamic that was designed, consciously or not, to keep you doubting yourself.
Untangling that takes more than information. It takes learning to trust your own body and your own perception again, and that is the work I want to walk through with you here.
What Is Narcissistic Abuse?
What is narcissistic abuse? It describes a repeating pattern of behavior in a relationship, romantic, parental, or otherwise, where one person's sense of self depends on controlling, diminishing, or extracting from another.
It is rarely a single dramatic event. More often, it accumulates slowly:
Subtle put-downs disguised as jokes
Affection that arrives only when it serves a purpose
A consistent redirection of blame back onto you
What makes this pattern so disorienting is that it is rarely constant. There are good moments. There is warmth, even generosity, mixed in. This inconsistency is part of what makes the pattern so hard to name while you are inside it, and it is central to the covert form specifically.
Covert Narcissistic Abuse: Why It's Harder to See
Covert narcissistic abuse is quieter than the overt form, and often harder to recover from precisely because it is so deniable, even to the person living through it.
When people imagine narcissistic abuse, they often picture something loud: yelling, obvious cruelty, control that announces itself. Covert narcissistic abuse does not look like cruelty. It often looks like love, offered at exactly the moment it will do the most work of controlling the interaction.
A clinical example:
I think of a client whose mother is exceptionally bright and, in her own way, exceptionally skilled at this pattern. In an early session, my client had a moment of recognition. Her mother's compliments and moments of warmth were not random. They tended to arrive at strategic points, softening my client just enough to make her more permeable, right before her mother redirected the conversation back to her original agenda.
My client had spent years trying to name what her mother was doing, only to be met with a genuine-sounding compliment that disarmed her, followed by a slow pivot back to wherever her mother wanted to go. Naming this pattern out loud, in session, was the beginning of being able to see it clearly enough to stop being swept along by it.
Why This Lives in the Body, Not Just the Story
Understanding narcissistic abuse intellectually is important. It is not the same as resolving it in your body.
When my client first named what her mother was doing, it started as a purely cognitive realization, an aha moment. What happened next matters more.
I asked her to notice what was happening inside her, not just as a thought, but as a felt experience: emotion, physical sensation, her sense of herself in that moment.
What she found:
This single moment of clarity opened a door to other memories, other instances of the same pattern, that suddenly made sense in sequence
She began to feel more present in her own body, which mattered because she has a strong tendency to dissociate when her mother behaves this way (you can read more about this kind of freeze response in what functional freeze symptoms are and what they mean)
Underneath the dissociation, she found anger, not just at her mother, but at how easily she herself had been moved and managed
Underneath that anger was a quiet sense of power, a reclaiming of her own awareness
The clarity was not only cognitive. It reached into the core of who she is, and that is what allowed it to actually anchor.
This is the difference between knowing something happened to you and resolving it in your body. Both matter. Only one of them changes how your body responds the next time the pattern shows up.
Recovering from Narcissistic Abuse: What the Body Needs
Recovering from narcissistic abuse often begins with recognizing fawning, one of the most consistent patterns I see in clients healing from the covert form specifically.
This shows up as:
People-pleasing
An inability to advocate for your own needs
A reflexive habit of saying what will keep the peace rather than what is true
Why this happens:
Underneath fawning is usually fear, not of the person exactly, but of what will happen if they respond badly. Many of my clients describe feeling responsible for managing the other person's emotional reaction. If they set a boundary and the other person becomes upset, they feel they now have to caretake that response.
This often comes bundled with guilt. Guilt for having needs. Guilt for wanting separation. Guilt for feelings that are, in fact, completely reasonable.
The somatic signature:
As a client begins to slip into fawning, they often lose connection with their body and move up into their head. In session, I help clients notice:
Breathing becoming shallower
Heart rate picking up slightly, even without full anxiety
Posture shifting into subtle stillness, arms drawn and in close
A quiet bracing rather than open, fluid movement
Thoughts getting louder while the body goes quiet
This is a form of freeze, and it is often happening well before the person is consciously aware of it. You cannot think your way out of a freeze response. You have to help the body find its way back to safety and choice, which is the core of nervous system regulation.
Is trauma Holding you back?
Perhaps you experienced a specific event that left you feeling different, disconnected, or stuck. Or maybe you carry a sense of unease in your body, struggling with anxiety or a feeling that something isn’t quite right.
As a somatic experiencing practitioner I specialize in helping people process and release stored trauma through gentle yet effective methods.
Download my FREE guide “Get Unstuck! The Truth About Body Trauma and How to Break Free’ and learn how to create the future you deserve.
Setting Boundaries After Narcissistic Abuse
Setting boundaries after narcissistic abuse fails less often from a lack of willpower and more often because the nervous system steps in and defaults into a fawning response.
You will find plenty of advice online that boils down to “just set the boundary”, or “just go no contact”. This advice is not wrong exactly, but it often skips the part that actually makes boundaries possible in the first place.
What I typically see when a boundary does not hold:
A client sets a boundary, feels the other person's reaction beginning to build, and gets flooded with anxiety. The instinct is to immediately walk it back. It's okay, we don't have to, it's fine, we can do what you want. Sometimes this shows up as speaking faster, almost trying to outrun the discomfort before the other person can respond.
This is not a failure of character. It is a nervous system that has learned, often over many years, that holding a boundary is unsafe.
What actually builds boundary capacity:
Recovering is not about forcing yourself to hold firm through sheer willpower. It is about slowly building the felt sense, in your body, that it is possible to:
Want something different
Feel that want clearly in the moment
Stay connected to yourself while someone else has a reaction to it
The boundary itself is often the last step, not the first. Long before you can enforce one, you have to be able to feel that you want one and stay connected to it.
Dating After Narcissistic Abuse: Learning to Trust Your Own Body Again
Dating after narcissistic abuse often brings a habit of scanning the other person to gauge whether your own preferences are acceptable, before you voice them.
A small, telling example:
A client will realize, only after the fact, that she said she was fine with Chinese food when she actually wanted Italian. In the moment, there was often a subtle physical signal, a slight stillness, a bracing in the body, that she overrode without fully registering it.
Learning to date again after this kind of history is largely about catching that signal earlier. Not analyzing whether the date went well afterward, but noticing, in real time, the small bodily cues that tell you when you have started to abandon your own preferences to keep things smooth.
This is delicate work, and it does not happen on a fixed timeline. It happens one noticed sensation at a time, one small moment of staying with yourself instead of overriding yourself, until that capacity becomes more available to you.
You Adapted. You Weren't Broken.
If any of this feels familiar, I want you to know something clearly: the confusion, the self-doubt, the difficulty holding a boundary even when you know intellectually that you deserve to, none of it means something is wrong with you.
It means you adapted, in the best way you could, to a dynamic that asked you to disconnect from yourself in order to stay safe or connected.
Healing from narcissistic abuse is not about becoming a different, more boundaried version of yourself overnight. It is about slowly, gently rebuilding your relationship with your own body and your own perception, one small moment of noticing at a time.
If you are ready to explore this work, I invite you to learn more about how I support clients healing from narcissistic abuse, or read about the somatic approach that underlies everything I do in session. If you have questions or want to talk through whether this work is right for you, I would love to hear from you.
Brianna Anderson, SEP
If you’re ready to begin your healing journey I’m here to help so you can begin to live the life of your dreams
My private practice specializes in helping people who have endured trauma, resolve the symptoms out of their body, mind & spirit so they can feel comfortable in their skin, find inner peace and live the desires of their heart.
I am based out of South Orange County, Ca and offer online therapy sessions. Whether you are just starting your healing journey or ready to try something new, I am here to help.