I’m really excited today about talking to you about the 4 Key Stages to Healing after narcissistic abuse, because I believe there needs to be some much-needed awareness around this. I would like to put under a microscope why the old stages of healing are flawed and why they don’t grant victims of narcissistic abuse true evolution and healing, compared to the revolutionary Thriver Way to heal which does.
The old systems and the new Thriver stage of healing after narcissistic abuse are in agreeance about these 4 main stages of recovery yet their reasons and the way they are carried out are very different.
Let’s investigate.
Stage 1: No Contact
Absolutely, No Contact (or strict Modified Contact such as in the case of parallel-parenting) is the number one thing anyone who has suffered narcissistic abuse needs to do to have any chance of recovery. This vital first stage to healing after narcissistic abuse is so that a person can get off the battlefield where they are sustaining trauma after trauma and start to learn how to heal.
What I find missing in this step of contemporary recovery, is the deeper understanding of what No Contact really is.
It can’t just be physical No Contact.
Narcissistic abuse is a spiritual/energetic/psychic phenomenon. Narcissists are energy vampires and they are getting an energy feed off you with ANY emotional energy you grant them in any shape or form.
After being traumatically abused, the abuse lives on inside you as if it has a life of its own. Even if you have gone No Contact it’s likely that you will still feel like you are in the thick of abuse, plus there is also a chemical addiction withdrawal to the narcissist going on which is horrific. This is your body and brain trying to force you to reconnect back to the source of the peptides (emotional cocktails) that your cellular being is hooked on.
The standard No Contact stage of healing after narcissistic abuse includes these issues: a belief that staying away physically should be enough to get well, and the non-recognition or treatment of the peptide addiction, meaning that the victim suffers horrific addictive pulls to the narcissist (even if just as obsessive thoughts) that feel almost impossible to overcome.
In standard No Contact, where the mental, emotional and psychic connection to the narcissist is not being addressed and released from within ourselves, the breaking of No Contact is usual, in fact probable. Additionally, if there is not enough emphasis on blocking all contact, and letting go of all involvement, interest or checking up on the narcissist whatsoever, there is a real danger to get hooked back in.
What is really required is knowing how vital all of these actions are because of the energetic, emotional component that needs to be dissolved.
I have also found that there is a lack of preparation or treatment for the inevitable after-shock that hits victims hard, means they feel worse when out of the relationship than they did in it (due to a fully activated peptide addiction) and this can be a real danger time where they go back or break down making future recovery even more arduous.
In contrast, the Thriver Way to do No Contact addresses what is required for No Contact to hold and be as it is intended to be – grant the space to heal.
This can only work if we treat the feelings of addiction by quickly getting into our bodies to start becoming a sound, comforting and more solid source to ourselves so that we can get through the horror and out to the other side.
First of all, we need to accept that the enmeshment with a narcissist primarily is emotional and physical. This is no less than a psychic takeover and even though physical distance is vital, if we don’t get the emotional and psychic aspect of it right we are prone to break no contact, and/or remain traumatised, terrified, heartbroken and keep handing the narcissist our pain and fear to defeat us in court or with other matters, severely diminishing our ability to get on with and generate our True Self and True Life.
In no shape or form does just a physical No Contact create a Thriver Recovery.
Thriver No Contact entails a removal of ALL energy. Which means no physical contact (or very strict modified contact through 3rd parties if necessary).
No Contact also means NO checking up, asking people about or stalking on social media.
What is really required is a letting go of all common threads and connections.
This person is also blocked in every way possible so that we are never expecting a contact, and if this person finds a way to contact you don’t respond and then block that line of contact again, or take out an intervention order which means ‘Do NOT contact me.’
What is also vitally necessary is: strict No Contact with one’s own mind. ‘I am not going to think about this person, instead, I will use the NARP Modules to come into my body and release the trauma from inside me associated with these thoughts’.
By adopting this self-devoted practice, the obsession and pulls start melting away very quickly, and we become empowered on these topics and areas we were continually thinking about.
By addressing the deeper issues with narcissistic abuse and having the emotional Quantum tools in place to deal with these deadly enmeshments, as well as addictive feelings and pulls, generally a much more powerful and straight line of recovery and dealing with the aftermath of narcissistic abuse occurs.
If there is a slip up on breaking No Contact, the tools and processes are in place to be able to find the associated trauma that was generating that momentary powerlessness inside, release it, and then go up higher into an even more powerful state of self than previously.
Stage 2: Taking Radical Personal Resposibility
After narcissistic abuse, there has been so much projected onto you that it is usual to feel defective and wrong. You were probably convinced that you were to blame for a great deal of the relationship.
It truly is such a relief when we DO discover information about narcissists that helps us realise that there is a name for this insanity and that we are not going mad!
You will have absolutely no argument from me whatsoever that this is a very important part of the healing process, but I want you to know with every fibre of my being, in no way is this the complete answer to recovery.
This second stage of recovery after narcissistic abuse is one we have to get very clear about because if we assign focus and blame to narcissists and keep looking outwards, we are going to be in for a very hard time.
In no way does doing this heal your traumatised Inner Being or abuse programs.
Demonising narcissists doesn’t make you well. That’s like taking poison every day and hoping the other person will be exterminated.
In the Thriver Way to heal the following is what we embody as our truth:
‘If the trauma is inside my Being, then I am the only person, as an adult, who can take the responsibility to heal it. It is only me who can meet it and do the work inside my Inner Being no matter who did this, how it got there or what it is about.’
And …
‘I am my own saviour and no more am I going to be stuck in the powerless victimisation of trying to force damaged others to fix me. In my Thriver Life I am going to become a self-generative source of my own healing and Thriving regardless of what other people are or aren’t doing … and SO it IS!’
I really want you to know that is freedom, because no longer do you have to wait. You CAN start getting better now!
There are HUGE differences between the words ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Blame’. As Thrivers we are not taking the blame! Rather, we are taking radical personal responsibility (our power back) to FINALLY heal our lives.
Now let’s look at the 3nd key stage of healing after narcissistic abuse.
Stage 3: Start Releasing the Trauma
The third of the key stages of healing after narcissistic abuse is very important. Especially, once we have detached and got some space from the narcissist, the almighty peptide addiction is going to hit VERY hard.
This is when people can feel like they are losing their mind. I wrote about in my book You Can Thrive After Narcissistic Abuse, when Kevin felt like he was madly in love with his ex-partner because he couldn’t stop missing her, and how Margaret literally felt like she was losing her mind when she finally got out.
I remember all those years ago when I did (on one occasion) get very clear that I needed to go No Contact, stay away and keep away, and my therapist told me “This is wonderful you have broken through, you get it!”
Yet, nothing could have been further from the truth. Before long, my body chemically (because of not getting its hit of the chemicals it was addictively craving: abuse, victimisation and the horror of powerlessness) had me thinking about him again. Wanting to reconnect, wanting to get closure, justice, reconciliation, his love (the list goes on and on).
Because I didn’t yet know how to get the trauma out of my cells in order to have space for real recovery, which is wellbeing and the resolution of my broken and traumatising belief systems and wounds, I was defaulting back to what my entire cellular being was hooked on … him … and the emotional charges he produced within me.
Of course, I broke No Contact repetitively.
Most people in the contemporary way of trying to recover do that often too.
And here’s the thing, we know we are clogged up with more trauma than we can handle. We can barely eat, sleep or function by the time we are either cruelly discarded or we have somehow crawled away because finally, the horror of staying has become worse than the terror of leaving.
Yet, we may believe what we were contemporarily told to do, which is ‘talk it out’ to people about what happened to us.
Yes, it’s so important to come out of the shame of our shadows and share and know that we’re not alone. But what we do need to know is this: sharing our war stories with others who are also sharing their war stories means we get further cemented in our war stories.
And this is very tempting, because other people in your life who have no idea of the deep soul violation of narcissistic abuse truly get sick of hearing about it. They can’t possibly understand what it is like or what you are going through.
Yet, even though you have this avenue through Abuse Forums and the general consensus which is: ‘spend years talking about it to detox it’, neuroscience now shows us that this is fact reinforcing brain pathways that are victimised.
And, they are right! Devastatingly, the real-life proof is there for all to see. Abuse Forums are full of people who have been there for years, whose Inner Identity is fully identified in telling their story over and over again, with no shift into a healthy life whatsoever. These people are not getting well, in fact as time goes on, they get sicker.
This is the truth in regard to our inner healing necessity – unless we get a shift in our subconscious (Inner Identity) to become a different self, the peptide addiction to negative emotions remains unchecked and increases over time. Whatever peptide, large emotional doses, the cells of our body receive, as each cell divides the number of docking points to receive that exact emotional cocktail multiply.
As a result, these people are ‘abuse victims’ disintegrating rather than getting the shift that would integrate them back to themselves and up and beyond their abuse patterns.
The Thriver Way to release trauma from abuse is completely different, and it’s a way of releasing your woundedness that works for real.
It involves using the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program and applying the Quanta Freedom Healing Modules within it to access the traumas in our subconscious programs (that exist throughout our entire cellular network). By doing so we load up the toxicity of these traumas, release them from ourselves, create space and then replace them with our Higher Self (our Superconscious) that can heal what our limited cognitive mind doesn’t have the power to.
This provides a real shift into relief and peace inside, and then our brain follows, which means that because we have become different, we automatically think differently. (The brain follows the Inner Being/body always.)
There are two incredible benefits of doing this third stage of recovery after narcissistic abuse, releasing the trauma in a way that works and cuts out all the ongoing regurgitation and cementing of further victimisation.
Firstly, the pain, trauma and addiction start to dissolve immediately, as does the abuse symptoms that we are suffering such as PTSD, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, adrenal fatigue and the like. This happens because our cellular being starting to shed trauma starts resetting our entire Being to healing and well-being.
Then, the second incredible benefit is that we are no longer ‘dissolving’ and further ’disintegrating’ as a self. Rather, as a result of locating and releasing not just the present-day traumas, but also the epigenetic, past life and childhood ones, that are all the unconscious reasons we are still in repeat abuse, we are integrating back to self.
This means we have started evolving beyond our previous abuse program and patterns.
Without our traumas corrupting our True Self, we start emerging as self-partnered and self-generative and no longer seeking love, approval, security and survival outside of ourselves.
This means we now show up authentically, we no longer hand power away trying to get people to love us and be safe. We became a self who knows there are plenty of resources and people in life to generate with and we can leave alone those people and things that are not a match for our new and healing solid Inner Identity.
Stage 4: Ensuring You are Never Abused Again
This fourth stage of vital recovery after narcissistic abuse was contemporarily about learning all there is about toxic people and narcissists to try to avoid them in the future.
If only this worked!
I can’t tell you the amount of people I’ve met over the years who have been taken down by subsequent narcissists despite being incredibly learned experts on everything there is to know about narcissists.
This is the thing, all our brain pathways form around our Inner Identity beliefs. If we still have faulty and traumatised ones, our mind will come up with thoughts that dismiss the ‘gut warning’, make excuses and reconnect us with the exact match of the still existing painful belief.
Take for example my second narcissistic abuse experience. Here is was a world narcissistic expert, yet I was taken in by a very cunning altruistic narcissist who appeared to be all the things that the first narcissist wasn’t.
Yet, he did a very cruel abandonment trick very early in the relationship, where my three-year-old wound (that I hadn’t healed to completion yet) was fully activated and clung to him and handed power over. From that moment on I was in an abusive relationship making excuses.
Since healing that wound, I have graduated many times from that being the case again (running towards someone being cruel and horrible) and now this pattern doesn’t exist in my life.
The other thing we may fall into the trap of doing is believe that defences and being FULLY on guard is the way to go.
I want you to imagine this: closing the shutters down on a house when it has terrible mould and toxins trapped inside. Everyone just gets sicker within those metaphoric four walls! And that’s what happens, people report that there is no way they will risk trusting someone and getting into a relationship again. They don’t trust people, life and themselves and it’s a terrible way to live.
Life has lost joy for them.
It’s horrible and painful.
Or if people DO venture out and try to open up to love again, without doing the inner work, exactly the thing they think they are protecting themselves from ends up in their life again. And of course, this further cements the inner traumas that have not been healed yet.
In stark contrast, when we commit to a Thriver Recovery our real job is to get the mould and the toxins out from within our dwelling (our Inner Being) and then be so empowered, radiant and authentic that no False Self can ever take us down again.
And I promise you they can’t, when we have no fears or painful programs that they can use against us.
What True Recovery Looks Like
The wonders and joy of the Thriver Way of recovery is that we have committed to our inner work and the releasing and up-levelling of our previous traumas and subconscious painful programs into healthy and empowered ones. This becomes a wonderful self-devoted lifestyle.
In this way of living, we want development, expansion and freedom. We have stopped trying to learn about, lecture and prescribe to, navigate, or fix and change the billions of other people in the world.
Instead, we work on the one person we can, ourselves, to break out of co-dependent patterns that are the perfect match for narcissists in toxic relationships with them.
I love that as Thrivers we are creating a different way of being, feeling, thinking and living for ourselves, our children and our future generations.
Truly, this does create a reality free of abuse.
I hope you have enjoyed this article the 4 Key Stages of Healing After Narcissistic Abuse, and that it has cleared up the difference between the old and new paradigms of healing for you.
Maybe you have been in this Community for a while, accessing my informational resources, yet you know it’s time to start the real inner work to transform at the only level it can really take place and hold, within your Inner Being.
If this is you, then my highest recommendation is to take a look at the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program which to date has helped 20,000 people from all over the world not just survive abuse, but thrive in their new abuse-free lives.
As always, I look forward to answering your comments and questions about this article.
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