🎁 Fun Queen Resources

💌 Join the Free Private Facebook Community — connect with other Queens rebuilding after narcissistic abuse.
👉 https://www.facebook.com/groups/narcissisticabuserecoverypodcast

👑 Grab Your Free Boundaries Pocket Guide — learn how to say nope without guilt.
👉 https://christyjade.ck.page/ce79ea9250

💬 Copy-Paste-Peace Scripts — ready-made boundary phrases that protect your peace.
👉 https://shethrives.thrivecart.com/copy-paste-peace-scripts/

EMAIL ME: [email protected]

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Hello, queens. All right. Last week I told you we’re changing things up around here. We are giving the narcissist less airtime because haven’t we had enough? Huh? Anyone know Uncle Jesse? Did I sound like him? All right. So we’ve analyzed what the narcissists do, their gaslighting, manipulation, very clear lack of boundaries. We’ve talked about going no contact my favorite way to deal with them. We’ve talked about all of it and all that’s super, super important, especially when you’re first realizing what happened to you. But eventually I want us to ask a different question. And by the way, all those episodes are in my past library of episodes. You can go, if you need to catch up there first, go right ahead. There’s tons of information. But I want us to ask a different question now. Once you’ve gone through all that, once you understand more about the narcissist and how they work, how their minds work, what tactics they use, all that.

(01:03)
What happened to you while you were surviving all of that? And maybe even more importantly, how do we help you feel like you again? Or maybe you don’t even know the version of you that is in your future and is going to be amazing and shiny and queen like. Because one of the strangest things about getting out of these situations is that the narcissists can be gone. They are powerful. They’re not as powerful as they think, but they are powerful in a way of, it can still feel like you’re waiting for the next thing to happen. You can be sitting in your house, nobody’s yelling, no one’s criticizing you, no one’s giving you the silent treatment or accusing you of something you didn’t do. Nobody’s making you explain yourself for hours. Everything is technically maybe fine, but it doesn’t feel fine, right? But your body is like, I don’t trust this.

(02:02)
Anybody? Okay. Today we’re talking about why you can still feel on edge after narcissistic abuse, even when you’re finally safe.

(02:14)
So if you spent months or years with a narcissist or even emotionally abusive person, think about how much information you are constantly processing. What mood are they in? How did they say that? Was that a normal fine or was that fine? I feel like it’s like there’s this robot that ends up in our head, just these standard questions you’re scanning, you’re questioning, right? Why are they quiet? Why they shut the door like that? Should I bring this up? Should I wait? How can I say this without upsetting them? Are they going to twist what I say? Yes, they are, by the way. Do I have proof of what actually happened? Am I remembering this correctly? Maybe I’m the problem. You’re not the problem. But you become a detective in your own relationship, whatever that relationship is. And when somebody’s reactions are unpredictable, paying close attention can feel protective because maybe if you notice the mood change early enough, you can prevent the explosion.

(03:16)
Maybe if you choose exactly the right words, you can avoid the argument. Maybe if you’re good enough, calm enough, accommodating enough, understanding enough, everything will stay okay. Except you eventually learn there was no perfect combination, but your brain still learned something during that. Pay attention. Don’t relax too much. Something could change. And then you leave, you’re out of the situation. And this is the part I don’t think we talk about enough. You can remove yourself from the abusive situation, but you don’t instantly just erase everything you learned while you were in it. Your brain learned patterns. Our brains are constantly using previous experiences to help predict what might happen next. We are professional predictors. It’s a great thing and an awful thing. It’s one of those double edged swords. If you have spent years experiencing criticism, manipulation, emotional unpredictability, walking on those eggshells, your attention can become very tuned into signs that something might be wrong.

(04:34)
So now you’re with a healthy person and they say, “Okay.” And this could be, look, if you’re in a new relationship, I dealt with this. Actually having a healthy relationship was very abnormal and felt wrong and uncomfortable to me. But this could be even with you have a calm friend or you’re hanging out with new people that almost seem boring because everything is predictable and calm, right? They say, “Okay, that’s it. Okay.” Normal people hear okay, but you might hear, “Okay, what did that mean? Are you mad?” They’ll send a text and it just has a period instead of an exclamation and you’re like, “Huh, maybe they’re busy.” But your brain has already written a Netflix limited series about what happened, right? Or everything in your life is going really well and instead of enjoying it, you’re waiting for this other shoe to drop. I was like that with my husband when I first met him.

(05:34)
I just was like waiting, waiting so much I actually caused an issue because I was looking for scanning, scanning, looking for something. There has to be something wrong. There’s always been something wrong in my home relationships, in my romantic relationships.

(05:54)
So if you have especially both, which is very common to grow up in a home with a narcissist and then go out in the world and attract narcissists and accept narcissists, that’s the thing, right? So you have this whole world of narcissistic abuse around you. So by the time you enter something normal, I mean, you just don’t believe it. You subconsciously are not accepting it. So you are going to find the wrong thing because there’s got to be a wrong thing. There’s always been a wrong thing. That can be one of the leftovers of living in an unpredictable emotional environment. The circumstances changed. Your brain is still learning. It doesn’t have to do that job anymore and it can take a long time.

(06:44)
But that’s why we’re here to make it not take so long, to help you kind of crack through it a little faster than you might be able to without some of this knowledge or tools. So feeling on edge after narcissistic abuse doesn’t necessarily mean you’re walking around terrified all day. It could be, but sometimes it’s more subtle. It’s over explaining yourself when nobody asks you to explain. I was so guilty of that. My husband would be like, “Why are you giving like 90 reasons for something you could just say no to like an invite somewhere?” No, because we were trained to do that, because we were trained if we did not give all the explanations, a no was not good enough. Even the explanations were really never good enough, were they?

(07:36)
It’s rehearsing conversations before you have them. It’s immediately assuming someone’s mood has something to do with you. Another huge one in general in our society. I think we assume we are the problem when 98% of the time it has nothing to do with you. Everyone’s in their own shit, let’s be honest. It could be apologizing constantly. My therapist the other day, I started crying. I was like, “I’m sorry, blah, blah, blah.” And he’s like, “You need to stop apologizing all the time.” It’s feeling uncomfortable saying no. It’s checking people’s faces, right? Oh my God. I used to always be, “Oh, I’m so intuitive. I was trained to be intuitive. Let’s be real.” We’re all empaths. Are we? I think we are probably by nature, but also I think we become high empaths when dealing with narcissists because you have to feel and see every nuance to make sure it’s going to be okay, right?

(08:50)
It’s feeling guilty when you’re resting. It’s being suspicious when somebody is genuinely kind to you.

(08:58)
It’s having trouble making simple decisions because for years, your choices were criticized, right? Do you even know what toothpaste or deodorant you’d like to use today when you’re in your new life? Maybe you’re past that, but often when you come out of a relationship on your own, you are so controlled that you don’t even feel like you know what you want. It’s thinking, what do they want me to do before you ever ask, what do I want? What do I want? And here’s a big one, peace. Like I said, with my relationship, I had this and just even new friendships I developed as I got older, peace can initially feel really weird because chaos was familiar. It was comfortable. That doesn’t mean you wanted it or liked it. Let’s not get it twisted. It’s familiar. Doesn’t mean you want it. Doesn’t mean you miss the narcissist.

(10:06)
Doesn’t mean healthy relationships are boring. It means familiar and safe are not always the same thing. And I’ll say that again. Familiar and safe are not always the same thing. And sometimes we have to give ourselves time and experiences that teach us this is what peace feels like. But here’s where I don’t want us to get stuck, okay? Because now that we’re learning about nervous system and trauma and mind body healing, there’s another trap we can fall into. We can start monitoring ourselves the same way you used to monitor them, right? Am I regulated? Was that a trauma response? Why did I react like that? Am I healed? Is my nervous system dysregulated? Did that trigger me? And suddenly we’re still scanning for danger just in a different way, right? We just changed the person we’re watching. So we’ve done enough monitoring probably for a lifetime.

(11:06)
It’s exhausting. It’s what has beaten up your nervous system. The goal of healing isn’t to become a perfectly calm human who never gets triggered, never gets anxious and floats peacefully through whole foods like a Buddhist monk. You’re a person, you’ll get irritated, you have bad days, you’ll misunderstand someone, you might get hurt, you might hurt someone. The goal is not perfection. Here we go, drum roll, my word of the year. The goal is freedom.

(11:39)
So how do we start teaching ourselves something different? Not by spending 12 hours a day trying to regulate our nervous system, right? You know I’m a big proponent of all these tools to help. I teach them. I’m certified in them, but that can’t be your whole life either, right? But let’s start living, having new experiences, being around people who are consistent, even if it feels boring at first, saying no and discovering, guess what? The world is not going to explode if you say no. The more you say no, I know it’s hard for a lot of us, right? The more you do it, the more it practice. It’s like desensiti… Why can’t I say that word? Desensitization or exposure by expressing an opinion and realizing nobody punishes you for having one, by making a mistake and noticing nobody humiliates you, resting without earning it, by laughing like belly laughing, right?

(12:51)
Just letting loose, watching a funny movie, getting together with a friend just because by choosing, right? There’s that freedom. It could be simple. I did this exercise with one of my clients where she just didn’t know what she wanted in life and she was on her own and wanted to redecorate her new place and did not know where to start. So we had a little exercise. First, we did it kind of in a somatic session where she envisioned being in a store and picking things out and what color comes to mind to kind of get a color pale. Then she went into in person, into home goods and we started with just thinking about those things that came to her in the somatic session and bringing that to reality and finding a beautiful painting she loved. Freedom, that’s a freedom. That’s a choice she got to make and it was huge for her.

(14:00)
By enjoying things, enjoying life, slowing down and having more experiences that say, “I don’t have to walk on eggshells anymore.” I want you to actually experience one of those this week. Okay? So here is your little… Oh, what did I call it last week? Now I forget. Take me a while to get used to this new show, but your sparkle drop or whatever, glitter drop, I think it’s glitter drop. Your glitter drop of the week, it’s a quick thing, easy, 10 minute freedom experiment. Okay? Assignment, drum roll. Okay. For 10 minutes this week, I want you to do something you genuinely enjoy. And here’s the catch, practice not monitoring anyone else or anything during this 10 minutes. So if you’re sitting with someone, you go out to enjoy a cup of coffee or something, you don’t need to figure out what mood they’re in. You don’t have to make sure they’re okay or that they’re having fun.

(15:08)
You don’t need to think about if you’re talking too much. Don’t need to make sure everyone else is comfortable. For 10 minutes, you get to just exist.

(15:22)
So maybe drink coffee outside, maybe you blast music in your car, maybe you walk around TJ Maxx, even walk around TJ Maxx, right? Oh, should I bother this woman who is unloading the cart that works here? I want to ask a question, right? No, we’re going to try to get rid of this. Obviously we want to be polite and like normal humans in the world, but we don’t want to overthink. So it’s going, when those questions come up, just say, “Oh, thanks for that question. That’s nice, but I’m just going to do what I want and I want to ask this woman a question and not be a big deal.” You want to take a class, but don’t monitor other people and don’t get so obsessed with how you are coming off, right?

(16:19)
So you could dance around your kitchen and not think about what if someone walks in right now or, “Ugh, I really want to lose weight. My flub’s dancing around with me.” None of it, right? But notice if your brain tries to pull you into, “Should I be doing something else? Is everybody okay? Am I wasting time?” And instead of fighting with that thought, come back to what you’re doing. Just say, “I’m allowed to be here.” Another question comes up, say, “I am going to be in the present for 10 minutes. I can think about that later.” Okay?

(17:09)
So you’re doing something that you want to do because you like it. Okay? And it’s simple. It’s 10 minutes. And if you want to be a nerd, we can have a little bonus and make a list. If you’re a journaler, you don’t have to, but if you want it, or you could just think about it to start rebuilding your life, rediscovering your own sense of self. Start thinking about things like what music do you like? What clothes make you feel good? What makes you laugh? Where do you want to go? What do you enjoy being around or who do you enjoy being around? What do you want your Saturday afternoon to look like? I know especially a lot of us are parents. It’s all about the kids. Okay. Well, what if you thought about what you wanted for a couple hours on a Saturday, right?

(18:14)
A couple hours on a Saturday, what would I like to do if I could do anything? Might be eating bonbons in your closet. Might be saying, “Hey family, I want to go for a drive to see the beautiful fall leaves.

(18:32)
Might want to go take a painting class, whatever.” They sound like tiny questions, but they’re not. You’re rebuilding a relationship with yourself and that is what we’re doing here. We’re not pretending the abuse didn’t happen. We’re not telling you to just move on. We’re not saying understanding narcissistic abuse isn’t important. It is. And we got all that in my previous episodes, but there comes a point when healing has to become about more than understanding them. You already spent enough of your life studying them, like literally the entire relationship was studying them to please them. Now, let’s study you. What makes you feel alive? What makes you laugh? What makes you feel peaceful? What do you want? What do you want your life to look like now that you’re not designing it around someone else’s reactions all the time? That’s the next chapter. I always say U 2.0 with all my clients because that’s what it is.

(19:40)
It’s another version of yourself, right? And you don’t have to wait until you feel 100% healed to start living like that. No. No, ma’am. We’re not waiting for anything anymore. You already waited the whole time you were with them under their control, and now you’re still technically under control if you’re not living freely and not making choices for yourself and not knowing what to do. So we’re going to shift that. Start small, 10 minutes, one choice that’s yours, a little piece of yourself that you can take back. That’s how we’re getting that spackle back, okay? One glittery piece at a time. All right? So we’ll see you next week. You can always email me. My email address is always in the show notes. And if you have any questions, and also you can join my Facebook group. The link should be in the show notes.

(20:42)
And please, either in the Facebook group or email, let me know what 10 minute activity you’re going to do. I’d love to hear it, okay? And I will see you in the next one. Bye.