Surviving of Narcissistic Abuse and Recovering your Self-Esteem

This is a compendium of self-help tapes for self-esteem and how to recover after being abused by a narcissist. There are short speaker tapes, that you can tell what the topics are by the titles. Much of this addresses self-affirmation and the speaker teaches you about life after dealing with a narcissist. As survivors, the individual who has been manipulated and abused for so long and often battered — gentleness and encouragement is required for them.

These snippets identify many traits of narcissists. Narcissists don’t really love themselves. Actually, they’re driven by shame. It’s the idealized image of themselves, which they convince themselves they embody, that they admire. But deep down, narcissists feel the gap between the façade they show the world and their shame-based self. They work hard to avoid feeling that shame. To fill this gap narcissists use destructive defense mechanisms that destroy relationships and cause pain and damage to their loved ones.

For those dealing with recovering, rather than recognizing the emotional abuse and consequential damage, patients are focused on their flaws and their weaknesses that are exaggerated by the narcissists. Victims are self-critical and blame themselves for the narcissist’s behavior. Rather than focusing on their own healing, they seek help for how to improve in order to help their narcissist partner. Denial of the abuse and self-blame for the behavior dominates the mindset of the patient and the conversation between patient and therapist.

Some narcissists want you to feel bad about yourself because they feel bad about who they are, some don’t though. The speaker discusses the different kinds of narcissists and why, actually with any of them, it is actually best to just leave them because, most will, can’t, ever change. The advice from this speaker is to get out.

All this and more is discussed in this series of tapes. It is a good set and quite interesting. If you are dealing with a narcissist or recovering from abuse, I highly recommend this set for listening to.

Listen to Understanding and Dealing With Toxic Narcissists and more self improvement audio programs on Audiojoy — download free on iOS or Android.

 

Content Review by: Adriana Zajac