Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome… Like many people who have suffered narcissistic and emotional abuse, you probably didn’t realize what was happening to you–until you reached a near-insanity stage and began to search desperately for reasons why your fictional romance had taken a dangerous turn for the worse.
On top of that, the person you love made you feel like you couldn’t do anything right. Relationship salvation always lies on the far horizon and depends entirely on you changing something about yourself — which is impossible to do (despite frantic efforts on your part) — because your self-absorbed mate is constantly changing goals.
These suspicious behaviors on the part of your partner are indications of a destructive personality disorder. But, there are other very strong signs that your partner may be a narcissist, which has more to do with how their behavior affects you.
If the following signs describe your life, your partner is likely a narcissist, which means that your relationship problems are undoubtedly not your fault.
Related: Why The Silent Treatment Never Works And 6 Ways To Communicate Better
6 Signs you have narcissistic abuse syndrome
1) You always feel lonely.
Down to the core of your soul. While your partner may be living with you, eating meals at your table, and sleeping next to you in bed, you’ve never felt so lonely. You often find yourself curled up in the fetal position, imagining someone coming to put their arms around you to help ease your feelings of isolation.
The reason you feel this way is because you are living with a mirage of the person you love. This person does not exist, and at the same time, you are being abandoned in every possible way. According to Susan Anderson, author of The Journey from Abandonment to Healing,
Abandonment is a kind of grief – a powerful, universal grief for human beings. Grief can be acute — as when we’re going through the end of a relationship, or chronic — as when we feel the impact of past losses and disconnections.
The wound of abandonment is deep and invisible. It pulls and pulls, making it hard to let go, always acting below the surface, infusing primal fear into moments of separation, disappointment, and loss, and generating feelings of insecurity and self-doubt that persist into future relationships. Unresolved abandonment is a primary source of self-sabotage.
If you feel like your partner is simply “tolerating” you, and is only coming to keep you going, it’s because you’re serving a purpose. If communicating with your partner makes you feel unheard, unsettled, and frustrated, it’s because they don’t care about you, let alone what you have to say.
The guy who loves you wants to spend time with you, know everything about you, and make sure you feel safe and cared for.
2) You don’t feel good enough.
Even though you’ve proven successful in your career, built a solid foundation for yourself, and received compliments regarding your accomplishments (and even your looks), you’re starting to feel like an impostor.
No matter what kudos you receive from the outside world, your partner doesn’t seem to notice it, and worse, makes fun of you.
Watch out for signs that you are dating someone with narcissistic abuse syndrome
Narcissists mock and ridicule for many reasons, one of which is to make themselves look superior. But the main reason they deride their victim’s victories is that they are looking to destroy their victim’s self-esteem. What better way to keep you under their rule than to make you believe that no matter what you accomplish, you’re “still a loser under it all.”
Sadly, this works very effectively in many cases, leaving victims of this type of abuse so broken and dysfunctional that they lose everything – careers, children, homes, licenses (such as those required to work as doctors, lawyers, and therapists), bank accounts, And worst of all, their sense of self.
If you notice that you feel largely insignificant within your relationship and a failure in life in general – which coincides with the time you spend with your partner – this is a sign of narcissistic abuse syndrome.
Narcissists can be angels on the outside and demons on the inside. To understand this read -The Secret Narcissist
Related: 5 Types Of Emotional Vampires: How To Identify Them and Protect Yourself
3) You feel overwhelmed in the relationship.
One of the trademarks of individuals with narcissistic abuse syndrome is the way they hijack their victim’s world, actively consuming every moment of the day.
This ingestion can be seen in the way they call, text, and email multiple times a day (often up to hundreds), encourage you to separate from friends and family, dictate how you wear and/or wear your hair, display excessive jealousy, and sometimes control over what you eat.
This ingestion also consists of the feeling of “walking on eggshells” and the constant anxiety you feel. This comes from the fear of not knowing what is bothering your fickle partner. Therefore, every action you take must be upfront with a detailed analysis of whether or not it will upset them, and even then, your best-considered plans may crumble around your feet—leaving you with a gnawing feeling of hopelessness and hopelessness.
Healthy relationships don’t make you feel like a prisoner. You should feel free to be yourself and rest easy in your nuclear and extended relationships with friends and family.
4) You have begun to compromise your integrity and values.
In the past, you stood up for what you believed in, but within your relationship, you begin to tolerate (and perhaps even participate in) things that make you uncomfortable, and ironically doing those things is what you believe in. You can show your love to your partner.
You focus all of your energies on how to get your partner to love you and treat you again like the soul mate they told you to be. Ironically, “in the name of love,” you may have found yourself watching porn. It could be because your partner is insisting, or the thought of a threesome, or other degrading sexual activity makes you feel sick at the thought of it.
In other cases, you may resist leaving tips at restaurants, donating time or money, volunteering, and participating in other charitable activities. Because your domineering partner has told you these things are a waste of time and money and/or is mocking you for doing them.
Even worse, your kids may have taken a back seat to the constant drama.
A caring and confident partner will never force you to participate in things that make you feel uncomfortable or insecure, nor will they force you to stop participating in charitable activities. If your partner leads you to believe that you can only prove your love by violating your values, then you are in an abusive relationship.
No loophole in this regard prevents your partner from being abusive, no matter what they want for you.
5) You feel unworthy because of insults from your partner.
It’s one thing for your partner to call you pet names or even tease you at times, but quite another to call you a “crybaby,” “tempered bi-**h” (or “I’m not a man”), “unstable,” ” crazy”, or other mischievous nouns – meant to harm you.
Name-calling is a form of abuse. It is used to belittle you and make you question your worth. It is used during outbursts of anger, storms of blame, and alternately under the guise of a joke. Whether your partner is arguing with you or the two of you are having a “good” day, name-calling is never appropriate.
Note that narcissists and other abusers call their partners names and then pretend they are joking (eg, “You’re so sensitive” or “I was just kidding”). This is a trademark of verbal abuse! And it’s no different with your partner, no matter what excuses they give you.
Having a difficult childhood, bad past relationships, or stress in the workplace doesn’t give them the right to embarrass, humiliate, put you down, or make you feel guilty.
6) I’m exhausted from repeated cycles of Hurt and Rescue.
This tactic preys on your emotions. Here, your partner with narcissistic abuse syndrome causes you a great deal of stress and anxiety and then suddenly relieves that stress.
The most common technique used by narcissists in this category is silent treatment, which brings up your fear of abandonment. When the narcissist finally returns, you feel a rush of euphoric relief.
Repeated cycles of hurt and rescue are emotionally draining. This is the same method used in police interrogation to get a person to confess, sometimes even when they are innocent!
When narcissists return after many periods of silent treatment, you are emotionally defenseless and more likely to accept their aggressive behaviors to avoid them leaving you again. Furthermore, this often leads to pleading, apologizing, and begging the narcissist to stay, even if they did nothing wrong.
Hurt and Rescue Courses explain why victims of narcissistic abuse experience cravings and obsessive thoughts once no contact is made.
According to an experiment inspired by Langer, Blank, and Chanowitz (1978), and recently conducted by Dolinski and Nawrat, when the event that triggers and justifies one’s experience of fear is suddenly removed (that is, no contact with the narcissist), we can experience a short-term state of disorientation. During this period of confusion, people act automatically and without thinking, engaging in pre-programmed automatic actions.
In other words, even when we go to No Contact, we tend to engage in the same obsessive thoughts and behaviors as we did when we were still with the narcissist and put up with the silent treatment because our subconscious mind can’t tell the difference.
