Have you taken some time for yourself today?

If you are a trauma survivor, the answer is probably not. As survivors, the last person we think about is ourselves because we have spent years being suppressed into believing that we don’t exist, that we are nothing, and that we deserve nothing.

An abuser asserts control over us by intimidation and fear. The damage from hearing that we are nothing and we have no voice is deeply ingrained in us. It doesn’t matter if decades have passed since you left home; that core self-image was shattered well before your personality had taken form.

This is why we never stop to think about ourselves.

In this article, I want to address the issue of self-image after suffering child abuse and how this deep wound is difficult to heal.

Let’s start with an exercise:

Look in a full-length mirror where you can see your whole body. If you don’t have one at home, plenty of stores have them. I want you to linger in front of the mirror and look at yourself.

What do you see?

Who do you see?

What does your face look like?

Are you smiling, or do you have a sad face?

What does this tell you about the image in the mirror? Who is this person in the mirror? Where have you been today?

As trauma survivors, we rarely stop and look at ourselves.

Next, look at your body.

What do you see?

What are you wearing?

Why did you wear those clothes today?

How do they make you feel?

When we have a disconnect between ourselves and the world, we don’t always pause to think about what we look like.

Now, back to my first question: How are you feeling today?

Did you find those questions difficult to answer? Why do you think that is?

In our busy world, we rarely take the time to pause and simply be for a while. We’re so busy that we often eat our lunch at our desks; heck, we might even work through lunch. Our calendars are so full that we cannot afford to stop, and it is no wonder that we get sick from stress.

Taking time to notice how we feel is so far down our agenda that we forget to “feel.” It is no wonder that if we cannot “feel,” we also forget who we are.

I want you to look into that mirror one more time. This time, look into your eyes. Someone once told me that eyes are like windows into the soul. I agree with them. Eyes do tell stories about someone, if you look.

What do you see in your eyes? Can you see the emotional pain that you are in?

If you can see it, then maybe you can start to understand that the pain is there. You were deeply hurt, but your life is not over; far from it.

You matter, and you still have many sunrises to discover.

There is so much that your face can tell you, and if you look even closer at your image, there is a road map laid out in front of you.

Every bruise, scar, blemish, and wrinkle has a story. They matter, every single one matters because they are yours.

They tell the exact truth of how much you have had to endure in the past. How brave you were to overcome your trauma; to stand here in this moment, and look at yourself.

My therapist asked me; who do I see when I look in the mirror? I found myself not being able to answer. Then she changed the question and asked me to tell me how other people saw me.

It took me a while to answer because I never really think about myself.

Do you take time to think about yourself?

Who are you?

My therapist had to break it down for me into labels to help me answer her question. I was like a child having their food cut up into bite-sized pieces. But in this case, the food was a simple question of: who are you?

We eventually agreed that I was a wife, mom, author, teacher, etc. Those are all true facts, but I still couldn’t find the words to name them.

If you are finding it tricky to think of who you are, then turn it around and think about how other people see you.

Who are you to others around you? How do they see you?

Think about everything that you have achieved so far, and be proud of every stepping stone it took to get there. I’m not just talking about academics here, but anything you have achieved, no matter how small, is still something.

Where have you been, and what kind of people did you meet along the way?

How did those experiences and people teach you and shape you to who you are today?

You should feel proud of who you are, wherever your life is in this moment. You survived, and your body is your story.

From now on, you have a choice of where you want to go next. You are free to make that choice, and nobody can tell you what to do and how to do it. You are free.

I know these words are hard to read because if you are anything like me, you don’t believe in yourself. It’s hard to feel proud of anything when it doesn’t come naturally.

What do we say to our kids when they cannot do something at first? Well, we ask them to try again, and again, and again. We tell them that by practicing something, eventually they will get better and succeed.

So, take another look in that mirror and practice telling yourself that you matter, and you should feel proud of who you are.

My name is Lizzy. I’m a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.

If you like reading my posts, then please follow me.

For more about me: www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Elizabeth Woods

For more about me: https://www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com

Elizabeth Woods grew up in a world of brutal sex offenders, murderers, and inconceivably neglectful adults. Elizabeth is passionate about spreading awareness of what it is like to survive after trauma. She is the author of several books and has written her memoir, telling her childhood story: The Sex-Offender’s Daughter: A True Story of Survival Against All Odds, available on Amazon Kindle and paperback.

Elizabeth is also the author of “Living with Complex PTSD” and the Cedar’s Port Fiction series: “Saving Joshua”, “Protecting Sarah”, “Guarding Noah” and “Bringing Back Faith,” and “Restoring Hope,” available here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0BCBZQN7L/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=7e223b5b-1a29-45f0-ad9d-e9c8fdb59e9c&ref_=ap_rdr&ccs_id=931f96e2-c220-4765-acc8-cc99bb95e8bd

www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com/

The fawn response is the least recognized of the four primary trauma reactions: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. While the first three are more familiar in both psychology and pop culture, fawning often flies under the radar because it doesn’t look like fear. It looks like being helpful, agreeable, and selfless. But under the surface, it’s a survival strategy wired into the nervous system to avoid conflict, maintain attachment, and stay safe.

What Is the Fawn Response?

Coined by therapist Pete Walker, the fawn response refers to a trauma-driven pattern of people-pleasing behaviors designed to diffuse danger when the brain senses threat, especially social or relational threat. The survivor may instinctively placate, appease, or over-accommodate.

Research in polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, helps explain why this happens. When fight, flight, or freeze aren’t viable options—as is often the case in childhood trauma, domestic violence, or institutional abuse—the nervous system defaults to fawning to stay safe. It’s a biologically embedded attempt to maintain a connection with those who may also be the source of a threat.

What begins as a protective strategy becomes a deeply ingrained personality pattern. Over time, many survivors confuse the fawn response with their identity, unaware that their constant accommodating is actually trauma playing out in slow motion.

What It Looks Like in Real Life

People who operate from the fawn response often exhibit:

• Chronic people-pleasing and approval-seeking
• Avoidance of conflict at any cost
• Over-apologizing, even when not at fault
• Feeling responsible for others’ emotions
• Struggling to set or enforce boundaries
• Difficulty identifying their own needs

These patterns are often rewarded in society—especially in women and marginalized groups—which makes them even harder to detect. Being seen as “nice,” “helpful,” or “loyal” can reinforce fawning behaviors that are actually rooted in fear, not authenticity.

In professional settings, fawning might look like never saying no to extra tasks, tolerating mistreatment from superiors, or downplaying achievements to avoid attention. In relationships, it can manifest as staying silent about unmet needs, walking on eggshells, or becoming emotionally invisible to preserve peace.

The Psychological Toll of Fawning

Though it appears calm on the surface, the fawn response takes a significant psychological toll. It can lead to:

• Emotional exhaustion and burnout
• Resentment and repressed anger
• Identity erosion (not knowing who you are without others’ needs guiding you)
• Depersonalization or dissociation
• Anxiety, depression, and complex PTSD

Long-term fawning also inhibits healing. It keeps survivors locked in trauma-informed behavior patterns that prevent true emotional intimacy and self-trust. While other trauma responses may draw more attention, fawning quietly corrodes a survivor’s sense of agency.

Why It’s So Hard to Recognize

Unlike fight or flight, fawning is socially rewarded. Kindness is a virtue, and empathy is crucial in any society—but when those traits are compulsively used to manage fear or prevent abandonment, they become survival tools, not values. That distinction is subtle but critical.

Trauma-informed behavioral profiling shows that fawning is not about being nice—it’s about being safe. Survivors may feel discomfort when praised for being “so easy to work with” or “always willing to help,” because somewhere inside, they know the behavior isn’t truly a choice.

Fawning is often misdiagnosed as low self-esteem or social anxiety. In reality, it’s a deeply rehearsed pattern born from environments where saying no, expressing anger, or having needs led to punishment or withdrawal.

Pathways to Recovery

Healing from the fawn response requires more than setting boundaries. It requires reclaiming the nervous system’s sense of safety.

Some strategies include:

• Working with trauma-informed professionals who understand CPTSD and the fawn response
• Learning to tolerate the discomfort of healthy conflict
• Rebuilding connection to one’s own preferences, needs, and limits
• Somatic practices to regulate the nervous system
• Reframing self-worth as intrinsic, not earned through service or sacrifice

True kindness is not self-erasure. It’s grounded in authenticity, not appeasement.

Closing Thoughts

Many survivors live decades unaware that their most praised traits—generosity, agreeableness, and loyalty—may actually be coping mechanisms forged in trauma. The fawn response isn’t who you are. It’s survival skills – that is, what you learned to do to stay alive.

Recognizing this pattern isn’t about shame—it’s about clarity. And with clarity comes the quiet power to rewire the fear-driven patterns and rebuild a life led by choice, not compulsion.

This isn’t about fixing your personality. It’s about finally hearing your own voice underneath the noise of survival.

Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Dr. Mozelle Martin

Dr. Mozelle Martin is a retired trauma therapist and former Clinical Director of a trauma center, with extensive experience in forensic psychology, criminology, and applied ethics. A survivor of childhood and young adulthood trauma, Dr. Martin has dedicated decades to understanding the psychological and ethical complexities of trauma, crime, and accountability. Her career began as a volunteer in a women’s domestic violence shelter, then as a SA hospital advocate, later becoming a Crisis Therapist working alongside law enforcement on the streets of Phoenix. She went on to earn an AS in Psychology, a BS in Forensic Psychology, an MA in Criminology, and a PhD in Applied Ethics, ultimately working extensively in forensic mental health—providing psychological assessments, intervention, and rehabilitative support with inmates and in the community. A published author and lifelong student of life, she continues to explore the relationship and crossovers of forensic science, mental health, and ethical accountability in both historical and modern contexts.

www.InkProfiler.com

My answer? I never gave up on me. 

Why? 

Because I wanted me. I wanted to believe I was good, even though I felt worthless. Flute playing helped. As a homeless teen, I carried my flute everywhere. If a place had good reverberation, like an apartment vestibule, I’d take out my flute and play. Shower stalls were good places, too. Rocky canyons, pedestrian underpasses. I couldn’t read music, but I had a good ear and could improvise melodies. Every time I held the flute to my lips, I escaped the pain for a little while, and something beautiful escaped from within me. The music I made was like a life preserver in a tumultuous sea. When I put my flute away, I always felt a little better for a while.

After months of listless wandering about the country as a high school dropout, I realized that was a dead end. I returned home to my mom’s new apartment, my parents were divorced by then, I was enrolled at a new high school, and I joined the band program. Because I couldn’t read music, I sat in the second-to-last chair in the worst band. But I wanted to be good at flute playing, so I asked my mother if I could take private lessons. (She knew nothing about the survival sex or being trafficked, and I didn’t tell her; she didn’t ask.) She said okay. 

It’s amazing how far a little praise and attention goes

I blossomed under the attention of my new flute teacher. It’s amazing how far a little praise and attention go. Under her tutelage, I progressed through the ranks and eventually made it to first chair in concert band, then skipped symphonic band altogether and landed in the honors band. I became co-first chair, soloed with the school orchestra, and earned a music scholarship at DePaul University. That was over fifty years ago. I teach flute to this day.

While flute playing has provided stability over the years, as well as satisfaction, it isn’t the only reason I feel sane and well-adjusted today. Good therapy has been essential. Finding a good therapist takes time. I went through several until landing on one I stayed with off and on for over twenty years. 

I learned that you must interview therapists, try them out for a few sessions, and see if they speak your language. I tried several and was unhappy with all of them. Then I remembered a dream workshop I went to where the speaker, a Jungian analyst, interpreted a recurring nightmare from my childhood that had haunted me for years. She said it was a dream about the imbalance of power: People/things that shouldn’t have power, did (me as a little girl), and people/things that should have power, didn’t (my parents). She said the fact that I remembered it all these years later meant that it still had significance. Boy, did it ever. It became a theme of our working together, uncovering all the ways I was given too much power as a child, all the ways I was treated like an adult when I wasn’t one.

In addition to therapy, many spiritual practices have provided insight into my pain and soul. Growing up, my family didn’t attend church. As an adult, I picked up prayer and meditation on my own. Also, reading tarot cards, the I Ching, Celtic runes, walking a labyrinth, yoga, and qi gong. I practiced Catholicism for a time. Then Unitarian Universalism. You name it, I’ve probably dabbled in it. Then later in life I discovered S-Anon, a Twelve-Step program (which is, essentially, a spiritual program) for those affected by another person’s sexaholism. It has been key in helping me to understand the sexual abuse of my childhood and teen years, and has given me a community of people who share this issue. I am no longer isolated by my memories. 

Working the Steps and Traditions of the Twelve-Step program has enriched me in so many ways. I already believed in a Higher Power, but the words of Step Two: “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” are my rock. It’s a promise that is continually fulfilled. Because let’s face it, even after achieving stability, we all fall apart now and then. But the pieces lay scattered far less longer than they used to, and sometimes, it’s only for moments.

People of integrity who inspire me and give me hope

I also have a deep gratefulness practice. I love the site grateful.org and met the founder, Brother David. I surround myself with, and am attracted to, people who have deep spiritual practices, people I admire and look up to. Lynn Twist, who founded the Soul of Money Institute and the Pachamama Alliance, is another mentor, as is Roshi Joan of the Buddhist Upaya Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These are people of integrity who inspire me and give me hope.

And so, while I had a rough start in life, as many of us have, I’ve made peace with my past, as I believe we all can. It takes work and dedication—it requires a commitment to ourselves. And it is so worth it. In my Twelve Step program, we end every meeting with the Serenity prayer and these words: “It works if you work it, and you’re worth it, so work it.” 

I am very happy. I have a good life. I’ve done incredibly bad things, have made poor choices, been done to as a victim, and done to others in my pain and rage, but today I am free of all that. Self-forgiveness is key. And I wouldn’t have found self-forgiveness and self-love without hard work, perseverance, and the determination never to give up on myself. 

Through it all, flute playing has been a constant. It still gives me joy. So many things do. But flute playing gave me a goal, something to work towards. I didn’t understand until many years later that I am inherently good, even without being good at playing the flute. I am good because I am me, and I have so much to be grateful for.

As Brother David says, it isn’t happiness that makes me grateful; it is gratefulness that makes me happy. 

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Polly Hansen

Mushrooms are notorious for only being distinguishable as poisonous by the elite. It’s how they collectively protect themselves. If our individual and collective personalities continue to proliferate in such a disordered way, we would be wise to proactively develop a counter strategy. We must develop a new approach when compassion and flexible thinking are exploited. In no uncertain terms, when it is safe to do so, some of us need to hold the line in small ways—in this case, calling a horse a horse.

The lifeblood of language is only possible through relinquishing power: when a word leaves one’s mouth and reaches another’s ear. “Grey-rocking” and “no-contact” advice have their time and place; for me, they echoed the agency-stripping accommodations I’ve been forced to swallow too often. I couldn’t do it; I was filled to the brim. My body is metabolizing intense bouts of word salad: when someone says words in sequences that follow syntactic rules but rapid-fired so you can’t stop to notice they have no meaning. Word salad is strategic, a mechanism of misdirection. Direct language is an antidote to narcissism, a non-black-and-white intersubjectivity that never guarantees dominance or falsely proselytizes “truth” but is 100% honest. Exacting direct language is, at least, a surefire way to get a read on the person you are dealing with in flesh and blood at any given moment: Can they tolerate an external consensus that places restrictions on them? Can they accommodate others even if there’s nothing in it for them? Or do they balk at the request for adjustments? Is “no” enough?

I have read enough articles about triggers as superpowers for a lifetime, about sensitivity being like a carbon monoxide detector, and about how our bodies are trying to tell us something. I keep waiting for this steady collective strength to appear in all its terrifying glory, like the unveiling of a game-changing map. They say pain and fear are messengers; we are wise to listen, but I am no longer interested in protecting myself alone.

I’m not asking for compassionate or PC alternatives to official NPD naming, but ones that are precise and on the record. (After NPD abuse, my knee-jerk defense is to rename it “black-hole broken-cup disorder” or “soul-raping joker-faced syndrome.”) I am asking for suggestions on language that will distinguish the everyday usage of narcissism from when you realize too late that you’re deeply entangled with someone who doesn’t have the capacity to hold back harm. For when you require intervention more urgently than the time it takes to rewire every one of your childhood trauma responses.

Here is my call to this community of resilient deep thinkers: what do you wish was said instead? What language did you develop that you wish you had from the beginning to describe this bizarre exploitation style? Or are words offered by elders along the way that someone in the white-hot thick of it might not remember available? How do you explain this behavior to your children or prepare them for this dynamic in the world? During your recovery, did you feel a pit in your stomach as the word narcissist was casually thrown around? At the same time, maybe you calculated the personal-danger/societal-progress ratio of hearing the word aloud in public spaces. Hopefully, it wasn’t just in pop culture but in poli-sci theory, legislature, medical settings, schoolrooms, and good company with people learning to reflect on the first person and the collective impact.

Any suggestions on what else we might name it for those who find themselves in chat rooms at 3 AM, pouring over “dark triad”/cluster-B literature, drained, on the brink, watching their brains attempt to make sense of bizarre nonsense… clinging to lifelines of writings that use phrases like psychological murder and mental rape, praying that the accurate usage of this extreme language won’t be judged as “dramatic” by people from which they are asking for help and harbor? Suggestions for what to call it when this energy follows you (maybe because you’re now able to see what was always there) … but don’t know what to call it and can’t call it by its name… but can’t tolerate it anymore, either? We get to decide. Language is arbitrary, and form follows function.

Suggestions for alternative names to NPD are welcome in the comments below from experiences as affirmed by the victim of a fun house “love” that engaged in recon to target your weakest spots. “Love” that left you wondering how to compost your murdered self without accurate language. Relationships that whipped you in the same place twice when you attempted to describe them accurately.

Nuances in NPD diagnoses would benefit from reference manuals recognizing variants like covert, grandiose, or malignant, but a new paradigm could also be modeled off a five-alarm or def-com system. Could a renaming honor that little zombified ant? Or, maybe, in the tradition of Greek mythology, instead of Narcissus, Orpheus—master instrumentalist and enchanter? Orpheus lived out a tragic story: he loved, or at least he tried. He went to the depths of hell to rescue his beloved Euripides and succeeded because he was intelligent, charming, and determined. But it didn’t occur to him to ensure that Euripides was also in the light before looking back to unravel it all. From then on, he was a broken man. He was later cannibalized alive by the women to whom he could no longer connect while attempting to rest and grieve his losses.

I look forward to doing what the intersection of my life’s greatest griefs has brazened me with the capacity to do: metabolize how it is both about me and not about me with an understanding of consequences, object permanence, and shreds of compassion even after my most outlandish moments. (I am returning to myself.) I am curious about what language was harmful, helpful, or an absurd replication during your recovery from NPD abuse or what language you prioritize for the next generations. The more survivors I speak to, the more I realize that it irrevocably alters the way one sees. I aim to use my strange afterlife to call upon institutions (like mental health diagnostic manuals) to call horses by the name we gave them: to call pop stars and assholes “narcissists”; and call NPD something more nuanced amidst this evolution.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

My mother is a deeply dysfunctional and angry person, and she dumped all
her life’s frustrations on her unwanted daughter’s shoulders. From her
frustration at being a single mother to her struggles with money to having to
work jobs she hated due to her debilitating insomnia, my mom felt that life had
somehow shortchanged her.

When I was growing up, my mom often told me all she wanted was a life of
leisure, enough time to ride her beloved horses, go shopping, and do
whatever pleased her. Unfortunately, a series of bad decisions and four
failed marriages never brought my mom the life she felt she so richly deserved. My mom took absolutely no responsibility for her own actions,
instead making herself a victim of life’s circumstances. And let me tell you,
she was furious at all that life had thrown at her, and she spewed that
anger far and wide.

I am a highly sensitive person and always have been. It has taken me years to
learn how to work with my sensitivity in a healthy manner, but I had no idea
how to do that when I was growing up. Like every child, my developing
brain was like a sponge. I had no way to make sense of the terrifying and
humiliating things that happened to me at home other than to make it all my
fault. My traumatized mind reasoned that somehow, some way, somewhere,
the blame for all of the abuse I suffered rested squarely on my shoulders.
But that is the lie of child abuse, and I bought into it, hook, line, and sinker.

By the time I was nine years old, I had learned to hate myself.
That toxic shame that I first experienced at the tender age of five years old
and the years of abuse I suffered as a child invaded every part of my life
and created a myriad of toxic feelings in me: depression, anxiety,
loneliness, guilt, and humiliation. I felt if someone really took the time to get
to know me, all of my filthy secrets would be exposed. When I looked
inward, I could see a cauldron of black moldering waste furiously
bubbling and boiling with toxic shame and humiliation.

Every time I felt depressed, I felt ashamed, as if somehow the depression
was my fault. That made me even more depressed. Every time I felt
anxious, I felt ashamed, and that brought more depression. The same with
loneliness. Same with the guilt. It was a never-ending cycle.

Since early childhood, I have suffered from insomnia and severe migraines.
The few times I made the mistake of complaining to my mom about the
head pain when I was a child, I was met with, “Oh, for God’s sake, quit
feeling sorry for yourself!” And guess what? Any time I had a sleepless
night or a migraine, which was a daily occurrence, that brought more
shame and depression. Throughout my life, I have learned to put a brave
smile on my face and power through the pain no matter how bad I felt.
Through years of counseling and revisiting my childhood, I am slowly
coming to terms with my past. One of the biggest things that is helping me
heal is the realization that from the moment my mother found out she was
pregnant with me, I had a target on my back. After I was born, it didn’t take long for me to become a scapegoat for my mother’s anger, a receptacle for
the years of pent-up anger and frustration she had accumulated in life. No
matter who would have been born to my mother, they would have suffered
the same fate that I did. I never stood a chance.

And now, when shame rears its ugly head, I can catch it before it
gains momentum and gently release it instead of shaming and beating
myself up like I did for years. I no longer take the abuse, and that has released an immense amount of grief.

Photo by Yuris Alhumaydy on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Morrene Hauser

Morrene Hauser currently lives in Central Ohio. For a little over 30 years she ran and operated her own business as a court reporter. Upon retirement Morrene started writing about the many wonderful animals she had while growing up and the powerful impact they have had on her life.  Morrene also writes about mental health.

I want to preface the following with a distinction between “a narc” and abusively narcissistic patterned behavior because this is so much bigger than any one individual. People who suffer from NPD (as opposed to narcissistic jerks) are so deeply traumatized and will take it as a reflection on them… but it isn’t. I’m not wishing to incite violence, but the idealism of “becoming the change I hope to see” doesn’t hold water when what I hope to see has been reverse-victim-ordered.

NPD has a high correlation with misogyny, racism, xenophobic discrimination, and all the other ailments of the world we are regularly told can’t be fixed. When the man to whom I was trauma-bonded (but didn’t yet comprehend had NPD) projected by screaming at me until he was sweating and his eyes were black that I had a personality disorder, I was naively trying to care for him and his sprained ego, ahem, I mean, ankle… and reacting to being snapped at that I “could stand to get him a cold drink”. He later made me apologize for suggesting this happened. At that point, I was hooked by a web of stealthy lies that reflected everything I had ever hoped for and belittled through the grooming of incremental boundary-testing, so my broken spirit acquiesced. My pupils were probably large and black, too, from fear.

A year and a half into our relationship, after much talk about his “very observant, quick-learning, self-aware and progressive path,” he grinned while he tested me with “suddenly realizing” who my closest friend was (he was attempting to suggest a threesome) and the sudden information about his possession of U.S. Confederate memorabilia. My gaslit bleeding heart tried to respect this complicated ambush of cultural heritage and sexual pseudo-liberation and told him, “Just don’t be hateful to people” and “yeah, I don’t need you two to be close”. In retrospect, it was the same grin that he had while I frantically searched for items I’m fairly certain he intentionally hid from me and, to this day, still has in his possession.

I would have said anything at that point so he would stop trapping me. Looking back, this fueled the entrapment. Then again, once the funhouse music and coercive rage started, there was nothing I could do. There was no appeal to logic or facts, no appeal to empathy. Even abrupt no-contact would have had severe consequences for my life, but I was also naively trying to get back to the great love that was first sold to me. Once the funhouse music started, I would apologize for things he did so he wouldn’t scream at me then he would scream at me for apologizing too much, mocking my lack of self-respect. He kept coming back because I had something he wanted, something to which he felt entitled, but it was pure sabotage.

Based on what I now know about my ex’s reputation (that was strategically hidden from me) and how furiously he screamed that I had “ruined everything” the first time I confronted him, I believe I was recruited to prove to everyone that he could keep an LTR. This was why he was on such deceitfully good behavior in the beginning. Today, the recovery advice relating to brainwashing and cult leaders has been most relevant. And since I proclaim honesty, there is a part of me that realized halfway through our relationship that I was deep undercover. Every day still, talking myself through the ambiguous grief of being in love with a man who never existed takes up most of my calories.

During my attempts to get anyone in a position of authority to hold my ex accountable for his psychological violence, half the officials told me, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, that’s incredibly abusive, but unfortunately that’s not how the law works.” The other half said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, and that’s not how the law usually works… but I see what you’re saying. Where are you in the process? I’ll tell you what I know.” I followed their advice as far as I could.

I was then repeatedly told not to say the word narcissist in a courtroom because it’s style of abuse is notoriously difficult to prosecute, and the precedent varies from state to state for its connection to the intentional infliction of extreme emotional distress. In my highly triggered state, this struck me as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, so I took a page out of his playbook. I proceeded to fight my way into courtrooms and get the word on any record as often as possible, even if it had to be mine. Today I still can’t, in good conscience, say that I disagree with myself. But I admit it was a messy process amidst an insufficient status quo.

Nowadays, I reassure myself about my worst reactions by noticing that this is not a pattern in any other of my relationships. I understand that it’s my responsibility to work through the shakes that making even simple decisions gives me after having my sense of self gutted by being regularly screamed at for being a “stupid, useless little girl that shouldn’t trust my body or judgment”. I wake up every day with a restraining order on my name because the reactive abuse was effective and remind myself in the mirror that I didn’t ‘lose it’; it was taken. Keep your chin up, kid. I tried to take the shame and secrecy out of what was already happening since there was no higher road.

But I still stand in front of judges who’ve heard decimated versions of the saga (but ask zero contextualizing questions) and simply accept the consequences. I go to therapy twice a week, plus domestic violence support groups plus EMDR for the laundry list of intrusive thoughts from the distorted intimacy. I’m resilient and adaptive, and I see leaps and bounds of the hallmarks of health since denying the continuation of this treatment. Every morning, I remember the most bad-ass advice I’ve been given so far: that my best revenge is to prosper.

More importantly, in these therapies, I accept my part, realizing that fawning is manipulative even when rooted in fear, and yes (go figure) I didn’t get enough unconditional love as a child. I was tenuously glued back together when my abuser met me, and he smelled it on me. Since he scapegoated my past for everything, it kept me reluctant to admit that all of these are true. I think it is a good sign that I am even considering my part and how to prevent it in the future. I’m proud to take what’s mine, but I am not strong enough to take it all, nor do I deserve to. I’m not willing to “get on with my life.” I’m actively discontinuing this tradition of complicity.

Suppose our best guess about the root of NPD is stunting around the developmental stage of object permanence (peek-a-boo age). In that case, I defer to all the mothers who contain their toddlers’ outbursts on playgrounds: letting kids live out Godzilla fantasies without repercussion isn’t healthy. It isn’t healthy (or loving) to let a toddler feel entitled to that behavior. It gets murky when the toddler is in an adult body with a credit card and voting rights. By the time they’ve grown into an adult body, it’s far too late.

We need to teach kids this discretion as early as possible before sending them back out onto playgrounds (and workplaces, and sacred contracts of intimacy) where sadistic Godzillas will repeatedly bludgeon them. It is a slippery slope to collectively tell others that it’s now their responsibility to metabolize violence far beyond interpretive doubts. I can live with my sandcastles being swallowed by the tide or stomped on by bullies; I can’t tolerate being assaulted behind the swings and then denied the language to accurately describe what happened.

The perks of constant interconnected global conveniences and entertainment come with a responsibility to exercise this hard-earned discretion, part logic and part intuition. If violence is cyclical, we need to find a way to support the wrenches in the wheel who have first-hand knowledge of how enough has become enough and connect them to developing little minds. We need to intervene because narcissistic traits are running rampant like bullies on playgrounds, except now they exact policy through the offices they hold or through their 200 million Instagram followers that enact their word like Gospel. And with so many networks, most behavior has gone covert.

It will be one of the wildest rides you will ever go on to call out narcissistic behavior, be it individual or institutional. Do so judiciously and take care of yourself during the backlash. Men in uniform will choke on their best attempts at trauma-informed language, gate-keeping your recourse. They may tell you the threats you made against coveted models of cars are more valid than what you endured with your body and psyche. Strangers (who know half the cherry-picked version of what happened) will scream at you in the street. People you’ve known since birth will tell you that “good girls don’t talk about that kind of thing.” Connecting your story to the bigger story will get you shamed (and forget to mention how it can be both). You’ll somehow be simultaneously selfish and at fault for giving too much. You’ll be “over-reactive” when it’s convenient and told your trauma is nothing special if you start making sense. They are shades of the same playbook.

However, it will be a rock-hard reclamation of self and reality. People will vet themselves, and flying monkeys will drop like flies when they know they can’t play you like a violin anymore. Some may say that fighting fire with fire makes the world burn, but we are already burning, and self-defense has long been distinguished from preemptive strike. Sauter it with precision.

Participation in this style of resistance calls for deep discretion. In recovery groups, I spoke with mothers who couldn’t fight back because they had kids they were protecting from their exes. I also interviewed someone who told me they wished they had fought back seventeen years earlier in their marriage to get their abuser to back off. (This account single-handedly helped me start sleeping better amidst the consequences of my body’s reasonable reactions to my ex’s gaslighting and reactive abuse.) If you need to get to safety before you use this hard-earned knowledge to fight a dark societal trend, let that get you up in the morning. Let that guide you to a centered safety one day at a time. We need you. We all need what your body now knows.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

In an oversaturated language, I ran out of words to describe the extent of the damage. Psychological murder and mental rape seemed more appropriate, but using spiritual, metaphysical descriptors in a secular world is challenging. You’re treated like you don’t know the strength of your words; you’re covertly tagged as hysterical. And yes, I am sensitive to that treatment, however inadvertent. It’s reasonable that any survivor of narc abuse would be. My ex’s treatment would have broken anybody, and I’m no longer available for conversations about how I could’ve handled it better.

Analogies have proven helpful: descriptions of the dark spider web I was living in are most proportionately responded to when I describe my narc as “less Taylor Swift, more Ted Bundy.” It illuminates his superficial charm and the unease and chaos that follows. Yes, people can be that improvisationally manipulative, down to their precognitive skeletons, reflexively transactional, even in their best attempts at loving and being loved. The conversations in recovery groups and with practitioners who don’t balk when I use words like sociopathy and violence (even though my ex never hit me) are markedly safer and more productive.

Back to mushrooms: they each have their taxonomy institutionally sanctioned as distinct from all the other mushrooms’ excellent works. Yule log mushrooms will not understand the coercion experienced by a zombified ant. They won’t relate to the alchemy that Cryptococcus neoforman wield. The zombie ant fungus spore babies did nothing wrong, but the ants need convalescence after their heads split if we expect them to return with their stories from the other side and rejoin the work force.

Even after having the mechanisms of NPD shoved down my throat for the last time, it broke my heart that people with NPD are institutionally abandoned, that their suffering is forfeited, and abuse acquiesced to. In contrast, because I had already shouldered violent amounts of blame-shifting, it further broke my psychologically assaulted brain to be told there was nothing I could do but metabolize it. Professionals told me they were baffled; that my ex (and formative family members) would never see it; and sorry, good luck. Stay hydrated.

Meanwhile, institutions collectively take on these patterned behaviors. It drives us to near extinction. As a student of global power dynamics, this parallel keeps me from accepting the radical acceptance stage. If one “can’t get well in the environment that made you sick,” how am I supposed to get well in a world where collective narcissism is running rampantly unchecked? It’s scary to let go of hopes for accountability; where does that leave my god- and grandchildren? (And the philosopher’s quintessential quandary: Why do we do anything without hope for change?) Radical acceptance is a powerful tool for protecting oneself in a damaging world. But the world is becoming one big rug, under which room runs out for things to be swept.

I’m not the only one at this trend’s mercy: I see it in the desperate relief of people in survivor groups. Self-accountability is essential in healing, but it’s too much to ask those already humiliated and repeatedly mortally wounded to bear the exclusive brunt of rectification while their brains (bodies) are functioning at an all-time low. Narcissists, being narcissists, will exploit this, and so on. It’s a societal extension of scapegoating that keeps suicide rates disproportionately high in narc abuse survivors. We are watching this socio-epidemiological snowball in real time. It turns voting polls into circuses. It lines Taylor Swift’s bank accounts with fur: fans crying at concerts, relieved that someone sees it… or is she embodying it? The whodunit is juicy.

Thoughtful choice of words is not diplomacy at cocktail parties; it’s our lifeblood. In a world quickly becoming a compassion vacuum, I was enduring a strange formula of social endemics like rapists and cults that were officially weaponized as only my burden, and recovering from severe abuse under the guise of love. I barely endured the aftermath of unremittingly brutal spiritual assaults (in part) because we’ve made too much wiggle room. During my attempts to not turn against myself this time, I have engaged with group after group of disoriented victims who gather. They hope to re-learn how to validate what was first dismissed by their formative caregivers, secondly, dismissed by their abuser(s), and thirdly, dismissed by society at large, yet is somehow officially only their responsibility. We are being told to run and hide from the air we breathe.

In interviews with narc abuse survivors, especially those entrenched in legal battles, one piece of advice repeatedly pops up: write everything down. Keep a log. Date it. Keep a journal of intuitions you don’t know where to place yet. Keep two paper copies. Fight dirty and record conversations, with or without consent. Even if it’s not legally admissible in court, it will ground you in the fact that you’re not going crazy. Ever notice how some folks get when they’re about to be inexorably caught red-handed? It’ll tell you everything you need to know about a person. We need to accurately get this behavior on the record. Ink is magical in this way.

Narcissism isn’t the word that should be attached to NPD abuse anymore. That’s not what happened. I needed that word to be stronger. I needed to be able to walk into a doctor’s office under Medicare and say, “A narcissist has attacked me,” and not have them look at me like I had been listening to too many true-crime podcasts. Fewer and fewer of us have access to gurus, homeopathists and publicly appointed attorneys that will understand this wavelength. I want those at highest risk for narc abuse who are emerging from having their childhood traumas subjugated to recognizance, coerced, lied to, puppeteered, tricked, then subtly raped, hollowed out, fed upon, then their faces rubbed in it like a bad dog to be able to walk into a medical office and say, “I have my suspicions that I am in relation with a sociopath.” They walk among us and don’t look like they belong in Taylor Swift’s music videos. I am beyond my attempted gestures of inclusive understanding being met with taunts of how history belongs to the victor.

Anything said will be bastardized if you lack the muscle to understand the need for gray spaces, grace for others, and reasonable interpretation. Not having the bandwidth for others who have explicitly expressed the need for support in enduring society’s cracks is not the same as cheekily weaponizing a disregard for transgressions of known boundaries. It’s why some people can’t stand that it’s not PC to say certain words anymore. They are sans the muscle that sees that they’re “allowed” to say these words, but there are harmful repercussions to vulnerable populations that have been begging people to stop for decades; it’s reactive abuse. It’s the basis of NIMBYism: that ideals are good in theory until someone must make a sacrifice that doesn’t directly benefit them. Accountability is being DARVO’ed in our collective ethics. “Consent” is being reduced to an annoying digital box we check to get to a main page. A new strategy is needed.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

The natural world is rife with much richer analogies than our “higher” cultured structures. We have been strategically separated from the knowledge that mushrooms are awesome. They are resilient, adaptive, adept at divvying up decomposition, and taxonomically distinguished amongst the many types. Consider three examples: 1.) Mushrooms that grow on New England Yule logs (morels, oysters, lion’s mane) are iconic, delicious, and indispensable to the ecosystem. 2.) Cryptococcus neoformans fungi are doing a different alchemical work: metabolizing radiation thirty-eight years after the man-made nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl. 3.) Deep in tropical forests, a spore called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (zombie-ant fungus) infects ants’ brains to alter their behavior. The fungus drives an ant to the top of a hill, where there is sunlight that the fungus can’t otherwise reach. It then releases spores for reproduction via the ant’s exploded head. (Plus thousands of examples of fungi soldiers in between!) Yet even in the natural world, parasite populations sometimes get out of balance.

Trauma is everywhere; the more humans there are on the planet, the more trauma there will be. A vast majority of us are living in a triggered state, and only some of us admit it. We also foster minds that can navigate the nuances necessitated by spectrums, strengthening our non-black-and-white thinking in an exponentially complex world. We are tending to those historically kept out of conversations or that need triage because of an immutable past. Institutional sanction may “seem like a trivial issue to some,” but although I didn’t have a say in the need for triage, my privileged access to narc abuse research was undeniable. I accessed it via sanctioned definitions plus survivor’s accounts.

Defending the farthest ends of imposed destruction is essential. In the mid-20^th century, the philosopher Jacques Derrida watched his non-binary deconstructionism weaponized by Holocaust deniers. It was a quick adaptation, one which he himself waded in. Comparisons aren’t logical in trauma-informed arenas; we cannot let it turn into an Olympic sport. First-person accounts are invaluable; they are tools against didactics. If “power over” is the enemy, let it burn. We will benefit from listening to those who have been to the far side: they embody a cipher, attuned to the most damaging collective dynamics.

I would never claim to know the trauma of someone chained in a basement for a decade. To an analogous but empirically lesser degree, it was maddening to hear people say they were “triggered” by things for which they have distaste or “gaslit” by someone who disagreed with them once. During the last chapter and harrowing afterlife of my NPD narcissist, my evenings resembled an Apocalypse Now hotel stay. The mechanisms found when local labor is coerced into performing its own resource extraction are not far off from what drives domestic violence, but it is not the same as the discomfort caused by calling someone out on their bullshit. All of these can be covert, blatant, or have spectacle. It is up to us to navigate the shades in between.

You can’t gaslight someone once or accidentally; it is a method, a grooming process. It is based on a pattern, and keeping a log of this pattern before throwing the word around would serve us all well. Trauma bonding isn’t what occurs when two people become friends by sharing accounts of their trauma, however true and deserving of recognition (think: Stockholm’s Syndrome). You don’t have PTSD from stressful experiences; you have PTS. Love-bombing isn’t over-zealous, misguided courtship, though the pattern of suspicion by its recipients is illuminating. The idealization phase isn’t a “honeymoon period” (think objectification). And the lyrical, colloquial usage of the word narcissist doesn’t do justice to the factions of survivors clamoring to get well in an environment made of this stuff.

It was a year into my recovery from acute NPD abuse before I found therapeutic environments where I could use the word sociopath, which was the accurate word. A year to find spaces where clinicians heard me say: “I’m not sick, I’m injured.” There is growing research that NPD abuse causes literal brain damage, cognitive severance based on coercive depersonalization, inflammation, increased cortisol and adrenaline, and a weakened immune system. Anecdotally, every hellish microsecond of my burning nervous system concurs. Without this patient narrative, my doctors were mistreating me for an inaccurate condition.

By then, I was regularly calling suicide hotlines because my support system was exhausted or my abuser had triangulated them. I cut ties with the rest because of their unnuanced judgments. My tolerance was at an all-time low, and I was realizing similar traits in the people with whom I surrounded myself: they were used to me allowing this behavior, too.

For a while, knowing narcissism is prevalent and underreported, I tried to stay with people’s best commiserative offerings. I believe in this practice of respectful witness but, exhausted from fighting for validation (mine and precedence), my stripped psyche has retreated. I will return. These days, I hold a policy that I won’t discuss “narcissism” with anyone who hasn’t done basic research into the condition.

 I spent a year navigating significant neurological and physical dysfunctions like sequential reasoning, short-term memory, debilitating fatigue, loss of coordination, vision impairment, constant pain and inflammation, sleep disruption, and seizures. My community insisted that eating well, stretching, and forgiveness meditations would help me feel better. I am absolutely not knocking the first two; recovering from narc abuse has taken more physical stamina than I knew I had. But because of the underestimation from all outward appearances, being asked to take better care of myself at that early stage was like asking someone to perform their own appendectomy. I was then criticized for not doing it quietly enough.

I still defend against forced premature forgiveness, though. Insistence on it is dismissive and minimizing. I’m grateful to now be in companies that don’t see it as a prerequisite for my recovery and acknowledge that it may never be possible. I don’t yet talk to many people from “the before times” because the level of sociopathic abuse I experienced is not well-represented by the public’s definition of narcissism. Few aspects of my life that are unscathed by it, about which I can chit-chat. I appreciated the sentiment to take better care of myself and extended grace to their confusion. But thinking positively was not going to cut it. So, I fought my way through.

Recovery coaches recommend not defending yourself to conserve energy. Paradoxically, however, I couldn’t get the treatment I needed without defending the gravity of the situation. I spent taxing amounts of energy defending myself against “breakups are hard” rhetoric. (Several times, my abuser manipulated my closest friends into relaying this message to me. Hearing his echo through them was spooky, but it taught me much about them. I was then ostracized for this accurate paranoia.)  I’m not saying the outlandish reactions that followed were justified (I was as surprised as anybody by them) or that the lack of narc abuse awareness caused them, but it made me significantly lonelier, angrier, and gaslit by proxy. I spent a year putting out some fires and stoking others — because my dangerously empathetic heart sees how this isn’t just about me or my ex — before getting to the actual work. The delay was (partly) due to a lack of shared vocabulary.

Part 3 will be published on Wednesday, 9/25/24

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

In 1980, the DSM-III first added narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) to its diagnostic manual. It incorporated the trait of passive aggression, which applies primarily to covert/vulnerable NPD. We don’t diagnose passive aggression anymore because most people are, to some degree, passive-aggressive. The term has desaturated. Today, the DSM-5 has yet to distinguish between malignant and grandiose pathological narcissism, while practicing behavioral therapists do.

In 2015, the WHO issued guidelines on best practices for naming infectious diseases. Dr. Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security at WHO, highlighted the importance of accurate, culturally attuned language around public health: “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected…(It) can have serious consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods.”

In 2022, pop mistress Taylor Swift qualified narcissist with the word covert in her mega-hit “Anti-Hero.” In 2023, gaslighting was Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year”. (The top contenders were oligarch, omicron, raid (as in police maneuver), LGBTQIA+, and queen’s consort.) TikTok regularly debates #NarcTok: over 2 billion accounts have engaged with the social media tag to date. This increased awareness is a double-edged sword: language is an instrument for our natural human desire to relate, but it is also volatile and amorphous. Collectively, we have established the vernacular of the narcissistic playbook but have growing pains around the necessary discretion about the degree of severity.

Narcissistic traits to the point of NPD are rare, officially occurring in 1-3% of the population. That’s equivalent to a median of 1.75% of every breakup song you’ve ever heard being caused by a qualifiable spiritual rapist. Paradoxically, however, the disorder is underreported because, at its core, it is an inability to recognize fault or seek treatment. While healing from all nine diagnostic qualifiers during later lied-about private moments, I found myself more qualified than my abuser to name it.

Ordinarily, this is problematic: intersubjectivities should be honored, and advocates have long fought for patient’s rights to validation. But this wasn’t ordinary life: it was dragged-through-hell-backwards-by-a-sociopath land. NPD differs in this bizarre “logic” even from other cluster-B disorders, though comorbidity can exist. It’s natural to have blind spots to one’s patterns, but narcissists/narcissistic collectives occupy a sinister corner because they are the dead-last person/group qualified to recognize their faults or be trusted to hold themselves accountable. Narcissus was doomed to only love his reflection, but the scariest thing about NPD is that there is no center of self to reflect upon, thus the constant need for external supply. While we foster safe spaces in society, it is important to outline when somebody has a diminished capacity to do so.

The following entries are aspects of my reflection as I (like everyone) move through a dangerous world in my overlapping roles. My formative years were spent under a regime of religious and regional patriarchy. Relatedly, but rarely stated in black and white: I was repeatedly raped as a child. My caregivers didn’t have the language to ask me why I was so sullen and numb, so of course, I didn’t either, and I was heavily medicated. I survived, adapted, and grew up. I was then repeatedly sexually assaulted as an adult.

Today, I am actively in recovery from domestic violence by somebody who claimed to love me. I have ample evidence of his vicious narcissistic abuse, but nowhere to put it. After he discarded his broken toy, I went rogue in retaliation. I was fueled by our collective lack of awareness about and institutional replication of the situation’s severity and received a slew of contradictory messages from a recovery culture that encouraged me to return to my intuition. I took full responsibility for it. Today, as a post-graduate researcher, I’m knee-deep in our messy global history and the philosophies on whether our current collective state needs to be so dire.

I have collided with the rising prevalence of this patterned behavior from deflective black holes. I have borne repeated witness to humans asking to be gods without knowing how. I am not in the business of prescriptive false prophecy, but contrary to my less-than-perfect record disqualifying me from this conversation, it has been the main consideration through every breath of my life.

When I was breaking down from my profoundly projective boyfriend’s reactive abuse (plus getting a handle on “the playbook” and calling his bluff), he convinced me that I had a personality disorder, and I deep-dove into research on the condition’s dynamics to keep from bursting into a million pieces. The relief from hearing others put language to the strange, inverted mechanisms that my ex used to break my mind, body, and heart was indescribable.

As I emerge from the typical narc abuse rabbit hole, these questions keep me up at night: What happens if two people gaslight each other? What happens if two institutions gaslight each other? How do you differentiate between demanding accountability and a projection? And why exactly is DARVO so effective? I appreciate reminders that profound losses of self come in different forms. It would be ridiculous for me to suggest my relationship with a narc was a thousand times more traumatic than your break-up. But I do not hesitate to say it was a thousand times more bizarre and convoluted than anybody gave it due. My recovery was from a distinct experience, the exact function for which we invented language.

Many therapists won’t work with NPD folks because therapy is futile without reflection. I hope to learn more from those who are willing. I must admit to derailing my recovery when I discovered some narcs do know that they’re narcs. Many of these channels are under suspicion of convincing satire. Contemporary therapeutic efforts primarily aim to help survivors re-personalize since NPD is difficult to treat (read: how to get a qualified narc to recognize their condition in the first place). NPD treatment is one of the universe’s perfect knotted paradoxes protected by bleeding hearts, flying monkeys, and narcissistic institutions.

In keeping with the prioritization of recovery and prevention, I intend to formally petition the American Psychiatric Association (who will publish the DMS-6) and the World Health Organization (who will publish the ICD-12) to consider these shifting dynamics. My call here is two-fold: to support each other in disclosing non-consensual sadistic patterned behavior when it is safe to do so and (relatedly) to create a language describing the extent of narcissistic abuse that occurs at the hands of people with NPD. It should be distinguishable from the increasingly acceptable narcissistic behavior. I would love to hear suggestions on an alternative to present to the institutions that be. Further down the road, I hope to incorporate these reflections in developing early education awareness programs.

While we work to get NPD individuals to admit a need for healing alongside us and prepare children for a world entrenched in narcissism, my proposal for an alternative to the official name of narcissistic personality disorder aims to extract the pop psychology usage of narcissism, giving another tool to those on fire from its unique style of fallout. If the official name is changed, narcissists will remain narcissists in the colloquial sense, and we should continue to engage with that rising implication. There is no reason to throw out the baby of this common usage with the bathwater during this learning curve. No cancel culture: we should be “allowed” to say the word… but we need to know what it is that we’re saying.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

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Bonni Benton

Bonni Benton is a multimedia artist and student. She has a BA in Theatre from Hunter College (CUNY) and will hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from UNM at the end of this year. She put her roots back down in her home state of New Mexico in 2020, where she and her two rabbits currently live in a tiny house in the mountains.

Having grown up in Texas, Christianity was the only belief system I knew, so I found the dusty Bible in the back of my closet and opened it. I was soon filled with a deep love for my faith and started researching more and more about my God. I found a profound sense of hope in believing that there was more to life than the suffering I knew and that there was a better world awaiting me. 

I went to college in a state that was far from my hometown and where I had no family. Finding that adjustment hard, I found a ministry on campus to meet new people. Everyone was welcoming, and we played all sorts of fun games each week and went on camping retreats every semester.

Without even realizing that what was happening wasn’t a healthy way of worship

With time, I desired a deeper understanding of the Bible, so I branched out of the ministry and started church-hopping around the city with my friends from the ministry. Seasons changed, and my friends started getting married and going their own ways out of state until I ended up on my own. Ultimately, my desire to find a strong faith led me to end up at a few different churches that were abusive and controlling, and I ended up enduring about six years of religious abuse at different churches without even realizing that what was happening wasn’t a healthy way of worship. At the time, I didn’t realize that even in religious communities, we must exercise caution with the people we put our hearts out to. When I was fed up with the bad experiences at one church, I didn’t give up on my search for meaning and continued to another church, putting my heart out there repeatedly. In retrospect, my vulnerability was too easy to spot, and people took advantage of that. I trusted that the leaders and other church members “knew more” than I did due to their credentials (many of them had doctorates in theology) and had the answers to life that I was so desperately seeking. So, I blindly followed them, never questioning their motives. (However, their doctrines and denominations all disagreed with each other and argued with each other, believing that their doctrines and congregation members were “superior” to the others, even though they were all Christians, which only heightened my confusion.) 

Developing Religious OCD and Living in Fear

Looking back, my experiences at those churches were very intense. What I endured was so extreme that I started to have religious OCD, where I compulsively began to recite Bible verses I memorized and prayers of repentance, continuously asking God to forgive me for how “awful” I was. My mind was constantly racing, believing that almost everything I did, said, and thought was sinful and that any ounce of joy I experienced from God was “grace” since I was such a horrible person. My apartment counter was filled with stacks of notebook paper with all the verses I repetitively wrote out to memorize so that I could recite them in my head whenever I felt the need to repent throughout my day. I had numerous chapters of the Bible memorized, mostly ones on forgiveness and sin, because I thought that to appease God and avoid eternal damnation, I had to be completely forgiven for how awful I was, and I thought the people in my life who thought negatively of me had to forgive me for the “sins” I committed against them (I use “sins” in quotes because, in all these situations that I thought I was the one in the wrong, I was actually the victim). Being involved in these places also made me adopt even more self-guilt and blame than was already present from all the trauma I had endured, and I started to believe that the things I experienced in these religious communities were some form of punishment for who I was and that I deserved to be punished by God. I started to believe that maybe God didn’t really love me and that I needed to spend my time “working off” my sins and changing all the things about me that were “wrong.” All these thoughts were swirling in my head at a hundred miles per hour each day as I dealt with full-time work and school, making life and focusing on my personal goals even more difficult. 

After years of believing that these religious people were there to help me heal, I realized that was the last thing they wanted to do. They didn’t actually love me or care about my well-being. They were trying to control and manipulate me. They were trying to strip away my true essence, tell me I was never good enough, and “save my soul.” They just wanted to believe that they “saved” (who they thought) was a horrible, wretched person from her sinful ways and force her into the person that their God truly desired her to be. They told me I had to memorize this, read that, pray this way, give away my hard-earned money, throw out my closet, and buy the clothes they wanted me to wear. They even told me that, because I was a woman, I had to shut up and couldn’t open my mouth to ask my pastor any questions I had about the Bible.

I cried for over a week after a 60-year-old married man told me I was “temptation” for him, believing that was my fault and that I still wasn’t “covered up” enough. In these environments, my duty was to sit in the back of the building, look pretty, shut my mouth, and donate my money. Otherwise, I wasn’t good enough for God, and I wouldn’t make it into heaven. These things I mention are just the tip of a traumatic iceberg that I still hold tightly within me, among other traumas that have not left my lips.  

They did a fantastic job at convincing me of how awful I was and that I needed to change literally everything about myself. I needed to find my voice again. I needed to find God’s voice, too. I’m not even sure if there is a God anymore. If there is a God, I can’t picture that God as a kind, loving God. I can only picture the vengeful God of the Old Testament, ready to smite down an entire people for the smallest sin. The God these people taught me about is not a God I can worship. 

Not All Religious People Are Safe People

It’s a common myth that only weak people fall victim to religious abuse. Many doctors, lawyers, and well-educated people in the world congregated next to me and did the same things we were all told to do to gain admission to heaven. The psychological tactics are designed to terrify and control people. It’s unfortunate that some people in religious power prey on people desperately seeking answers and purpose. Looking back, I was convinced that they had the answers and the true path to heaven. I can’t believe how many years I spent terrified that God would throw me into hell because I wasn’t meeting these people’s man-made standards. 

I doubt I would have ended up in these situations if I hadn’t been a severe trauma victim. It was difficult for me to see the red flags at the time because I was desperately seeking a deeper meaning to life and an understanding of God. I don’t understand the motivation they had to control their vulnerable victims, but we were probably the only things in their lives that they could control, and they took the opportunity to do so. While their followers groveled at their feet for God’s forgiveness, they lived in a bubble, reminding themselves that they were above everyone else, immune to the very things they criticized. Through all of this, all the old wounds from my past trauma were wrenched wide open again, and I was living in a dystopian world, thinking that the big man in the sky hated my guts.

My heart hurts for other survivors of religious abuse. My heart hurts for those who think that they’re completely awful because of what “religious” people have said or done to them. 

It Only Made Me Stronger

I am slowly returning to my core self, and I will be stronger once I fully discard those old belief patterns. I’ve completely dissociated from many of those years and have no recollection of so many memories due to that dissociation. I no longer feel the need to try and change myself to please people who will never be pleased, and if people are hateful or make me uncomfortable, then they don’t belong in my life. If they want to judge me as a sinner, think I’m going to hell, or believe that their God smiles more favorably on them, then so be it. Their arrogance no longer intimidates me, it just saddens me. As if anyone has the right to decide who is worthy of God’s love and who isn’t. That’s not the kind of religious life that I want to live. And I know that’s not how the Jesus they claim to love lived either. I believe the stories of Christ found in the Bible are very beautiful and powerful, but it’s unfortunate that so many that claim to represent the love of Christ are incredibly hateful and spend their time trying to indoctrinate other people into adopting their same arrogance while being financially compensated to do so. I do not believe all Christians are bad people; I surround myself with many Christians who are the most loving people I have ever met. But what I realized for myself was that the Christians I was around all those years only loved me when I was conforming to their standards, donating my money, and submitting to their ruthless control.

I still believe spirituality can heal many people, and it is up to them to believe in what they choose. I do not judge another person for what they choose as long as they are a good person and do not use their religious beliefs to hurt or control others. My faith looks very different from what it previously did and is much healthier. From now on, I will pursue a spiritual life that works for me and does not keep me terrified, anxious, and judgmental of others. I will pursue a personal spirituality that does not take away from my core self, which enriches those who love me. I enjoy having conversations with people of all faiths to learn more about the world and understand how their faith helps them. I admire people who have a strong spirituality for themselves and do not allow the opinions, actions, or beliefs of others to affect their own beliefs. I also don’t judge others who choose not to believe in any higher power and find other ways to manage life in this tough world. Everyone is on their own timetable, and it’s unfortunate that many people judge others through the prism of their unbending sense of belief. While everyone has biases, we need to remember that everyone has a story and reasons as to why they have certain beliefs, and there is no way for one human being to understand another human being’s full story.

“Live and let live” is a philosophy that makes life much easier. It took me so long to adopt that philosophy and stop being so hard on myself, to stop believing all the dogmatic lies planted in my head, and start examining the abusive things that were done to me in the name of religion. It was hard, but I can finally say I’ve escaped those dystopian worlds I was in all those years and am no longer threatened by the people I once thought were so powerful.

And those people who stripped away my true essence during that time? They pose to the public as the representatives, leaders, and mouthpieces of a “loving God” and invite people into their houses of worship to do these things. However, all I hear are the words of Jesus when he admonished the Pharisees that they are like whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside, yet on the inside are “full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.” 

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

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Natalie Rose

My name is Natalie, and I am a survivor of about 13 years of absolute psychological torture from Complex PTSD symptoms. For the longest time, I thought I was inherently sick and broken beyond repair. I spent over a decade running around in circles in the medical system trying to figure out what was “wrong” with me and how to “fix” it.

♡ What is Complex PTSD? ♡

Complex PTSD symptoms come from severe, prolonged, and numerous incidents of trauma, typically of a relational nature. Symptoms can come from any type of trauma, though, and the trauma doesn’t necessarily have to stem from childhood — adults can develop CPTSD as well. Trauma can damage the brain and shrink the hippocampus, causing many of the symptoms of CPTSD. I decided to go public with my story to be a voice for the voiceless. There are too many survivors being told CPTSD is a lifelong sentence, and they are not being given the tools they need to overcome their symptoms.

♡ My Story ♡

I endured multiple types of traumas starting at around age thirteen, including numerous situations of both individual and large-group interpersonal cruelty. Some of these situations forced me to switch environments. My body couldn’t fathom what was happening, and my nervous system shut down. I saw danger everywhere, operated in a panicked survival mode, and lived in fear, anxiety, and isolation. I did my best to appear “normal” on the outside, keep a smile on my face, and control what was happening on the inside, distracting myself with extreme workaholism and doing nice things for others. I took active steps to keep branching out in confidence again, but these traumas kept piling onto each other and overlapping. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, though, because I knew my family and friends would be distraught if I did. The most difficult and heartbreaking part of my story is that the two communities I set out to seek healing in—religion and the medical system itself—caused further trauma when some religious leaders, congregation members, and medical professionals chose to take advantage of my vulnerability for their own motives. In most of these situations, I didn’t even realize I was a victim until outsiders pointed it out for me and that my vulnerability made me a target of malicious people. Each future situation of being targeted was just salt on the wound of the original incident.

♡ My Struggles to Find Answers ♡

What I went through all those years was so severe, and my symptoms and physical body reactions as a result were so excruciating that I went as far as to see a neurologist, concerned that my symptoms were the result of some sort of nervous system disorder. However, he returned with no paperwork in his hands to inform me that there was nothing wrong with me but that I was simply completely traumatized, and my body reacted accordingly. I finally realized that my symptoms were not the result of an inherent mental or physical illness and began to take a trauma-based approach to my healing after many years of believing that I was “sick” for the rest of my life. My true progress began when I finally rejected the lies that were told to me that I would have to manage my symptoms for the rest of my life and made the decision to believe that I was fully capable of healing from my excruciating pain.

♡ Finding My Own Healing ♡

I am excited to share tips for natural, somatic, and holistic healing that have helped me overcome things like dissociation, flashbacks, sleep challenges, anxiety, hypervigilance, and more. I began to pursue unique methods of healing after many years of not seeing much progress through westernized care, and this was the catalyst for fast-tracking my healing. I aim to help survivors overcome their feelings of self-guilt, blame, and humiliation and help them realize that their bodies had normal reactions to abnormal situations.

I’m so glad I didn’t give up when my pain felt unbearable. I know what I’ve survived. I know the work I’ve put in to overcome it. I am finally living a life of consistent peace and contentment, and I am sharing my story from the other side. I hope to encourage other survivors that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with and that they are capable of living healthy, happy, and fulfilled lives. I aim to live my life in love of both others and myself, understanding that everyone has a story of their own. I am grateful to the CPTSD Foundation for giving me an opportunity to share my story.

♡ Personal Blog ♡

To learn more about my healing journey, please visit my personal blog, “Little Cabin Life,” at:
littlecabinlife.com