Post traumatic growth after narcissistic abuse

A really funny story from Kristina: she was in a car with two people. One of them mentioned they had a very narcissistic dad, and the other said: I haven’t met a narcissist in my whole life! I’ve been so lucky!

Well, she then told a story about a relative of hers, and Kristina immediately started laughing: it was narcissistic behavior!

I guess there is some confusion: 

What is a narcissist? And a narcissistic behavior?

Our guest is the perfect one to explain:

Caroline Strawson is a multi-award winning ICF Accredited Trauma Informed Therapist & Coach and founder of The Post Traumatic Growth Academy, an academy with a mission to helping women heal the trauma of narcissistic abuse, find meaning, and awaken their potential to live a life of joy, love, and connection. In her therapy, she uses brain spotting and internal family systems. She was diagnosed with PTSD herself.

A narcissist, according to the DSM, has 9 traits of personality. The problem with that is that people don’t usually go to a psychologist or psychiatrist and agree that they identify with those 9 traits of personality.

So Caroline interprets narcissism as trauma-based, which is why she uses this approach. So Ifs doesn’t really look at a pathology as such of somebody; it looks at what we call protector parts. 

“With ifs, the premise is we are all born with a sense of self. We all have the essence of who we are, where we are curious, creative, and confident.”- she states.

We live with compassion, and we have these traits of self, and we all have them. We are born like that. Now, normally what happens to us in childhood, for whatever reason, this could be from abuse, but equally, it could be from our interpretation of our parents and caregivers an emotional parents. 

What happens is we then create beliefs about ourselves. Maybe I’m not good enough, I’m not worthy, I’m unlovable, or I’m not important. That creates what we can commonly call an inner child wound that becomes really painful. 

And we call this an exile in internal family systems. And that exile if you think about Earth as human beings, we’re driven for survival. Our nervous system is there to keep us safe and to move us away from pain. 

So the pain of a child feeling not good enough or unworthy is really painful. And our inner system then goes, ” Oh, don’t want to feel like this again. So we have these protector parts that then show up for us. 

And protector parts are going to be things like people-pleasing perfectionism. Equally, they can be things like addiction, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, dissociation, and these protector parts that will then show up for us to distract or move us away from feeling what our wound is that normally has formed in childhood. 

And the same for us that end up in relationships for narcissists with narcissists too. I see the term narcissist as an umbrella word for an individual with these abusive protector parts. 

That sits in the middle then of not the diagnostic pathologizing of somebody. And the hard nature then of getting a diagnosis for somebody. But equally, the compassionate side of us as human beings recognizes that a narcissist isn’t born that way. 

There’s no scientific research to say they are born like that. They are created from childhood interpretation, very often a golden child. But equally, there are ten different types of narcissists that I teach as well. 

A lot of the time, we call people narcissists when they show their well, traditionally, what is called grandiose narcissism and any other subtype of narcissism, which may still be very hard and abusive, we very often don’t recognize, especially if they have this I don’t recall how you call this empathy, but the one which is like short empathy.

Covert narcissism

“Until one day, I just got myself together and said, do you have a problem with me? Did I hurt you somehow? Let’s talk about it. Tell me. I’d like to be better. And she said, no, I love you. “

Kristina stops here and says that she has also read a lot of literature on narcissism and found someone in her life that said something hurtful to her but at the same time was lovable. 

Caroline says that this particular type is called a covert narcissist: these people are really likeable. 

A lot of what we think about when we think of narcissism is just, as you say, someone who walks into a room, commands attention, and is very grandiose. 

Could be a very malignant narcissist, too. The COVID narcissist, like the one you’ve described, is somebody we call a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They often act like the victim themselves. 

COVID narcissist is probably the hardest to spot because they portray themselves as being very kind. They portray themselves as being a certain way publicly, but they are just like you say, there’s some passive aggressiveness around it. 

There is an element of the poor me in this too, but they are doing it in a way to make you feel like something inside. And this forms part of what I call the narcissistic abuse cycle. So they will be really nice to you and say all the things you want to hear and feel because they’re almost filling that hole in your soul of not feeling good enough. 

So you’re trying to please them. They’re saying all the right things, but then a stage comes, just as you said. You started to question that. You ask the question, you look, is everything okay? 

Is everything all right? Have I done something wrong? And of course, they’re like, no, it’s fine. 

When they discard you, you are left reeling because it’s like reinforcing your feelings about yourself. I really mustn’t be good enough. So you start trying to fix this again. And then what happens in that scenario is either the friendship relationship ends, or you get hooked back into the cycle again. 

So the COVID narcissist is the most difficult to spot. It’s also one of the hardest to deal with when you break up with a covert narcissist in a relationship. Because when you break up from a relationship with a covert narcissist, it’s not like the Malignant or the overt one where everybody knows that they are an overt narcissist because of their protector parts showing up. 

And we can see that what happens with a covert narcissist is it almost looks like there are two survivors of potentially an abusive relationship. 

The poor him. I did everything, I tried everything to fix it, telling other people his version of events. And I remember I used to want to go around behind him with a great big megaphone and say, can I just tell you the truth now about all of this too? 

Because sometimes your friends or even your family might start to believe the COVID narcissist above what you are saying. And it can make it really difficult from a healing perspective. 

If you have a narcissistic family, believe that you are a great son or daughter, knowing they are narcissists. 

And that’s why it’s really important to surround yourself with communities and others who understand this with no judgment and are just there for you as you go through this healing process. 

So many people have narcissistic traits: the way to heal is to acknowledge that we have them! And to give ourselves and the next generations unconditional love.

Episode resources:

• Caroline Strawson | ⁠Instagram⁠

• Caroline Strawson | ⁠Facebook⁠

• Caroline Strawson | ⁠LinkedIn⁠

• Caroline Strawson | ⁠Website