Healing From Emotional Abuse | The First Week

If you are healing from a trauma or emotional abuse, welcome to my blog today. This blog post is about what to expect the first week after going no contact or getting away from an emotionally abusive person, group, or situation. Recently I shared a long blog post about what to expect the first day and how to cope using examples from my own experience as well as research that I have done to help. I shared my story because I thought it may help people relate or see similar trends in their own emotionally abusive situation. Moving forward, the blog posts in this series will not be as long because I will not be retelling my story.

I hope that you’re feeling safe and secure right now and that this blog serves as an emotionally safe place for you. This post is written for anyone who has had to or is planning to go no contact with an emotionally abusive family, family member, co-worker, boss, friend, or partner, however, it is written from the perspective of someone who has been scapegoated by a narcissistic family unit and has had to walk away. No matter the emotional abuse, our bodies react in similar ways with adrenal fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Every person’s experience is different and your feelings are valid. I hope that this blog post can bring you some peace during your first day away.

If you need help, please speak to a professional therapist, social worker, or the police if you are in psychical danger. I am not a trained professional, simply someone who has been through numerous complex traumas in childhood and early adulthood. Because I am not a professional, I am not giving out professional advice and my posts are not a replacement for real therapy. I have had therapy myself and highly recommend it. Instead, I am here to offer my own personal experience and share the wisdom I have learned after escaping an emotionally abusive situation. I am making this a small series that I will be sharing in the wellbeing category of my blog.

In these posts I will be sharing what helped me in the moment during my first day, week, month, three months, six months, and year after making the decision to get away and to heal my life. It is my hope today that this blog post can help you start your own healing journey and find some relief to the anxiety, hurt, and depression that you may be feeling now. I went through it and I know how suffocating it is. I didn’t think that it could ever get better, but I knew I had to try one day at a time. I knew that I could not continue living the way that I was if I wanted to have a life at all. I had reached a point where I realized that I could not have a real life if I stayed. I was at a breaking point. I hope you haven’t reached that point, but if you have or feel yourself nearing it, now it the time to educate yourself and plan your next move. You should never live a life of walking on eggshells, feeling constantly criticized, manipulated, put down, or even verbally attacked.

The First Week

As I stated in my last post, the first day is about reaching a place of safety and taking care of yourself in the moment. Everything else can wait. If you have not read that post, you can find it by clicking right here. But now it is week one. How are you feeling? For me, I felt an immense sense of relief right off the bat. I had blocked the person mistreating me and this person could no longer harass me online or through my phone. I felt peace. But I also felt guilt. Was I a bad person for going no contact? Was I being too sensitive? Did I deserve it? The answer is no.

If you’re having similar thoughts it is because you are a good and empathetic person who cares. Let that sink in. If you’re feeling bad over the tough decision you had to make, it is because you are a good person. You’ve been gas lighted so long into thinking that you are always the problem. Naturally, it is important to be honest with self reflection and recognize where you yourself went wrong, but in emotionally abusive situations where you have been the target of cruelty, it is not your fault. No one deserves to be treated badly on a regular basis. People make mistakes and say terrible things. Forgiveness is important, but forgiveness does not apply with emotional abuse. It is different when someone does so on a consistent basis, gives out fake apologies, and does it all over again. That is not a mistake or saying something in the heat of the moment. If you have given second chances, third chances, dozens of chances, that is not a mistake, but an intentional or pathological problem. That is an abusive person and you were right to walk away from that -end of story.

Week one your only tasks are to find safety, take care of yourself, and educate yourself to your experience.

Educate Yourself About Your Experience 

At this point in your healing journey you might be asking yourself a lot of questions. “Why me?” or “Why did it have to turn out this way.” You deserve answers. Most, but not all emotionally abusive people have narcissistic personality disorder and educating yourself on what narcissism is is a good first step for your first week. You will want to understand everything you can so that you understand how natural it is for you to feel the fatigue, burn out, hurt, anger, and sadness that you do. There is nothing wrong with you. It is natural for you to feel how you are feeling. The psychological war that the narcissist will put you through is something only someone who has been through it can understand.

For long lasting cases of abuse, you may experience complex post traumatic stress symptoms such as panic attacks, flash backs, nightmares, isolating yourself, depression, anxiety, fatigue, fear of running into the person who has psychologically harmed you, inability to focus, and feeling jittery like you cannot turn off your fight or flight reflex. In this case, your first week, like your first day, should be centered around taking care of yourself. If you’re having these symptoms a therapist will help. Take mental health breaks during your day, eat healthy, get exercise, reach out of your isolation to call a close friend, take care of your hygiene, and do small things that bring you joy each day. These symptoms of your abuse will take time to recover from. Do not rush yourself or put a time restraint on your recovery. If you put in the work, you will recover in good time. It may not feel like it right now, but things will get better because you have gotten away from what has harmed you.

When you’ve reached the point where you do feel safe this week, let your research begin, but do not spiral into it. When I learned what narcissism was and I started understanding what had happened to me, I couldn’t stop researching. I wanted to know everything. But it is important to take breaks. Depending on your situation, you will want to research narcissism in the workplace, in family units, friendships, or romantic relationships. Dr. Ramani on YouTube has series for all kinds of narcissism and her videos are an educational resource and will teach you more than I ever could.

You will want to first understand the different forms of narcissism, then look up terms such as gaslighting, cognizant dissonance, manipulation, gray rock, flying monkeys, hoovering, love bombing, narcissistic supply, and narcissistic family units such as golden child and scapegoat. Understanding these terms is key to understanding your own experience and how to heal.  This article by Psychology Today is a great first resource: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-narcissism/201909/understanding-the-terms-narcissism Understanding these terms is vital to helping you prevent yourself from falling victim to them again. In this case, knowledge is your super power and it will help you break the cycle of falling into these traps again.

Protect Yourself From Further Harm

At this point you may also fall victim to shaming from the flying monkeys in your life (people who will harass you on the behest of the abuser). It could be a friend who was stuck in the middle, a co-worker or boss, or a relative. You will need to protect yourself from attempts by this person, group of people, or even your abuser. They may try to guilt and manipulate you, make you feel bad, threaten, or destabilize your efforts to get away. Do not let them succeed. After you have made your stance known and kept strong, the person or people harming you may try to smear your reputation to other people you know. They will try to recruit other people against you or make special trips out to see people to gather allies. As difficult and impossible as the task may seem, your job this week and for the future is to stay out of it. You do not need to justify your actions or explain. In fact, doing so will usually backfire on you. Do not get ensnared back in. This is their ultimate goal. In my experience, this was the most painful. As soon as they realized I was not coming crawling back, they did their best to turn loved ones against me. It failed, but the efforts were successful in creating some distance between some loved ones and making other relationships strained. The fall out was the most painful part of going no contact and the narcissist knows that. They are counting on this to use the people around you to mob you and cause you harm as a means of revenge. With narcissists, you are either with or against them and no in between and they are vindictive in nature when they feel narcissistic injury or rejection.

Once you have gotten away, the person emotionally abusing you may do anything they can to get you to come back on their terms or punish you if you don’t. If they cannot get you to return the way that they want to, they may try to get your attention in anyway they can, even if it is bad attention. They will attempt to provoke you or cause further damage to get a rise or reaction from you. And if you respond or get angry they can and will use it against you to prove that you are “crazy” or “unwell” to other people. They will do whatever they can to get you to lash out in a way that they can use as proof against you to other people. Keeping to no contact will prevent that from happening. They may also play the victim. This step is the most difficult, but one of the most essential to stay firm to your no contact. If you made a decision to go no contact then you need to stick to it no matter what and that includes taking time away (often temporarily, but sometimes this can last months or even become permanent depending on how badly these flying monkeys treat you) from people that may try to mob or harass you at the bidding of your abuser. Stay true to your no (or low depending on your situation. For example, parents who split custody cannot go no contact) contact and in time you will heal. The attacks on you and your character will ramp up extensively the first month. If you stay no contact for the long haul they will eventually have to give up and it will end. It doesn’t end the first day or the first week of no contact. It is a long term process that does pay off over time.

It may not feel like it now, but with time you will win and they will lose. They already have lost. -They’ve lost you, a kind and empathetic person that they do not deserve. All they have now is the mask and public persona that they wear around. Inside they are empty and alone. Narcissistic people cannot hold onto relationships of any kind, even though they will exaggerate the other relationships in their lives to make it appear that they have many close friends, colleagues, and family. This too is an illusion they create. Their friends and family will come and go or only make appearances at key moments such as holidays or birthdays, but most people don’t like being treated like dish rags and they will leave or keep limited contact. Most of the “friendships” they parade online or in discussions, you will later discover were only acquaintances that they hyped up or people they abuse and manipulate and keep on the back burner when they need supply because they’ve lost their main source again. This is actually a common scenario; they will string people along and make them feel on top of the world just to keep them hooked when they discard and ignore them for long periods of time before they need them again. They may lose friends or contact with family, to get it back later, then lose it again because they can’t stop themselves from mistreating people. Feel sorry for these people, but protect yourself from them.

Your first week is primarily about educating yourself so you can become wiser to their abusive and manipulative tactics, protecting yourself from further harm they may try to inflict by using others to do their dirty work, and keeping to your no contact efforts.

The next post in this series will be about the first month, where we will talk about the next steps towards healing and thriving with a focus on the grief that comes with going no contact. I hope that you’re doing well this week.