How long does it take to heal after narcissistic abuse? Survivors often ask this following abuse. The unspoken questions being asked are “How long will it take before I stop feeling so awful? How long will it take before I feel like me again? Is it possible to ever feel like me again when I feel like emotional hamburger right now?”
The short answer is, “Yes. It’s possible to heal from narcissistic or sociopathic abuse.” The long answer is, “I don’t know how long it will take you. It’s a process and each person processes her grief in her own time.”
Stages of Grief
You may know Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. What you might not know is that these stages of grief aren’t linear. You could go from denial and anger to depression, back to anger to bargaining to a little acceptance and then find yourself feeling angry all over again and then feeling more acceptance. It’s a process.
My Own Experience
As for my own experience, I was never in denial about what he had done. That is to say, I had a hard time wrapping my mind that someone could pretend to be a Navy SEAL and pretend to be a veteran for close to 30 years and even work his way up in the American Legion and have that all be a lie, but I never was in denial about the actual facts of this.
For the first three months after I found out about the fraud I would hit mental speed bumps when I was thinking about something he’d told me about his military service. It was as if I was driving along a road at 35 mph and hit an actual speed bump. It was jarring to be in the middle of a memory and realize all of the sudden that wait he’s not a veteran and this is another lie. This happened a lot over the first three months.
I thought that I’d become less angry as time went by, but for me the opposite was true. I became more angry. The more I thought about how many lies he told me over the course of 5 and a half years, the angrier I got. Pretty much every single thing he ever said to me was a lie. Gradually I got used to the idea that it was all a lie and the anger level went down. Then I would be sad, then angry. It wasn’t a straight line.
I was super busy for the entire first year following the discovery of the fraud…with work, with building the Fraudulationship platform, with prepping documents for the court case, with healing. Then at the beginning of October of this year, I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands. After I decompressed from my very stressful job that I’d left at the beginning of October, I had a lot of free time on my hands. My new job that I’d expected to start mid-October was pushed off.
After finding out some of his personal chaos that I had to address with law enforcement, and the 3 weeks of being sucked back into that vortex, I realized that I needed to process what he had done to me in a deeper way. The magnitude of what he had done to me hit me and I felt like emotional hamburger. It took me several days to get through that sadness and I practiced really good self-care, which helped a lot. I decided to put building my workshop on hold for the time being and just take a breather, focusing on getting the podcast out each week. In time, the workshop and membership site will come.
No One-Size Fits All
So how long is it going to take you to heal? There’s no one-size fits all answer to that. What I do know is that you have to do the work to heal, but you also have to listen to what your body is telling you, what your heart is telling you and pay attention to your emotional state.
There’s a time to press forward and take an active role in your own healing and there’s time to step back and pause, regroup and recalibrate so that you can move forward actively. Recovering from narcissistic and sociopathic abuse, recovering from any kind of abuse actually, is a dance with yourself. You lead and you follow depending on the rhythm. And all of it is a part of the healing.
Being mindful of what you need when you need it and honoring those needs are the most essential tasks when you are developing a healing identity mindset following abuse. It’s all part of the process. It’s messy. It hurts sometimes. It’s also liberating and exciting and scary.
The Good News
The good news is you can’t fail. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep showing up. Get support when you need it. You’ve already gone through the worst part, the Olympic Games of MindF***kery. Acknowledge that. You are strong. You are amazing. And you’ve got this.