It sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Why on earth would we fail to recognize when someone we love is treating us badly? Why would we normalize our own abuse?
Narcissists, that’s why.
Anyone who has been in love with a Narcissist and made it to the other side (like yours truly) knows very well how the process works. Where once we were strong and capable, after a certain amount of time we become watered-down versions of ourselves and no longer recognize the face staring back at us in the mirror. Our sense of reality becomes skewed to favor our abuser while the voices in our head that we believe to be ours (but are not) betray us at every turn.
All the women I’ve coached over the years experience the same “waking up” to the realization that they’d unconsciously lowered all of their standards in response to being repeatedly hurt by a Narcissist. This is due to the manipulation tactics a Narcissist employs to keep a victim under control by continued use of demoralization, gaslighting, and a nasty head game they play called bait-and-switch in which they lure you in with love-bombing (it’s just as it sounds) before resorting back to being cold and cruel.
Over time, a pattern is established between a Narcissist and his victim (change pronoun if needed) that involves a gradual lowering of our boundaries and expectations in response to the lack of love and attention we became accustomed to receiving at the beginning of our relationship with a Narcissist (the love-bombing stage) and which we later only receive in sporadic amounts. Essentially, we were promised a feast and yet find ourselves begging for scraps as time goes on.
Before long, we feel like a trapped animal who doesn’t know it’s trapped and is happy with the smallest amount of breadcrumbs because it’s starving. The plot twist? We see the one offering us those crumbs as our savior, the one who really cares about us, not knowing that our minds have been muddled with desperation. At that moment, it’s nearly impossible to see how we’ve been trained to lower our expectations to such a level that we are actually satisfied with those crumbs.
A Narcissist is a master of normalizing a victim to her own abuse. In essence, we become blinded by our own desperate need to get attention, love, and respect from the one that we love to the point where we can’t see the truth right in front of us. We can’t feel the chain around our neck as we’re so focused on that meager offering of breadcrumbs that are designed to keep us in place, keep us under control, and keep us begging for more.
This tactic of normalizing by a Narcissist convinces us to forgive them again and again. Give them another shot. Believe them when they say they’re sorry and they’ll never hurt us like that again. We then start normalizing the Narcissist’s behavior and downplay his actions, no longer seeing clearly or having the perspective to accurately assess the situation. We make excuses. We put up with behavior that had once seemed abnormal or unthinkable. Our ability to stand up for ourselves plummets along with our self-worth and self-respect. Inevitably, we blame ourselves for our situation, while also enduring the judgment of outsiders who cannot understand how we put up with what we do.
This is why understanding the normalizing of our own abuse is so crucial to successful healing and recovery after a relationship with a Narcissist. If we fail to address and accept this, we are doomed to move forward into a similar relationship due to these new lower standards of how we think we should be treated by another person (this goes for friendships and family relations as well).
The women I coach all first come out of a relationship with a Narcissist in a fog, having lost all perspective on what they actually deserve. Anyone on the outside of a victim’s experience would justifiably be in shock at what she not only endured but also put up with. However, this is no place or time for judgment (not that there really ever is a place for that) of a victim of Narcissistic abuse. Instead, it’s a time for reminding a person what she really deserves and bringing her back to who she was before the abuse began, reminding her that she deserves more than breadcrumbs from someone she loves, and empowering her to see the one who hurt her for who he really is.
And then and only then, while claiming her space in the light of a life she deserves, will she finally be truly free.
