How I Work With Narcissistic Abuse

The Rationale & The Methods

Narcissistic abuse by a life partner can be traumatising. It can cause deep moral injury, and leave a survivor experiencing a massive burden of loss, which needs to be grieved. The betrayals and injustices handed out by the narcissistic ex-partner are often compounded by further injustice handed to the survivor by law enforcement and the Family Court (because abusers frequently make false allegations that cast the survivor as the perpetrator).

The acronym used for this in women’s protection services is DARVO – deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender. Narcissistic abusers will always blame someone else and refuse accountability for their malignant behaviour. They ‘get in first’ by accusing their target of being abusive, mentally unstable, untrustworthy, and an unfit parent. So right when the survivor needs protection and support, they experience being treated like a perpetrator – adding insult to injury, as the old saying goes.

How Can Narcissistic Abuse Counselling Help a Survivor?

Essentially Narcissistic Abuse Counselling is a way of arming a survivor for what to expect after the split at the same time as experimenting with new tools to balance the nervous system and move towards a new independent life. Whilst nothing about narcissistic abuse is easy to hear, being forewarned can help a survivor be forearmed for what possibly lies ahead and to make sense of what just happened to them. Arguably, psycho-education is how most victim-survivors wrestle back some kind of control over the narrative, instead of being buffeted around by the perfect storm that is narcissistic abuse.

High-spectrum narcissists and psychopaths love power and robbing others of power. In order for victim-survivors to take back their power, they can either wade through tonnes of misinformation on the net or they can find a therapist who gets it.

What I aim to do is to teach survivors how to be their own therapist by:

1.     Orienting to strengths

2.     Attending to pain

3.     Taking charge of the narrative of their lives

How To Be Your Own Therapist

A journey of narcissistic abuse recovery involves understanding….

·      the effects of trauma on the body and mind

·      how to build new supports into your life

·      how to talk about what happened

·      narcissism and psychopathy, stigma, cultural victim-blaming and gender issues

·      how to change your self-image from the abuser’s warped and cruel perspective

·      how to embark on new safe relationships

·      how to envisage a positive new future life

My Methodology

I specialise in what are called “third-wave” psychological interventions. That is, a more holistic approach to healing that involves using our own internal resources – approaches that have made their way out of ancient wisdom traditions and into mainstream psychology. I also advocate the exploration of what we in Australia call “alternative therapies”. By this I mean long-established Eastern traditions that have hundreds or thousands of years of empirical evidence in support of their efficacy – not so-called New Age practices necessarily.

My bottom-line belief is that victim-survivors need to try everything they hope might provide relief from the struggle of deep moral injury. Every survivor will be different in this regard, so recovery is essentially a journey of experimentation.

Mindfulness is not a New Age fad – as much as social media might have made it seem a superficial craze. Our minds are incredibly powerful – they can hurt us or heal us. Mindfulness-based interventions are about training the mind. In science-speak, they are about creating new neural pathways by employing our natural meta-cognition.

So many survivors just want to detach from cruel inner critics inside their minds. Sometimes these harsh critical inner narratives take the form of repetitive thoughts – rumination, nightmares, social anxiety, deep mistrust, self-loathing or depression. The application of mind-training techniques from Buddhist Psychology or it’s science-based twin, ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), has tried and tested methods for detaching, letting go or ‘defusing’ the hold our minds have over us.

We are not our rational mind alone, although analysing our situation using traditional talk therapy – and being heard – can get us a long way down the recovery path.  Almost every human mind has the capacity to notice what is happening in our mind and body at any given moment. This is called “meta-cognition”. Training this capacity is how we learn to be our own therapist.

So my role as your counsellor is to do myself out of a job!

 © Nicki Paull

DISCLAIMER: Narcissists are not all male. Using male pronouns to reference the narcissist and female pronouns to reference the victim-survivor is not an indication of the clinical data on gender in narcissism, but rather an editorial choice.