dollyvee's recovery journal

[NarcKiddo]

I think you are right to feel you have made progress. I can't necessarily point to a thing you said in the past vs a thing you say now like, say, your therapist could. But the very fact that you are prepared to step up here and say that you have is, to me, ample proof that you have - and probably more than you think. It seems to me that it is very hard for us to give ourselves credit without outside validation. The narcs made us fit their mould so we simply had no way, back then, to even have a view of who we were or what we wanted or whether we had succeeded or failed. We had to rely on the narc telling us, or the teacher giving us a gold star, or the employer saying they were pleased with our work. To have your own internal compass, to be able to step up and say "I've made a lot of progress" is huge.

I also think it is huge to be able to accept and acknowledge that things you expected to be problematic actually went fine. Living with a narc who shapes your entire existence means that one tends to go into every situation with some sort of preconceived idea of what it will be like. If something turns out to be nice that the narc said would be horrid, the cognitive dissonance is huge - plus of course there was the need to reassure the narc that it was, indeed, horrid and they were right all along. So being able to experience something for what it actually is, and then to say what it was like, truthfully, is huge.

[natureluvr]

I'm glad to hear that things went well for you yesterday morning.  I can relate to what you said about being self protective around other people.  I'm the same way, and I think we do this for very good reason.  As they say "once burnt, twice shy".  We've been hurt badly, so we are trying not to get hurt again.