Maintaining Growth

It is exhausting to heal. It takes so much emotional energy.  You outgrow the people around you who aren’t doing their own work. The people closest to you can be the most toxic and create the most roadblocks to prevent your growth because they don’t understand it. And if after all that you somehow get to the “other side” and feel mostly healed, those same people might say or act like “ok are you done now”, can we go back to the ways we treated you before – invalidating and gaslighting you.

People who go through therapy know the healing journey is forever. It might ebb and flow and sometimes it might look like maintenance, but it is continuous. Healing can include identifying toxic behavior quicker and addressing it earlier. It is also remembering not to put other people’s feelings before your own and that others’ responses to your boundaries are not your responsibility. If you expect a certain reaction, it is almost validating when it happens.

I’ve dealt with exactly 3 people like this in my life that I couldn’t just walk away from, I had to try before giving up on the relationship. I call it, giving them a chance to surprise me. While listening to the Navigating Narcissism podcast by Dr. Ramani (https://www.youtube.com/@NavigatingNarcissismPod/about) I’ve learned more about the narcissist playbook and can predict how these 3 people, and others like them, will react. Once the narcissist shows themselves, the decisions are easy to distance, separate or go no contact. In one episode they discussed “stepping on the eggshells” around a narcissist to see if or how they react. We spend so much energy and time tiptoeing around the eggshells to prevent the blow up, when if we just stepped on the eggshells the narcissist would reveal themselves much faster. This shows their true colors and gives us the information and “permission” to remove ourselves from the relationship or at least put appropriate distance in place.

If you suspect someone is a narcissist, step on the eggshells, see if they respond in one of the classic, textbook ways. Don’t waste your newly achieved healing on someone who’s just trying to squash your authenticity. You’re allowed to maintain all the hard work you’ve accomplished. Standing up for yourself is part of the continuous journey and now you have the tools, skills and willpower to do it.