Mental Health Awareness Month – Let’s Talk

Have you ever noticed how some people shape-shift depending on who’s watching? Talkative with one person, silent with another. Sweet to some, distant to many. But who are they—really? They lie, first to themselves, then to others. Each small lie becomes a mask, stitching together the costume they wear and pulling them further from who they truly are. Nobody really knows them—not even them. So they build versions—some polished, some broken—all incomplete. And somewhere beneath all the stories, their real self waits—hidden, hushed, and heavy with silence. They’re not tired from talking, but from carrying the weight of pretending. The truth is, anyone who lies to themselves will lie to you. And worse, they’ll drag their entire family into the delusion.

Content Note: This series addresses topics of a sensitive and emotional nature, including trauma, narcissism, depression, and toxic behavior. While I am not a licensed clinical therapist, I speak from lived experience, academic grounding in psychology, and a commitment to becoming a trauma therapist. What I offer here is raw truth—honesty shaped by personal healing, continued study, and the voices of those who have survived and are still surviving. These reflections are not clinical diagnoses, but deeply human interpretations of how emotional wounds impact our choices, our relationships, and our capacity to heal.

What is Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

According to the Mayo Clinic, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, also known as NPD, is a mental health condition marked by an inflated sense of self-importance, constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, often masking deep insecurity and hypersensitivity to criticism. This disorder can severely disrupt relationships, careers, and daily functioning, leaving individuals feeling unfulfilled and others emotionally drained. Though more common in males and typically emerging in adolescence or early adulthood, treatment primarily involves long-term psychotherapy to address underlying emotional issues and interpersonal challenges (Mayo Clinic).

What Most People Believe

Narcissism is a serious disorder. When the average person hears the word “narcissist,” they think of someone vain, self-absorbed, maybe a little arrogant—someone who takes too many selfies or loves the sound of their own voice. The term gets tossed around casually, used to describe a person who lacks empathy, a malicious family member, or a boss who loves being in control. But that surface-level understanding barely scratches the truth.

What most people don’t realize is that narcissism at its most extreme—Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)—isn’t just about ego. It’s about emotional warfare. It’s about charm used as bait, affection as control, and love as a performance. People with NPD can be calculating, cruel, and dangerously manipulative, not just difficult partners but often psychologically abusive ones. They are transactional, distort reality, erode self-worth, and condition their partners to tolerate pain in the name of love.

The real danger isn’t in how loudly a narcissist talks about themselves or to themselves—it’s in how quietly they dismantle you while making you believe it’s your fault. That’s the part most people don’t see. That’s the part most survivors carry.

If you suspect you may have narcissistic traits, seek a professional evaluation. A clinical diagnosis is the first step toward understanding—and getting the support you need to heal and grow.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Every narcissist operates at different levels, but they all speak the same language: silence, manipulation, transaction, deception. And while every survivor’s story is different, the aftermath always tastes the same, like silence after a scream. When I think of the ultimate narcissist, I’m evoked by Ike Turner in Tina Turner’s story—when affection becomes a weapon, a performance, and survival becomes the real love story. Tina, legendary and fearless, didn’t just escape narcissistic abuse—she reclaimed her autonomy with fire. That’s what makes her unforgettable.

To a narcissist, love is a transaction—something to extract, not experience. They can’t connect with you on a genuine emotional level because they’re disconnected from the core of real love itself. There’s a brutal distortion that takes place: where care becomes a cage, giving becomes a one-sided obligation, and staying means slowly vanishing into someone else’s shadow. Sometimes, you love someone so deeply that you lose yourself trying to keep them. You stay—even as it breaks you—believing your love will be enough for both of you. But real love doesn’t feel like drowning; rather, a lifeboat.

I was fifty years old when I recognized that one of my parents was a narcissist, and that toxic imprint shaped every love relationship I ever had, beginning in high school. But it showed up loudest in my marriage. Being with a narcissist is a mistake you often don’t see until it’s too late, until the mask slips, and the damage is already done. They won’t apologize. They believe they’re superior. They act like being with you is charity. And all the while, they demand you give up everything to become their nothing.

So, who did you really fall in love with?

Was it them—or the mask they wore so convincingly?

If your relationship looked anything like mine, then you already know what support doesn’t look like: silent standoffs passed off as communication, touch without tenderness, a cold absence where emotional presence should live, and the unspoken rule that you should keep giving—without ever receiving. Behind the charm, the grandiosity, and the carefully crafted persona is a hollow self, built on attention, manipulation, and deception.

Don’t start what you can’t finish. Because the moment you stop playing the role of caretaker or doormat, hell will be unleashed. If for no reason other than your refusal to suffer quietly.

Mine was a trigger—the ultimate trigger. He knew exactly how to hold and twist words and emotions to keep me off balance, unsettled, ashamed, and disjointed. When an empath loves a narcissist—especially in marriage—it marks the beginning of a different kind of hell. One that breathes fire into your spirit and dares you to survive it.

The Narcs Enablers

In the beginning, the narcissist wasn’t born —he/she was bred. It’s vital to understand that long before they mastered manipulation, there was an audience—silent, compliant, and complicit. The enablers. The ones who looked away, excused the outbursts, normalized the cruelty, and fed the ego under the guise of love, duty, or fear. Narcissists don’t emerge from a vacuum; they are sculpted in environments that reward control and punish vulnerability. Maybe it was a parent who mistook domination for strength, a sibling who stayed quiet to avoid conflict, or a previous partner who blurred every boundary in the name of loyalty.

Dr. Lindsay Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, explores how emotional unavailability, especially in fathers, can lay the groundwork for narcissistic traits in their sons—fostering a distorted model of masculinity that equates emotional detachment with strength. These emotionally immature dynamics—often brushed off or never named—become breeding grounds for manipulation, entitlement, and a refusal to take accountability.

The narcissist’s rise is rarely a solo performance; it’s a production, supported by systems and people who helped script the play. To truly understand how narcissists are made, you must examine not just the mask but the stage that allowed it to form.

The Silent Chaos of Family Systems

Some families don’t need raised voices to cause harm—just silence, control, and carefully curated performances of love. When the matriarch or patriarch is a narcissist, the entire family bends around their emotional needs. Praise becomes conditional. Affection is weaponized. Truth gets rewritten to protect the illusion of harmony. When a parent demands loyalty at the expense of your identity, love begins to feel like a betrayal of yourself. And so the cycle continues—until someone names it, breaks it, and decides they will no longer sacrifice their mental health for the sake of family image.

This is how generational trauma takes root, not only through what’s done, but through what’s never named. Children grow up confused about their worth, often becoming adults who attract similar dynamics or, unintentionally, repeat them. The narcissist in the family becomes both the architect of dysfunction and the figure no one is allowed to challenge.

I’ve seen it in my own bloodline—and in others. Narcissistic parents don’t just wound their children in the moment; they plant seeds of self-doubt, people-pleasing, and perfectionism that bloom across generations. As Dr. Karyl McBride writes in Will I Ever Be Good Enough?, daughters of narcissistic mothers often inherit a legacy of emotional neglect and identity loss, learning to equate love with performance, not presence.

That’s what makes the narcissistic family system so dangerous. It teaches you to mistrust your instincts, to sacrifice your truth for someone else’s comfort, and to confuse survival with connection. But I’ve learned that real love—the kind that heals instead of harms—starts with reclaiming yourself. Wholeness is not a luxury; it’s a birthright. And the most radical act of love in a legacy of distortion is to break the cycle and become the truth-teller your lineage never had.

A Distorted Reality

Living with a narcissist is not just hard—it’s a slow erosion of self. I managed it for seven years, though “managed” feels generous. What I didn’t fully grasp was that I was trapped inside a psychological maze—one where every wrong turn was somehow my fault, every doubt was weaponized, and the truth was always just out of reach. He offered zero accountability. Gas-lighting wasn’t occasional, it was constant, a daily distortion of reality: “That’s not what I said.” “You’re so sensitive.” “You’re imagining things.”

These weren’t just words—they were weapons. Every comment was calculated to unseat my confidence and fracture my grip on reality. Over time, I began to second-guess everything—my memory, my instincts, even my sanity. That’s the cruelty of narcissistic abuse: it doesn’t just wound you—it rewires you to believe you deserve the pain. I could be speaking about anything—something important, something mundane—and he’d cut me off with a dismissive, “Blah, blah, blah.” It was the most dehumanizing thing I’d ever experienced in a relationship. I often use the idiomatic expression, “you can’t make this stuff up“—because truly, you can’t.

Narcissists are skilled at projection—accusing you of the very harm they’re inflicting. Their cruelty becomes your “overreaction.” Their neglect, your “neediness.” For some, it’s never violent or loud. But it’s often wrapped in charm, delivered with a smile, or followed by a grand gesture—what’s commonly known as love bombing. A narcissist mirrors your values to earn your trust, only to manipulate it later. They apologize just enough to keep you hopeful, or, in some cases, like mine, no apologies at all. And no hope. Instead of remorse, there’s deliberate denial, silence, and blame. And when the mask inevitably slips, they don’t take responsibility; they punish you for noticing.

The Hidden Cost of Narcissistic Abuse

Of course, I made mistakes. I didn’t always get things right. I loved my husband. I cared for him deeply and gave everything I had. But that wasn’t enough. Loving a narcissist didn’t just break my heart; it hijacked my nervous system. I found myself consistently bracing for impact, even in silence. Especially in silence. The tension lived in my body before I could name it. No yelling, no outright fights—just sharp, calculated jabs cloaked in passivity, lies spun behind my back, and constant emotional contortion to avoid “conflict,” because a simple conversation to him was “conflict”. I wasn’t just emotionally drained—I was physiologically trapped in a loop of hypervigilance. My body was breaking down, my sleep was disjointed, and my inner peace was wrecked. At some point, my entire body collapsed. As Dr. Gabor Maté says, “When emotions are repressed, the nervous system pays the price.” Survivors of narcissistic abuse often minimize their pain, but the body never stops reacting. Mine didn’t. Not until the marriage was over.

The narcissist is profoundly insecure and will do everything possible to conceal their own fractures, because facing who they truly are is too unbearable. My experience loving and living with a narcissistic spouse left a kind of damage that’s impossible to deny. And though I’m surviving the aftermath with grace, the gas-lighting, the emotional starvation, the dizzying cycles of idealization and abandonment left bruises on my heart that won’t fully fade. Some wounds don’t disappear—they just teach you how to move forward and carry yourself differently.

Recently, I became part of a global community of survivors of narcissistic abuse—people who have endured gaslighting, psychological control, and the relentless erosion of their emotional well-being. Their stories run deep and stretch wide, spanning cultures and continents, yet echo the same truth: survival. These are individuals who have clawed their way back to themselves after years of manipulation and emotional warfare. Their testimonies shine a light on what it means to heal—through self-compassion, radical awareness, and the courageous decision to break the cycle for good.

Hard Decisions, Real Freedom

Whether you were brave enough to leave the toxic relationship or you’re the one who got discarded like a can of garbage, peace isn’t passive. After years of silent chaos, healing can look like moments with just you and the sky, quiet mornings, chosen family, therapy wins, and an inner calm money can never buy. Many survivors have distanced themselves from narcissistic or toxic relatives and found peace.

Let’s be clear: peace didn’t fall into our laps—we fought for it. We cried for it. We buried versions of ourselves to rise toward it. We chose peace over performance, clarity over confusion, and truth over loyalty to dysfunction.

And that choice? IT COSTS.

You’ll mourn people you loved who were incapable of loving you back. You’ll grieve partners who never truly saw you. You’ll sit in rooms where your absence is louder than your presence ever was. But you’ll sleep better. You’ll breathe deeper. You’ll stop negotiating your worth. Because survival isn’t just about getting out—it’s about never going back.

I deserve a love that is expansive, rooted, and reverent. For me, love is radical—it is a homecoming, not a performance. It requires presence, honesty, and wholeness. It is never fractured by manipulation, never conditional upon obedience, and never earned through the erasure of self. True love honors your full humanity. It listens without silencing, holds without blaming, and cherishes without asking you to shrink. It is not a transaction—it is a sanctuary.

My life isn’t perfect, but everything’s beautiful.

Communities That Hold You: Support for Survivors of Narcissistic Abuse. These accounts offer daily reminders that your healing is sacred and possible.

Online Communities & Forums

Reddit – r/Narcissistic Abuse. A large, active subreddit where survivors share experiences, coping strategies, and healing tools.

Facebook Groups (search: “Narcissistic Abuse Recovery”). Many private groups exist for survivors to connect in safer, moderated spaces. Look for those with trauma-informed admin teams.

Out of the Fog
Website: outofthefog.website. Offers support and information for those dealing with people who have personality disorders, including narcissists.

Psychopath Free Community
Website: psychopathfree.com. Focused on emotional abuse recovery with forums, resources, and survivor stories.

Educational & Therapeutic Platforms

Dr. Karyl McBride – Will I Ever Be Good Enough?
Website: willieverbegoodenough.com
Offers articles, quizzes, therapist directories, and healing programs specifically for adult children of narcissistic parents.

Dr. Ramani Durvasula (YouTube & Instagram)Renowned clinical psychologist who specializes in narcissistic abuse. Her videos are deeply validating and informative.

The Narcissist Abuse Recovery Center (NARC)
Offers coaching, courses, and a trauma-informed lens on recovery.

Holistic Support & Peer Networks

The Mighty (Mental Health & Trauma Recovery Stories)Website: themighty.com. Features real-life stories from survivors and professionals on narcissistic abuse and complex trauma.

Instagram Healing Communities. Accounts like @selfhealerscircle, @narcissist_abuse_recovery, and @the.holistic.psychologist offer bite-sized education, affirmations, and recovery tools.