Many of us on a Spiritual Path or Journey of Consciousness have suffered emotional abuse in our past, including me. I’ve written this article to see if I can help us to join up the dots on why this may be the case and to help us to find perhaps missing links between our spirituality and healing and the emotional and narcissistic abuse that we endured.

Most people don’t know that they are being emotionally abused when it’s happening.
This sounds crazy to someone that has not experienced a relationship with a narcissist or an emotional abuser, they just can’t understand why you wouldn’t know.
However, if you have been on the receiving end you totally get it.
These people are so manipulative that we literally don’t see it coming in the first place and then don’t know that it’s going as the relationship progresses.

We adapt our behaviour in subtle ways to avoid their “consequences” which could range from a bit of a huff initially, to a full on ghosting later on.
Emotional abuse seeps into your life very gradually and emotional abusers make sure that you are absolutely on the hook before they begin their campaign.
They recruit you into their world with a tactic called Love Bombing, where they shower you with love, attention and affection. You start to feel like this person is “so different” and they are, they are grooming you and blind siding you do that when the manipulation starts they have a massive deposit in your emotional bank account and you overlook their controlling behaviour because you have bought in to the idea that they are just SO lovely.

They subtly begin to isolate you from family and friends, often citing that they want special time alone with you – you take this on board as more evidence that they love and adore you but in truth they are moving you away from other people that may challenge the controlling and abusive behaviour. This also assists them to remove many healthy references from your reality, so when they start to gas light you, you buy into their narrative and begin to question yourself, your sanity, your capability as a person, your decision making and more.

And then they ramp up the love bombing and “help” you in your time of confusion.
Because they love you and you’re tired and stressed and you’re working too hard.
They rescue you and you buy into the feeling that they clearly have your best interests at heart and what do other people know, so what if you don’t want to go out with your friends any more – you’re in a relationship now and that is your priority.

Slowly you lose yourself and become more and more brain washed.
It’s like being in a cult, but worse because you don’t even know it’s a cult.
No one can reach you and if they try to, you defend your abuser because they have programmed you this way and the story has become entrenched.

They use tactics to control you such as removing love and connection, ignoring you and sometimes full-on tantrums. They flirt with other people in front of you and then tell you that you are insecure, they financially hold the purse strings and make social situations really difficult.

And then they love you again!
When you behave in ways that they approve of the love and connection comes back.
You’ve worked your way back into their favour.
(You cancelled your night out for example)
This is a massive relief to you and it feels like a reward.
Finally you are accepted and loved and approved of.
For now, until they decide that you are not doing what they want you to do, or when they feel like they need an injection of drama and validation that you are completely under their control.
Then it begins again.
You trigger them and the cycle kicks off……

And you are SO worn down and it’s been such a long process that you don’t even see this as a cycle and you just think that this is the way that your relationship “works” and because you are isolated and have no healthy references this is so easy for them to maintain.

You lose more and more of yourself and live in the bubble that they have created for you.
Unhappy.
Unreachable.
And no idea why you feel so confused, so up and down and so lacking in self-worth.

Even making small decisions for yourself becomes difficult.
But don’t worry they will help you.

These people steal the essence of who you are.
It’s strategic, it’s deliberate and it’s highly abusive.

Things to expect after emotional abuse

1) Loneliness & Isolation.

This is not the “normal” loneliness you feel when you go through a break up.
Its extreme and magnified because your abuser isolated you from people in your life that would have been able to call them out.
You might feel foolish and embarrassed that you stayed too long and that you didn’t see it, you are worried about people judging you and saying I told you so because your self-worth has been decimated and you have little or no self-belief.

This can stop you from reaching out to the people that you may have contacted in the past, because you have stopped seeing them as often and you’ve had to cancel arrangements so often and let them down. Friendships and relationships have drifted due to the abuser controlling who you saw and what you did, and now in the aftermath you feel like a user if you contact anyone.

Your abuser will probably start a smear campaign and tell people their “side of the story” before you can.
They have built up the persona of being kind and charming and many will people believe them and not you. Because your self-worth is so damaged you really can’t fight back and this isolates you even more, people that you thought were friends that you had in common will stop returning messages, block you on social media and side with the narcissist / abuser.

Another thing that makes you feel intensely lonely is that the abuser will have made you reliant on them and their approval. They made sure that they were the go to person in your life that was always there and available for you to turn to and that they always had your back.
They told  you that other people didn’t love you like they did and that you didn’t need anyone else, and you bought into it for the sake of love.

You therefore feel a deeper kind of isolation than a regular break up, you have given over your power and invested so very much of yourself that you now feel really broken and lost.

Does the isolation and loneliness make you look at yourself more deeply?

When you feel disconnected from other people does this naturally make us go within more and engage in a process of soul searching? Do the feelings that enduring emotional and narcissistic abuse bring up make you reflect on your own stuff even more?

Is this “cocoon time” where you feel like you are in the darkness but in many ways you are beginning to transform behind the scenes?

You hit the bottom and question who you are after a life trauma, something significant happening to us can make us question our purpose and the meaning of life generally.
It can lead to epiphanies and paradigm shifts that we would otherwise not have considered, it makes us dig really deep.

You sometimes have to lose yourself to begin to find yourself again.

The process of excavating who you are amid the confusion can illuminate surprising characteristics, hopes, dreams, talents and aspects of self that you may never have been able to find.

Maybe there are parts of you that want to come back?
Perhaps you loved to listen to music while you were cooking dinner and that was not encouraged.
Maybe you loved having your girlfriends around for a drink once a month and that had to stop.
Perhaps you had a hobby at the weekend that you no longer engage in.
In the isolation and quiet you might be able to remember who you were.

But also know that you will have changed and you are fragile and regrouping.
Confusion and lack of direction and self-belief are very common and you may seek therapy to support you, it helped me hugely.

It is in the silence that we hear the whispers of our soul.
Although the isolation is socially brutal, it can give us an opportunity to cave out and lick our wounds as we regroup and gather our strength again.

This is a good time to reach out to a counsellor or a therapist if you feel you want to, a conscious and non-biased perspective can bring a lot of validation and support and the space and time you have can feel less isolating and more like breathing space.

Try to overcome the feeling that you cannot reach out to  family and friends.
They are unlikely to be able to understand what you are going through and may try to “jolly you along” and “cheer you up” as if it’s a normal breakup, and this can feel like they may be minimizing what you have been through. Try to understand that they are not going to be able to see what has happened to you, they have probably been aware that you have changed in some way but they have also been on the receiving end of the abuser coming over as being a nice, charming and helpful person – so they won’t necessarily believe what you have been through.
Try not to get caught up in being right.
Social reconnection and support is important, and you may have to be aware that they cannot see things from your point of view. Although frustrating this is a chance to have compassion and practice good emotional boundaries whilst reconnecting with friends and family.
In time you may be able to explain more of what happened once you have a clearer idea yourself.

2) Emotional Excavation

Once you start to research what emotional abuse is, you’re going to uncover things about yourself that made you a target for this. You start to dig into who you are and the patterns that you have and you can see why this happened to you, this is not about blaming yourself, it’s about healing the past. Stuff from your childhood, old relationships and more will come up and you need to look at it and see where the dots join up.

This is where the GOLD is.

It’s the toughest part of it but it ‘s also the best part as you get real epiphanies.
Be brave and don’t judge, lean into the process and find out about yourself.

Would you ever have been able to dig this deeply unless your foundation had been so rocked?

The process of breaking down who you used to be (and who you thought you were) through emotional abuse, means that you need to rebuild yourself.
This has to start with looking at what you’ve got left – the real parts of you that are your values, your dreams and your intrinsic worth.
It’s who you are at your core, and much of this may have been hidden away in order to comply with the situation that you were in.
You have probably been told that parts of you were not good enough, that they were an embarrassment, that they were weak and unacceptable.
Your empathic traits are likely to have been used against you in all manner of ways, making you unintentionally step away from using your intuition and closing down your heart to yourself.

You’re going to get to know you in a whole new and much deeper way than before.
And this is a journey that you would probably have never taken if you hadn’t been so broken apart.

Who you thought you were is now an illusion.
This is deeply unsettling, but also a place of great opportunity and freedom.
You no longer have to be the person that you were “groomed” into being, you no longer have to live by the rules and expectations of another person and fear the consequences of not complying.

3) Awakening to Spirituality or Consciousness

The level of self-awareness that you can access once you excavate can be incredible.
Owning your story and your old wounds is healing and empowering.
During your excavation you will have probably been able to see the wounds and patterns that made you a target for emotional abuse, and if you dig in even more you may be able to find the source of these wounds and heal them on a very deep level.

It is in healing the pain from the emotional abuse that you can begin to see what lies underneath it.
A process of joining up the dots begins and you are made aware of some past issues that you may have never been able to access or look at before now, this is where your recovery becomes a real life transformation and awakening into consciousness and spirituality.

Immense growth and evolution can be gained ad you start to build your life back up again and learn that its healthy to release the past and forgive yourself and others.
The more work that you can do on healing the past abusive situation and reclaiming aspects of yourself, the more your self-worth begins to return and the more you begin to love yourself through.
You realise that it wasn’t your fault and that they were the broken one not you.
As you research different personality disorders such as narcissism you can see that there is no way that your abuser will change, and that they will move on to do this to someone else after you.
In time this releases self-reproach and blame and can even stir feelings of compassion towards your abuser when enough healing has occurred, because they will never be able to have a healthy and functioning relationship.

These feelings are higher in vibration that the feelings of unworthiness and confusion that you found yourself with initially, and they elevate your frequency along with the fact that you have probably healed old wounds and sabotaging patterns that you had before the abuse took place.

Because your frequency has lifted and you have an intention to heal yourself, I believe that The Universe starts to match this through Law of Attraction and send you people and information that can help you on your journey. You’ve “asked” to become more whole and healed and to find your way back to yourself, and a journey of living consciously is the key.

So you start to get opportunities and insights into how you can do this.
Nudges and ideas of how you can start to live into some of the principles of spirituality.
Perhaps you find you have an urge to try yoga, or a friend gives you crystals for your birthday.
Maybe your social media feed throws you some ideas about the benefits of grounding or why letting go of resentment can be so healthy.

The dots start to join up for you and you become open to trying new things and living from a different perspective, growing into a more evolved and conscious version of yourself and understanding that through healing and practicing a more spiritual existence that you can create a version of yourself and a life you love.

This is currently my take on the link between emotional / narcissistic abuse and spiritual awakening, it might evolve as I do but for now this is how I feel, and I’d love to know how you feel and what you’ve been through in the comments.

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