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Love Your Life Show: Personal Growth, Mindset, + Habits for Busy Moms
3 Habits That Keep You Stuck After Narcissistic Abuse
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If you’ve ever been in a narcissistic relationship (with a partner, parent, boss, or friend), you know the effects don’t magically disappear when you leave. In fact, sometimes that’s when the real work begins. -
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Hi, this is the Love youe Life show with Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let's go, warriors.
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Oh, hello, warriors, and welcome to the Love youe Life show. I am your host and and coach, Susie Pettit, a certified life parent and relationship coach and fellow human learning right along with you. If this is your first episode, you're going to want to grab the podcast roadmap@smbwell.com roadmap all one word to get the foundational episodes that'll set you up with, you know, just the basic building blocks for emotional intelligence and all the relationship skills. And keep listening because this, whether this is your first episode or your 360, whatever number we're on right now, we're diving into a topic that shows up in so many people's lives and is so important and close to my heart, which is life after narcissistic relationships. Life after we're involved in relationships with emotionally immature people, whether that relationship was because that person was our parent or with like a romantic partner or a boss, a sibling or even a friend. Okay. The impact of being in a relationship like that doesn't magically disappear once we're out of it, right? In fact, for many of us, that's where the real work begins. Because here's the thing. And again, this is your first episode. Get the roadmap. I was in these relationships. But here's the thing. When you've spent years or decades in a relationship where you were gaslit, manipulated, and made to question your own worth and sanity, basically your brain and nervous system adapts to survive. And those adaptions don't vanish because you've left the relationship. I know this because I live this. I grew up with a narcissistic parent and then went on to marry, if not a narcissist, a man at the very low end of emotional maturity, very, you know, an emotional intelligence. And while I am now surrounded by healthy relationships, I still notice my pre programmed self wanting to go back and act in ways that were protective for me in those other relationships. And so today I want to shine a light on this sort of thing. And I'm going to pull out three common behaviors that I see over and over again in myself and in my clients. Okay. That come up after leaving a narcissistic relationship or in a relationship with someone who's emotionally immature. Really on the spectrum, okay, we're all emotionally immature. So there's no shame there. I'm just saying someone that's like really far down on that spectrum. Again, if you're new to the show, text me because I have a great episode on that one. Narcissist and emotionally immature. Anyhow, back to this. This is part one of a two part series. I'm trying to stay focused because they're so much information here in so many ways. I can help you today is this first part is all about awareness. Learning what these behaviors are, these three behaviors I'm talking about and looking to see how they might be showing up in your life. Right? But don't worry, I'm not leaving you there. Which is why it's two parter. Next week is actually my birthday. Woohoo. And in celebration, I want to talk about the healing and growing. It's such a gift for us. All right. It is a gift for you to notice and maybe feel a little uncomfortable. And the next week, the what now? How to begin shifting, healing and reclaiming your power. Woohoo. So let's jump in. Behavior number one that I see is hyper vigilance and people pleasing. If you grew up with or were in a relationship with a narcissist, your nervous system learned very quickly that your safety depended on reading the room constantly. You became a master at scanning facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, always on the lookout for the smallest shift in mood. In a narcissistic relationship, someone else's mood would change the whole atmosphere. If you know, you know that dance we did behind the scene to keep dad or mom or husband or sister calm and happy. Because otherwise, oh my. Watch out. And so as a survival strategy, we learn to head that off by anticipating their needs and smoothing things over. This hyper awareness often turns into people pleasing. Saying yes when we want to say no, agreeing to things just to keep the peace, prioritizing their needs and wants over yours. Always, always making sure others are okay before even checking in with yourself. Now, dear warrior, before you go beating yourself up for being weak or lame, things I've thought about myself now that I'm out of those relationships, okay, I'll be like, come on Susie, own your power. Right? Right. Please remember, dear one, that hyper vigilance and people pleasing were things really smart things we did to protect ourselves. Survival skills. They kept us safe in an unsafe environment. And yes, I'm with you. Now that we're out of that environment, we want to stop doing these things because they keep us from fully living and fully connecting our current relationships. From fully feeling as confident about ourselves as we can, okay? They can keep us swinging between anxiety, overthinking and emotional numbness. So for this first part, hyper vigilant and people pleasing. This week, I want you to be on the lookout, okay? If this is you, you might notice things like feeling on edge, okay? Like you have to monitor everyone's mood or struggling to relax because you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or saying yes to things that you later regret. You're like, why did I say that? Feeling exhausted after interactions because you're like, instead of just being in those interactions, it's like you're performing in those interactions. If you're nodding along, you're not alone, Remember? And next week we'll get to action steps. This week we are just looking to see where you do it. Behavior number two that we want to be on to is this difficulty in trusting our own perceptions and feeling a lot of self doubt. One of the cruelest effects of narcissistic abuse is that it makes you doubt your own reality. It makes you question your own brilliance and amazingness. Narcissists use gaslighting, which is when they twist facts, deny things that happen, or maybe tell you you're too sensitive, you're overreacting. They do this until you start to wonder if you can trust your own memory, your own feelings, and your own judgment. After years of this, it makes sense that even when the relationship ends, you would still second guess decisions you've made. Or maybe you reread emails and texts 10 times before sending them. Or you ask for lots of reassurance from others when you're making a decision or before you act or. Two big ones for me are over defending and over explaining. I would talk a lot and explain why I was doing what I was doing or why I was talking about why I was talking about. I used to get criticized or get in trouble, quote unquote, for talking, doing these kind of things in my old relationships. And so now even my healthy relationships, okay? This used to show up as me. It still does. As over explaining and over defending. We need to be onto it. I'm trying to think. I caught myself doing this the other day. I wanted to share something interesting I had heard in this podcast on AI. I listened to it that morning and I was driving in a car with my husband and instead of just saying that like, hey, I heard this interesting thing, I said like 400 times more words, okay? I. If you listened to me, if we had a little video camera in the car, it would have been like, hey, I was listening to this podcast episode at the gym this morning because I like to listen to podcasts at business podcasts at the gym. And so was listening to this thing on AI and the show is by a woman who I love, who wrote a New York Times bestseller and she's interviewing someone like yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. That's 100% of my old programming. All right, over explaining why I'm opening my mouth. Since narcissists, it has to be all about them. When we get out of these relationships, we might over explain what we're doing or saying to show how what we're about to say has worthy value to take their time and attention. Like us having something to say isn't worthy in itself. So we feel like we have to over explain so he or she gets what we're saying and they understand why we're taking their precious time and attention. Over defending is cut from the same cloth. Over defending, like pay attention if you're over defending why you did something or maybe a decision you made. Okay, like say I'm meeting, I notice this, you know, meeting my adults, like when I'm making decisions. So notice say I'm meeting my adult son for breakfast and I'm in charge of choosing the restaurant. Okay. Because of my past, I would be inclined to over explain and give lots of background as to why I chose the place I chose. Okay, I might share that. I did this Google search and I was thinking this and I looked here and I like not only that, us recovering people pleasers are also going to feel extra responsible for all aspects of the experience. Like if the service is slow, it's somehow my fault for choosing the place. Or if my son doesn't like the thing that he ordered off the menu that has 40 choices, he chose one of them and he doesn't like it. It's my fault that heaviness. You guys, other people don't do this. Okay? So remember next week I'll give you tips and tactics to practice breaking yourself out of this icky feeling and behavior. And this heaviness, because this is like is exhausting. This week your job is to be on the lookout for where you're over explaining, over defending, having problems making decisions, just sort of spinning in that and reminder you're not weak for doing this. Your brain learned that trusting yourself was dangerous in the past, so it tends to do a lot of spinning. The third behavior I want us to pay attention to is emotional dysregulation or numbness. Alright, Emotional Dysregulation can look like having really big emotional reactions to situations that don't seem to warrant it, right? Or the opposite, emotional numbness. We feel numb, like we're ahead, walking around, disconnected from our body. Someone asks you how you feel about something going on in your life and you're like, huh? What? When you've lived in high stress, invalidating environment, your nervous system has been through a lot, you've been in a constant state of fight, flight, freeze. And so thus after leaving those relationships, something small, like a small piece of negative feedback or a text that maybe doesn't have all the flower emojis and maybe comes off as a bit harsh in your brain. Or maybe just a look from a friend or a partner. Heck, even silence from them, them just sitting there can set off a huge emotional wave. Okay, your husband comes in, you know, from wherever and he just goes into the refrigerator and starts making a snack or something like immediately. If you're, if your system is like, what's wrong? What did I do? You're listening to the right episode. Your body thinks you're back in danger. And so we often have bigger emotional reactions than the circumstance warrants. I love the expression, if it's hysterical, it's historical. Okay? Like for me, when my dad or ex were angry with me, they would be quiet. So that scene where I just played like the husband coming up to get a snack, like my body would be like, like I knew that if they were sitting there not saying anything, problems were ahead. Their silence was not safe for me. All right, well get this warriors little aside. You know how like I say, the universe always gives you what you need to learn and evolve. Well guess what? My now husband, healthy husband, an emotionally immature man by the emotionally mature man, by the way, guess what he does for a living? He's a freaking meditation teacher. So what do you think he spends a lot of time doing sitting in silence? So what? Like I get so much practice, it's just so crazy. And before I sort of was on to myself and knew what was going on, my nervous system would freak out continuously when I was with him. Alright, I'd go back to that first behavior of like hyper vigilance and ask him, are you okay? Did I do something? All right, Sort of looking for him to calm my nervous system because my nervous system was freaking out. And don't worry, I'll share how I got out of it this next week because we don't want to keep relying on someone outside of us to make us calm. But this is Normal. I met him after I'd been a life coach for more than a decade. I'm doing this work, so like you doing, there's no room here to beat yourself up for this. We are bringing awareness. We are looking to see if your emotional reactions are bigger than the experience you're having. And maybe pausing and questioning in a kind way with yourself, oh, I wonder what's going on. Okay, Also look to see where maybe you're shutting down, feeling detached, almost like you're in like a fog or a bubble. You're going through the motions, but you're avoiding emotions because it feels safer this way. Right? Just sort of shut that down. This used to happen in the past, or maybe even it just pay attention. Maybe in the past, like you're daughter and your husband were arguing, conflict, loud voices, ah, do you go numb or do you do numbing behavior like you're there in body but not in spirit? Okay, for me, literally, it would feel like my brain would blank out. We actually like your brain, sort of. You don't. Some of us, if we have the really traumatic past, we don't have memories from our past because our brain literally blacks out. This is totally normal for the past relationships we were in, our body and mind learned coping strategies to survive. And you can see they don't serve us as we move forward in healthy, interdependent relationships. And they were vital back then. So bleep, bleep, come back to me here. If you've sort of zoned off, come back to me. None of these behaviors mean you're broken. They mean you adapted to survive. They are evidence of your resilience, your awesomeness, your warriorness. And if we keep doing them, they will hold us back, keep us playing small in our relationships. It will keep us from these deep relationships with these deep connections with the people who matter now. Okay? Like our kids, our current partners, our current healthy friendships. And so the first step, my dears, is noticing. Like this week, okay, if you practice naming, what's happening, oh, this is me being hyper vigilant, or oh, I'm doubting myself right now because of these old patterns, or oh, wow, I'm really feeling the need to explain myself here. Or gee, I'm having a big reaction to this. This feels so uncomfortable in my body. So much bigger than what's happening. I think this is that sort of like I'm feeling hysterical and it's historical. The situation feels way bigger than it actually is. Pay attention to that. When you pay attention, you open the door to change. And we want that to be a kind, compassionate attention. Your invitation this week is to observe. Notice when you're scanning the room for danger. Notice when you're nervous, your chest sort of tightens up. Okay. Notice when you maybe hesitate to trust your feelings or you feel disconnected from your body. No judgment, just curiosity. And then for my birthday next week, warriors, come back in part two, we'll talk about what to do with this awareness, how to begin calming your nervous system, trusting yourself again, and reconnecting with your emotions in safe, healthy ways. So exciting. And speaking of birthdays, can you do me a favor? Just head to www.patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com susipett and for the price of a coffee, you can support my mission to help women heal and live lives they love while also keeping this podcast that I do for free. Keeping it ad free. It would mean a lot to me and back to you. You mean a lot to me. I shared some heavy stuff in this week's episode because I know the life changing magic this is. I know that if you pay attention this week and to where you're doing these things, while it might feel uncomfortable, a bit vulnerable, like, oh, okay, there it is. It is the path, my dear one, to greater self acceptance, self worth and connection to the people that are now healthy for us. And I want that for you. I love you, I support you and I am here this week cheering you on. Let's go, warrior.
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Thank you for listening to the love your life show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on itunes. Also leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Go get them, warriors.