Narcissistic Abuse Survivor - Lisa A. Romano & Guest

In this episode, Lisa A. Romano interviews Rachel, a narcissistic abuse survivor who has learned to redefine her self worth, honor her authentic self and let go of unhealthy attachment to fairy tale type thinking about relationships.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

Thank you everybody for tuning in to Breakdowns to Breakthrough.

As you know,

I'm Lisa A.

Romano,

And today is a very special guest.

Her name is Rachel,

And she's a graduate of the 12 We Breakthrough Cooking program.

And Rachel has shared with us throughout the program some of her experiences dating narcissists.

And I thought it was a great idea to have this fabulous young woman who has worked so hard to recover from everything that she's been through to experience great breakthroughs,

Because it's an inspiration.

When we know that someone who is like us has experienced things that we've gone through,

And we know that they are or they have found ways to keep on keeping on,

I think it inspires us to believe that it's possible for us to recover.

I think it helps us recognize that there is hope.

And it's just like learning how to fix a car.

Once you know how to fix the car,

You feel confident.

But if you have a car that keeps breaking down and you don't have the tools,

Well,

That's when you feel hopeless.

So when we hear stories from other people who have been where we are,

And they're learning how to gain the tools they need to improve their lives,

It helps inspire all of us to keep going.

So I just want to welcome Rachel.

Thank you for being here,

Rachel.

Absolutely.

I'm so excited to be here and get to talk to you.

Thank you so much for asking me.

Yeah,

I think it's important.

Like we were saying before we actually started recording that when other people are in the throes of a toxic relationship,

We won't even call it abusive.

We'll just say a toxic relationship.

Sometimes they don't know that it's actually toxic.

We're just surviving day to day in the minutia of the chaos.

Absolutely.

Can you speak to that?

Have you ever been in that type of a situation?

Absolutely.

And I think that's one of the reasons why I was so honored to be asked to share my story because that was exactly my experience,

Probably in the toxic relationship that I had about three years ago and endured.

I had never heard of narcissism before.

I had never heard of narcissistic traits.

And so what I was going through was probably one of the most painful,

Existentially painful experiences of my life.

And I had no idea that there was actually a specific pattern to my partner's behavior.

I had no idea that there was actually an answer to why I was going through what I was going through and why I was feeling the way I was feeling that actually there was an answer for all of it.

I just assumed that I must be a horrible failure of a girlfriend or romantic partner.

And it was just a world of pain.

It was a world of hurt.

And had somebody else that I really loved and cared about not said to me,

You know,

I hate to bandy around fancy psychological terms,

But I'm telling you,

I think that you've been dating somebody that's somewhere on the narcissistic spectrum.

I think you should start reading about it or trying to learn something about it to try to save yourself.

I would have had no idea.

It could have cost me a much longer time in extreme,

Extreme emotional pain.

I just didn't know.

I had no idea what I was going through because I didn't have the information in front of me.

Yeah,

I think that is so important because it's the art.

We tend to be fixated on what's happening outside of us and or fixated on the turmoil inside of us and in that space,

We're not recognizing that there's a lack of awareness and there's a lack of information.

Right.

So when I don't know that I'm in the throes of a codependent or narcissistic relationship,

Then I have no ability to escape the maze because this becomes my norm.

Or like what you said,

You just assumed it must be me,

Like all of this chaos must be my fault.

Yes.

And it's fascinating because,

You know,

Three years,

You know,

Flash three years forward,

The woman that I am now and the kind of work that I've done and the kind of awareness I have,

I can look back,

I can see the pattern from the courtship to the dumping and the discarding,

All the manipulations.

I understand it all.

Had I been the woman that I am now,

I don't think that we would have lasted past the third date,

But I didn't know what I didn't know.

And the other thing,

Too,

And,

You know,

I've talked about this in,

You know,

In the Facebook groups that I'm still connected to after doing,

You know,

The Breakthrough Program and with friends of mine that have gone through something similar,

That when you are when you are in in relationship or tied to a very toxic partner who,

Even if they're not an actual,

You know,

Psychological study clinical case of narcissism,

But display high narcissistic traits,

You are in a place where you are probably what I call bleeding out from high emotional reactivity.

I mean,

You are I can only I can only speak to my experience.

As soon as things started going south,

As soon as I was off the pedestal and the love bombing,

As we call it,

It happened.

And I was a normal human being and a normal woman that had her own expectations and needs in a relationship as soon as the first sort of mentally abusive or toxic dance happened.

I was then in a permanent state for basically the rest of the relationship in fight or flight.

I remember it.

I'll never forget it because it was not only emotionally intense,

But it was physically tense.

So I spent at least the latter half of the relationship in a constant sense of anxiety.

My nerve endings were shot.

I wasn't sleeping.

I wasn't eating.

I mean,

You're basically just surviving from minute to minute.

And it if you are a codependent like I was,

Because that's,

You know,

That's the easiest prey,

Right,

For somebody toxic to hook into.

My only conscious thought was,

How do I keep this person from breaking up with me?

Yep.

So you immediately go into this place of a fear of abandonment,

Wanting to hold on to this person that's basically trashing your nervous system,

Trashing your emotional system,

You know,

On some level being abusive.

And because you can't see the forest for the trees,

First of all,

On some level,

You don't think that you're worthy of being treated any better,

Right?

That's why you stay.

But in the on top of that,

There's just a sense of,

I remember just a sense of just trying to take it minute by minute or hour or hour or day by day.

And my modus operandi became,

I'm,

You know,

I believe everything this person is telling me,

I basically drank the Kool-Aid,

Right,

Of all their character assassinations and the way they would talk to me and,

You know,

How they would try to control my behavior,

What have you.

And my only motive was I need to keep this person from breaking up with me.

That was it.

So your your world becomes tiny.

Like it just becomes really small,

Which is so sad.

Well,

It goes back to at least I feel my opinion as it goes back to childhood when our world was small,

When it was us and the people that we loved and all we wanted was and what we needed and deserve was to try to figure out how to love and be loved.

So in essence,

How do I prevent from being more emotionally neglected?

Yes.

Or completely emotionally annihilated?

How do I keep from doing that?

So I think it's what you're saying is beautiful.

And you're right.

Our world gets very small.

I remember having the same feeling and then doing the emotional recovery work and recognizing,

Well,

My world was small when I was a little girl.

All I diggered about was mommy and daddy,

Siblings.

And that was it.

And absolutely.

So it's not surprising when you take a giant quantum step back and you look at patterns,

You're like,

Oh,

Wow.

So my adult relationships became really small,

Which mirrored my relationships with the people that I loved when I was little.

Absolutely.

I mean,

You know,

With doing what it's the word I'm looking for,

It's sort of doing the homework,

Right?

Doing the journaling and being able to stay calm enough or be aware enough to look at the past without getting emotionally flooded,

Which sometimes can be very difficult to do.

You start,

It's like you kind of have to mine the past for your gold,

Basically.

Right.

So the things as adults that we don't want to have to look at anymore actually can be the key that unlocks the door to our healing.

As somebody in my family once said to me,

You know,

In many of the conversations that I had while trying to heal over the,

You know,

Over the breakup and try to take better care of myself,

They said to me,

You know,

It's kind of like you went through all of the worst traits of one of your parents with none of the good ones.

And it was really interesting when they said that to me.

And I can look back now,

Like I said,

You know,

Fast forward three years,

And I can see that I have not only drawn to me,

But chosen romantic partners that allow me unconsciously to sort of do this toxic dance over and over and over again.

And there's a very specific dynamic that replicates what was broken in my relationship with my parents,

Especially my father,

Without understanding.

So that feeling that we get when we believe that the stars have aligned and this person must have been our soulmate in,

You know,

Past lives.

It's unfortunately more likely that whatever your unconscious baggage is,

Is hooking onto that person's unconscious baggage,

That the recognition is not familiarity because in healthy dating and healthy relationships,

I've only learned in my mid forties,

Actually,

You understand that you can have a hope of having a good sense of somebody,

But that it actually takes a really,

Really long time to get to know someone.

It takes a long time to see who somebody really is.

So that sense of intensity,

In intense heightened,

Like intimacy within the first date,

That just means that your baggage has recognized the other person's package,

You know,

And you're about to do lockstep into something that could end up causing a lot of pain,

You know,

At the end.

It's not your fault,

But it's gonna happen.

You know?

Yeah,

I've coached,

I can't tell you how many men and women who are looking for that.

They think the fantasy is the goal.

They think that the fairy tale is the goal.

And,

You know,

That's why I always said,

You know,

Walt Disney was a genius,

But he screwed a lot of us up.

You know,

Like,

We're thinking that Prince Charming is supposed to come and rescue us and on the side of the men that I've coached,

They have this hero thing going on.

They feel excited and alive when they are rescuing or caretaking a woman.

And so it's the women who are looking to be rescued in lots of the cases,

At least that's what I've come across,

And thinking that this man,

And though this relationship is,

In essence,

Going to rescue me from my own loneliness.

It might not be the man,

But it's the relationship.

And we're talking about heterosexual relationships right now.

This goes across homosexual relationships for sure as well.

But men that I've coached who are codependent,

It is their need to be needed.

Or this idea that if she's in trouble and I can fix it,

Then I'm good.

I am the prince.

I am rescuing her.

And so it's a hand and a glove.

So little boys were watching Disney movies too.

Yes,

Absolutely.

You know,

So I think,

I think what you're saying is amazing.

I'm glad.

I mean,

It took a,

As you know,

I mean,

It's taken me a lot of conscious work,

You know,

Over the past couple of years to get here.

But I think,

You know,

What's fascinating to me now is that when I look back at the kind of relationships that I would immediately hook into,

Especially with,

You know,

This person that was really like my,

I guess you could say,

That was my rock bottom.

And I,

The fallout of that relationship was so painful that I said to myself,

I have to do something to change,

Because I don't know if I'm going to emotionally survive ever going through something like that again.

So all I have control over is myself and my own behavior.

But looking back now,

The kinds of,

The kinds of behaviors and patterns,

Especially early on in like the courtship phase,

Which with toxic relationships tends to be like we've talked about,

Like the Walt Disney fantasy,

Right?

It's every love song,

Right?

It's every,

I'm a classical musician.

It's every Italian love aria that you've ever heard that was written since 1850,

Right?

This is a story that gets repeated over and over and over again.

And we're sort of conditioned socially to believe that that's what we're supposed to look for.

And not only that,

But if we can't find it,

That there's something wrong with us,

Right?

Which is also,

Which is also part of what's unhealthy.

But I think of the traits now that I saw as valiant or sexy or attractive,

And they're all red flags now.

Every single one of them.

So I can,

I will,

I will still get triggered,

But instead of getting excited about somebody or for instance,

Calling my sister up by the third date to say,

I think I met the man that I'm going to marry.

I mean,

How many of us have been there before instead there's like a little red flag and an alarm bell that goes off that says,

Nope,

Don't go there.

That's really,

Really dangerous.

That's not good for you.

Thank God.

I think what a lot of people,

For me,

This was the missing piece of the puzzle was the awareness piece or the consciousness piece.

That was the missing piece of the puzzle for me,

Recognizing that my level of consciousness,

The same level of consciousness that created the problem was still recreating the problem.

Einstein,

Right?

Einstein says you can't solve a problem with the same level of intelligence that created the problem.

Absolutely.

I was stuck in this like weird ectoplasm,

Ectoplasm,

You know,

Purgatory,

Like what am I doing?

And it was the awareness that,

Well,

You're the common denominator.

Absolutely.

That's the secret.

Yeah.

These men don't know one another.

They're all different types of narcissists,

Malignant,

Psychopathic,

Cerebral,

Somatic,

All different types,

You know,

Minor garden variety,

And then really bad.

But yeah,

You're the one.

You're the,

You're the constant.

And that freaked me out.

Yeah.

And that's when I was,

I'm doing something wrong.

Yes.

And I think that it takes a certain kind of,

This is also one of the things that I've learned.

It takes a certain kind of humility and it takes a certain kind of bravery because you have to get to a point,

I think,

Where it's more important to you to heal and to change from the inside than it is to try to lock down.

Reviews

Amazing. Thank you so much

Thank you Lisa. I have learned so much about myself and others through your “talks”. Thank you for helping me power through with self love and understanding . Lots of love to you. 💚

Wow, covered so much in this talk. It was all too relatable for me. I liked the wrap up: the answer always comes back to love. Thank you!!

This was fantastic. Thank you!

Well this had made so much sense... priceless information. Thank you!

Very insightful!

This is my first time listening to her and this is fantastic. I identified with a lot that was discussed here and feel comforted that I am not alone. I will be checking out more of her content. Highly recommend!

Wonderful conversation. Thank you for sharing.

Amazing xx thank you for sharing that