Number 2: Obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
I’m not saying disorder; I’m saying tendencies. For example, over-cleaning. You obsessively start cleaning. You’re constantly going through the same things again and again. You’re trying to tidy up your house when you know it’s already properly cleaned. You did it earlier three times, and now you’re doing it a fourth time. You’re scrubbing the dishes. Why do you do this? One, it feels relieving. You feel like you’re getting control back in your life. Two, it gives you a sense of closure; you’re doing something that has nothing to do with that narcissist. Another example I can give you is obsessively talking about the same thing with everybody you meet. This is called trauma dumping. You dump a lot of trauma, not because you’re a bad person, but because you feel like you need to tell everybody so that you get confirmation for the fact that it was your actual experience. You didn’t make it up.
Why do you want that kind of confirmation? Well, that narcissist gaslit you into thinking you were making it all up, that you were causing these issues on purpose, that you were stirring trouble, that you were the actual perpetrator. So you go around obsessively talking about the same thing to find closure that you won’t get, because talking is not what leads to closure. It’s also called trauma reenactment. You reenact the same trauma in different situations, with an unconscious expectation that this time it’s going to complete the trauma response. But that never happens, and you get re-traumatized. What should you do? You should process it in therapy using body-based therapeutic modalities such as somatic experiencing, brain spotting, trauma-releasing exercises, trauma-informed yoga, and so on.
Number 3: Dissociative disorders.
A lot of people struggle with them. I’m talking about the feeling when you can’t feel your body, when you feel like you’re looking at your body from way above, when you can’t recognize the person that you are seeing in the mirror, or when you feel like your reality is a fiction—like a movie that is playing; it’s not real. That is extreme levels of dissociation. Dissociation also happens when you’re not able to connect with your emotions. You try to feel what you are experiencing in your body, but you don’t have any feedback; you can’t get any because it’s overwhelming to go down there and to know what lies beyond your neck.
What leads to the development of dissociative disorders in this case? Well, extreme abuse and overwhelming emotions. First, you try to adapt to your situation by trying to fawn, by trying to please a narcissist, by doing more. But the abuse did not stop, so your system had to mitigate. It had to do something else. What did it do? It completely cut off your emotions. You can’t feel anything anymore; you start to float. What do you do? This is tricky because dissociative disorders are actually there to protect you from a lot of trauma, and the problem is that your system doesn’t want to come back into reality because reality is too painful. You can’t force yourself back. What you need to do is process that trauma in a gentle way, step by step, working with a therapist to help you come back into your body, feeling your emotions slowly and steadily.
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