The Stages of Narcissism Recovery

You’ve probably heard of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief, but have you thought about how her stages of grief apply to narcissism recovery?

Kubler-Ross was a psychiatrist whose work revolutionized the way health care professionals addressed death and dying, and her research was applied to many other populations and situations.

Kubler-Ross observed that when people learn they have a terminal illness, they tend to experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief, there is no particular starting point at which everyone will begin their grief journey, and there is no particular order in which people will travel. Stages of grief theory also holds that people may go back to a stage of grief and revisit it, perhaps multiple times, before moving through it to acceptance.

I’ve noticed that in narcissism recovery, people tend to go through similar stages of grief in order to reach acceptance. As with Kubler-Ross' stages of grief theory, people don’t begin at a particular point and travel through the stages in a linear fashion. And they may revisit a stage, perhaps multiple times, before working through that particular stage.

However, although Kubler-Ross' stages are a good starting point, the stages of change look different in narcissism recovery. I also see that because of the nature of narcissistic abuse, many people don’t know how to grieve, or don't think they need to grieve. They lack the skills to feel sadness and move through it. They feel as though grieving puts them at risk for being abused again, or that the relationship was so abusive there’s nothing to grieve.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In reflecting on a relationship with a person with narcissistic traits, hurtful things happened to you. People with narcissistic traits are self-centered and lack empathy, so they do what they want, when they want, because it’s what they want to do. Your thoughts and feelings were ignored or ridiculed. That’s hurtful. We process being ignored in the same part of the brain in which we process physical abuse. Being ignored deserves to be acknowledged, so you can make sense of it and heal.

There’s also a need to grieve what didn’t happen. In a relationship with a parent with narcissistic traits, that means grieving the things you didn’t experience together. Perhaps your parent didn’t go to your athletic events, but attended all of your sibling’s. Maybe they cancelled your sleepovers last-minute, and you never experienced your parent hosting a sleepover with you and your friends, then talking with your parent about how much fun you had the next day. Or you might have grown up learning how to take care of yourself, physically and emotionally, perhaps while raising your siblings. In any case, you didn't have a parent who saw you through loving eyes. You didn't have a parent who supported you and relished being your parent, in both challenging moments and in times of celebration.

If you were (or are) in a friendship or partnership with someone with narcissistic traits, the same basic truth applies. You entered into the relationship with hopes and dreams. Maybe you saw yourself enjoying holidays and celebrations together, growing old together, or looked forward to supporting one another. Unfortunately, your hopes and dreams were dashed, because the person with narcissistic traits has the emotional capacity of a four-year-old, not an adult. You've been responsible for meeting their wants and needs, and you've had to take care of your own thoughts and feelings alone.

Whatever the type of the relationship or the specifics of what happened, you didn’t have a relationship with someone who saw you, heard you, and cared about meeting your needs. It can be hard to pin down the losses, because you didn’t experience them. Nonetheless, the losses are very real, and need to be acknowledged and healed. In a relationship with any person with narcissistic traits, but particularly with a parent, sibling, or partner, there’s a need to grieve the loss of the relationship both as it could have been, and as you imagined it.

So far, I've spoken about grieving, but the other stages are important in narcissism recovery, too. Let’s take a look at the stages of change as they relate to narcissism recovery:

• Denial

Many people begin their journey toward narcissism recovery when they are jolted out of denial. In the denial stage, you either don’t see a problem with the behavior of the person with narcissistic traits, or you downplay the harm their behavior causes you.

People often judge themselves for having been in denial, especially with regard to choosing a friend or partner with narcissistic traits. But people who don’t see that narcissistic traits are harmful are usually people who grew up with parents (or other important family members) with narcissistic traits.

This makes sense, because children have very few skills to manage traumatic situations. One way children manage trauma is to minimize it. Denial makes it possible to survive a relationship with a parent with narcissistic traits. This kind of childhood experience also makes it easy to get into a relationship with someone with narcissistic traits as an adult. In addition, people often stay in denial because of societal, religious, or cultural beliefs and expectations about family and relationships.

• Bargaining

In narcissism recovery, you're in the bargaining stage when you focus on what you’re doing wrong in your relationship with a person with narcissistic traits, and you try to change your behavior to appease them. Bargaining can happen because the people who raised you directly blamed you for their behavior, or for things that happened to you. Bargaining can also happen because another way children deal with trauma is to blame themselves. This gives children a feeling of control that they would not otherwise have.

Not surprisingly, denial and bargaining often go hand-in-hand. If you had a parent with narcissistic traits, you probably used both denial and bargaining to survive your childhood. That means it's likely you'll feel comfortable using these skills in your adult relationships until you've healed your childhood hurts, and made sense of the things that happened in your childhood.

• Anger

If you’ve been on social media and researched narcissism recovery, chances are good you’ve run across at least one angry individual in narcissism recovery. It’s understandable why anger is one of the stages of grief. The behaviors in which people with narcissistic tendencies engage can be infuriating. And as we’ll explore in a moment, the anger stage is necessary and important.

That said, getting stuck in the anger stage is not the outlook of a thriving individual. Chronic anger raises your blood pressure, harms your heart, and affects your sleep, digestion, and immune system. As with the other stages of grief (aside from acceptance), anger isn’t a healthy stage to stay in indefinitely.

That’s not to say that anger is bad. Anger, like every other emotion, is information about yourself and your relationship to the world around you. Anger is a separating emotion. It’s the only emotion that creates space between people. Without the anger stage, it’s hard to create enough space to find healing.

That said, healthy anger is balanced and calm. Healthy anger helps you set boundaries and enforce them. It gives you the energy you need to keep yourself safe. I encourage clients to see anger toward the person with narcissistic traits as a stage of grief, not a destination.

• Grief

If you grew up in a family that didn’t model healthy emotion regulation skills, this may be the most difficult stage to move through. Grief is an uncomfortable emotion on its own. On top of that, you may find it challenging to allow yourself to feel sad. Sometimes people believe they’re not lovable unless they’re accomplishing something, so the process of sitting still and feeling sadness is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. If you weren’t supported in feeling your emotions in childhood, you may fear that if you allow yourself to cry, you’ll never stop.

For some people, the realization of how abusive their relationship with a person with narcissistic traits was can leave them wondering what they have to grieve. If you were in a long-term relationship with a person with narcissistic traits, you may not know how things were supposed to be. Learning to love yourself and treat yourself with the caring and respect you deserve makes it easier to see where the gaps in your past relationships were, so you can grieve the losses and move on to acceptance.

• Acceptance

The last stage of grief is acceptance. In narcissism recovery, this looks like making sense of one’s childhood experiences. That usually entails understanding how narcissistic traits develop, understanding the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, healing childhood hurts, and replacing old self-talk with skills that allow you to be a caring parent to yourself, and assertive in your relationships with others.

When people reach the acceptance stage, it's normal to sometimes experience emotions from other stages. If you have a parent with narcissistic traits, or if you share children with a person with narcissistic traits, it's hard to imagine that you wouldn't feel sad from time to time that you aren't sharing happy memories and exciting new life events with them. But in acceptance, you experience the sadness, and the sadness is brief and balanced.

Have you moved through the stages into acceptance? Give yourself the credit you deserve! If you’re feeling stuck in one of the stages of narcissism recovery, or feel reluctant to work through one of the stages on your own, you may benefit from working with a therapist who specializes in narcissism recovery. Regardless of stage you're in, you deserve a lifetime of health and happiness!

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