Grown Up Survivors of Childhood Abuse and Their Narcissist Partners

When I was sixteen I ran away from my abusive childhood home. In my naivety I thought that this was the end of my problems and the start of my happiness.

Obviously, I had a lot to learn about the world.

It’s a sad truth that those of us who survive childhood abuse rarely get to just escape that pain and scamper off to live in a world of peace, love and Disney-style woodland characters singing us to sleep at night.

In reality, the survival skills we’ve learned in childhood, and the lack of self-worth we have developed make us prime targets for other abusers.

You see, our particular brand of survival skills are not healthy ones. We learn from a young age that to avoid angering our abuser, who also happens to be our primary care giver, that we need to be what they want us to be.

We develop ninja people pleasing skills, never once putting our own well-being above that of whoever we are currently in an unhealthy relationship with.

We learn to recognize instantly when we have failed to be who they wanted us to be, and their anger is quick to return.

That horrible sense of Deja Vu rises up inside you, from your gut to your brain, and your entire being recognizes abuse happening to you yet again.

Fawning as a survival skill

The terms ‘fawning’ means to diffuse conflict by pleasing the other person. It was first described by therapist and fellow survivor Pete Walker, in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.

We begin to learn this behavior as a response to feeling rejected as a child.

As Walker says: “If you felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated and/or despised for a lengthy portion of your childhood, trauma may be deeply engrained in your mind, soul and body.”

Fawning is a maladaptive behavior that typically involves anticipating the abuser’s needs in order to please them. This sort of living in the future, always thinking ahead, seems to bring a lot of anxiety with it, leaving the survivor unable to relax.

Certainly, in my past adult relationships I’ve had a feeling of constantly having to be ‘on’. I only ever relaxed when I was in an empty house, and even then I was anticipating my partner coming home and what his needs might be.

I would stress about having a meal ready for the moment he walked through the door, not considering that a reasonable person would be happy to wait, and would just be grateful to be offered food at all.

When we learn to stop behaving in this way, and more ‘normal’ behaviors become our norm too, life feels like it finally begins. Today I am able to live for myself, not for others, but it took a lot of work to get here.

Therapy was a starting point for me, but it also took the passing of time.

Learning to think differently and beginning to reparent ourselves with healthy affirmations doesn’t change us overnight. We are starting from a place of really well-ingrained habit, very strongly fused neural pathways, and changing that is no mean feat.

Narcissistic abuse is a common trap for us

Something I’ve fallen for time and time again is the love bombing of the narcissist — both in romantic relationships, and the work-based equivalent too.

Whether it was a boyfriend giving me the love I’d been so starved of in childhood, or a boss giving me the praise I’d always longed for, I was prime fodder for this kind of trap.

When an abuse survivor meets a narcissist, it’s like finding two complex puzzle pieces that fit together. You wouldn’t think they’d fit so well, but they tick each other's boxes in the most unhealthy of ways.

A narcissist typically has huge holes in their self-worth too, but their maladaptive expressions of this are opposite and complimentary to ours as survivors.

The narcissist blames external forces, like the people around them. Whereas the typical childhood abuse survivor blames themselves.

The narcissist needs a scapegoat, and you know who fits that bill? Yep, you guessed it.

Personally, after the love bombing and admiration dried up, and I was fully committed, I easily stepped into my fawning role each time.

But I knew I was on the path to healing when I’d started to see the pattern play out in real time in my last unhealthy relationship.

In a rare moment of clarity, I saw exactly what he was doing as he used very well-chosen words like “little” and “f**ked up” to describe my intellect.

Don’t worry, I got out of there pretty soon after.

Accepting less

This is what it all boils down to. As survivors, we have spent our lives feeling less than, so we accept less.

Many of us feel that we are lucky to be alive at all — and that translates to accepting all kinds of abuse.

Personally I’ve seen this play out in myself and with a couple of friends, mostly in a combination of survivor and narcissist. But I’m sure there is a whole range of unhealthy combinations out there.

But no matter the abuse sub-type and terminology, there is a common thread running through it all. And that thread is about what we accept as our norm.

Growing up for a second time

Perhaps we accept abuse as our norm unconsciously, because it’s familiar and feels kind of like home. Perhaps we consciously accept less, or maybe we don’t. Maybe some of us just think we are unlucky.

But what I do believe to be the same for all of us, is that once we are awake to the patterns we are trapped in, we then have a choice to make.

We can choose to work on ourselves, to change our patterns and to finally leave abuse behind us once and for all.

From my personal experience I can share that reparenting yourself with better beliefs is one way to do this. As I mentioned above, this began for me with a lot of therapy.

But of course therapy isn’t where it ends. I have needed to check in with myself every day, and I probably will do for the rest of my life.

When I feel a colleague is “off” with me, I need to pause and ask myself if history is repeating itself, or if I’m just having a heightened reaction to normal, every day human stuff.

Keep checking in with yourself

It is normal for us to question ourselves, and I think it’s wise to keep doing so for perspective.

If a friend says something that gives me that sense of Deja Vu again, then I will definitely give it more thought.

Often I’m overthinking, and when I figure that out then all is well again. But if I think carefully and with perspective, and if I still smell a rat, then I will distance myself from that person.

Protecting ourselves in the big wide world is complex. As survivors, we will doubt ourselves often, sometimes with good reason to, and other times just because it is an old pattern.

But I know that with therapy, time and real sustained effort we can break the chains of abuse and become free once and for all.

Don’t give up on yourself.