Recovering after a relationship with a narcissistic person: why you doubt yourself and how trust returns

“It’s been six months since we split up and every evening I still run the same scenes through my head. Not because I want him back. I just want to know whether it really happened the way I remember it, or whether I made half of it up.”

After a certain kind of relationship, a sentence like that is almost the rule. After most break-ups you miss the other person, or you are angry, or sad. Here a third thing turns up alongside: you no longer trust your own memory. You read old messages to check whether he really was that cold. You describe events to friends and keep adding “but maybe I really was oversensitive”. And when you finally manage to get angry, an hour later you remember a lovely weekend by the sea and the anger collapses into guilt.

In this post I write about what remains after a relationship in which you were, for a long time, alternately put on a pedestal and devalued, why self-doubt is its most stubborn consequence, and how trust in your own perception slowly returns. What such a relationship looks like from the inside, while it is still going on, is the subject of Living with a narcissistic partner: the patterns that wear you down; here I am interested in the time afterwards.

First, about the word in the title

The phrase “narcissistic person” is in the title because that is what people type into a search engine when they are looking for an explanation of what they went through. I use it as shorthand for a cluster of behaviours in a relationship: a strong need for admiration, difficulty seeing the other as a separate person with needs of their own, oversensitivity to criticism, and a habit of the blame moving over to you again and again. I do not use it as a diagnosis.

Narcissistic personality disorder is a diagnosis made by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist after a thorough assessment, and made of the person sitting in front of them. Nobody can give it to someone on the basis of a former partner’s account, and neither can I. It is also rarer than social media would suggest. In a large American study that interviewed more than 34,000 adults, 6.2% met the criteria for it at some point in their lives (Stinson et al., 2008), while other studies in the general population have found considerably lower figures, some close to zero. Most of the people we call “narcissists” in conversation, then, do not have the diagnosis. More on why we reach for the word so quickly is in “Narcissist”: a word we use too quickly.

For your recovery, though, the other person’s diagnosis is not really the point. The point is what went on between the two of you and what it did to you. We can talk about that without putting a label on anyone.

What is different about this kind of relationship

The relationships I am writing about have a recognisable rhythm. At the beginning there is a great deal of attention, things move fast, and you have the sense that someone finally sees you. The professional term for this is idealisation. Then something turns. Remarks appear, comparisons with other people, silences that last for days, and the explanation that all of it is your fault. When you are completely flattened, the warmth comes back: an apology, tenderness, a plan for a trip together. And just as you relax, the cycle starts again.

Australian researchers who interviewed the partners and relatives of people with pronounced narcissistic traits wrote that those close to them describe both sides: superiority and a demand for special treatment on the one hand, and great vulnerability, hurt and withdrawal on the other (Day et al., 2020). This matters because it explains why leaving is so hard. You were not living with someone who was cold all the time. You were living with someone who was at times also wounded, frightened and gentle, and it was that side that held you.

Self-doubt: how it forms and why it stays

If someone tells you once that you misunderstood something, you disagree and move on. If they tell you for two years, calmly and with conviction, about things you saw with your own eyes, something else happens. You start checking yourself before you speak. You write conversations down so as to have proof. In the end you apologise for things you did not do, because it is less exhausting than another argument about who said what.

The term that has taken hold for the systematic undermining of trust in your own perception is gaslighting. The sociologist Paige Sweet (2019) showed that it does not work only because of the skill of the person doing it. It works because it leans on an imbalance of power and on stereotypes that are already to hand: “too emotional”, “hysterical”, “unstable”, “jealous for no reason”. When you hear this for long enough from someone you trust, you take the description in.

That is why the doubt does not disappear with the break-up. The voice that corrected you was outside at first, then it moved inside, and now it speaks in your own voice. I wrote about how that happens in Your inner voices were once outer ones. After a relationship like this it is typical to doubt things that have nothing to do with the former partner: whether you did your work well, whether you really promised a friend something, whether you are allowed to be tired.

The trauma bond: why you miss someone who hurt you

The second thing that most confuses people after such a relationship is the longing. You know it was bad for you. You know you do not want to go back. And still, when his name appears on the screen, your body does something that nobody else makes it do.

The Canadian psychologists Donald Dutton and Susan Painter described this as traumatic bonding. In their account it arises when two conditions are present: an imbalance of power, and bad treatment alternating with good. In a study that followed women after they had left abusive relationships, they found that precisely these two factors predicted how strong the attachment to the former partner still was months later (Dutton & Painter, 1993). The attachment, then, was not weaker where things had been worse. It was stronger where things had been more unpredictable.

We know the mechanism from learning in general: a reward that comes irregularly strengthens a behaviour more than a reward that comes every time. Add to that what Helen Fisher’s research group saw in people whose partner had recently left them. When they looked at a photograph of that person, the brain areas that responded were those associated with reward and craving, the same ones known from addiction research (Fisher et al., 2010). Missing someone is therefore not proof that the relationship was good. It is proof that your nervous system spent a long time waiting for relief from one particular person.

Once you understand this, you stop asking what is wrong with you for still thinking about him. Why people return after relationships like these, sometimes several times, is described in more detail in Why victims go back to an abusive partner — and what holds them.

Why this break-up is different from others

In an ordinary break-up you grieve for a person and for a shared life. Here you also grieve for someone who may never have existed in that form: the person from the first few months. It is hard to mourn something when you are not sure it was real. At the same time you almost never get what people call closure. The conversation in which the other person says “it’s true, I did that to you and I’m sorry” mostly never comes. If you wait for it, you are waiting for reality to be confirmed by the person who used to take it away from you.

The third difference is loneliness. A relationship like this often ends with a smaller circle of people than you had at the start: some friends you dropped because they were “a bad influence”, others you stopped confiding in because you were ashamed. Now it is hard to explain to them what was going on, because individual incidents, said out loud, sound trivial. “He sulked because I went for coffee with my sister” says nothing about what it is like to live with that for three years.

The following exchange is a composite, not a real person; but it shows how doubt sounds when you say it aloud to someone who believes you.

“I read our messages again yesterday. For two hours.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Proof. That he really did say I’d made up the injury to get attention.”
“And did you find it?”
“I did. In black and white. And ten minutes later I was already thinking that maybe I’d provoked him.”
“What would you say to a friend if she showed you a message like that?”
“That nobody deserves it. I’d believe her straight away.”

The gap between what you believe for others and what you believe for yourself is a good measure of where you are in recovery. At the beginning it is wide. It narrows slowly, and not because you have argued yourself into it, but because around people who do not correct you, you once again have the experience that your perception holds.

How recovery unfolds

In her book Trauma and Recovery (1992), the American psychiatrist Judith Herman described three stages of recovery after prolonged, damaging relationships: first safety, then remembrance and mourning, and finally reconnection with people and with ordinary life. The description is more than thirty years old and professionals still use it, because it says clearly in what order things are possible at all.

Safety means very practical things. That you sleep. That you eat. That you know where you will live and how you will pay the bills. That there is only as much contact with your former partner as there truly has to be, and that it goes through the channel that unsettles you least; when you have children together, that is often brief, written communication about them alone. Until this is in place, thinking about “why did I stay so long” does not bring insight, only another sleepless night.

Only then does the story have its turn. At this stage people often feel anger for the first time and are frightened by it, because in the relationship they were taught that their anger was proof that they were the problem. After anger, sadness usually follows. The third stage is the return among people, with new boundaries and a careful testing of whether you can trust someone again.

What helps in the first months

As little contact as possible. Every message, every look at his profile, every “chance” meeting is, for the nervous system, a new crumb from step four of the cycle. Where a complete break is not possible, it helps if contact is predictable, short and about concrete matters.

Written facts instead of night-time checking. Reading old messages at one in the morning is a search for certainty that quickly turns into rumination, the same thoughts going round with no new conclusion. It works better to write the events down once, in the daytime, and to return to that record when doubt takes hold. The exercise below describes how.

People who knew you before. A sister, a friend from your student years, a colleague who watched you change. You do not need them to tell you what he was like. You need them to remind you what you were like before you began every sentence with an apology.

The body before the explanation. After a long period of walking on eggshells, the body is used to being on alert. Regular meals, movement and sleep are not a substitute for working things through, but they are a condition for it. If sleeplessness, anxiety or low mood last for weeks and take away your ability to work, talk to your GP.

A gentle attitude towards yourself. The question “how could I have been so stupid” is devaluation continued by other means. Self-compassion does not mean forgiving yourself everything. It means treating yourself as you would a friend this had happened to.

Exercise: the fact sheet

This exercise is meant for the moments when something in you says “maybe it wasn’t that bad” or “maybe it was my fault”. You do it once, in daylight, and then you use it.

1. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns. Head the left one “What happened” and the right one “How I explained it to myself”.
2. In the left column, write down five concrete events. Only what a camera would have recorded: who said or did what, when and where. No adjectives and no explanations.
3. In the right column, next to each event, write the explanation you accepted at the time. For example: “I’m oversensitive”, “I provoked him”, “every relationship is like this”.
4. Read the left column as if it had been written by someone you love. Underneath, add one sentence you would say to that person.
5. Keep the sheet somewhere within reach. When doubt takes hold, or the urge to write to your former partner, read the left column and that sentence first. Do not open the old messages.

If the writing overwhelms you, so that you shake, go numb or cannot stop crying, break off and keep the exercise for a time when you have professional support beside you. That is not a sign you did it wrong, but that there is more material than it is safe to carry alone.

When there was also abuse in the relationship

The patterns I describe often overlap with psychological abuse, and sometimes with economic, sexual or physical abuse as well. If you fear for your safety after the break-up, if your former partner follows you, threatens you or monitors you, that is first a question of safety and only then of psychotherapy. In Slovenia, the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence, 080 11 55, is a place to talk through what is happening and what your options are. In immediate danger, call the police in Slovenia on 113 or emergency services on 112. If thoughts come that you cannot go on, the Samarijan confidential helpline in Slovenia, 116 123, is available twenty-four hours a day.

How the first year after leaving such a relationship goes, with all the practical steps, is covered in Recovering from an abusive relationship: the first year, and the consequences that stay in the body in Trauma after abuse: what remains and how it heals. I will not repeat that here. I will only add that I am not a specialist in trauma or abuse, and that with more severe consequences the right route is to a professional who is specifically trained for that work.

Where this explanation does not apply

Explaining things as a “narcissistic relationship” can be freeing, because it gives a name to something that was previously only fog. But it has limits, and it is only fair that I say what they are.

First, not every painful relationship is of this kind. A partner who was selfish, immature, avoided conversations or was unfaithful may have done you a great deal of harm without the cycle described here being involved. If we call every disappointment by the same word, the word loses its meaning for exactly the people who need it most.

Second, the label can hold you back. The hours you spend with content about how a narcissist thinks are still hours in which he is at the centre. At the beginning that helps, because it confirms you were not imagining things. After a few months, a more useful question is what was happening in you: what drew you in so strongly at the start, which warning sign you saw and explained away, and who in your early history had already made familiar the feeling that love has to be earned.

That question is not a search for blame. The person who treated you that way is responsible for how he treated you. But it is the only part of the story you have any influence over, and the part that protects you from here on. Sometimes, in doing this work, a person also notices behaviour of their own that they are not proud of: shouting, vindictiveness, checking a phone. That too belongs in an honest review, and it does not erase what happened to you.

And third: if the consequences are severe, intrusive memories, nightmares, numbness, panic attacks, thoughts of suicide, an explanation from a blog is not enough. Then the first step is your GP or a psychiatrist.

Where psychotherapy comes in

Self-doubt was formed in a relationship, and it is also most easily repaired in one. In relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, we would not be interested in what diagnosis your former partner has. We would be interested in how the atmosphere of that relationship settled inside you, where in your body you feel it, and where you may already know it from. It often turns out that the feeling “I have to try harder and then it will be good again” was familiar long before this relationship. When you want to look at exactly these family patterns, there is a longer session with a genogram for that, A Look into the Past.

I am a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision, and sessions take place in person in Ljubljana; I also work with English-speaking clients. I do not diagnose and I do not prescribe medication; when either is needed, I will refer you to a doctor or psychiatrist.

What to remember

• In everyday speech, “narcissistic person” describes patterns of behaviour, not a diagnosis. A diagnosis is made by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, and it is not what decides your recovery.
• Self-doubt is the result of having your perception corrected over a long time, not proof that you were wrong. It stays after the break-up because the critical voice has become an inner one.
• Longing for a former partner does not mean the relationship was good. A trauma bond forms precisely where warmth and devaluation alternate unpredictably.
• Recovery goes in order: first safety and the body, then the story and mourning, then the return among people. Going back to the first step is not a setback.
• Where there was abuse or you fear for your safety, in Slovenia call 080 11 55, and in an emergency 113 or 112.