What is narcissistic abuse and how does it prevent a healthy marriage?
Maybe, your relationship feels dishonest. You may not be able to put your finger on it, but something feels off. Perhaps, your partner has been cheating or lying. Maybe, your partner puts your down and puts themself above you. There could be alcoholism, drug use, or secret keeping around finances. You may be married to a person who has narcissistic personality disorder. It might feel like you can’t ever come to a resolution after a conflict. Working with the narcissistic abuse therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling can helps partners change in a positive way.
We understand complex trauma in a holistic, mind-body way.
From counseling, a victim of narcissistic abuse can learn to have a voice and that their voice matters. As well, a person with narcissistic personality disorder can learn self-awareness skills. From there, they can choose healthier communication skills that promote genuine honest.
What traits does a person with narcissistic personality disorder have?
A person with narcissistic personality disorder may have the following traits. Narcissists have a grandiose sense of self-importance and they like being liked by others. As well, narcissists tend to live in a fantasy world that leads others to praise and admire them. Furthermore, narcissists have a bold sense of entitlement. They feel they deserve the best and will exploits others. Narcissistic people disregard other people’s boundaries without guilt, regret, or shame. Due to low self-esteem issues, a narcissist will demean, intimidate, humiliate, criticize, bully, or belittle others. If a person shares fear with a narcissist, a narcissist will laugh in their face or make fun of them.
Marriage therapy in Southeastern Connecticut for couples stuck in cycles of narcissistic abuse
Being in relationship with a narcissist
You find yourself being very forgiving and sometimes, ignoring red flags. Narcissistic abuse therapists specializes with couples who get stuck in a cycle of trauma. Partners who are stuck in a trauma bond may feel in love and want to stay together. However, the cycle of communication is hurtful, painful, and confusing. As well, narcissistic abuse can occur in LGBTQIA+, same sex, and heterosexual relationships alike. People of any race or gender can have narcissistic personality disorder.
High conflict arguments, name calling, and criticism are common reasons why couples start with a narcissistic abuse therapist.
The narcissistic abuse therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling help couples learn to love one another in a healthy way.
In an argument, things get nasty. You’re at a point where there’s jealousy, betrayal, anger, hurt. These narcissistic arguments are just like a tornado. You feel scared, hurt, and sad about the fighting. Fights are escalating and getting very intense. You might feel like working with a narcissistic abuse therapist can help you finally feel heard. Narcissistic behaviors can be problematic to live with too.
Working with a couples therapist who specializes in recovery from narcissistic abuse, you can heal together.
Whether you want to heal alone or together, therapy can help. Couples therapy with a focus on narcissism helps couples change negative behaviors.
To begin, click the button below to book your phone consult to start counseling as a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
These changes help children communicate in healthier ways too. Narcissistic abuse therapists understand manipulation, fear tactics, and do not get sucked in.
In your marriage, does it feel like you’re not feeling heard or valued?
Plus, partners can stop door slamming, name calling, belittling, criticism from learning alternatives to narcissistic abuse. At Wisdom Within Counseling, you can have a safe place to work with a team of narcissistic abuse therapists. You may not even feel important to your partner anymore.
How can I tell if I need to meet with a narcissistic abuse therapist to have a better marriage?
For one, when you bring topics to your partner, they dismiss you. As well, your partner might be spending all their free time at work. When you bring up spending more time together, they make fun of you for being needy or clingy.
Your narcissistic spouse may be prioritizing their own extended family over you. If you partner is in a social setting, they may put you down or insult you publicly.
Why start in marriage counseling anyway?
You may be having a lot of feelings that you want to talk about in relationship counseling. Living with a narcissist is a good reason why couples come to therapy. Coming to couples therapy can help you build positive coping strategies after surviving narcissistic abuse. Marriage counseling with a narcissistic abuse therapist teaches healthier communication skills.
If your partner is narcissistic, and they want to change, there is hope. It is possible for people to create a desirable, loving, passionate marriage.
How does betrayal and anger play a role in the counseling narcissistic abuse therapists do ?
Fighting, distressed couples come to counseling because they are fueled with betrayal or anger. Often, narcissists show anger over all other emotions. Anger can create a sense of intimidation, but really a narcissist is feeling insecure.
You might walk on eggshells around your narcissistic spouse. As well, you always feel like you’ve done something wrong. Your narcissistic partner’s anger can leave you feeling frozen, sad, hurt, and confused.
To begin, click the button below to book your phone consult to start counseling as a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
Narcissists may justify cheating and emotional affairs
If your partner had an affair, it can be heartbreaking. One part of you may deeply love them still. But, the other part of you feels so hurt and betrayed. Your partner having an affair is painful and a form of betrayal. So, an affair and infidelity are great reasons to come in for relationship counseling. An affair is a sign here have been cracks in your marriage’s foundation.
Katie Ziskind and the team of therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling are narcissistic abuse therapists. If you or your partner need help breaking a dysfunctional cycle, our counselors are here for you.
How do affairs take place and how can narcissistic abuse therapy help?
Probably, for the past five to six years before an affair takes place, there are major things missing from a relationship. However, narcissistic people will not goto their partner, break up or get a divorce. An affair and infidelity are signs of much deeper issues. In childhood, a person may have watched their parent cheat.
Parents often teach their children how to cope, and keep secrets. Cheating, lying, and secrets became normal.
Secret keeping perpetuates dysfunction
Perhaps, in childhood, parents told their child to keep their parental affair a secret from their other parent. A child learns to keep secrets early on from having narcissistic parents themselves. As well, narcissistic people tend to feel high off keeping secrets.
Not being honest makes it difficult to keep a healthy marriage and friends. Lying, cheating, and sneaking around behind their partner’s back is part of narcissistic personality disorder.
Therefore, if you want to stay together, and your partner wants to change ways, marriage counseling after an affair can be healing.
Infidelity therapy at Wisdom Within Counseling help you understand what’s causing problems. The secret keeping behavior is not healthy or supportive for a good marriage. When a person who has had an affair understand why they were cheating or keeping secrets, healing can occur. Your narcissistic abuse therapist at Wisdom Within Counseling can understand why your partner have been lying.
As well, your marriage counselor can see what’s preventing honesty and how do we rebuild meaningful trust. Couples therapy essentially rebuilds your marriage from the ground up. The team at Wisdom Within Counseling can help you create an even better and closer marriage than you ever had before after an affair.
And, couples stuck in a narcissistic bond can heal through couples counseling.
However, it takes time and professional marital therapy with a narcissistic abuse specialist. AS well, it is amazing to see positive changes when two people are committed to healing from childhood trauma patterns. Furthermore, when couples stuck in a narcissistic trauma bond want to change, a healthy connection is totally possible.
At Wisdom Within Counseling, we help couples who are in distress and fighting break the generational cycle of narcissistic abuse.
If you are having the same fight over and over, or feeling unimportant, or your sex life has just kind of gone out the window, narcissistic abuse therapy can help. We offer you both compassion, acceptance, and emotional expression tools.
To begin, click the button below to book your phone consult to start counseling as a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
Often, couples never have a safe place to share emotions and be vulnerable together. Couples can identify patterns of dysfunction and gain perspective from narcissistic abuse. Therefore, once couples come to counseling, they can gain self-awareness skills to stop the pattern of narcissistic abuse.
Victims of narcissistic abuse tend to have low self-esteem and low self-worth.
A lot of couples got into arguments where they yell or where they emotionally shut down. using the silent treatment is called stonewalling. So, one partner is just not speaking anymore, or ignoring the other partner.
This is a cycle of negative communication that perpetuates anger and betrayal. And, the cycle of narcissistic abuse in your romantic relationship mirrors childhood trauma and abuse. Wisdom Within Counseling specializes in complex trauma and working with couples stuck in a narcissistic trauma bond.
What happens in a fight with a narcissist?
So, when there’s intense anger, your heart rates increases. The sympathetic nervous system kicks into overdrive. It feels like you are a raccoon in headlights and freeze.
Your partner may deny emotional abuse took place after the fight is over. In your marriage, you want hope and healing, but it feels like you need a therapist. Talking at home is no longer working.
You’re butting heads all the time.
A narcissistic abuse therapist at Wisdom Within Counseling can understand your fight cycle. For some couples, they fight with silence. Other couples fight with name calling. Essentially, couples counseling gives you skills and tools to connect emotionally in ways you never have before. To add, when you come in for couples counseling, we can give you a toolbox of healthy strategies.
You can have a narcissistic abuse therapist and trauma specialist to guide you both in healthy communication. Many times, couples who are stuck in a narcissistic abuse pattern grow up with severe childhood trauma. The team at Wisdom Within Counseling specializes in helping couples heal childhood trauma to have a healthier marriage.
To begin, click the button below to book your phone consult to start counseling as a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
Often, for couples who grew up in narcissistic abuse in childhood, this is the first time they are learning healthy communication.
Couples come in counseling due to struggles with narcissistic and abuse family members and in-laws. Maybe, your partner has a parent who is really emotionally abusive. Your spouse has experienced narcissistic abuse from their sibling or even mother.
Childhood trauma and emotionally immature parents can cause damage
Hitting and beating, hitting, burning, isolating, whipping, severe shaking, and spanking a child are forms for narcissistic physical abuse. A parent who does things things is not able to show empathy. In narcissism, lacking empathy is a key feature.
An emotionally immature parent lacks the ability to raise a child in a safe environment.
In child abuse and neglect situations, children grow up having to protect themselves from their parents.
As well, when narcissistic parents reject their child, that is emotional abuse. Emotionally immature parents may communicate to their child that they are not good enough. Children may internalize shame, guilt, and feel blamed for being born.
Furthermore, parents who are narcissistic may withhold affection and show disgust with their child. This may be a pattern occurring in your romantic relationship too.
To add, narcissistic parents use threats, curse and yell at their children.
Growing up with childhood neglect and abuse can be damaging and impacts romantic interactions.
In your marriage, you feel like there’s a boundary that needs to be set to get healthier. Changing a family patter of narcissistic abuse takes the help of a specialist.
At Wisdom Within Counseling, Katie Ziskind and the team of therapists specialize in complex trauma.
What can narcissistic abuse look like in families?
Your in-law are always asking for money or guilt tripping you.
Perhaps, a narcissistic and abusive parent is now living in your house again. As a child, you had to be the parent to them. They were always drunk, high, or with a new boyfriend or girlfriend. As a child, it felt like you never mattered.
To begin, click the button below to book your phone consult to start counseling as a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
Narcissists raise narcissists, and simply wanting to change is a great start.
For your spouse, they had a severely emotionally abusive parent and now they are the spitting image of their parent. It feels overwhelming to try to break the cycle of narcissistic abuse without counseling. Being with a narcissist is not easy.
Couples therapy teaches self-awareness skills and how to listen to your intuition.
Dealing with narcissistic people, especially in-laws and parents, challenge your marriage and your relationship together. Couples therapy can be that safe place to talk about it all.
If you and your partner want to break the pattern of childhood trauma, the team of therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling can help.
The team at Wisdom Within Counseling help you heal after narcissistic abuse and build playfulness. You can reconnect to joy. Couples get a safe place to slow down intense conversations in a calm and effective manner. Marital therapy to stop narcissistic abuse gives you a toolbox of skills that are positive.
With just a few skills, you can build a loving, long-lasting, positive relationship. Remember, we don’t learn how to have healthy relationships growing up or in school.
So, this is a safe, confidential place at Wisdom Within Counseling, you can overcome criticism and yelling. Couples stuck in a narcissistic trauma bond can start to have healthy communication. Overall, narcissistic abuse therapy sets a foundation, so you can teach these skills to your children one day too.
About Katie Ziskind and the team at Wisdom Within Counseling
Katie Ziskind is the owner of Wisdom Within Counseling in Niantic Connecticut and Florida. We help families, teens and couples needing support in Florida, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. We offer art, yoga, music, animals, and nature therapies to help couples heal. Painting and yoga can be a language beyond words that promote spiritual connection. Furthermore, musical instruments can bring couples together in playful, presenting ways.
If you’re in a couple unit where there’s fighting, stress, tension, disagreements, let our team of marital and trauma specialists help.
With a focus on stop narcissistic abuse, couples therapy supports building the marriage of your dreams through healthy communication.
Create a sense of joy together rather than criticism, fear and anger. Learn to have each other as your best friend rather than your enemy. Our team of marriage and family therapists would love to help you and your partner thrive after narcissistic abuse.
