Everything I Need to Know, I Learned Healing from Narcissistic Abuse

I want to start with a bold claim: Everything I need to know, I learned healing from narcissistic abuse. 

Quite a statement. Huh?

Understanding the World We’re Living In

Whether you are aware of being in a narcissistically abusive relationship or not, if that’s been a part of your life, it doesn’t matter. 

What I will share will still be helpful for you to make sense of the world that we are now living in. And in dynamics that you might have going on in your life or around you, that don’t quite make sense.

So what is it that I needed to know, that I now know having healed from narcissistic abuse?

The First Thing I Needed to Know

The first thing is: there is so much going on in front of my face, in plain sight, that’s deeply destructive to me, that’s causing me difficulty, is affecting me in quite profound ways, right there in front of my face . . . and I am completely unaware of it.

And even worse, I’m participating in it.

The Second Thing I Needed to Know

And number two is: that simply waking up and knowing this, seeing this dynamic, removing myself from this dynamic while that’s really great … it doesn’t in the end protect me. It’s not enough.

I feel that these two points are critically important now, here in this life, as we’re finding our way through this time of immense crisis in the world. 

It’s only just begun.

Even as more people are waking up and seeing what’s going on in the world, realizing “there have been things going on, in my life personally and in my life that I share with others collectively, that I was not seeing.’

This is really good. But there’s so much more.

And simply seeing it does not protect you moving forward.

The Third Thing I Needed to Know

Now hear me out. I’ve got a third thing that I learned that will show you how you can take what it is that you’re seeing and go deeper so that you do not find yourself in these destructive dynamics. There is a way out.

But simply making yourself aware of them, does not keep you from being in them again.

A little bit later I’ll share number three, at that point it will make more sense. But let me say more about numbers one and two, so that you understand what I’m talking about.

So first I’m Daniel Piatek. I show you how to free your Infinite Spirit from its imprisonment within you. I teach The Way of the Practical Mystic, a system for following the divine guidance that is there for you to see all day long, and for freeing yourself from the chains that bind you.

It’s All Right There Plain as Day

Let’s take a look at #1: There is so much going on right now in front of my face, in plain sight, that is deeply destructive to me, and I am unaware of it.

Let me share with you some very specific things that I learned as I was healing my way out of the very, very, very painful experience that I had had, and maybe you have had, maybe you are having, healing my way out of the painful experience of a deeply abusive relationship.

So what did I suddenly start to see that I wasn’t seeing?

All the Things That I Learned

The first is that people lie. They flat out lie. And it’s not just ‘those kind of people’, whatever that might be for you. Sometimes it’s the people that you’re sharing a bed with.

What else? I’ve learned not to believe what anybody else tells me at face value. Especially when it doesn’t feel right to me. Just because I think I know somebody doesn’t trump my own sense that something isn’t right.

Third: Being made to feel bad about myself through somebody belittling me, yelling at me, giving me the silent treatment, name calling – those aren’t expressions of care, no matter what they say.

Four: I can’t assume that people are functioning from a place in themselves that means well. This dynamic helped me to realize that I just assumed that people were coming from a place where they meant well. 

Now people can do awful things and people can be short-sighted or caught up in their own stuff, but I always assumed that fundamentally people are well-meaning.

I now realize I can’t make that assumption, especially when there’s parts of my own experience that are wondering where somebody’s coming from.

Another thing I learned is that it’s important to pay attention when I’ve had a conversation with somebody and I’m left feeling less clear, things are less resolved, I’m more confused, and/or I’m doubting myself.

When there’s an attempt on my part to seek resolution or understanding or to get clear, and I am left over and over again less so, I need to wonder what’s going on on the other end.

I’ve learned that a huge warning sign is when people don’t take responsibility for things that they’ve said or they’ve done. This is one way I can really quite quickly find out where somebody’s coming from.

I no longer just let things slide when something’s said that doesn’t feel right, or when something is done that is either out of line or not in accordance with an agreement that we’ve made. I speak up. At that moment, how someone responds tells me a lot about who they are and where they’re coming from.

I’ve also learned that something’s off when the story keeps changing.

I’ve learned that something’s not right when I’m continually left doubting myself – wondering if it was me that misheard something or misremembered something, and that experience keeps happening over and over.

I learned that people who supposedly care about you can actually be intending you harm. And they won’t admit it, likely because they’re not conscious of it themselves.

But whether or not that person is aware of what they’re doing, people who supposedly care about you, through their actions can actually be intending harm. 

When others insist that I should be thinking something or feeling something or doing something, or telling me what I think, feel, or what I should do – it’s highly suspect. 

Even if it seems like it’s coming from a place of care or concern, this insistence on falling in line, giving in to that other’s point of view or opinion, I’ve learned is highly suspect.

And when I’m constantly worried about saying or doing the wrong thing, because I’m going to say or do something and then suddenly I’m gonna get punished . . . or thrown off a social media platform.

Probably the most difficult and disturbing thing I’ve realized is that people can do things that I can’t imagine that a human being would do. 

Things that express cruelty or simply lack care and concern. Their words and actions indicate that they’re not being able to see me – it’s like my existence, my wants, and desires don’t matter, over and over and over again. There are people in the world that lack empathy, that lack the ability to actually see, acknowledge, and feel another human being.

For those of you that have gone on a journey through narcissistic abuse, consciously, you are already painfully familiar with everything I’ve talked about.

And if you think about all that I just spoke about, they would also apply to what’s happening in the world at large right now.

Think about it for a second.

Why Didn’t I See All of That?

In my own journey, I started to wonder why wasn’t I seeing those things? Especially as I worked on the healing that was needed to free myself from them, these dynamics became plain as day. 

Why wasn’t I seeing them? 

And why had I spent 50 years in these dynamics with many people and many types of relationships in my life.

Why had I not seen these things?

Simply Seeing Isn’t Enough

Let’s take a look at number two: Simply waking up to these things and knowing this doesn’t, in and of itself, protect me.

Knowing that people can do these things, knowing that that was what was going on in that last relationship – these are really important. Being able to see this is really important.

If one can’t begin to see these things, then you are, in essence, stuck in them. They will keep recurring over and over again.

And in the times that we are living in staying stuck in these things might, in fact, cost you dearly.

But it doesn’t need to.

So simply waking up and knowing this doesn’t, in and of itself, protect me.

I can think, ‘Oh, it was just bad luck that I got in into relationship with that person. Maybe it’ll, you know, get better. It won’t happen again.’

Another way it can go is, ‘I can’t trust anybody. How am I ever gonna know? Oh my God. I was with that person for so many years, how am I ever gonna be able to trust anybody?’ 

That’s another place you can go.

Many People are Waking Up

One way that this is playing out in the world right now, one of the gifts of these last few years on the planet, have been that things which were always going on which weren’t being seen are suddenly being seen. Realizing that institutions, officials, organizations that are there to supposedly help us, support us, are not.

In fact, they may actually be working against us in certain ways.

At the very least they are highly inefficient, unorganized, and don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

But We Need to Go Further

So just seeing this, just knowing this, it’s good. It’s important. It’s a first step. 

Suddenly that which wasn’t being seen, but was always right there, which was having detrimental effects on us which weren’t being registered, suddenly they’re being seen.

This is important. Don’t get me wrong.

But if we don’t take it one step further, and it’s the all important step, then we will be living in a place where we are assigning too much power to that other person, to those people, to that organization, to that government, to the men behind the curtain.

Why?

Let’s go to number three.

It’s All in My (Your) Hands

The third thing follows on from the first two. 

So let me restate: the first thing that I learned through narcissistic abuse is that there is so much going on in front of my face, in plain sight, that’s deeply destructive to me, that’s causing me difficulty, is affecting me in quite profound ways, and I am completely unaware of it. 

And even worse, I’m participating in it.

Number two is that: simply waking up and knowing this, seeing the dynamic, removing myself from it while it’s really great, in fact it’s important, it’s critical, and it’s the first step. 

In the end, simply seeing and knowing doesn’t protect me. It’s not enough.

So then what is the third thing? The third thing swings back around to the fact that, without me knowing it, I was participating in that dynamic. 

I was the part that I could control that kept the dynamic alive.

The third and most important thing that I have learned is: this is all entirely up to me.

Whether or not people like this, organizations like this, institutions like this affect me … Is entirely up to me.

So how did I get there?

He / She /They / It Will Never Change

There are a few pieces to this that all add up to me recognizing that, “Oh my gosh, I have complete control over all of this.”

The first part was recognizing and finally coming to the realization that, referring back to this relationship that I left … that person would never change.

No matter how hard I would try, no matter what I could do or not do, this person would never change. 

This institution, this organization, will never change.

It is what it is.

It is that way because of factors that I will discuss in the next video I make about this subject, but that needs to be another conversation.

So again, this person, this institution that has been causing me problems and I never saw it, and I finally see it … is never going to change.

Why is it all up to me? If anything about this is going to change, and that other person/institution/organization is not, then it’s up to me.

That was the first piece of me recognizing it’s all up to me.

I Have the Power to See It or Not

The second piece of this was when I began to realize, again, referring back to my situation in this relationship: “Hold on, I may not have seen these dynamics, all of these ways I was being treated for nine plus years, but other people could see this behavior.”

People would come and meet this person and get to know them a little bit and then move on, recognizing that this person wasn’t for them. They didn’t like how they were being treated.

It was very evident with my spiritual teacher. There were a lot of people that would come to him and just think, ‘This guy’s so arrogant, so this, so that, etc.’ They were seeing some of the things that I wasn’t willing or able to see.

The second realization of it’s all up to me was that: ‘Hold on, no matter how good that person may have been at hiding who they were to me, other people could see it.’

It wasn’t entirely about how good they were at hiding how manipulative and destructive they were. 

It had to do with the person experiencing them and their ability to see it, recognize it, feel it, and respond to it.

Lightning Strikes

This made me realize there’s something about this that I’ve been missing. Especially as I did my healing work and so many dynamics that had been going on for nine years that I wasn’t seeing when they were happening, suddenly I was seeing them very clearly.

It’s like, “Oh my God, that was what was going on right there. This whole dynamic, that wasn’t what I thought it was, it was the other thing instead.”

I refer to it as it’s when history rewrites itself, when our ability to see what was always already there is able to see it.

So it’s always up to me. As long as I am available to seeing, feeling, recognizing what is already there, then I have nothing to worry about. Because it is all up to me.

But Doesn’t Go All the Way

Now, I learned something quite humbling in this realm. A couple of years after I left that relationship, I entered another relationship. Oddly enough, with someone who is a spiritual teacher. Not my spiritual teacher, but a spiritual teacher.

And it took me almost three years to recognize, “Oh my gosh, these are the same dynamics that I left a number of years ago. The same dynamics.

I had already been through a great deal of deep healing, doing a lot of studying about the dynamics of narcissism and narcissistic abuse and how this works.

I was taking responsibility for my part in it: my unwillingness to respond to things, my worry so much about what this other person was going to think of me, and not so much about how I was being treated.

I was seeing how codependent I was. I could see the pain in that person and taking it on as mine to fix … as opposed to what to protect myself from. 

I had seen all of these things.

We can see a lot as our eyes begin to open up to what’s going on in our world. In our personal world and the wider world, we can begin to see a lot.

But Simply Seeing – It’s Not Enough

But to the degree that we have not come inside of ourselves, where we have complete and full control, and dealt with those things that live inside of us that prevent us from seeing clearly . . . from feeling the assault that comes in many forms, through words, actions, deeds from this other person or organization, the things inside of us that have us more worried about what other people are going to think than about our own safety and taking action on that, the stuff that lives inside of us that is more concerned with fitting in than standing up.

These things live inside of us.

This was my second huge lesson in learning: It is all up to me. I am not at the mercy of anything out there.

It’s Not About Out There – But In Here Instead

What I need to be most concerned about is what’s going on in here that I am unaware of, that is keeping it so that I don’t see or that I don’t respond.

So this leads me to one of my greatest concerns. I see it in the people that I work with and I’m seeing it happen across the world right now.

People are waking up and seeing a lot of what they weren’t seeing before. This is The Times that we’re in on the planet. That seems to be our collective fate at this moment, so that we can move on.

And as you begin to do that, one of the places people can go, and this is a trap, is: “That awful narcissist over there. How awful, how awful, how awful. There’s a lot of pointing fingers over there, “the all-powerful thing over there.” And then it never stops, the tune never changes.

But that creates it so that, if I’m ‘over here’ and pointing my finger ‘over there’, then I have just disempowered myself.

Don’t Get Trapped in Focusing Out There

Now that’s an important phase to go through. Because part of it is realizing this was really fucking awful what it is that you have been doing to me. 

It’s really important to reclaim the rage, reclaim the sadness, feel the betrayal … it’s super important.

And this is where healing comes in.

There’s No Power In That

But when healing doesn’t happen, then one of the places people can get stuck is finger pointing, and there can be a lot of self-justified, self-righteous anger and rage.

But I’m telling you now, there is no power in that.

Because one is still stuck in believing that they (over there) have all the power.

What I’m about to say is not blaming anybody. I’ll say it in the first person, and I wholeheartedly believe this, is that for the 10 years in that relationship, I was participating in it. 

Taking Response-Ability

I was participating in that dynamic.

The way that I know the power of not participating is I said, “No. You cannot yell at me. We can have a conversation about this, but only if you don’t yell at me.” 

I stuck to it, I didn’t back down this time.

I drew the line and I stuck to it, which you gotta believe took a hell of a lot on my part, because this was going against my own conditioning. It took a hell of a lot.

But as soon as I stuck to it, I could see so much more, everything was so clear. This person lost their power over me because I had taken on my own power.

I had taken my own power.

What I was able to see over a number of years of healing (I’m sharing with you the benefits of a lot of work) is that as long as I take my power . . . 

which basically means my ability to see, to experience, to feel fully, to deal with my own anger, upset, fear, worry, self-doubt, and respond in a way that protects and keeps me safe and in alignment and in my own integrity . . . 

that I have absolutely nothing to worry about.

So number three is: It’s all in my hands, my own hands.

How Do I Focus ‘In Here?’

Here is a link to something that I offer on how to do one’s own healing work, which I offer for free.

Speaking from my own experience, without doing our own healing, which means dealing with the things in us that kept us all along from seeing the things that are now obvious.

What are those things in you, in me, that kept me from seeing those things which were really kind of there all along to see.

Imagine – Nothing to Fear

And when you do that, when you do that healing work, there’s nothing to fear. Because you’ll see it the next time it happens, with this other situation, with this other organization, with this other person that crosses your path.

You’ll see it. You’ll feel it. You’ll recognize it. You’ll be there for yourself with your own fear, worry, concern, or anything that comes up in you.

And you will respond in a way that is appropriate to your own best interest.

Now how’s that for a way of living?

But I’m going to suggest that it is a very important, but at some point a stuck place, to be sitting back and going like this (pointing) over there.

Because there will be the next thing, and the next thing that comes up. And there will be a lot of next things over these next years that will invite us to simply go along, and not see, and not respond, and not take care of ourselves.

But when you come in and do your own work, then you have nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

I’m gonna be doing a follow up post to this where I’ll be talking about The Narcissism Mechanism.

The dynamics that I’ve spoken about here today, I’m seeing as something that we, as a planet, are wrestling with right now.

The Narcissism Mechanism seems to be built into the way of life on the planet at this point. It’s a game of power and control, fueled by fear and anchored by victimization.

Don’t miss it!

But please make sure that you click the link at the bottom of this post, and take a look at the material that I’m presenting on how to do one’s own healing.

I’m offering it for free because I feel it’s really important that as many people as possible do this work.

And until next time, keep the faith.

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Here’s the link to my FREE HEALING COURSE – Unleash Yourself: Finally Breaking Free