Think about it. When you expressed a need, you were dismissed, mocked, or told you were too much. When you shared something you were excited about, it was overshadowed, minimized, or redirected. When you were in pain, you didn’t receive comfort; you received guilt, blame, or indifference. Over time, that does something to you. You start to believe your feelings are problems. You start to quiet your own voice just to avoid another explosion. You start to shrink your dreams so they don’t threaten somebody’s ego. You begin to disappear in your own life.
Even the moments that felt tender weren’t really about you. The rare softness, the praise, the attention—those weren’t grounded in a genuine desire to see you thrive. They were about the emotional hit the narcissist got from your reaction. The narcissist was always reacting to their own reflection, not your heart. When you finally see this, you stop saying, “I’m too sensitive,” and start saying, “I was never allowed to exist fully.” That shift is powerful. You realize you weren’t overreacting; you were undervalued. That’s the turning point.
You begin to reclaim your right to feel, your right to have needs, your right to say, “I don’t like this,” your right to exist in a relationship as a full human being, not just a support system for someone else’s ego. As you reclaim that, you change. You stop tolerating any space where your feelings are constantly minimized or mocked. You stop justifying disrespect. You begin to trust your instincts again. The process takes time; it can feel messy. Some days you’ll wonder if you’re asking for too much, but deep down you know you’re not. You’re only asking for what you always deserved: to be treated as a person, not a prop.
Silence becomes your strength. One of the most painful realizations is this: your reactions once gave the narcissist power. Every argument, every long explanation, every late-night text trying to get through, every desperate attempt to make the narcissist understand—all of it became fuel. The narcissist thrived on your frustration, your confusion, your emotional intensity. The more you tried to reason, the more you tried to prove your point, the more tightly the narcissist’s control wrapped around you.
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