Life After Narcissism: Confronting the What Next Moment

Healing isn't just about the past, it's about what comes next.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

No one talks about the silence that comes after the bombshells of trauma settle. When I started recovering from narcissistic abuse and confronting my own shadow, I was one of those people who expected something…louder…on the other side. Not a parade, per se, but something. An obviously different life, perhaps. Some kind of personal recognition. I didn’t think there would be silence, and I certainly didn’t think I would find myself in a wide and empty space.

That’s the truth, though. You eventually come to the “end of the road” when it comes to understanding your past, your trauma, and what happened to you. There’s an end to the amount of information you can digest, the amount of “knowing” you can really heap up. And what comes after that?

Silence.

You get off a sinking ship in a whirling storm to find yourself on a deserted island the size of New York City. What are you going to do with it? Where are you going to go next? This is the crossroads at which you are given the choice: act and create, or stagnate and fall back into the storm.

That’s exactly where I found myself after years of recovering from narcissistic abuse (and helping others recover), and I had no idea what to do with it.

Naming the void

I get why people don’t like to talk about this space, which I eventually came to call “The Void.” The Void is a scary place to be. It’s the point at which your entire identity is wiped. Everything you thought you knew, reality as you understood it, is replaced. Along with that, you’re left chewing on some unpleasantly hard truths. Who wants to be in that place? Uncomfortable, unknowable, completely adrift by yourself.