Life After Narcissism: Confronting the What Next Moment
Healing isn't just about the past, it's about what comes next.
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.
The Void sucks, but only by naming it and confronting it can we begin our journey to self on the other side of all that recovery work. That’s a tall order. Getting to the other side of narcissistic abuse, of a traumatic relationship or childhood, it comes with a lot of identity confusion. Do you really have the power to become the person you want to be? Do you dare? You have to give yourself permission and start that process all on your own, by your own design.
There’s a grief in the void, too. The grief of all those things that never were, the people who failed, all your own failures. These things add up, and they can create a veil of shame that we have to pass beyond in order to start creating a life that is abundant and self-fulfilling.
We think the pressure is on in the beginning, when we step into those first shoes of healing, recognizing the patterns and acknowledging what was. The truth, though, is that there is major pressure on the other side. Once you know what happened, the pressure to act increases. You’re healed, aren’t you? What does that look like? What should that look like? Are you going to break out of the pattern, or fall back into the people pleasing and self-denial again?
For those who cannot take that first step, who stand lost in the silence and the emptiness of getting to the other side, the inner critic is a threat. She rushes in, brutal as a gorgon, to fill the space left behind by the chaos and dysfunction we have worked so hard to overcome. She will take you down. She is hungry for it, and only you can transcend her siren’s song and create a future that’s self-aligned and worth living for.
We’re all aware of The Void. When you get to the other side, you feel it keenly. Feeling it, though, isn’t the same as integrating it. In that path is where the true power lies. When you no longer fear the Void, you can pivot your story and embrace it instead.
Rewriting my story on the other side.
This is where I found myself on the other side of all my healing and trauma work. I was empty. I was burned out. I didn’t feel like myself. In fact, I didn’t even know who my true self really was. That’s where the next phase of work began. That was the precipice on which I stood and asked myself, Who do you really want to be? I’ve told the story half a dozen ways and half a dozen times. I was pushed into the arms of my passions, and in that, I found a reason to live and a hope for the future. I felt like myself again for the first time, perhaps ever, in my life.
But where was the turning point? What was that moment in which I knew I had to leap? That heartbeat, that instant, in which I had the faith to act?
Was it fate, or was it desperation? The two travel hand-in-hand more often than we like to admit. At the bottom of the barrel, completely aware of all the pain in the past and all the doubt in my future, I was cast adrift. I didn’t need to understand my pain anymore. I didn’t need to examine it with a fine-tooth comb. What I needed was to create something from it. To take action.
What is there to do in a storm? You sink or you swim. If I was going to lose this battle to the emptiness I now felt, I was going to do it in the depths of passion, activating some kind of life that I at the very least enjoyed.
“I didn’t need to understand my pain more. I needed to create something from it.”
I didn’t go to art school. I didn’t grow up with paints in the house or a great deal of encouragement to express myself visually. No one was putting my drawings up on the fridge, let’s just put it that way.
For most of my life, I didn’t even consider myself “creative.” I considered myself functional. I was surviving. Hyper-aware. Emotionally exhausted. Good at reading the room. Terrible at hearing myself.
And then, one day, I picked up a paintbrush. No one told me to. No one assigned it. I just... needed something. Something that didn’t require words or answers or analysis. Something that felt like mine.
What started as a quiet experiment became something much bigger. I taught myself to paint over the course of a few raw, imperfect, private months—and in doing so, I realized I wasn’t just learning technique. I was learning how to be with myself. I was witnessing emotion without shutting it down. I was making space for something real, even if I didn’t fully understand it.
The canvas became a mirror—not of who I was taught to be, but of who I might actually be underneath all the survival patterns. It didn’t matter if the work was good. It mattered that it was mine.
Every brushstroke became a tiny declaration: I exist outside of trauma. I am allowed to take up space. I am allowed to explore who I am becoming.
That’s what rebuilding identity looks like after years of emotional chaos—not some grand rebranding, but a series of quiet, creative choices that slowly reveal a self you never had the chance to meet before.
What is creative recovery?
I find myself now in that liminal space that so many humans before me have across the eons. That moment when I’m faced with the blank canvas of a life in front of me. I’m in that sacred space that I like to call “creative recovery,” where I’m bending all the rules, figuring out how to be fully myself, and learning that this life can look however I want it to as long as I have the courage to act.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about being an artist (though art is a part of it for me). Creative recovery is just that, getting creative about the next stage of your life. Committing to leaving more behind than you took from the world around you.
The aim of creative recovery is not to become Picasso in some Manhattan high-rise. The point is about reconnecting with yourself through gentle forms of self-expression. It’s the next stage of healing, the next stage of becoming fully who you are. Not instead of, but rather after, years of living in a state of survival and chaos.
What happens in this next chapter?
Here’s where I have to be brutally honest with you. I don’t have a five-step plan for this next chapter. Not for me, this blog, or anything else in my life. That’s the point. What I have now is curiosity. Stillness. Paint-stained fingers and a deep belief that something softer, more spacious, and more authentic is possible.
Once we get to that stopping place, once we stop hyperfocusing on the past and trying to fix it with our knowledge, we start asking ourselves: what do I want to create from all that chaos?
This is what the next chapter is about for me, and maybe for you, too.
It’s about building a life that isn’t shaped by the past, but rather informed by it. It’s about trusting my voice enough to use it to the fullness of its strength, not to defend or to explain, but to express. In that same vein, it’s about remembering that creativity isn’t reserved for the “perfectly healed.” It’s the action through which we heal. It’s the link in the chain that connects us to hundreds of thousands of years of human experience.
If you’re here, and you’re still reading this, still breathing through it, maybe you’re ready too. Not for a performance, not for perfection, but for something true. If that is you, stay with me. Let’s explore together what creative recovery really looks like, live in real time. No, not as an escape from trauma, but as a means of life on the other side of the work and the recovery.
This is a homecoming for me and for you. It’s time for all of us to embrace the truth. Healing isn’t about getting over it or ruminating on what was; it’s about finally having the space to create the reality you desire.
© E.B. Johnson 2025