Who Did You Become to Survive Your Abuse?

Reconciling with the darkest parts of survival.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

There are certain wounds that don’t bruise the skin or leave visible scars—but they hollow you out from the inside. If you’ve ever walked away from a toxic relationship or an abusive family system and felt ashamed of who you became in order to survive, you’re not alone. Maybe you learned to lie. Maybe you went cold. Maybe you shut people out, withheld love, or stopped feeling anything at all. And maybe, in the aftermath, you looked in the mirror and thought: I don’t even know who I am anymore.

This isn’t just trauma. It’s something deeper, something heavier. It’s called moral injury—a rupture in your sense of self that occurs when you’re forced to act in ways that betray your own values just to stay safe. It’s what happens when kindness gets punished, when honesty is turned into a weapon, and when love becomes a liability. In the world of narcissistic abuse, empathy is often exploited, boundaries are bulldozed, and survival comes at a personal cost: your identity, your integrity, your inner peace.

You may feel like you failed yourself. You didn’t.

You may believe you “became just like them.” You didn’t.

You did what you had to do in a space where there were no good options—only damage control, only desperate measures to preserve something sacred inside of you. And now, you’re left not only to heal what was done to you, but also to reconcile with the parts of yourself that emerged in the fire.

This is about naming that pain. It’s about understanding how moral injury forms in narcissistic relationships, how it shapes our behavior and self-perception, and—most importantly—how we begin to repair it. If you’ve ever felt haunted not just by what happened, but by who you had to become to survive it, this is for you. You’re not broken. You’re not bad. You adapted. And now, it’s time to come home to yourself.