Have you Abandoned Yourself?
Part of the support I received during my high conflict divorce with a partner diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, included training in mindfulness and emotional regulation. One of the key learnings for me was prioritizing one of 3 areas in any interpersonal exchange:
The goal or outcome of the encounter
Preserving the relationship with the person you’re interacting with
Preserving your own self-respect
This last one was a huge AHA moment for me. My own self-respect?! Here I was more than half way through my life and I realized my own self-respect had never been on my radar. And not just that, my self-respect had been so diminished in a narcissistic family system that I had essentially abandoned this basic human right. I don’t blame myself for this, and I now understand why and how it happened.
Learning to prioritize my self-respect also led to identifying my core values.
I went through my growing up years knowing what values meant. I think I always valued hard work, respect, kindness, and standing up for others. I didn’t give thought to my values, I just think they were instilled by my family and the community around me.
In the present I realized my values were trampled on by my abuser because his top priority was his need for power and control in our relationship. A person who is high on the narcissistic spectrum sees their partner as an extension of themselves, not as a separate individual with their own needs, ideas, beliefs and values. So my core values were dismissed which I can now see and understand. Without blaming or shaming myself, the important question became, what happened to me to cause me to abandon this part of myself?
If you have a core value of honesty and the person you're with asks you to forge a document or give false information, that is a breach of your core value. If you have a core value of empathy but allow messages and actions in your home that dehumanize a person or group of people, you have not honored your core value. If you have a spiritual core value of inclusion and love and you continue to attend a church that preaches hateful and exclusive messages about homosexuals, you have abandoned your spiritual path. After your core values are breached even one time, it makes it easier for the abuser to breach more and more.
So how did this happen?
Narcissists are attracted to empathic people and empathic people are typically people pleasers. It is harder for people pleasers to set and maintain healthy boundaries, so I can see how this happened to me. Without realizing the cost, I accepted the role of being the people pleaser and abandoned my core values. Because not doing so meant I was bullied by my abuser and made to feel that I didn’t belong to my own family. Now I know that I just couldn’t fit in. Fitting in and Belonging are completely different. I couldn’t belong because I wouldn’t fit in. But true belonging doesn’t require you to fit in to belong. True belonging requires you to belong to yourself first.
So I spent time coming up with a list of ten core values that became the foundation I wanted to stand on. Some key values remained the same but I prioritized them differently. Now I keep them top of mind. One of my core values is my own self-respect which means with every consideration, decision, action, idea, and belief, I will not abandon myself. So now, anything that calls me to consider abandoning myself is a deal breaker. Then the thick boundary is set and my path forward becomes clear.
Visit our contact page if you want to partner with one of our coaches to evoke awareness on how to prioritize yourself when dealing with other people, or to examine how you can learn to maintain boundaries and stand in the power of your core values.
