A common theme amongst survivors of narcissistic abuse is a profound sense of loss regarding one’s sense of identity. You of course know what your name is, what you do for work, who you’re partnered with, and what you like to eat for lunch, but the deeper sense of who-I-am feels fuzzy. You might experience are moments of emptiness when you don’t feel a connection to yourself or others, a sense that you’re performing to make others comfortable rather that just being your self, and instances when it’s difficult to actually say what you mean. What’s going on here?

Identity Is Formed in Relationships

Many assume the problem is that they haven’t done enough work to really know who they are, but the deeper truth is that they may never have been allowed to be themselves in their family of origin. Identity isn’t formed in a vacuum, it’s formed in relationship. If your parents were highly narcissistic or emotionally immature, then that likely created an insecure attachment. Your ability to lean on them for guidance, express your fury and exuberance, experience your needs as valid, and experience consistency was deeply fractured. To be yourself was a liability to that relationship, so you learned to keep parts of yourself that could threaten the attachment out of awareness, only revealing the parts of you that you believed would be accepted.

Prioritizing Survival Over Authenticity

This routine begins to chip away at identity in big ways. To begin, you learn survival over authenticity. To form an identity, we must have enough emotional safety in our relationships to begin to explore who we are and what we like. Without that, you end up learning skills of adaptation, which might lead to people-pleasing or pretending that your feelings aren’t as big as they feel. Another way this erodes identity is that you learn to focus on other people rather than yourself. When you’re chronically imagining how another person might respond, what they would think of you, or how they might judge you, you don’t have much room to explore what you think or how you’d like to express yourself. This creates an imbalance in which your psyche learns that safety is found in monitoring the thoughts or opinions of others and so it keeps you tilted toward hypervigilance.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Narcissistic parents don’t provide adequate mirroring, the process by which caregivers attune to their child and adequately affirm the child’s image, emotional state, and needs. For instance, a narcissistic parent might ignore entirely their child’s accomplishments, dismissing them as givens. For the child who is still developing, this sends the message that what they do is not that impressive or important. Their ability to integrate their accomplishments into their identity becomes fractured and they’re less likely to recognize themselves accurately.

Children raised by narcissistic parents end up taking on the projections of their parents, which will further skew and distort their sense of self. A projection is when an individual takes something that they are experiencing and relocates it onto someone else. If I’m in relationship with someone and I feel anger toward them, but I’m not owning my anger, I could project that onto the other person, accusing them of being mad at me. This happens to children raised by narcissists constantly. The unfortunate side effect is that the child equates their parent’s projections with who they are, which can lead to significant damage to their developing identity and contribute to feelings of worthlessness, shame, or insignificance.

How Healing Occurs

Since identity is formed through relationships, starting the healing process within a therapeutic relationship is essential. We must be able to experience ourselves differently, and accurately, in order to recover who we truly are. The therapeutic relationship can provide a corrective relational and emotional experience, which can lead to massive shifts in identity, a reduction of chronic shame, and the restoration of one’s sense of worthiness.

Insight Alone Isn’t Always Enough

Insight alone may not move the needle because it’s too cognitive and intellectual. This has its place in healing, as it can offer a practical understanding of the ways in which identity is restored by challenging thoughts or recognizing patterns of behavior. However, work rooted in experiential processes such as somatic experiencing, internal family systems and other parts work, and emotion-focused modalities will provide a new framework for relating to the self, the body, and one’s emotions. The body can serve as a site of identity recovery since that is where our subjective experiences occur. We feel our emotions somatically, not cognitively. We experience our needs physiologically, and we perceive our environments through the state of our nervous system. When you are working at all three levels, identity restoration becomes possible.

Learning to Reconnect to Your Emotions

In practice, identity recovery might require paying attention to your emotional and somatic experiences and building a relationship to them. An example of this could be noticing how you felt toward a friend who said you were being “overly dramatic” and exploring what it is like to make contact with that feeling. Most of us learned to equate a feeling with a thought, such as “I thought it was kind of rude,” so untangling that will be necessary. What we’re actually looking for in a situation like this is not what you thought, but what you felt. So an accurate answer might be something more like: “I felt kind of irritated. My stomach tightened up, and I felt this desire to pull away.”

The better we can identify what we feel emotionally and somatically, the clearer a picture will form regarding who we are and what matters to us. Emotions tell us a lot about how we experience our environment and what we need. Anger will almost always point to a boundary that needs to be enforced, grief will help us let go and make room for something new, and fear may help us hone in our instinctual awareness and orient us to our environment. Emotional clarity goes a long way toward building our identities back up. We just have to have enough relational safety to begin this process, hence why it’s so essential to work with a therapist who is not only trauma-informed, but experiential.

You Can Heal

What’s important to know is that you’re not broken. You never were. You were raised in an environment that required you to prioritize survival over authenticity. As an adult, you have the agency and ability to turn this around. Authenticity will always live just under the surface of survival, which means it’s readily accessible when the conditions are right.

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.