Do you rationalize cruel behaviour from others?
Before you begin healing from the abuse, you have to acknowledge that it occurred.
Since narcissistic abuse can be subtle by nature, you may question for a long time whether you are abused at all.
During the relationship, you may have had to rationalize the behavior for a long period. In fact, so long that accepting that it wasn’t rational or excusable can be difficult.
It is also often easier to take the blame for a situation than it is to accept that someone you deeply cared for hurt you in such a horrible way. However, denying that it happened takes away your opportunity to address it.
Rationalizing cruel behaviors from others is a way of coping.
If you rationalize it, you can brain-train yourself to not deal with it.
Acknowledging that someone is positively taking steps to harm you can be too much to deal with. But this is where those who are toxic create a winning situation for themselves. When you first met them, you were love-bombed and it all seemed so wonderful.
After a while, this changes. But, what you should have picked up was that this person was testing you at the same time. So, for instance, throwing in little insults dressed up as jokes, just to see how you reacted. Then they immediately swing back to their "normal" loving other selves. Each time the insults come, they get worse, but so does the opposite. And, the whole point of this is to completely muddle you and make you wonder if you are imagining their behavior. Thus questioning what you are experiencing, you doubt yourself more and focus even more on their alternating lovely behavior. And as others outside the relationship only see the affable, kind respectable person, you blame it on yourself.
The poison is then in you, working its way through your system. Surely this person didn't mean it that way, or maybe you heard it wrong. Maybe you are the one with the problem, right?
Toxic abuse can be very subtle, and it works more deeply, the longer you are in a relationship, or in a close presence of a sociopath, narcissist, or psychopath.
In my personal opinion, one leads to the other or is the flip side to the other. The longer you stay in that environment, the deeper you become unstuck in your intrinsic intuition to know you are being abused. You might even blame yourself, like so many people do, and become a shadow of your former self.
I have this feeling Tiggy that this is what it is, but I don't trust myself.
If you speak to those who have been through this and out the other side, they will tell you that this is how they felt early on in the relationship. This new person in their life made them doubt their judgment.
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