Reclaiming Your Life and Power: Healing After a Marriage to a Narcissist

Healing after being married to a narcissist can be a combination of both feeling finally free and also deeply wounded. The damage to ourselves can feel heavy. However, this healing journey can lead to powerful transformation and a renewed sense of self if we heal properly.

If you found yourself in a relationship filled with manipulation, emotional abuse, and false promises by a controlling, manipulative, abusive person know you are not alone. Many have faced this difficult path to leave and move on and have come out stronger and more resilient in time afterwards. This post will share practical strategies and insights to help you reclaim your life and power after your marriage to a narcissist.

Understanding the Impact of Narcissism

A marriage to a narcissist leaves lasting emotional scars. Bruises on the inside that we can't see outwardly on the surface. But they are still there.

Narcissistic individuals often use control, gaslighting, and manipulation, creating an environment where you might question your reality and worth which when done over many years can have a deep impact on our self-worth, confidence and soul.

Recognizing these effects is a crucial step toward healing because it can be so easy to downplay their effect on our psyche into the longterm. Often clients come to me months, sometimes years after the end of a marriage like this still carrying deep wounds that they either thought weren't there or that they thought they'd healed.

Acknowledge Your Emotions

The first step to healing is recognizing and acknowledging your emotions. Whether your feelings are of sadness, anger, trauma or even relief, it is important to honor them rather than push them aside.

Don't expect yourself to be able to move on without processing what you've been through. Yes you're free but in time you will realising that leaving was just the beginning of your journey and that the healing and moving on path that you need to walk to step into your power and come home to yourself is actually THE journey.

Seek Professional Support

Healing from a marriage to a narcissist requires professional help because the cumulative effect of many years worth of unhealthy behaviour that has been directed towards us and build up over the years.

Both the thinking mind and the pain body require healing and this is where traditional talk therapy modalities like therapy and counselling have their limitations. Talking alone about your experience, your pain and what you've been through doesn't heal your heart, it keeps us in our mind looping, replaying the story, the pain, what we've been through and what they did.

Rebuild Your Self-Esteem

A narcissistic marriage often chips away at our self-esteem and self-worth. Our self-image and self-perception also falls with it. Who you are today, post your marriage ending, needs to be a very different version of self than the individual who came into the marriage or who was in the marriage.

Your patterns, your self-belief, your thinking needs to be upgraded, cleansed and purged. See yourself like a computer, literally needing an update and reboot so that you are never a magnet to another narcissist again.

Create Boundaries

Learning to establish healthy boundaries is essential after a relationship with a narcissist. Narcissists often ignore boundaries, leaving you feeling overwhelmed.

Identify the boundaries crucial for your healing. This could mean limiting contact with your ex-spouse or setting emotional boundaries about what behavior you will tolerate from others. Practicing boundary-setting empowers you to protect your emotional health in future relationships.

If boundaries and an ex who consistently triggers you and tries to manipulate you is one of the patterns that are continuing to present themselves to you as something to overcome and deal with again and again please consider my online coaching program here where I speak about this in depth. You are the aspect to change, not your ex. Please find this program here.

Divorce Your Old Version Of Self

The end of a marriage to a narcissist opens the door to personal growth and self-discovery. This is your opportunity to become a new person on the inside and out, and necessarily so. Divorce a person yes, but you also need to divorce an old version of self that co-created and enabled your marriage.

You are the core focus to move on from the trauma of being in a marriage or relationship with a narcissist. In all my years of coaching I've never had someone come to me seeking help because they identify as a narcissist!!!

They won't change. They have an established patterning with you that more than likely served them. Break up with the story and with the conversation with others about what they are doing or not doing.

Step into your power. Step into your self-worth. Own your new version of self. Clear your trauma and I suggest joining one of my coaching services to help you do so because of the deep impact this leaves on an individuals heart and mind.

After leaving a narcissist we never want to waste another day, or another year with them impacting or weighing us down negatively in our head or in our new life.

Choose you and your desired future today.

If this has resonated with you:

Please explore my Rising Beyond Separatoin & Divorce coaching program here.

Please explore my 1:1 coaching services here.