This title is a bit of a trick question. We’re taught to be wary of others, which assumes our “safety” depends on our ability to correctly discern others’ meaning and motives. That is part of the equation, yes. But, it sets us up to live in suspicion and fear.
You were told the codependency was yours — a flaw you brought in with you. But compliance and hyper-independence are both doors out of the same house. They are not who you are. They are what you learned to survive.
In this part of our series on Narcissistic Victim Syndrome, we focus on recovery. Standard, run-of-the-mill approaches are potentially dangerous for couples stuck in power and control cycles. As coaches and counselors, we must protect the victim from further harm and work to potentially bring them to a place of collaboration. The dominating partner must become connection-oriented before collaboration can occur. Which means that couples work is not the first step.
I’m going to make a statement that might initially cause a strong reaction in you, but please hear me out. Ultimately, my goal is to find that precious, sacred, powerful point at which we become intentional about living, even in the midst of a destructive, stifling world. It is at that point where we have the God-given agency to make a choice about our next step, and about who we are and how we are showing up. The hardest question to answer is: How?
Another nuance impacting attachment is confirmation bias. This might seem a bit random in the context of trauma, but there is a strong correlation between confirmation bias and resistance to change, thus resistance to healing. What we’ve deeply learned, both intrinsically and extrinsically, determines what we seek, expect, and perceive. When there is a gap in our understanding, we fill it in with our own narrative based upon previous learning. Most often we fill in those blanks with negativity and suspicion. Trauma teaches us what to watch for, what to expect, and how to perceive it.
Most women in destructive relationships spend enormous energy trying to answer one question: why does he do what he does? It feels like if you could just understand his intent, you could either excuse the pain — or finally know how to stop it.
Here’s what I want you to see instead: why is rarely the question that helps. It doesn’t excuse, and it never makes the pain smaller. The question that actually moves you forward is much simpler — what needs to happen next?
That’s where boundaries come in. And I want to give you one of the simplest tools I use with clients to find them.
“A godly wife submits.” You’ve heard it quoted at you, usually by the person who benefits most. But biblical submission in marriage was never compliance. Once fear, obligation, or guilt removes the choice, it stops being submission, and becomes something else entirely.
For both men and women, anger is a key building block in their wall of self-protection. It supports defense mechanisms and fuels the façades we wear. Anger can make it very difficult to be authentic and connect to your spouse. The only connection that can happen is to whatever is in front of your shield of self-protection, which is often a very shallow, non-vulnerable self. In being self-protective, you disable the very thing your heart craves: authentic connection.
Many of my clients start their story by saying, “It has taken me way too long to get the courage to speak up about this. I am so ashamed of letting myself stay in this abuse for so long!” They often feel a sense of misplaced responsibility, thinking they could have have seen and stopped it. Or that they should have been better, sexier, more fun, a better housekeeper, more submissive, more respectful. They often believe that if they were just less selfish, they could have made him happy. “If I had just done it differently, I could have figured this out and fixed it.”
Where’d you park? Not literally — I mean in your life. Your marriage. Your walk with God. The people you keep close.
Most of us never stop to ask. And if you’re anything like the people I sit across from every week, some part of you already knows why: looking honestly at where you’ve parked means admitting you might need to move.
“Extend him some grace.” You’ve heard it from a pulpit, a friend, maybe from him. I wrote this post in 2013 about the grace that rescued me. Here’s what I didn’t know to write then: what grace was never meant to cover.