Narcissistic relationships LEAD TO F***ED UP RESILIENCE

hey everyone it's Dr Romney welcome back to this YouTube channel and we're going to talk about resilience but we're going to talk about effed up resilience so there's really no other way for me to say it and I am afraid that since I'm not some dude gamer type YouTube channel if I keep dropping F bombs YouTube's not going to like it so I'm just going to say effing and it's probably not professional for me to actually say the word okay what am I talking about so I was talking to a long-term Survivor of multiple narcissistic relationships these relationships man from childhood into adulthood narcissistic grandparents parents and then a long-term marriage with a malignant narcissistic person the person who I was talking to extremely nice easy to get along with pleasant person and very resilient she has been having to solve problems that probably she shouldn't have had to have solve on a very at since a very young age she was kicked out of the nest the minute she graduated high school that kind of thing very smart lovely lovely person she's also really really adaptable and it led me to think and then I started thinking about another person I knew in a similar situation I was also talking to a few weeks ago narcissistic mother narcissistic long-term marriage narcissistic adult child again extraordinarily nice very pleasant and as empathic and compassionate as they come and ridiculously adaptable and resilient honestly probably the most flexible human being I have ever known then as I thought about those two people I rushed to my computer like a craz detective I pulled up my clinical files it's almost like I already knew the answer but I wanted to see how the data would show up and in the vast majority of clients I've worked with who were survivors long-term survivors of narcissistic abuse with childhood narcissistic exposure than adult narcissistic exposure not all but most okay not all but definitely most let's say 85 90% plus were nice pleasant empathic and above all else were extremely adaptable resilient and flexible in that most recent conversation I had with this the Survivor of multiple narcissistic relationships I was reflecting on how difficult her life had been since her divorce from a malignant narcissistic person it was horrific terrible post-separation abuse and she got financially pretty wrecked by him no big surprise but she just kept trying to make her life work when she encounters difficult people in the months and years since then she makes it work when things require a workaround she makes it work it's not always easy but she makes it work and she always has she had no choice almost none of the people she'd encountered significant people since she was a child none of them would have helped her and as a kid she didn't know what narcissism was and she didn't even know what narcissism was for most of her marriage so she kept trying to change herself adapt herself to be better for the marriage to be better to do more just like most people who go through narcissistic abuse and then she learned about narcissism and in her case she got out listen some people stick out the relationships I mean in her case she got out but it dawned on me that she is so resilient like really really resilient most most of these folks who go through this are but as I talked to her I said this is really effed up resilience because to this day she and most of these folks who survived these relationships were still having to create workarounds often for a lifetime because the people the close people to them who were supposed to be supports who were supposed to help to guide to be present such as parents should have been never were so they had to figure it all out everything from applying fing to school to doing homework to tending their broken hearts to dealing with play Playard bullies to even having to take care of the parent or the parents' needs when they were children and then as adults finding themselves often having to appease a fragile narcissistic spouse or partner or family member sacrificing things that matter to them doing more and more and striving to be enough for the narcissistic person so maybe the marriage or relationship could work out it meant that they were as adaptable flexible and resilient as anyone I had ever met but it was really effed up resilience a need to have to learn to do every single thing in their lives alone because help was almost never coming to be able to turn on a dime at the last minute and be flexible because the narcissistic people in their lives often pulled the rug out from underneath them to learn emotional regulation skills that were literally out of this world because every day was a disappointment they learned to never have the good things that happened to them ever celebrated because the narcissistic people around them would typically ignore mock dismiss or devalue anything good that happened to them but yet they still kept on keeping on I guess and striving and doing their best these folks also learned that the people who were close to them Partners parents family members would not soothe them at times of pain so they did their best to cultivate other supports perhaps seek out therapy they figured it all out listen I'm a shrink I'm the first one that's going to tell you resilience is great It's associated with a whole bunch of great outcomes better health and mental health outcomes It's associated with success with better overall functioning resilience is about flexibility it is efficacy it's problem solving abilities it's a Stress Management tool it's a Stress Management approach it is about not getting stuck in just one way of doing things but being able to Pivot to taking a new route taking on a new routine quickly packing up and starting again resilient people rally they often uplift and encourage other people resilient folks are the people you want at your side when you walk through the gates of hell not everyone who goes through adversity develops resilience some folks don't have it some folks don't cultivate it and those folks will struggle for a lifetime after they experience adversity I'll tell you one little hack if you're ever hiring for a job hire the resilient person resilient people tend to be agreeable and have persistence and grit as a side note listen not all survivors of narcissistic abuse are resist resilient many if not most are but a subset may actually find that the mental health struggles that are a product of The Chronic emotional abuse overwhelm them and undercut resilience whether or not someone develops resilience often relates to a lot of things like how severe cons consistent and inescapable the narcissistic abuse is whether other traumas were happening um or whether this elevated to the level of relational trauma other mental health issues that may co-occurring and the presence of how how much support a person has do they have resources do they have supports some of that can have to do with their resilience and a lot of it probably comes down to temperament but the resilience a human being has to develop as a result of chronic narcissistic abuse is effed up you basically have to learn to chronically appease another person always have a plan B CDE E and F live in a constant state of disappointment its resilience with a huge side helping of grief when I work with survivors I have to remind them how resilient they are but when they reflect they don't even think of themselves as resilient but when they reflect on why they are so resilient it can bring up some really painful feelings which is understandable effed up resilience can sometimes feel less like resilience and more like endurance the way a resilient person can figure it out you know resilient person can figure it out if they don't get food for hours while they're traveling right it's similar effed up resilience means you're able to just stand up in the face of toxic people and keep on keeping on I know a gal who had a narcissistic dad kind of a narcissistic mom a narcissistic partner and is surrounded by narcissistic friends she is resilient and kind and flexible and her endurance for the toxic BS of the people around her is prodigious it's actually kind of painful to watch survivors should not have had to become so resilient right they may have been equally resilient even if they didn't have lots of narcissistic in their relationships but resilience in a way at some level while it can be cultivated a lot of it is a trait effed up resilience is a combination of resilience and Trauma response and a survival skill set that'll occur again alongside that trait of resilience it can feel different than regular Garden variety resilience listen children are not in a position to make sense of narcissistic behavior and most people are not taught this so even as that child comes up into adulthood they may not recognize that their flexibility and amenability and adaptability are part and parcel of the resilience that came out of the workarounds and the tolerance of disappointment that narcissistic abuse requires however in a strange way the resilience this thing that is so good for us becomes a risk factor because the resilience means that when we keep encountering narcissistic people in adulthood well we are flexible right we may be more likely to make excuses or give Second Chances or forgive we may almost reflexively just do the work around drive a 100 miles out of our way do what needs to be done because because we're resilient we may not think twice about the flexibility and the adaptations we're making for toxic people so the very thing the resilience that is protective and good for us may actually make things more difficult in narcissistic relationships unless we understand narcissism because that effed up resilience can end up being one of the gifts that you take out of the narcissistic relationship it can become a flexibility that allows you to pursue goals and dreams in a gritty and persistent way it can allow you to be a great friend to healthy people who are hopefully also flexible and agreeable once the narcissistic folks in your life are largely disengaged from it can contribute to your health and well-being to have this prodigious level of of resilience it can also help you you manage stress so if you could take that resilience know who the toxic folks are be flexible in your life but give yourself permission to disengage from those toxic folks resilience isn't about enduring other people's toxicity just because you're able to it's about being Discerning and giving yourself permission to disengage and being flexible in a way that isn't about appeasing and giving into to them but about being more stress resistant so this eff up resilience right which so many people who' have gone through narcissistic abuse have this ability to just really roll with those punches and keep getting up and rolling and getting knocked down and keep getting up it's something that I've really really seen quite frequently in a large proportion of survivors of narcissistic abuse and what I do see especially with the people who get out of a narcissistic relationship an option I know is not available to any not to everyone but when they get out the resilience stays around but they're not working around the narcissistic person in the same way anymore and they're really there's an adaptability it's unlike anything I've ever seen in other people and really like I said these are the people you want to travel with and do things with because there's a real ease to them they like okay sure we can do we can do it that way or I can do it that way or I'm I'm easy and they really can make it work the counter way to this is that f up resilience can mean that it can sometimes be difficult to to make your needs and wants known because you're so used to going with the flow and part of the process of healing is giving yourself permission to sometimes say yeah no I don't want to go to that restaurant I don't eat that kind of food like to have find some of that voice because the effed up resilience can often mean that you're so flexible that you don't make those needs and wants known so it's definitely an evolution but when we think about this is effed up resilience that so many survivors have there's in that in the midst of that is a real gift you can pull out and make your own because it's it's a wonderful wonderful quality to have especially as you get older but let's just get the effed up part out of it so you don't spend your life appeasing or don't run the risk of letting more narcissistic people into your life thanks again

Channel: DoctorRamani

Views: 204,035

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Id: zKTaufecrOw

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024