If you are the victim of narcissistic abuse by a parent, spouse, or someone who was in a position of authority or control, you have probably experienced pain paralysis when trying to recover. That pain is not caused by your recovery, it is caused by the historical wounds of your soul.

Here are some specific ways your history causes you pain when you’re in recovery.

• A wound may appear to be healed, but emotional scar tissue still remains. A bad scratch on the shin will heal. It will form a scab that will eventually fall off leaving a scar. That scar can leave the spot tender for years. If you press or hit the scarred area, you will feel some pain or at least discomfort. Emotional wounds work the same way. In recovery, when you start to delve into your psyche, you are likely to find some sore spots. The prick may cause discomfort or it may cause a sharp pain. The puncture would not hurt if there were no tender points.
• The tactics you used to protect an injury may have widened the area of ​​pain. Years of hearing that you are the problem in the family, that you are not good enough, that you are unlovable, or that some other humiliating condemnation will probably inflict a wound. However, the injury does not end with the wound. Humiliation for something that is part of your essence will make you protect that something. If you have a physical injury, you will change the way you move, sit, or lie down to protect the injury. That change in your movement or posture will probably cause some other part of your body to ache or ache. Like a game of whack-a-mole, the cure can cause just as much pain as the injury. Several years ago I broke a small bone in my elbow and had to wear a metal brace internally for a year. The bone healed very well, but because of wearing the brace for so long, my arm is weaker than it was before the injury and does not fully straighten. Both of these things can make my arm hurt. When the metal brace was put on and I hit it against something, I experienced pain like I had never experienced before. Once I was trying to open a sliding door that was stuck; when the door was suddenly opened, I hit the door frame with the part of my arm that contained the metal brace. It hurts so much I had to sit down. I’m wearing that vibrated metal brace. So if you’ve had an emotional injury, anything you’ve done to protect that injured area may also cause you pain. This is especially likely as you begin to peel back the layers of abuse as you go through recovery.
• Abuse can cause you to stop using an aspect of your personality. Then, when you work to recover, wearing that skin can feel awkward, abnormal, or even dangerous; it can be uncomfortable or painful. In this situation, recovery is a lot like physical therapy. When your knee has been replaced or a limb has been broken or even after you’ve had a heart attack, recovery involves rehabilitation. Rehab can be very painful. Again I use my broken elbow as an example. Once the brace was on my arm and the incision healed properly, I began physical therapy. It was definitely a case of “no pain, no gain.” For six weeks my arm had been in a sling and practically immobile. So stretching it out and regaining strength and flexibility felt like torture. The pain of physiotherapy makes many people look for excuses not to do it and even makes some give up. Recovery from abuse, particularly narcissistic abuse, involves reactivating and strengthening aspects of the personality that have been dormant, usually for a long time. The story of not using the skin (often multiple skins) triggers fear and pain.

Both living with and recovering from narcissistic abuse involve trade-offs. While you live in it, you endure the abuse and protect yourself or feel the sting of the narcissist’s poison. While in recovery, do you endure the pain of the story brought to the surface by your therapy and self-employment, or do you live with the despondency and isolated emptiness you built up during the abuse. The biggest difference, for me, is that pain during abuse is followed by depression and sadness; while the pain felt during recovery is followed by victory and peace.

As always, I encourage everyone who has suffered narcissistic abuse to write. Writing is the mind’s natural way of dealing with an emotional problem and therefore aids in recovery. It doesn’t matter what you write. I write fictional tales of narcissistic abuse and articles like this one. You can write poetry, letters, lists, stories, diaries, etc. You can share your writing with safe and respectful people or you can hide it under your mattress. (All experts say don’t share them with the narcissistic abuser because it will never convince him that he is to blame for anything and will probably goad him to new heights of abuse.) Writing will improve and speed your recovery because the act of writing takes the pain out of your soul and puts it into solid form, instead of the murky mess that clouds your brain. Some people even burn, shred or tear up their writing as a symbolic destruction of the pain caused by the abuse.

Let me know how you use writing to deal with pain during recovery.