Now, you may ask, does my childhood trauma play a role in any of this? Your childhood trauma is not the primary reason you attract narcissists, as they put it. They activate your childhood traumas during devaluation, and your stay in the relationship is prolonged as a consequence. Whether it was a narcissistic parent, a sibling, or another dominant figure in your life, you adapted. Your brain wired itself for survival, and for many of us, that meant developing the fawning response, which is popularly known as people pleasing or codependency.
Fawning is not kindness, nor is it weakness. It is a survival mechanism—your nervous system’s way of ensuring safety in an environment where love was conditional, unpredictable, or totally absent. You learned that in order to avoid conflict, neglect, or outright abuse, you had to anticipate the needs of others, shrink yourself, or become whatever was required to keep the peace.
When a narcissist enters your life in adulthood, your brain perceives some kind of familiarity; it recognizes the patterns and mistakes. You feel trapped because, in your earliest experiences, love and pain were intertwined. So, you revert to the behaviors that once saved you: fawning, placating, over-explaining, walking on eggshells, losing yourself in their needs, and so forth. Your childhood responses are not flaws; they are proof of your resilience—evidence of your ability to survive in the face of psychological warfare. But what once protected you now keeps you trapped.
That’s the difference. The fawning response convinces you that if you just love them enough, understand them deeply enough, and meet their impossible demands, you will finally be safe. But that safety never comes because, with a narcissist, there is no safety—only a cycle of depletion and destruction. It’s not just fawning that I’m talking about; other trauma responses, such as freezing (feeling paralyzed in their presence), fighting (trying to confront them but ultimately being crushed by their relentless manipulation), and flight (escaping but feeling magnetically pulled back), all come into play. Your nervous system oscillates between these states, trying to find a way to exist in their chaos without losing yourself entirely.
But the more you fight for their love, the more you lose the battle for your own soul.
Spiritual Perspective on Healing
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