The Fact That Narcissistic Abuse Couldn’t Turn You Evil is Insane
You became more careful. You became harder to fool. You became less willing to tolerate disrespect. You stopped giving everyone unlimited access to you. You learned that forgiveness doesn’t mean reopening the door. Compassion doesn’t mean volunteering to be abused again. And understanding someone’s wounds doesn’t make you responsible for surviving what those wounds make them do to you.
But underneath all of that, something in you remained intact. You still care when someone is hurting. You still feel guilty when you accidentally hurt someone. You still think about the impact of your words every day. You still apologize when you’re wrong. You still try not to make another person feel the way someone once made you feel.
Narcissistic abuse doesn’t just hurt you—it teaches terrible lessons about power. It shows you how easy it is to confuse someone. How effective silence can be as punishment. How insecurity can be created on purpose. How affection can be withheld until a person starts begging for scraps. How someone’s vulnerabilities can be remembered and later used against them.
You’ve seen the machinery up close. You know where people are soft because someone spent years discovering yours. You know how devastating certain words can be because you’ve had those words used on you at the exact moment they would hurt most. You could have taken everything you learned through suffering and used it to hurt other people—but you didn’t. That’s the part people underestimate.
Being a good person after a protected life is one thing. Remaining decent after someone repeatedly proves that decency can be exploited is something else. You had reasons to become selfish. Reasons to stop trusting. Reasons to start using people before they could use you. Reasons to become emotionally unavailable and call it strength. Reasons to make the next person pay for what the last one did.
But somewhere along the way, you decided—subconsciously or consciously—that what happened to you would change your boundaries without changing your character.
Continue reading on the next page
Sharing is caring!
