Mending my Broken Self after Narcissistic Abuse

This is the most terrifying thing I have ever gone public with, and this is a very raw and real post, but I will not linger on the dark stuff for more than a few paragraphs. I feel like I really need to get this darkness out into the open, but I will explain how the events served me in the long run. I think this blog post also puts my shop into context.

The Dark Stuff

In 2018 I had a complete psychological and mental breakdown. I lost the capacity to speak at normal speed or to formulate sentences and was having multiple panic attacks a day. I was put on sick leave from work for 6 months by my doctor and was advised by my Ph.D. supervisor to put my studies on hold. My self-worth had hit ground zero, my relationship with my body was completely broken and my desire to live was gone.

The reason?

I was in the aftermath of an extremely toxic relationship with a sex/porn addict who had continually told me how worthless and unloveable I was. He generally cited my face, my age, and my body shape as reasons for my lack of worth. I didn’t know about his illness and addiction until I was well into the relationship as he did an excellent job of concealing it with a very innocent but convincing false persona. It was once his secret life revealed itself that the daily verbal attacks on my appearance began.

The title of this blog is not used flippantly. I saw a trauma therapist after exiting the relationship just so that I might be able to start functioning again and to calm down the panic attacks. It was her who explained that what I had experienced was narcissistic abuse (I had not heard of it before then) and that I had acquired PTSD as a result. 

I have never had a very good relationship with my face and body, in fact, I’ve been extremely cruel towards myself over the years. The words this man spoke in some way mirrored the words I have spoken to myself throughout my life. This is why I stayed in the relationship – because what he said, on an unconscious level, fitted my own self-concept. From what I understand about abuse, this is generally how it works and why people don’t leave the minute it starts. Also, abuse sneaks in through the back door so you don’t really even notice it until it’s too late. Also for my part, I completely handed my power away to this man. On some level I participated in my own downfall.

It is difficult to explain why a relationship like this one had the effect on me that it did to anyone who hasn’t themselves experienced one like it, or to anyone who has a strong and healthy sense of self. But in simple terms, my ex found my absolutely most vulnerable insecurities and attacked them without remorse. As a result, I was dragged down to the bottom of my own personal hell… and it completely broke me.

Roll on 3 years (and quite a lot of therapy and shadow-work later) and I still have a lot of self-worth issues. I know that a lot of women battle with their self-image, this obviously isn’t new. We don’t exactly live in a society that’s particularly kind towards real women’s faces and bodies… And anyone who has experienced what I experienced in that relationship will know exactly how additionally difficult it is to rebuild one’s self-worth afterward. You are battling with what appears to be an external “truth” because the media also reinforces the words of your abuser.

But I am moving in the right direction.

The Healing 

When I had my breakdown, there were two things that remained intact: my relationship with nature and my relationship with creativity. Those things seem pretty solid, and those are the things that have helped me bring myself back from the precipice; they have brought light to my darkest moments and they always remind me that I do definitely want to be alive. 

The first big healing breakthrough came from swimming with enormous basking sharks in Northern Scotland a few months later in that same year. This had an extremely transformational effect on me. There was something about swimming in very deep water (which I am very afraid of) with enormous sharks (also very afraid of – even though basking sharks are harmless to humans they are still very big) and doing it voluntarily that shifted something inside me. It made me realise that if I can face these fears, I can also face the terrifying demons within my subconscious. I was so inspired by what I had experienced with the sharks that I went on to write a large orchestral piece of music. It was a piece of music that felt expressed both the depths of darkness I had experienced and also the transformation that the sharks helped bring about, and I had a very intense and overwhelming feeling of having touched a very deep part of my own soul, like my soul had pushed itself up through the depths of the trauma so that I knew it was still there, and at my essence I was not mortally wounded. After writing the final note of the piece I remember walking on a beach that evening and crying a lot. It was a strange and beautiful feeling. This was the first instance that nature and creativity helped me to bring about my own healing. 

The next instance happened last year when I went away on a little trip alone in my van to a beautiful place near Dolgellau. Just me, my van, my camera (and Agnes the ferret). I was really just starting to get to know my camera and to understand how photography worked at that point (I still have a long way to go). One morning at dawn there was a beautiful mist in the forest where I had chosen to sleep, so I went for a walk with my camera and found a little gorge with a small river running through it and decided to take some photos. The light from the rising sun was just starting to creep down through the canyon, hitting the walls and painting them and the trees a beautiful shade of gold. As I looked at this beautiful scene, I had a thought… how about if I put myself into the photos… I would have complete control over the pictures, and I could angle myself in whichever way felt most comfortable. And then I had another thought, how about if I do this naked. 

So I did!

I was really stunned and happy with what my camera captured. I got some very beautiful photos of the river, the sunlight, mother nature and me, just as I am. No post shoot-photoshop edits to remove lumps and bumps from my body. It was me, just as I am (I did edit the colours of the scene in Lightroom though because I love doing that!). 

That day in the gorge I discovered that entwining nature and creativity with the most wounded parts of myself (namely my broken attitude towards my body) started to heal something. It was like the light began to finally penetrate the darkness. The toxic reality I had been enduring, in regards to my self-image, began to crack and small shoots of flowers began to poke through. The unhealthy stuff was still there and is still there now, but the healthy part of me is gently dismantling the grip of those beliefs. The system of control and brainwashing used on us women to destroy our relationships with our bodies has lived on in me for far too long, but these experiences have started to break down the power it has over me.

Transmuting the Energy 

In October last year (2020) I started to put my shop together and discovered I could print my art – essentially my creativity – onto clothes, and in particular onto swimwear (my love for wild swimming made me particularly drawn to swimwear) and I realised I could, in essence, wear my own art. Something again shifted, and my long-lost self-esteem started to come back into view, this time with quite a clear sense of purpose. My creative self again gently took my wounded self by the hand, guiding it back out into the world.

Bit by bit I began to wear my own swimwear with a sense of pride, and with a real feeling of happiness when I put it on. I finally reached the day where I was able to put a photo of myself in a swimming costume and another of myself in a bikini on Facebook! This was a BIG deal. I have barely been able to put photos of me fully dressed on fb for many years due to the trauma I still live with each day, never mind in a bikini, but I did it:

The sense of fulfilment I get from creating and wearing clothes printed with my own artwork is intense and deeply heartfelt and actually very healing!  Also the fact that people want to buy and wear my art fills me with so much joy! The energy in all my paintings comes from my connection to the world and to the universe, so for it to be appreciated by others fills me with a very authentic sense of belonging and knowing my place in the world.

I feel like I have really started to break away from that toxic reality I previously bought into. In that old reality we are forced to buy the story that women are not beautiful unless they look a certain way (the reality my ex reinforced on a daily basis). But actually, it’s bulls**t.

I realised that the healing that needed to be done for me (and for others struggling with similar issues I believe too) was not for me to try and somehow fit into that unwholesome ideology by making myself look a certain way or by making myself thin enough that I might finally be loveable. The healing that needed to be done involved me completely turning my back on that cold, hard, narcissistic worldview and stopping feeding it energy with my own fears and self-hate. I choose to build my own reality; a reality that comes from a healthy place bursting with life-force energy and flourishing with creativity. 

My message to that old unhealthy mentality is: “I see you for what you are and I choose not to feed you or buy into your belief systems. You are no longer interesting to me and you cannot control me. You are abusive and empty and I won’t indulge in that emptiness anymore.”

I still have plenty of self-worth issues, and I am working on them, but I don’t see them as truths anymore.

It is difficult transmuting such ingrained self-attacking patterns. It’s almost like teaching myself to go against myself because I have been so identified with this way of thinking my entire life. I also think that these beliefs are not only in my mind but actually in the very cells of my body because women have been taught to think this way for hundreds of years. It’s generational and epigenetic trauma that I’m trying to dig out, so I can’t just reason with myself and get over it. But I know on a core level that the unwholesome way of thinking is not my truth (even if it seems that way sometimes). I actually have come to believe that it is our responsibility to remember (not learn) how to genuinely love ourselves and be our authentic selves in order to make the world a safer place for the younger generations.

“In a society that profits from your self-doubt, loving yourself is a rebellious act.”

Caroline Caldwel.

I have spoken out here about what I think about the old reality because I needed to express this stuff in order to name it and speak out about it rather than feeling like I have to hold onto it and carry a load of shame. I don’t want to carry this weight and burden anymore – it isn’t my shame. Also, I need to experience the catharsis that comes from owning one’s truth and from telling one’s own story – just how it is. I have been afraid to express this story. But that old system thrives on people holding the pain inside and staying silent. The old system isn’t interested in the suffering it causes, in fact, it wants to fully invalidate the suffering in order to dehumanise the victims even more, so I think it is important to speak out.

However, from now, rather than continually pushing against the old system, I want to help create the new one. I am committed to building the reality I would like to live in myself. I am building it on a foundation of genuinely heartfelt, creative and soul-driven energy. I want to live in a world bursting with colour, freedom and self-expression, absent of judgement and unrealistic ideals of people and I am taking steps to create that reality.

The mockups of the swimwear in my shop are modelled by an extremely thin model (probably hugely photoshopped too) as that is all that was supplied by the print provider… however… big changes are coming… lots of women in the wild swimming community in North Wales have offered themselves to model my swimwear and I have loads of photoshoots lined up over summer (I’ll be taking the photos). These are real women; women who have birthed babies, and who have really lived and experienced life; women of all age groups, shapes, and sizes. I will also be interviewing them too and writing blog posts about our relationships with our bodies. I aim to have the most wholesome and inclusive swimwear shop out there! I want to promote natural beauty and acceptance of ourselves and I also want to promote our relationship with and connection to nature as the photoshoots will all be taking place out in nature in variety of gorgeous locations. I am extremely excited! This is my contribution to making the world a more healthy and wholesome place.

I still have a very long way to go until I feel completely comfortable in my own skin, in fact I may never completely get there 100%, but I am working on it, chipping away at it, and putting that transmuted energy out into the world, with the help of nature and the magically transformative power of creativity.