A short talk by Ashok Gupta describing steps to heal emotional pain from relationships with narcissists. He emphasizes awareness and understanding of past dynamics, grieving and releasing anger/shame, inner-child reparenting through guided processes, and cultivating self-love and inner resilience so external relationships no longer must fill unmet childhood needs.
How do you deal? How do you heal, in fact, from the pain of relating to narcissists? You see, that pain was experienced at a certain moment in your life. If we hold on to the blame and the anger and the guilt and the shame, we stay stuck in the past in order to heal that. As we went through that process there. There's a process first of all of awareness and then understanding. And that's just that first step that we've taken today, awareness and understanding of some of these dynamics and these interplays that may have impacted on us. And that that next step is really how do we grieve for our past? Are we still holding onto sadness and grief about the childhood that we didn't have? Are we holding on to anger to one or more parents that can also be crippling to our emotional sense of well being? So is there any anger or hurt that we need to let go of? Once again, working with a coach or therapist, and once we've done that, once we've been able to release that anger or those pent up emotions, that pain that we experience, then we can begin to heal the inner child. What is it that that child within you needed that it wasn't able to get? What resources did it require? And now you literally. And we have an inner child process which is within the Gupta program where we get to actually speak to these parts of us which have become isolated and fearful and actually have a conversation to nurture and heal these wounded parts because they're there, they need reparenting. And through this inner child work, we have the ability to say I love me rather than I need you to love me or you didn't love me, I love me. And that is the only thing, in fact, that can fill that yawning gap within. And a lot of the time we look to our romantic relationships to fill the gap and our partners become a proxy for one or more of our parents. And initially there's all the euphoria of being in that romantic relationship, oh, wow, this person completes me. And in some senses, falsely, you feel they have completed you because they've given you permission to love yourself. Because finally this person understands me and loves me unconditionally. But then as time goes on, there is no way that person in your life can keep filling that yawning gap within you. And that's when the relationship suddenly doesn't meet your needs. And you think, does that person really love me? Are they really showing me love and attention? Because that inner wounded child can't possibly believe that someone else could show me this unconditional love. And so either we become an anxious attachment style in that relationship, or we become avoidant. So rather than looking from the outside for that healing, we then turn inwards and say, I heal me, I love me. That's far more important. And when we can feel that strong sense of inner resilience, the self love, I have all the love within me for myself, anything from the outside is a bonus, then we really feel so much stronger inside. We feel that connection to spirit as well. Because no one, the outside ever can make you feel loved. They simply give you permission to love yourself. So in that sense, all love might end up being self love.
