The 5 Stages of Grief are Essential When Healing from Narcissist Abuse

Chris Freyler
4 min readNov 17, 2021

Nothing is more complicated than grieving someone still alive.

Photo by Alyssa Stevenson on Unsplash

Since I started writing about Narcissistic Abuse about 1.5 years ago, I still feel stuck. I’m stuck in the cognitive dissonance to an extent but still, trauma bonded, but I never thought about the grieving process.

So, I looked it up. There are five states: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Reading this threw me in a tailspin. It’s a hot god damn mess! While I am slowly seeing them for who they are, I have bouts of anger that can be nothing more described than black and white thinking; it’s frustrating.

I spoke to a friend the other night; she is an aware Borderline with Antisocial Personality Personality Traits(ASPD). She has been in therapy for years. It was fascinating to me how she said she adjust to who she is talking to because she doesn’t have empathy or guilt. But with therapy she is learning how to understand others circumstances and her behaviors.

We talked for 5 hours! It opened my eyes to a whole new world and understanding when she told me how I was “splitting” on our phone call. Not in the personality disorder sense, but in a way I’m drained emotionally. It was maddening that I would go from anger to guilt, to depression and every emotion under the sun…

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Chris Freyler

Mistake Maker Extraordinaire .Writing from a place I don’t understand at times. I write to help myself, in return hope it helps you. Just another Quora guy.