Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Therapy
Have you survived narcissistic abuse?
What this is…
Narcissistic abuse is one of the most disorienting forms of relational harm. It systematically erodes your ability to trust your own perception. Gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, idealization followed by devaluation, the slow dismantling of your sense of reality are not accidents. They are the predictable dynamics of a relationship with someone who lacks the capacity for genuine empathy or mutuality. And they leave a particular kind of damage: a profound uncertainty about what is real, what you deserve, and who you are outside of that relationship.
Recovery from narcissistic abuse is not simply about leaving, or about understanding what happened intellectually. Many people can name the patterns clearly and still feel trapped — in the relationship, in the aftermath, or in versions of the same dynamic that keep recurring. Therapy is a place to go deeper than the diagnostic label, into the personal history that made this particular wound so effective, and the work of rebuilding a self that belongs to you.
Who this is for…
You might be in the right place if:
You've left a relationship — romantic, familial, or professional — with someone who was controlling, manipulative, or emotionally abusive, and you're still not okay
You find yourself doubting your own memory, your own perceptions, your own account of what happened
You walked away from the relationship but part of you is still trying to make sense of it, still replaying conversations, still looking for the moment it went wrong
You feel responsible for what happened — or you oscillate between knowing it wasn't your fault and feeling like it must have been
You grew up with a narcissistic parent and you're only now beginning to understand how that shaped you — your self-worth, your relationship patterns, your tolerance for behavior that shouldn't have been tolerable
You keep finding yourself in similar dynamics and you want to understand why, not just escape the current one
The relationship is over but the internal critic it installed isn't — you hear their voice more than your own
You're grieving someone who hurt you, and the grief is tangled with relief, shame, rage, and a love you can't explain
What we work on…
Narcissistic abuse leaves two distinct kinds of damage that need to be addressed separately. The first is the direct harm — the specific experiences of manipulation, devaluation, and reality distortion that need to be named, validated, and processed. The second, and often more enduring, is what the relationship revealed or reopened: the early wounds, the attachment patterns, the internalized beliefs about your own worth that made you vulnerable to this dynamic in the first place — and that will quietly organize your next relationship if they go unexamined.
Using a psychodynamic approach, we work on both levels. We look at what happened — carefully, without minimizing — and we look at the deeper story underneath it: where your sense of self was already shaky before this relationship found it, what you were looking for, what it cost you to stay, and what it's costing you now to rebuild. This isn't about blame. People with secure self-worth and solid early attachment histories can end up in abusive relationships too. But understanding your own history gives you something the relationship tried to take away — a clear, grounded sense of who you are and what you will and won't accept.
Where it's useful, I draw on EMDR to work with the body-level material that often accompanies this kind of relational trauma — the hypervigilance, the intrusive memories, the nervous system responses that linger long after the relationship has ended.
How to get started…
Working together starts with a complimentary consultation call that lasts about fifteen minutes. It helps me to hear briefly what’s bringing you into therapy at this time. I can then answer any questions you may have and share more about how I work. From there you might decide to schedule a session. The best way to tell if we are a fit is to have a session or few. My wish is for you to find the best therapist for your needs, whether that’s me or someone else and we can discover that together by beginning the process and seeing what unfolds.