If you think narcissist abuse starts and ends with the relationship solely, then you’re completely mistaken.
Unfortunately, there are repercussions to knowing and spending so much time with a narcissist, and those repercussions all come back onto you.
With mental illness being a very common consequence to sharing your life with a person who displays narcissistic tendencies, it’s no wonder you can be left feeling like a completely different person.
And it’s no joke. In fact, here are 8 mental illnesses caused by narcissists.
#1 C-PTSD
C-PTSD – or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – occurs after a person’s trauma is not made up by one big, traumatic event, but rather a series (sometimes years) of trauma that chips away at their identity and person as a whole.
Imagine you’ve got this whole plate of food; a mountain of it. PTSD would be like somebody coming along and taking all the food off your plate in one go.
C-PTSD works where a person or people take one small thing at a time. At first, you don’t notice, until you realize the plate is half empty and you trusted them to not touch any of it.
Symptoms can run in the same way. Flashbacks, reliving the events in your mind (so your body feels as though it’s happening all over again), avoidance, and that constant feeling of being on edge.
These are just a few symptoms, but ultimately, the narcissist will make you believe the trauma they caused has a constant presence in your mind and body.
It’s like you want to escape, but you can’t.
I’m happy to say that there’s a wide range of therapeutic tools out there you can use to gain control of this disorder.
#2 Depression
There are still people out there who believe depression is just when you feel sad, but it goes so much further than that.
Depression is a feeling of hopelessness, where much time is spent feeling nothing at all.
If you’ve spent prolonged periods of time with a narcissist, it’s no wonder you’ll feel that way.
Where hope once lived, now lives a person who knows through their own lived experience that nothing changes, and hope is futile.
Depression will leave a mark on you, but there are ways you can offer yourself the inner peace you truly deserve.
Acknowledging how you feel is a big part of that battle, and telling yourself that you were not to blame.
Unfortunately, depression is what narcissists leave with a lot of their victims. Years of abuse will do that to anybody.
#3 Anxiety
When you live with somebody whose moods you can never predict, and where you constantly have to live on the edge in case it all kicks off, it’s no wonder you have anxiety.
Even as a child, it’s possible to have feelings of worry that you can’t explain.
Those knots in your tummy, or the uncertainty of what’s to come will often lead you down the avenue of anxiety, and it quickly becomes an illness you live with.
Anxiety can spiral off into so many different forms, from social anxiety, to generalized anxiety, to health anxiety, to even forms of OCD and agoraphobia.
If you were to travel back along the vine line of the illness, you’ll reach the roots and find a great big picture of the narcissist next to them.
The key with anxiety is to not make it bigger than you, which is equally as hard when you feel so small from narcissistic abuse.
#4 Dissociation
Disconnecting from your thoughts, feelings, opinions and sense of identity is not to be underrated, and is a consequence of experiencing narcissistic abuse. Even your memories can be affected.
Ranging in severeness, dissociation will affect how each day pans out for you.
You can feel numb in stressful situations. You might not remember aspects of a drive you went on. You might space out while somebody is talking. Then it can even stem further:
Depersonalization. Feeling detached from yourself, like you’re observing your life from outside your body somehow.
Derealization. You can feel as though the world around you isn’t real or is dreamlike.
Dissociative Amnesia. You may have an inability to recall important personal information.
Dissacisitoon is a coping mechanism. If you can’t immediately process something overwhelming, it will kick in.
#5 Low self-esteem
Nobody is born with low self-esteem. If you have a negative or critical opinion of yourself, these thoughts will stem from having it, and it can make you feel unworthy of something, inadequate or even unlovable.
Even without solid proof, a person with low self-esteem can create that proof within them, making excuses as to why they are not good enough.
This type of mental illness is programmed into you by the narcissist, who uses criticism as a tool to chip away at who you are.
Look out for:
Constant self-criticism (“I’m not good at anything”)
Fear of failure or rejection
Difficulty accepting compliments
People-pleasing or trouble setting boundaries
Comparing yourself negatively to others
Avoiding challenges due to fear of not being capable
Believe it or not, you are good enough.
#6 Hypervigilance
Do you ever feel like:
You can never fully relax?
You’re easily startled or jumpy?
You’re constantly scanning your environment for threats?
You have trouble sleeping or concentrating?
You feel emotionally overwhelmed or irritable?
You overreact to minor changes or cues?
You struggle with trusting others?
You can tick the hypervigilance box if those questions apply to you, and you have the narcissist to blame for it all.
Nobody should be constantly worried or feel like they are in a state of heightened alert.
Scanning for danger isn’t normal, especially when there’s no actual threat.
#7 Emotional dysregulation
Being emotionally dysregulated comes from years of being around a narcissist.
It can become difficult to manage your emotional responses, or even control them.
You might struggle to calm down, or feel easily overwhelmed. There’s even a part of emotional dysregulation that involves reacting intensely to situations that you could control.
Victims admit they struggle to manage their emotions, flitting from calm to angry quickly, or finding it difficult to pinpoint or express how they’re feeling.
This is largely due to having their emotions suppressed all the time with the narcissist.
Whether that be via gaslighting or being shut down all the years entangled with toxic characters; there will be a consequence to that kind of treatment.
#8 Insomnia
Insomnia is a sleep disorder where a person has trouble either falling asleep, or staying asleep.
Sometimes it can be that they wake up too early and cannot get back to sleep, even when they have the chance to rest.
Think about what kind of person the narcissist is, and how much you have to keep on high alert in your day-to-day life.
It’s no wonder that when you get the chance to rest and sleep, recharging your body and mind, you are unable to do that.
Experiencing insomnia can lead to other mental health conditions such as heightened depression or anxiety, so you can see how they intertwine easily and create even bigger problems for victims of narcissistic abuse.
