What does counselling look like?

Narcissistic abuse counselling is not about “fixing” you or teaching you to tolerate difficult relationships better.

It is a structured recovery process designed to address what happens when manipulation, gaslighting, and emotional control destabilize your sense of self, boundaries, and nervous system.

Counselling can help you:

• Discern whether or not your relationship is worth saving.
• Reconstruct what actually happened in the relationship without minimising or self-blame.
• Reduce chronic self-doubt, rumination, and hyper-vigilance.
• Understand trauma bonding and why leaving or detaching feels so difficult.
• Stabilise your nervous system after prolonged emotional stress.
• Rebuild boundaries, identity, and decision-making confidence.
• Learn how to recognise unsafe relational patterns before you are pulled into them again.

This is not insight for insight’s sake. It is recovery that restores clarity, agency, and self-trust.

The 3 Stages of Narcissistic Abuse Recovery

Stage 1 – Restoring Reality and Self-Trust

We begin by slowing things down and making sense of what you have been living through—especially if you feel confused, emotionally spun around, or unsure what to trust inside yourself.

This includes identifying patterns such as:

• gaslighting and reality distortion
• emotional role reversal
• chronic invalidation
• trauma bonding patterns

The goal of this stage is to help you restore a grounded, accurate understanding of what occurred—so your internal sense of reality can stabilise again as you work through the emotional and psychological damage left behind.

Stage 2 – Nervous System and Identity Stabilisation

After prolonged narcissistic abuse, it is common to feel emotionally flooded, exhausted, on edge, or disconnected from yourself. Your nervous system has been doing its best to survive—and it can take time to settle again.

In this stage, we work to:

• reduce hyper-arousal and emotional exhaustion
• address chronic anxiety, shutdown, or emotional numbing
• understand why self-doubt becomes “sticky” and hard to turn off
• separate your authentic self from survival adaptations

This is often where clients begin to feel internally solid again—less reactive, clearer, and more able to trust their own judgement.

Stage 3 – Rebuilding Boundaries, Agency, and Relational Safety

Recovery is not complete until you can reliably protect your energy, your boundaries, and your sense of self—especially when someone applies pressure, guilt, charm, or intimidation.

This stage focuses on:

• rebuilding a clear and stable sense of self
• learning how healthy power, reciprocity, and responsibility actually function
• developing boundaries that hold under pressure
• preventing re-entanglement with similar dynamics

This is not about becoming closed or hardened. It is about learning how to stay open-hearted while no longer overriding your own signals, boundaries, or reality in order to keep a relationship alive.

You are the centre of the counselling process

If you have spent a long time adapting, holding things together, or putting your own needs aside, taking time for yourself can feel unfamiliar—or even uncomfortable.

Many people who seek counselling are capable, thoughtful, and highly self-reliant. They are not looking for someone to “fix” them. They are looking for a place where they can slow down, make sense of what they have been living through, and reconnect with themselves without being judged or rushed.

You do not come to counselling because you are weak. You come because something important in you knows that continuing the same way is no longer sustainable.

This work is about helping you regain clarity, emotional steadiness, and a sense of agency—so you can make decisions from a place that feels grounded and self-respecting, rather than reactive or depleted.

If you are ready to begin rebuilding from a place of clarity rather than confusion, support is available.