One of the hardest parts of recovering from a relationship with a covert narcissist is that for a long time, you weren't sure anything was wrong. There was no explosive rage, no obvious cruelty — just a slow, quiet erosion. A relationship where you somehow always ended up apologizing. Where your reality was subtly rewritten, your needs made to seem unreasonable, your sense of yourself gradually hollowed out.
And because it was subtle, you may have spent years — maybe still are — wondering if you're the problem. If you're too sensitive. If you imagined it.
You didn't.
WHAT COVERT NARCISSISTIC ABUSE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
Why it's so hard to name — and why that matters.
Covert narcissism doesn't announce itself. Unlike the loud, grandiose narcissism most people recognize, covert narcissism operates underneath the surface — through guilt, passive withdrawal, subtle manipulation, and a persistent, unspoken message that your needs, perceptions, and feelings are somehow always a little bit wrong.
The people who've experienced it often describe a particular kind of confusion: the relationship felt loving and suffocating at the same time. There were moments of real warmth, real connection — which made the gaslighting harder to see, and the leaving harder to trust.
You may recognize some of this:
Feeling responsible for managing the other person's emotions, almost constantly. Having your reality questioned so often that you stopped trusting your own perceptions. Walking on eggshells without being able to name exactly why. Feeling guilty for having needs. Leaving interactions feeling confused, diminished, or somehow at fault — even when you can't quite explain how it happened. A gradual shrinking of who you were before.
If any of that sounds familiar, you're not alone — and you're not crazy. What you're describing has a name, and it has a real impact on your nervous system, your sense of self, and your capacity to trust your own experience.
The harm was real. The confusion was by design. And the work of recovery is real too.
IF YOU'RE STILL IN IT
For those still trying to figure out what's happening — or how to leave safely.
If you're not sure whether what you're experiencing is abuse, that uncertainty is part of the pattern. Covert narcissistic relationships are specifically disorienting in this way — the confusion isn't incidental, it's how the dynamic maintains itself.
You don't have to have it all figured out before you reach out for support. In fact, having a safe, private space to begin sorting through your experience — without pressure, without your perceptions being questioned — is often the first step. Therapy can help you get grounded in your own reality again, which is what makes any next step possible.
If safety is a concern, we take that seriously and move at a pace that makes sense for your situation.
WHAT RECOVERY ACTUALLY INVOLVES
This isn't just about processing what happened. It's about rebuilding who you are.
Recovery from narcissistic abuse — especially covert narcissistic abuse — isn't a single conversation or a linear process. The damage tends to go deep: into your self-trust, your sense of reality, your capacity to feel safe in relationships, and the beliefs you now carry about your own worth and perceptions.
That's not a small thing to heal. And it can't be healed by thinking your way through it alone. The confusion, the self-doubt, the hypervigilance — these live in the body and in the system, not just in the story you tell about what happened.
Rebuilding your relationship with your own reality.
One of the most significant impacts of covert narcissistic abuse is what it does to your ability to trust yourself — your perceptions, your instincts, your sense of what's real. A large part of this work is the slow, careful process of returning to your own authority. Learning to trust what you feel, what you know, what your body has been telling you all along.
Working with the parts of you that adapted to survive it.
In order to function inside a covert narcissistic relationship, most people develop a set of internal adaptations — hypervigilance, people-pleasing, self-erasure, minimizing their own needs. These were protective strategies that made sense in context. The work isn't to shame those parts of you, but to help them update — to show them that the dynamic they were protecting you from no longer has to run the show.
Healing the younger wounds that made you vulnerable to it.
Narcissistic relationships rarely land on people at random. They tend to find the places where we learned, early on, that love comes with conditions — that our worth is something to be earned, that our needs are too much, that we need to make ourselves smaller to be accepted. Part of this work is going back to those earlier experiences and doing the repair there, so the old wound stops making decisions for the present.
Reconnecting to who you were before — and who you're becoming.
One of the quietest griefs of this kind of recovery is realizing how much of yourself you set aside. Interests, opinions, ways of being that got slowly edited out. Part of what becomes possible in this work is reclaiming those pieces — not returning to who you were before, exactly, but finding your way to someone truer and more solid than either version.
MY APPROACH
What we do together.
I work primarily with Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic therapy, and trauma-informed care — and this particular kind of relational trauma is an area where all three are essential.
IFS allows us to work directly with the parts of you shaped by this relationship — the hypervigilant part, the part that still doubts itself, the part that's grieving — without pathologizing them or pushing them away. Somatic work helps us track and release what the nervous system has been carrying, often for years. And a trauma-informed framework means we move at your pace, with your safety and your agency at the center of everything.
I also have a high tolerance for the complexity of this kind of recovery — including the grief of loving someone who caused real harm, the ambivalence of leaving, and the long tail of self-doubt that tends to follow. None of that will be rushed or minimized here.
My goal isn't to make you dependent on me to feel okay. It's to help you become so grounded in your own reality, your own perceptions, your own authority — that no one can talk you out of yourself again.
WHO THIS IS FOR
This work is a good fit if...
You've left a relationship that confused and diminished you, and you're trying to make sense of what happened — and who you are on the other side of it. Or you're still in it, still trying to get your bearings, and you need a safe place to do that.
You're not looking for someone to simply validate your pain, though your pain absolutely deserves space here. You're also looking to rebuild — your self-trust, your sense of reality, your capacity to know yourself and act from that knowing. That combination of honesty and forward momentum is exactly what this work is built for.