Exploring the intersection of narcissistic abuse and body grief

It’s official! I’ve completed Dr. Ramani’s training program and am now a Certified Narcissistic Abuse Treatment Clinician. As a part of our licensure as social workers, we’re required to get a certain amount of CE’s (continued education) credits per year to remain active and expand our knowledge base in order to deliver high-quality care to patients. Our field advances as new science is discovered and theories developed, and as a therapist wholeheartedly dedicated to my client’s growth and wellbeing, staying stuck in the past is simply not an option. Plus, I happen to love learning! So when I learned of Dr. Ramani’s program, it was an undertaking I was excited to embark upon, as I think it can help people on the interpersonal level, and also help folks make sense of current events as they play out in our administration–take a look at my video chatting more about that!

How does a body grief therapist get interested in narcissistic abuse you may ask? Let’s dig into it! 

Narcissistic abuse is not only emotionally devastating, it is reality‑distorting, body‑disrupting, and often profoundly misunderstood. In order to responsibly work with clients experiencing it, clinicians must have an understanding of how power, manipulation, and chronic invalidation reshape both the mind and the body. 

Narcissistic abuse undermines reality and relies on you overriding your intuition in favor of the narcissist’s deceptive perspective. Narcissism requires you to forgo your connection to yourself, and ultimately opt to trust THEIR version of reality over objective truth. 

One of the defining features of narcissistic abuse is that it trains a person to question everything, so that the narcissist has full control. This happens in all sorts of ways, including:

• Gaslighting
• Chronic contradiction or denial
• Minimization of harm
• Rewriting history
• Blame‑shifting

Survivors are repeatedly pulled away from their own instincts and emotional signals. This erosion of self‑trust is a crucial component of narcissistic abuse, as narcissistic dynamics depend on destabilizing another person’s internal compass. When your sense of reality feels unreliable, you are more likely to defer, comply, doubt your boundaries, or stay silent–even when things feel deeply wrong. 

The Enteric Nervous System and Your Embodiment

I’ve talked about the enteric nervous system (take a quick read of that blog post here!), but as a quick refresher, your gut has an entire ecosystem that often processes information first before it reaches your brain. It’s where we get phrases like “gut instinct” from–our bodies are constantly trying to communicate to us when things feel right or wrong. You stand to benefit so much from being in tune with yourself (embodied!), and a narcissist stands to benefit from you being in tune with them (disembodied/disconnected from yourself). 

The connection I make between narcissistic abuse and body grief is complicated, but in an effort to distill it into something more succinct, I think if we can get you reconnected with yourself, you have a fighting chance at surviving narcissistic abuse. Your body is a site of truth–it carries you through your life, and it is always doing the best that it can for you. It’s time to trust yourself. 

My goal with Grief Into Gold has always been in your embodiment and radical acceptance of yourself, and I see this new certification as a Narcissistic Abuse Treatment Clinician as a support in that endeavor. I’m so excited to share more about this, so stay tuned!