Welcome to the narcissistic abuse recovery podcast. I'm Caroline Stawson and I'll be sharing with you

awareness, understanding and education about the devastating effects of narcissistic abuse to help you thrive.

I want you to know that I've been exactly where you are now and I believe you.

And this show is all about taking you from trauma to transformation.

So the question is, can you ever survive narcissistic abuse?

Because I've had a guest right now, you might well be thinking,

I don't know how the hell I'm going to get out of this. It feels like you are in this long,

dark tunnel. There's no light at the end of it and it can feel really dark and lonely.

And you can often have lots of feelings of anger, guilt, shame, and feeling like you have no energy.

And the reason I know this is because I have been exactly there. And I certainly know when I was

healing from narcissistic abuse, I felt in a very dark and lonely and low place. In fact,

I've always said if it wasn't for my two children, I probably wouldn't be

sat here doing this episode right now because I felt that low. I felt like I didn't know what to do

or anything because I had literally had about 18 months of a huge amount of trauma all in close

proximity. So my mum had passed away very suddenly and she was my rock. She was

actually codependent herself, which obviously really impacted my co-dependency, factored in with

my own emotional father. And then for me, my marriage broke down. I knew I was in over 70,000

pounds worth of debt. I lost my family home. I was diagnosed with

complex PTSD. I'd got depression, anxiety. I was self-harming. I was using the toothpaste that I had

to literally gout out the tops of my thighs to make them bleed. Because if I could focus on the pain

of that, it meant I could dial down the volume of pain

that I was feeling because of the narcissistic abuse. So for me, thinking about surviving all of this,

...