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Narcissistic relationship stories with positive outcomes can provide hope for those struggling with the pain of emotional abuse. If you have identified this complex, dysfunctional relationship dynamic in your life, please know that you’re not alone. Many before you have walked the same path. Even if you aren’t entirely sure what the problem is, if any of the details in this post resonate with you, it’s time for change.

At PIVOT, we have helped thousands of people extricate themselves from painful, complicated relationships. Our process – proven time and again – empowers each person to show up with their unique story and shape a trajectory toward healthier, happier relationships. 

Just like the heroes in our narcissistic relationship stories below, you can successfully rewrite the ending of your story. With PIVOT, you can be confident that you’re on the right path to healing.  

Surviving a Narcissistic Relationship

Kris’s Story

I met Marc at a company-wide workshop. At the end of the day, he sat at the bar’s piano and intrigued me with his singing.  Afterward, he caught my eye and walked over to ask if he could buy me a drink; I was hooked.

After a whirlwind year of weekend trips and expensive gifts, we got engaged. Marc was a few years older than me, and often made suggestions about my clothes and hairstyle. I was flattered that he cared so much and concluded that he had my best interests at heart. Whenever we disagreed, I usually acquiesced to his way of thinking. Though previously divorced, he told me I was nothing like his ex-wife. He made me feel valued and loved.

Our wedding and honeymoon were extravagant, romantic affairs. Soon after, however, things began to change. We started arguing more frequently, and I often felt I was to blame. During disagreements, Marc would lecture me in a condescending tone until I was convinced that I‘d been wrong all along. With each emotional outburst, I wondered what I’d done to provoke him and then vowed to try harder.

By our first anniversary, I was a shell of my former self. I’d stopped hanging out with friends because I didn’t want to set him off. I even avoided seeing my family to prevent the inevitable blow-up.  Marc’s friends and family seemed to hold me at arm’s length – I wondered what he had told them about me. I felt totally dependent on him, and the future seemed limited. What had become of my life?

Feeling a need to escape, I left while Marc was at work and took refuge with my parents. I took a few days to reset and reflect, then turned to the internet to search for help. That’s where I found PIVOT. 

When I shared my story with Kayla, she didn’t flinch. In fact, she seemed to understand exactly what I was going through. She suggested that I attend a narcissistic abuse retreat, which turned out to be a real turning point in my recovery. 

At the retreat, I found a supportive community and a PIVOT coach who showed me how to recognize the manipulative tactics Marc had used with me. As I healed, I also learned to communicate my needs more effectively. Soon, I felt like my old self again. 

Now, I’m fortified with the appropriate tools to better navigate my future relationships. PIVOT helped me rediscover my true self, so that I can look forward to healthier, more resilient personal connections.

Milo’s Story

I dated Kendall for two years before we tied the knot. I didn’t take any of the early warning signs seriously – I was too enamored. Sure, she liked to have things her way. Her older brothers hinted that as the only girl and youngest child, her family had always indulged her because she was “special.”

For someone who’d received so much love and attention as a child, she wasn’t very big on empathy. Her apologies usually sounded like, “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way!” Still, we were mostly happy as long as things were going well. 

It was during times of stress that Kendall became hard to live with. She demanded constant attention and became extremely controlling. When we argued, she twisted my words around and projected her behaviors onto me. The result was pretty destabilizing. I almost started believing that I was the one being unreasonable.

A friend at work told me about his great success with the PIVOT Process. I investigated online and learned about their couples’ intensive that could help me and Kendall make some critical changes in our relationship. I approached her at the right time, and she agreed to go.

As we worked through the process with our individual coaches, we learned a lot about ourselves and how our childhood relationships influenced our marriage. After Kendall and I finally came together with our advocates, our conversations were incredibly productive.

We learned to recognize how we were triggering negative emotions in each other and how to establish healthy boundaries. PIVOT gave us the tools to replace old, dysfunctional communication methods that paralyzed us in cycles of conflict. Now when we disagree, we use effective new strategies to diffuse the conflict peacefully. We’ve learned to align our thoughts and emotions with our actions, and our relationship is now on solid ground.

What You Can Learn from Narcissistic Relationship Stories

If you believe you’re in a narcissistic relationship or you see yourself in these stories, here’s an important takeaway: healing is not only possible, it’s within reach. Although it’s hard to effect lasting behavioral change by yourself, PIVOT is here to help.

PIVOT relationship coaches specialize in recognizing challenging interpersonal dynamics and helping people achieve relational freedom. We support you in the following skills:

• Learning to recognize manipulation techniques
• Changing repetitive behavioral patterns
• Setting and maintaining healthy boundaries
• Using the actionable tools from the PIVOT Process in your relationships

Like the survivors in these stories, you can reclaim a stronger, healthier, and more resilient you.

Do You Ever Fully Recover from Narcissistic Abuse?

Living with a narcissistic partner can strip away your self-confidence and damage your self-esteem. After being conditioned to doubt themselves in favor of their partner’s needs and demands, one of the most significant difficulties survivors of narcissistic abuse face is having healthy relationships in the future.  For this reason – and to ensure that you aren’t destined to repeat this excruciating experience – it’s essential to analyze how you fell into this trap.

A PIVOT relationship coach is your best resource for achieving this insight. We’ll help you examine your own developmental psychology and identify your attachment styles.  In addition, we’ll help you reconnect with your goals and provide the tools to help you reach them. Seeking help is your first step on the path to rewriting the ending of your narcissistic relationship story.

Transform Your Relationships With PIVOT  

If you hear echoes of your own experience in these narcissistic relationship stories, PIVOT can help. We offer expert relationship coaching for individuals, couples, and families who struggle with this challenging relationship dynamic. If you are anxious to see rapid behavioral change, intensives and retreats provide immersive, quick-start experiences. Reach out today to begin your journey to a healthier, happier life. Call us at 1-855-452-0707.

Many people are confused by the label of love addiction.  Love addiction describes a deep, unmet longing that drives people to desire a relationship to make the pain go away. In this respect, love addiction is similar to other addictions since it involves obsession, cravings, and withdrawal.

Despite its recognition in popular and some academic circles, love addiction is not formally recognized as a clinical diagnosis in major diagnostic manuals like the DSM-5. Some experts argue that the term “addiction” may be problematic due to its association with substance use disorders and the potential for stigmatization. Instead, terms like emotional reliance or affective dependence are sometimes preferred to describe the obsessive and compulsive behaviors associated with love addiction.
If you are feeling shame or uncertainty because you fear this label increasingly describes you, you aren’t alone, and you aren’t stuck. With the right support, it is absolutely possible to heal and create healthier connections. We hope these successful love addiction recovery stories will inspire you to take the first step toward happier relationships.

Why Am I Like This? The Love Addiction Recovery Story of PIVOT’s Founder Lori Jean Glass

I was thirty-seven years old and in a therapist’s office, brokenhearted over another romantic relationship that had fallen apart.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to go on.

I was labeled a love addict and told that I was incapable of giving or receiving love. My behavior towards love interests was controlling, and my expectations were unrealistic. I had to accept that love addiction was the thing that had derailed me.

That diagnosis didn’t make sense to me, however. My relationships didn’t feel loving; what I felt was a constant and intense longing to be loved. How could I be addicted to something I was so unfamiliar with?

In fact, I was starving for romantic love… hoping it would finally give me that sense of self-worth and belonging that my heart was hurting for. It had been a longing for…. as long as I could remember. As an adult, I thought that a romantic partner or a love interest might heal the breach in my low self-esteem, although it never quite worked out. But I kept trying.. and trying… and trying. This translated to me becoming a “stage five cling-on.” I couldn’t be alone and always had to be in a relationship.

So, when I was told I had love addiction, it confused me because the “cure” I was given was to not draw attention to myself, stay out of relationships for one year, and attend a “love addicts” group to listen to others share their stories of relationship addiction.

This prescription seemed totally counterintuitive and left me feeling even more abandoned and alone. What I always wanted was to love and to be loved, and now I couldn’t ever have that… because I was addicted to love. Would I have to stay away from love like any other addict would from any other addictive substances? The idea of addiction to love made me feel like I didn’t deserve to be loved. I couldn’t be trusted with love. Love wasn’t safe for me.

As a behavioral and mental health professional, I set out to find answers that made sense. I focused the energy of my early career on the meaning and treatment of love addiction… I worked hard to understand it. After extensive research on the topic, taking a deeper look at the effects of unhealthy attachment, and working alongside my gifted staff of therapists and healers at PIVOT, I came to understand an important reality. Love itself is not addictive. This truth changed everything.

Through sustained and concentrated effort, I learned how to be responsible for my emotions and stand in relational alignment. I created this term to describe a state where your mind thinks in alignment with how your heart feels, and you have the courage to take healthy action with your feet. It allows you to achieve a verticality that is honest, ethical, and authentic to who you are.

Once I found the inner strength to turn my life around, I developed and extensively tested the PIVOT Process, an evidence-based approach to achieving relational freedom. In the years since then, I have helped many, many people write their own love addiction recovery stories. It’s a journey that requires courage, determination, and a belief in your own worth.

Learning to Love Myself: Larissa’s Love Addiction Recovery Story

I truly thought that one person was going to change the way I felt about myself and my life. 

In an interview with my wedding videographer, I openly stated that my husband was “my adonis” and “my knight in shining armor.” Yes, it is on record. I truly believed that he would be the one person who could save me. Poor guy. He never stood a chance at fulfilling my fantasy. 

Sadly, he wasn’t the first to experience this intense passion. I would consistently and anxiously seek emotional validation from every guy who came into my life. I was overly dependent on them and felt like I needed to be with them all the time. I needed them more than I needed myself. My world got very small, and their approval of me equaled my self-worth. That’s a tough way to live, especially because in most of my relationships before I got married, I experienced some form of emotional, mental, or physical abuse. 

Why did I have to lose myself to gain a false sense of self-worth? Why did I have to compromise my mental and physical well-being to get an ounce of their attention? Why was I waiting for their phone calls or making late-night drives by their house to spy on them? Who goes to someone’s house at two in the morning to enter a dark bedroom just to see if that person is asleep in their bed and not with someone else? 

Even when they told me they loved me, it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. I was never enough. That feeling stayed with me into my marriage and family life and created a lot of conflict, drama, and trauma. My marriage was filled with more demands on my partner and less love and connection. I was even addicted to the need to be loved by my children. I was laced with depression, anxiety, and, at times, suicidal ideation. 

It was the suicidal ideation that brought me to my knees and forced me to get help. In the depths of my despair, I realized that I didn’t know what true love really was. How can the pursuit of love be so damaging? Why did love hurt so much? I was in so much pain, and I knew that I needed help. I needed to understand this obsession with the idea of love and why I couldn’t ever really feel it.

I found a wonderful therapist who gave me so much strength and hope, but that feeling of “not being loved” never went away.  It took another 10 years before I was introduced to the work of PIVOT. 

 When I found PIVOT, I found the answer. I had been seeking a fantasy of love. Coming from a childhood of confusion, attachment issues, emotional neglect, and having had several sexual abuse experiences, I developed a hard-core belief system about love. Someone who loves you will take away the pain. Love will take away the pain of feeling like something is wrong with me, that I don’t matter, that I am not enough and that I am very much alone. 

The euphoria of meeting someone new and believing in the fantasy of marriage did that. It took away the pain momentarily. It’s much easier to focus on someone else than it is to focus on oneself. That stops working. Trust me. I was conditioned to believe that someone else’s love was ALL I ever needed. Their love wasn’t enough! His love wasn’t enough! Gaining an understanding of the impact of those messages on me, of being less than, not mattering, not being good enough, feeling alone, and how love is supposed to fix you, was the beginning of my journey. 

Having the ability to repair those thoughts and emotions allowed me more space to heal. Healing is allowing me to learn more about my beautifully unique self. This internal shift I learned from PIVOT is teaching me what love really is. 

Love is more than just a feeling. It’s the action of trust, compassion, and positive regard. The reason why I didn’t feel loved was because I wasn’t being loving to myself. I had so many expectations of myself and so much self-disregard, I actually put more distance between myself and others. 

I’m now working on more appreciation, gratitude, and acceptance. I’m not going to lie and say I love all of me. Hell no! I’m working on that. I’m a work in progress. I won’t say it’s easy or it’s been overnight. I will say that I am my own “knight in shining armor” these days, thanks to PIVOT.

What Can You Learn From Love Addiction Recovery Stories?

As you read these stories of love addiction recovery, you may see parallels with your own life. What do you have in common? What about these stories resonates with you?

Though love addiction is a descriptive phrase, a more accurate term is attachment dysregulation. This is because the conditions that cause this pattern of behavior often originate in childhood with your earliest attachments. Abuse, neglect, and unmet needs may cause deep attachment wounds—the survival patterns adopted in response lead to the cycle known as love addiction.

For healing to occur, early attachment wounds must be identified, and you must learn healthier ways to cope. While each person’s healing journey to healthy relationships will be different, several things must happen along the way.

Love Addiction Recovery Steps

Undertaking the love addiction recovery journey with help from a seasoned expert provides the support you need to heal past traumas and attachment wounds and move toward healthy love in the future. A relationship coach will help you identify your survival patterns and replace them with healthy, sustainable actions. You will learn to set reasonable boundaries and hone your communication skills through the process. But most importantly, you will realize that you are worthy and capable of finding secure, fulfilling romantic love.

Begin Your Healing Journey With PIVOT

If you are ready to confront survival patterns that have you trapped in the cycle of love addiction, PIVOT has answers. With high-impact options that include relationship coaching for individuals and couples and love addiction retreats at the Glass House in northern California, we have a solution for you. Our personalized and highly customizable process can meet you where you are and help you find a path forward. Reach out today at 1-855-452-0707 to begin writing your love addiction recovery story.

Even if a picture of a crying child as parents leave for work is the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the words separation anxiety, the feeling behind it might not seem so distant or childish to many people. People suffering from adult separation anxiety in relationships usually feel a strong and irrational fear they might lose a loved one, most frequently a romantic partner, in various ways. Those can include injury, accidents, illness, and death, or they may fear being broken up with or abandoned by the person they love.

The overwhelming fear of being away from people you love, particularly your partner, can be quite familiar to many adults in their closest relationships; most of us can think of at least a few examples of having felt this way. While it’s perfectly normal to occasionally feel lonely when you’re away from your partner, in some cases, these feelings get out of control and can cause severe distress and pain. This is a clear sign you may be suffering from separation anxiety in relationships.

How Do I Know If I Have Separation Anxiety in Relationships?

While nobody likes to be away from the people they love, there are cases when people feel irrational fear, panic, anxiety, and overall distress at the very thought of not being around their loved ones. Adults who suffer from separation anxiety disorder experience both emotional and physical symptoms that include negative thoughts and obsessive worrying.

Separation anxiety is not equally serious in all cases. It can be mild for some, while others may experience overwhelming levels of stress and anxiety, preventing them from the most basic functioning in their everyday lives. If you’ve been living with these feelings, you might not even realize something is wrong.

You may be suffering from separation anxiety in relationships if:

• You feel unfounded and excessive worry and fear that people you love might disappear from your life, leave you, or pass away.
• You refuse to be away from your loved ones and experience severe distress if you do.
• You have difficulty sleeping when you’re away from your partner and feel extreme fear that something bad might happen to them.
• You experience frequent depression or anxiety episodes or have panic attacks if separated from your loved one for a period of time. Just thinking about being away from them can trigger strong negative emotions.
• Your daily commitments, work, parenting, self-care, etc., are compromised due to your fear of being away from loved ones, crippling your productivity and decision-making skills.

If this sounds like you, you aren’t alone, and you aren’t stuck. The first step in healing separation anxiety in relationships is understanding where it comes from. Relationship coaching can help you explore how your past relationships and environment made you feel unstable and fearful in your connections. This soul-searching work must be done in order to build healthier coping skills and heal your relationships.

What Can Cause Separation Anxiety in Relationships?

The causes of separation anxiety can be divided into several categories. Children of parents suffering from anxiety are more likely to experience it both as children and as grownups. Adults who are already diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder can often experience separation anxiety as one of the many manifestations of this type of disorder. Environmental factors and various stressors experienced later in life can also play a role in developing separation anxiety.

What Are the Negative Effects of Separation Anxiety on Your Relationship?

Separation anxiety is most obvious in romantic relationships, which inherently makes people feel vulnerable and exposed. An anxious attachment style, which can develop during early childhood, can also amplify feelings of separation anxiety in romantic relationships. Being intimate with someone and opening up to them may also mean revisiting a lot of suppressed emotions, including those from early childhood. When people are unaware of the underlying causes of their separation anxiety issues, it can cause a wide range of problems in romantic relationships.

There are, of course, cases when separation anxiety isn’t completely unfounded. People who enter romantic relationships with partners with avoidant attachment styles may be particularly susceptible to these issues.

Behaviors by love-avoidant people can make the situation worse, as those individuals crave independence and self-reliance. Love-avoidant individuals don’t feel comfortable relying on others or having others depend on them, so they tend to push their romantic partners away, easily triggering separation anxiety in the other partner.

Learn Coping Strategies for Relationship Separation Anxiety

If you recognize some of the behaviors and feelings in yourself or a partner, you might benefit from learning coping strategies to manage separation anxiety in relationships. While learning how to deal with such feelings requires some effort, professional guidance is available to help you make healthy attachments.

Managing separation anxiety involves developing healthy habits and activities that can alleviate feelings of anxiety when apart from your partner.

You can make the first step through PIVOT coaching sessions or retreats at the Glass House. Our experienced and caring relationship coaches can help you recognize and change unhealthy thoughts and behavior patterns, which can, in turn, make you better equipped to deal with your romantic relationship issues.

When you work with us, we can help you explore your and your partner’s attachment styles, communication patterns, and past traumas that are influencing your current relationship. We work with individuals and couples, both separately and together, to heal their connections and move forward in a healthier way.

Transform Your Relationships With PIVOT

PIVOT offers relationship coaching for individuals, duos, couples, and families, as well as business coaching and retreats. Reach out online or call us to begin the journey to a healthier, happier life where you no longer have separation anxiety in relationships.

Most people who’ve been in a long-term, committed relationship can recall times when it felt like you were spending all of your time together. You will also likely remember that there were times when you started feeling more distant or drifted away from your partner. This can be a sign that you’re starting to grow apart. However, it’s not necessarily a bad sign. It might be a result of changes in your career, complications with family and/or friends, a consequence of boredom with everyday routines etc. 

Many people struggle with understanding what to do with this felt sense of boredom. Rather than blaming yourself or each other, you may try to understand the nature of your unexpected emotional disconnection. Rather than let it turn into emotional neglect that can lead to challenges, you can seek professional help and learn how to improve intimacy in your relationship.

What Does It Mean To Be Emotionally Detached?

If you feel emotionally detached, it means that you feel disengaged or disconnected from the feelings of people around you. 

It might manifest itself as the absence of motivation to be involved in the emotional lives of other people, or a lack of capacity for it. It can be a reaction to a stressful period, which is often temporary, or it can be a trait of your attachment style, especially if it was developed as a way to cope with traumatic events in life. 

How Do You Get Emotional Detachment?

If you had traumatic experiences as a child, detaching from the feelings of others can be a means to survive and keep negative emotions at bay. There are other scenarios that can lead to emotional detachment as well:

• Experiences of significant loss, such as a separation from a primary caregiver, parental divorce, or death of a parent or sibling.
• Having traumatic experiences growing up, including natural disasters, immigration to a different country, and going through life-threatening situations.
• Spending childhood in foster care or challenged adoption home.
• Experiences of emotional and/or physical abuse.
• Experiences of physical and/or emotional neglect.

Remember, not all people who have survived emotional trauma in childhood or adolescence develop emotional detachment or other avoidant behavior. Some people will try to trauma bond with their romantic partners, idealizing them or reliving their trauma, and many will be able to recover and start healthy relationships. 

How Do You Know If You Are Emotionally Detached In Your Marriage? 

Here are some of the possible signs of emotional detachment in a relationship:

• You take each other for granted.
• You have stopped listening closely and started shifting focus from your relationship to other interests when the focus needs to be on your relationship.
• You no longer respect your mutual rituals, i.e. you don’t have breakfast, dinner, or go to bed at the same time.
• When on a business trip or away, you only communicate routinely and don’t really want to call each other to check in.
• You have a fear of engulfment i.e. loss of boundaries with your spouse, which wasn’t the case in the past.
• Getting lost in your job and career role, using your work responsibilities as an excuse not to spend time with your significant other.
• You have trouble finding ways to balance your personal space and intimacy.
• You seek reassurance and resources for your emotional needs from other people. This doesn’t have to take the form of adultery or flirtation. However, it can take the form of emotional infidelity.

What Do You Do When You Feel Disconnected From Your Partner?

If you want your relationship to be healthy, you will want to resolve it. You can start by looking at events that jeopardized your connection. You can also look up similarities with your past relationships, and see whether you’ve ever withdrawn the way you do right now. And, if you have no history of being emotionally detached, you might just need some personal space and your detachment is just temporary. 

It’s possible to reconnect by working on your relationship together. You may join a relationship workshop to help you pinpoint the causes of your emotional distance and work on bonding with each other again.

How Do I Emotionally Reconnect With My Spouse?

First, you may check whether the nature of your disconnection or detachment is traumatic or situational. Track down the source by taking your time and reflecting on the causes. 

1. Get To Know Yourself Better

Try to learn more about your needs and past experiences that you might’ve hidden deep. A relationship coach may help you discover your common relational patterns and attachment style.  Then you can work through the wounds that keep you from having a successful relationship.

2. Give Yourself Time

Be patient and gentle with yourself, so that you can be fair and caring for your spouse and your relationship. Sometimes, it will take you more than a short period of time to gain understanding and find a way to not avoid emotional intimacy.  

3. Recall Important Milestones Of Your Relationship

Reflect on the good times and the bad times. It may put your whole relationship into perspective and give you valuable insights.

4. Try To Get Into Their Shoes 

Try to see your relationship from your partner’s perspective. Talk to them to understand their position better and understand their wants and needs.  Then share yours and find common ground to rebuild your relationship.

5. Make Efforts To Rekindle Your Connection

You could do this with small gestures or by introducing the spirit of excitement and surprise. It’s a good idea to be creative and show that you care. Rebuilding your relationship on honesty, trust, and self-awareness is more likely to be successful, and a little effort often goes a long way.

How Can My Relationship Benefit From Experience-Based Intimacy Coaching? 

Whether you’re looking for a way to restore the warmth and passion in your long-term relationship or to work on your own patterns of attachment, you can count on our relationship advocates to PIVOT from your old ways and learn something new. 

We offer couple-based workshops that can help you improve your intimacy and mutual understanding, as well as private coaching sessions for individuals. 

You can pick the type of coaching you feel most comfortable with, and steadily. Give us a call today and embark on a journey toward a healthy emotional life.