Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The Attack on Your Inner Child: Why a Trauma Bond is So Charged

What pain is at the root of a trauma bond for both a narcissist and their supply?

After leaving a narcissist in a romantic relationship, the grieving process can feel more charged than anything you’ve felt before. Breaking a trauma bond can be as painful and challenging as quitting a drug. Many people often wonder if their narcissist was their twin flame, their soulmate, or the best they are ever going to get when it comes to love.

They question: Will I ever feel that intensity of love again?

Fortunately, with a commitment to healing, the answer is yes.

That intensity of love is what real SELF LOVE actually feels like.

Narcissists prey on those who are similar to them: no self love.

Only those who have never felt self love can be fooled by a fraudulent love.

They sniff it out quickly: there's an abandoned, lonely inner child crying inside of you.

Someone who was abandoned by your parents--a spiritual orphan.

They see that child and it's just what they need: A MASK.

An identity.

A LIVING HOST.

Because a stable identity is what the narcissist lacks.

Do you know what's inside of them?

A DEAD INNER CHILD.

Something in you felt that, you sniffed it too. You feel so deeply for this person’s deep void of pain. You want to love them back to life.

Make them laugh and play and never stop.

It feels just like your inner child, and, hey…look at that mask? Who is that?

IT’S YOU.

The zombie child is awakened: a new toy. A new mask. AN IDENTITY.

They mirror you: they have your interests, your values, your humor, your sexual desires, your dreams…

…they are mischievous and fun and a little reckless, just like…a child.

Your inner child sees this twin, and…stops crying.

They feel worthy! They feel lovable! A friend! Just like them! They love them!

THE NARCISSIST ABUSES BY MAKING YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH YOURSELF, but as an IMPOSTER.

The mask they wore was YOUR FACE.

Because when they were born, the narcissist parent said they were an extension of them, the best in the world, the most important and powerful.

And then, sometime in infancy, they introduced abuse and shame.

And that baby died.

A part of their brain died — it literally died.

It never developed.

Then the baby zombie rose from the dead and entered the narcissist fantasy world of the golden child. They tried to be just like their narcissist parent.

They kept getting abused.

They rose again, mirrored the parent more. Sometimes they got spoiled. Sometimes they got abused less than the scapegoat.

But they kept getting abused too. The narcissist parent knows no other way.

Which meant they kept collapsing.

And coming back.

Collapsing.

And coming back.

And every time the narcissist fantasy collapses, they recognize: I have no identity. I do not exist. I am not lovable. I should not be alive. I am ashamed.

And every time they come back, they are meaner and more defensive. The world feels more hostile.

Eventually, they realize they need an identity elsewhere, and in childhood, they start trying to make friends, trying on their identities, mirroring them and hoping this one will keep their fantasy of being the golden alive.

But they don’t. Something injures them.

Jealousy.

Fear.

Fear they are not enough, that they aren’t lovable, fear of shame, fear of going to that dark place again.

That place makes them angry.

It’s a primal wound.

It’s pure evil and darkness there.

They don’t belong there. They belong in fantasy land. Where they were born, good and perfect.

Where they were…alive.

Do you know what that dark place is that they go to when they collapse is?

IT'S DESPAIR.

Maybe you know it well. Maybe you felt it always in your crying inner child.

Maybe that’s why the narcissist chose you: because you are strong enough to carry the pain that they can’t.

What they can’t face, what they really, really can’t face, is the horror that they are already dead.

That they wander this earth as a ghost.

That nothing they think of themselves is real.

That they have no authentic self.

That they are wandering the earth totally alone.

That every day they rise from the grave of their childhood and replay the same wound from their childhood that took them out.

And ghosts must do again what gives them pain. (W.H. Auden)

They cannot face that no, they are not an innocent child playing with a toy they own — they are a haunting.

When they inevitably start to realize this, when the fantasy of their grandiosity crumbles, they think, the way a ghost has power is through fear.

They try to save the fantasy world by raging against you, abusing you, watching your fantasy crumble instead of theirs.

Sometimes, they use violence: violence is never an expression of power. It is always an expression of fear.

All the while, you are still watching your doppelgänger: your twin, the inner child of your face they carry.

They are attacking them.

You hadn’t thought them capable. You thought they loved you. They wore your face.

You LOVED THEM WITH A FORCE YOU’VE NEVER KNOWN BEFORE….

Their mask was the only way you could love your inner child.

And then…they just kidnap it.

Leaving you bereft and alone again.

Do not let the narcissist convince you it is your fault your inner child was alone and shivering in there.

It is likely something happened to them, something unjust.

Something unjust happened to the narcissist’s too. It was probably a thing you could both sense intuitively in each other: trauma.

Maybe you were abused as a child. Maybe you face some systemic injustices. Maybe you just have some things that this culture makes you feel like shit about: like you don’t like your weight, or a scar on your face.

No one is responsible for feeling unloved or unlovable in a world that profits off our self hate, that abandons our most abused children and cultural scapegoats.

You are not responsible for your trauma responses.

Tragically, neither is the narcissist.

But your inner child is still living; theirs is not.

The only choice you have: save yourself, or follow them in death.

You will undoubtedly feel this force of love again, IF YOU DO THE WORK TO HEAL.

I felt this intensity with every narcissist I dated…I cycled through a good number of them and almost died more than once.

When it finally nearly wrecked me, when I finally reunited with my inner child and cried for her, and held her, and showed her all we’d accomplished, all we’d survived, all her worth.

When I held her hand and introduced her to my friends I trusted, when I promised her I’d never give her to a ghost again,

I FELT A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER THAN I HAD WITH ANY NARCISSIST.

I’m talking a real, palpable love I’d never known.

I told that little girl: Now nothing holds you back. Now you have no limits. Dream as far as you can.

Love what you find that is alive.

When you find a person with an inner child like yours, frightened and alone, sit in front of them and tell them what you love about them.

Their child will still shiver, until they rescue them, but for a moment, it’ll feel a little warmer, a little safer.

And you, miraculously, will learn it is possible to fly.

Healing is a spiral. I still have BPD and PTSD. I remember the ghosts and the terror of their black voids of despair.

I grieve that they hate what loved them.

I grieve for my own inner child.

But my emotional state is mostly one of incredible self love: I do things I enjoy, find many moments of peace, feed my creativity, and still find wonder and joy in the world at every turn. I have a lot of love in my life. And I’m a professor blessed with wonderful students who appreciate my skills and make me laugh every day. My life has meaning.

I feel empowered knowing that narcissists cannot take that from me.

No matter what they do, they cannot take my inner child again. They can’t take my self love or accomplishments or creativity. They can’t take my long career or my past students or my friends.

They can disturb my peace, but only temporarily, just like a ghost.

I hope someday to share my life with a romantic partner. I have never experienced romantic love, having only bonded to NPDs like my parents.

But I’m okay if I don’t.

And if I do, they need to be on my level of self love and healed and awesome, and if that happens…that is gonna be mind blowingly amazing. 👩🏻‍🍳 👌🏽

Far beyond what I felt when I loved the imposter of me, the mask.

All along, the narcissist was destined to hate you because you have what all ghosts long for desperately…

…to be alive.

…to be able to love and be loved again, like they were once…long ago.

And when they recognize this undeniably in you, they want what all ghosts want: to avenge their death.

Your job is to recognize they are ghosts. And to remember: the living have power over ghosts.

But protect yourself. Have your stake and hammer on you always. 🩸

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

If you’d like to support my writing, check out my books, or Buy Me a Coffee.

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Anne M. Champion is the author of Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.

IT'S DESPAIR.

I FELT A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER THAN I HAD WITH ANY NARCISSIST.

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