What your kids really need when you’re healing from narcissistic abuse
If you’re a mother healing from trauma or narcissistic abuse, there can be an enormous pressure to keep everything going… and to hold up a positive front every day.
You’re trying to process what has happened, care for yourself, perhaps rebuild your life… and at the same time, there are little people who still need dinner, clean clothes, school lunches, baths and all the other things that don’t pause because you’re struggling.
And this is where I want to offer you a little permission.
Your children do not need perfection from you. They need you.
Ask yourself: how well am I resourced today?
When everything becomes really heavy, one of the most helpful questions I encourage women to ask themselves is:
How well resourced am I in this moment?
Notice that you’re not asking how much should I be able to do, or what would the perfect mother do.
How much do I genuinely have available today?
If it’s six o’clock and the answer is not very much, perhaps the bath can wait. Perhaps nobody needs their hair washed. Perhaps dinner is toast on the sofa and the house stays exactly as it is.
Because particularly when you are recovering from emotional trauma or narcissistic abuse, the measure of a loving home isn’t how much you managed to accomplish or how nutritious dinner was.
It is the emotional footprint you create within it.
A peaceful, connected evening where very little gets done may offer your children far more than an exhausted mother pushing herself beyond capacity to make everything look right.
Caring for yourself teaches your children something valuable too
There is another important piece to this, particularly for our daughters. Our children learn how to move through the world by watching us.
We can tell them that they matter, that their needs are important and that they should care for themselves. But if they consistently see Mum ignoring her own needs, running herself into the ground and placing everybody else ahead of herself, there is another message being communicated:
Love means abandoning yourself.
For many women healing from narcissistic abuse, self-abandonment is already part of the pattern we are trying to change.
Allowing your children to see you rest, recognise your limits, feed yourself, say no and make space for your own needs isn’t selfish. You are showing them what it looks like to factor yourself into your own life.
Healing can change your own story, and that of those around you
Recovery from narcissistic abuse involves so much more than just understanding the relationship you’ve left or healing what has happened to you.
There comes a point where the work becomes about reclaiming yourself. With this, I mean: understanding the patterns that have shaped you, reconnecting with your own needs and learning to make choices from a place of greater self-trust.
And when you’re a mother, that work has the potential to ripple outwards.
You don’t need to model perfection. You can model something much more valuable: a woman who knows that she matters too.
Mummy, are you ready to find your way back to you?
If you are moving beyond narcissistic abuse, trauma or a major life transition and feel ready to explore what comes next, I work with women who want to understand the patterns that have been holding them back and consciously create a different way forward.
I do not offer traditional talk therapy. Instead, all new clients begin with The Threshold Space: a focused six-week commitment to change where we begin to uncover those patterns, reconnect you with your inner wisdom and create momentum for meaningful, lasting transformation.
From there, the path is individual. We may continue working together through a tailored therapeutic pathway, immersion, retreat or transformational experience shaped around what you need.
Watch the video below to learn more about what kids really need when you’re recovering from trauma.
