The Danger of Believing None of It Was Real

by Tawnia Lives

One of the hardest parts of healing is making sense of two experiences that seem to contradict each other.

Someone hurt you.

And someone also loved you in ways that felt real.

Many conversations about narcissistic abuse unintentionally erase one side of that reality.

They tell survivors that every smile was fake.

Every kind word was manipulation.

Every tender moment was an illusion.

For many people, that isn’t what they experienced.

There were moments of laughter.

Moments of comfort.

Moments of genuine connection.

Moments that gave you hope.

Whether those moments reflected lasting change, mixed motives, or something else entirely, your experience of them was real.

You felt loved.

You felt seen.

You believed things could be different.

That is part of why leaving was so difficult.

If we erase those moments, we erase part of the survivor’s experience.

And when we erase that experience, we unintentionally create shame.

People begin asking themselves:

“If none of it was real, what does that say about me?”

“How could I have believed it?”

The better question is this:

“What made those moments so powerful that they kept me hoping?”

That question honors reality instead of rewriting it.

Healing doesn’t require us to pretend every memory was false.

It asks us to understand the whole relationship.

The tenderness.

The confusion.

The hope.

The manipulation.

The control.

The grief.

They can all exist in the same story.

That’s what makes these relationships so difficult to understand while you’re living them.

And sometimes, that’s what finally allows them to make sense after you’ve left.

— Tawnia Lives