How to Stop a Narcissistic Grandmother Grooming Your Child — Your Child Is Smarter Than You Think | How To Feel F*cking Amazing How to Stop a Narcissistic Grandmother Grooming Your Child — Your Child Is Smarter Than You Think Children are not as naive as people believe. They can smell fake from miles away. And the older they get, the faster they move away from someone who is either boring, exhausting, or genuinely dangerous. Here is something nobody says loudly enough: your child is not a passive victim waiting to be programmed. They are a small human being with extraordinarily well-calibrated fake detectors, and those detectors are working whether you know it or not. The narcissistic grandmother may believe she is building loyalty. What she is actually building, over time, is a child who finds her either tedious, confusing, or frightening — and who, given the freedom to make their own choices, will eventually make one. A narcissist is fundam...
Signs You Are Healing (Even When It Does Not Feel Like It)
Signs You Are Healing (Even When It Does Not Feel Like It) | How To Feel F*cking Amazing
Signs You Are Healing (Even When It Does Not Feel Like It)
You are probably further along than you think. Here is how to tell — even on the days when everything feels like it is falling apart.
Nobody tells you that healing often feels like getting worse. That the days you spend crying in the car, replaying conversations, feeling everything you spent years trying not to feel — those are not signs that you are broken. They are frequently signs that you are finally safe enough to feel. That the armour is coming off. That the work is actually working. This post is for the person who is doing everything right and wondering why it does not feel better yet. It does not feel better yet because it is not finished. But it is happening.
Healing is not a straight line. It is a spiral. You may come back to the same feelings — but from a more grounded place. That is not going backwards. That is the whole point.
First — What Healing Actually Looks Like
We have been sold a version of healing that looks like a tidy upward curve — broken at the start, progressively better, triumphant at the end. That is not what it looks like. Real healing looks more like a spiral — you revisit difficult territory, but from a slightly more grounded position each time. It looks like two steps forward and one step sideways. It looks like a Tuesday where you felt completely fine, followed by a Wednesday where you fell apart over something small.
The problem is not that you are healing wrong. The problem is that you are measuring real, messy, non-linear healing against a fictional straight line — and wondering why you do not match up. You do not match up because nobody does. The fictional version does not exist.
Signs You Are Healing — Even When It Does Not Feel Like It
Sign 1
You are feeling more, not less
For a long time, not feeling was the strategy. Numbness, dissociation, staying busy, staying functional — all ways the nervous system kept you operational under conditions that were genuinely unsafe. When healing begins, the feelings you held at bay start to surface. This can feel like falling apart. It is actually the opposite — your system is beginning to process what it previously had to suppress just to get through the day. Feeling more is often one of the earliest, most confusing signs of genuine progress.
Sign 2
Your reactions are slightly smaller than they used to be
Not gone. Not absent. Just slightly smaller, slightly shorter, slightly less consuming. The thing that used to take you three days to recover from now takes one. The conversation that used to ruin a week now ruins an afternoon. These changes are easy to miss because they feel incremental and because you are still reacting, still hurting, still not where you want to be. But the direction of travel is the thing that matters. Smaller and shorter is the direction of healing.
Sign 3
You trust your own perceptions more than you used to
After sustained gaslighting or narcissistic abuse, one of the most significant markers of recovery is being able to observe something that happened and trust your own reading of it — without immediately doubting yourself, looking for the way you might be wrong, or waiting for someone else to confirm that what you experienced was real. The return of trust in your own perceptions is quiet, gradual, and one of the most meaningful signs that the damage is being undone.
Sign 4
You feel genuine anger — not just guilt
For a long time, the dominant emotion was probably guilt. Guilt that you were not enough, that you caused the problems, that you should have done something differently. Anger, if it came, was quickly suppressed or redirected inward. When healing progresses, the anger starts to come — real, clean, appropriate anger at what was actually done to you. This is not a step backwards. It is the guilt giving way to something more accurate. Anger, in the right context, is one of the healthiest signs of recovery from abuse.
Sign 5
You catch yourself relaxing without deciding to
When the nervous system has been in survival mode for a long time, relaxation becomes something that requires effort — something you have to consciously decide to do, and even then never quite manage completely. As healing deepens, genuine relaxation starts to arrive uninvited. Your shoulders drop without you telling them to. You take a full breath without thinking about it. You notice you have been sitting comfortably for an hour without scanning for something wrong. These small, physical signs are the nervous system learning, slowly, that the danger has passed.
Sign 6
You have moments — even brief ones — of genuine okayness
Not happiness necessarily. Not everything being fine. Just moments of actual, uncomplicated okayness — where nothing is wrong right now, and you are able to notice that nothing is wrong right now without immediately waiting for the other shoe to drop. These moments might last five minutes. They might come and go. But they are new. And the fact that they are new is the entire point.
Sign 7
You are setting limits you never used to set
Not perfectly. Not without guilt. Not without the anxious replaying of whether you were too much or too harsh. But you said no when you meant no. You left the conversation when it started going somewhere familiar and bad. You did not apologise for something that was not your fault. These things are harder than they look, and the fact that you are doing them — however clumsily, however anxiously — is significant progress from someone who could not do them at all.
Sign 8
You are curious about your own experience rather than just surviving it
In survival mode, there is no space for curiosity — only management. Managing the next thing, the next mood, the next threat. When healing creates enough space for you to become curious — why do I react that way? where did that come from? what do I actually want? — that curiosity is the clearest possible sign that you are no longer entirely in survival mode. The person who is drowning cannot be curious about the water. The person who has swum far enough to rest can be.
Sign 9
The relationship has stopped defining your entire sense of self
After narcissistic abuse in particular, the relationship tends to occupy the entire frame — every thought, every self-evaluation, every interaction filtered through what happened and what it means about you. Healing begins to create distance from that frame. Not immediately. Not completely. But gradually, other things start to take up space again. You notice you went an hour without thinking about it. Then a morning. Then you realise you have a whole part of your life that exists completely separately from the thing that happened, and that part is getting bigger.
Sign 10
You are reading this
You searched for this. You are paying attention to your own experience, asking whether you are getting better, looking for information that helps you understand what is happening to you. The person who is completely stuck in survival mode does not do that. The person who has no hope of recovery does not do that. The fact that you are here, reading this, trying to understand — that is not nothing. That is actually quite a lot.
"You are not behind. You are not doing it wrong. You are in the messy, non-linear, genuinely difficult middle of something that has no shortcuts. That is not failure. That is the actual work."
The Signs People Mistake for Going Backwards
These are not regression. They are often signs of progress.
Feeling more emotional than usual — feelings surfacing as the protective numbness lifts
Suddenly feeling angry about things you previously felt only guilty about
Becoming more aware of what was done to you, which initially feels worse not better
Needing more rest — the nervous system uses enormous energy to process what it has been carrying
Old memories resurfacing — the brain revisiting stored experiences in order to integrate them
Feeling grief for the relationship or the person you thought they were — this is not weakness, it is processing
Becoming less tolerant of things you previously accepted — your standards adjusting to match what you actually deserve
What to Do on the Days It Does Not Feel Like Healing
On the days when nothing feels like progress — when you have cried again, when you have replayed a conversation again, when you are certain you are exactly where you were six months ago — do one thing. Find one piece of evidence that contradicts that certainty. One moment from the past month where you handled something differently than you would have before. One boundary you set that you could not have set before. One morning where you woke up and the first thought was not about them.
Healing is made of these small, individually invisible moments. They do not feel like progress when they are happening because they are too small and too close to see clearly. The distance required to see them as progress comes later. Trust that the distance is coming, and in the meantime, keep going. Not perfectly. Not without falling apart sometimes. Just keep going.
You have survived every difficult day so far. Every single one. The odds of you surviving the next one are, historically speaking, extremely good. You are further along than you think. Keep going.
Healing from trauma rarely feels like the linear improvement most people expect. The clearest signs include moments of genuine calm that arrive without effort, reacting with less intensity to things that previously overwhelmed you, being able to hold difficult emotions without being completely taken over by them, and feeling occasional stretches of genuine ease. Many people feel worse before they feel better, as protective numbness begins to lift and real feelings surface. That is often one of the clearest signs that healing is genuinely underway.
Because for a long time, survival mode provided protection — numbness and shutting down were ways the nervous system kept you functional under conditions that were genuinely unsafe. As healing begins and the nervous system starts to relax, suppressed feelings start to surface. This can feel like falling apart. It is actually the opposite — it is the system beginning to process what it previously had to hold at bay. Feeling more, not less, is often a sign of genuine progress.
Healing from narcissistic abuse often begins with the gradual return of trust in your own perceptions. After sustained gaslighting, being able to observe something that happened and trust your own reading of it is one of the most significant markers of recovery. Other early signs include reduced anxiety before interactions, fewer intrusive thoughts about past conversations, the ability to feel genuine anger at what happened, and moments where the relationship stops defining your entire sense of self.
Yes, and it is more common than most people realise. The protective mechanisms that kept you functional during trauma begin to lift as healing progresses, and the feelings underneath them surface. This can feel like a step backwards, particularly if the expectation was that healing would feel progressively better in a straight line. Healing is not a straight line. You may revisit difficult feelings from a more grounded place, which is not the same as going back to the beginning.
There is no universal timeline. Healing depends on the nature and duration of the trauma, the support available, and the nervous system's individual response. What is consistent is that healing is not measured by speed — it is measured by the gradual shift from survival to genuine living. Some people notice meaningful changes within months; for others it takes years of layered work. Progress is real even when it is slow, and slow is not the same as not happening.
I am not a qualified therapist or psychologist. This post is written for general awareness and information only, drawing on published research and personal experience. If you are struggling significantly, speaking to a qualified professional is always worthwhile. In the UK, find a therapist at bacp.co.uk. If you are in crisis, please contact Samaritans on 116 123 — available 24 hours a day, free of charge.
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