Accountability for doing the REAL inner-work, and exploring your own patterns to heal & grow as a person AFTER reconnecting with reality & stabilizing? Absolutely. Accountability for the abuse itself? Nah. #ResilientAF #narcissisticabusesurvivor #narcissisticabuserecovery #accountability #gaslighting

One of the most damaging things that you can say to a victim or survivor of narcissistic abuse is, okay, but what part did you play? What did you do wrong? I bet you weren't perfect. I'll even take it one step further and say not only is it damaging, but it's also just plain dumb as fuck because victims and survivors of narcissistic abuse are not claiming to be perfect. They're not claiming to be angels. They're not claiming to have never done anything wrong. They are saying I was abused. There's just something about people openly speaking about what happened to them that triggers something in other people to jump in and shift the focus to, well, what are you going to take accountability for? And it's just a distraction from the point. Because regardless of being perfect or not, they did not cause that person to abuse them. Abuse comes from a deeply rooted sense of entitlement and a desire for power and control. You could do every single thing that they want you to do and you could stop doing every single thing that they don't want you to do. You can shrink yourself. You can mold yourself and they will still find something. They will still move the goalposts. It's designed that way. There will always be something. Something else you didn't do right. Something else you didn't do perfectly. Something else that's your fault. Not because you're incapable and worthless, but because they need you to believe that you're incapable and worthless. They want you to fucking hate yourself so that you depend on them for validation and you will do anything and everything to get it. Which gives them power and control. When you hear a victim or survivor telling their story and you pop in and say, well, you must have played a part. Remember, you're saying that to someone who already has been convinced that they played the whole fucking part. You're saying that to someone who was already gaslit into fucking hating themselves, believing that they can't do anything right. Everything being blamed on them, being picked apart on the daily. It's been the entire relationship trying to prove their worth only to feel more and more worthless each time. Fun fact, victims and survivors of narcissistic abuse are fucking experts at self-reflecting and taking accountability. So much so that they spent the entire relationship not only taking accountability for the shit that they actually did wrong in the relationship, but also for all the shit that the other person did wrong that they refused to take accountability for and shifted the blame onto them. Oh no, accountability is not the issue. The issue is they were abused. Only place that their accountability belongs is in their healing and recovery, not in the abuse. There's a reason why I and so many other people in this community put such a heavy focus on it was not your fault. And that reason is not because we're trying to say that the victim is perfect, if because we're trying to reinforce the idea that the abuse was not their fault. If more people could actually just validate that, we would see so many more survivors stabilizing enough to actually leave these relationships, heal, recover, and stop repeating these cycles. Gotta stop making the conversation about perfection because no one fucking claimed to be perfect, but the point is not being perfect doesn't cause abuse, nor does it justify it. Is it essential that survivors take accountability for their healing and go to therapy and do the inner work? Apps of fucking Lutley. It's a very fine line with timing, because if you start trying to push that on someone who is actively trying to come back to reality and realize that the abuse wasn't their fault, the lines get very fucking blurry and they start blaming themselves for everything and fall back into the fucking relationship. There is an important sequence to follow within this, and the first part of it is the abuse wasn't your fucking fault. Without that step, you can never even get into fucking recovery, so stop fucking with the sequence and just validate it for people.