Why Blaming the Narcissist Is Holding You Back (And What To Do Instead)

Welcome to another empowering episode of AwakenHer with Corissa Stepp! In this transformative episode, Corissa explores how women can break the cycle of blame, release the weight of past trauma, and step confidently into healing after experiencing narcissistic abuse.

Episode Highlights:

• Understanding Victimhood After Narcissistic Abuse: Corissa explains why her book, The Savvy Girl’s Guide to Thriving Beyond Narcissistic Abuse, is designed to be read in full to validate your personal journey and help you move beyond simply identifying as a victim.
• Identifying Trauma & Navigating Recovery: Learn about the physical and emotional symptoms trauma leaves behind, and discover why taking personal accountability (without self-blame) is crucial in the healing process.
• The Path to Empowerment: Corissa offers empowering insights on how to move from blaming the narcissist or your past circumstances, to taking ownership of your future and reclaiming your authentic self.
• Breaking the Drama Triangle: Get practical tools to break out of the cycle of victim, persecutor, and rescuer, and step into the “creator” role of your own life story.
• Healing Childhood Wounds: Corissa dives deep into the impact of narcissistic parents, childhood family dynamics, and the importance of grieving and rewriting your personal narrative.
• Setting Boundaries & Maintaining Healthy Relationships: Find out how to set boundaries, communicate effectively, and relate to narcissists in a way that prioritizes your safety and self-worth.
• Releasing Energetic Burdens: Let go of unresolved resentment and grief, and discover how understanding, empathy, and healthy detachment can set you free.

Why Listen?

If you’ve st

💫 You’re invited to join us in the brand new Savvy & StrongHER Community—a powerful membership space for women healing after trauma or toxic relationships. Join for as low as $7/month in our entry tier. With three levels of support, there’s a path for you. Visit savvyandstrongher.com for more information and to join now!

💖 Strong enough to heal, savvy enough to thrive

________________________

Corissa is a Holistic Trauma-Informed Coach & Narcissistic Abuse Specialist™ who empowers women after they’ve endured narcissist trauma to rediscover who they are, reclaim their power, and find the clarity and courage to move forward and live a life they love. Corissa is also a recovering people-pleaser and codependent who has endured way too many narcissistic relationships to count! She coaches not only from her knowledge and training but also from the wisdom she has gained from her own healing journey.

Book a FREE 30-min Clarity Call HERE.

Ways to connect with Corissa:

Podcast Website
Website: www.corissastepp.com
Book: The Savvy Girl's Guide to Thriving Beyond Narcissistic Abuse
Instagram: @corissastepp
Facebook: Corissa Stepp
Free Quiz: Is My Partner a Narcissist?

We'd love to hear what you think so message us on IG. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, review, or share it so we can reach more people!

Transcript

Corissa Stepp [00:00:17]:
Welcome to Awaken her, the podcast where women find their strength and transform their pain into power. I'm Carissa Stepp, your guide on this journey of healing, growth and and empowerment. Here we share the real stories of women who have faced life's toughest challenges and emerged stronger together with expert insights to light your path forward. Whether you're seeking to heal, grow, or empower your life after heartache, Awaken her is here to show you that not only is change possible, but you are capable of achieving more than you ever imagined. Let's dive into today's episode and take another step towards becoming your most empowered self.

Corissa Stepp [00:01:05]:
Hey. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Awaken Her. I'm your host, Carissa Stepp, and I wanted to talk today a little bit about moving through victimhood. So I have been getting a lot of comments from people who have been reading my new book, the Savvy Girl's Guide to Thriving Beyond Narcissistic Abuse. And interestingly enough, I've had some people just kind of quote back to me either certain chapters or certain things that they've been reading in the book as. And what's happening is, is I'm finding that sometimes people are taking things like, a little bit out of context. So the book is meant to obviously be read in its entirety, not just kind of piecemealed.

Corissa Stepp [00:01:41]:
It's not meant to just be something that you would pick up and read one chapter as a guide or something to help you and then read a different chapter, basically not in consecutive order or not in the. In its entirety. Because the first part of the book is really to validate what you may have experienced in a narcissistic relationship by helping you understand what the behaviors are of a narcissist, how they kind of show up in relationships, the different manipulation tools that they use, the different types of abuse that you might experience in a narcissistic relationship. And that's all really important to help validate what you've experienced, because many of us don't even fully even sometimes comprehend the full picture of what we've actually just gone through when we're getting out of these relationships because they can be so disorienting and so confusing and it can be really easy to make a lot of excuses for someone else's bad behavior if that's a pattern of ours throughout our lives, especially if we are very good at people pleasing and we have a lot of empathy. So. So we're able to understand maybe why some of my behavior act in a certain way. Without really understanding the full, complete and total picture that it is a pattern of this person, that this is a tactic that they're using to get you to do something that either meets their needs or that they. They want you to do from a place of control.

Corissa Stepp [00:03:03]:
So that's the first part of the book. But if you were to only read the first part of the book, you might walk away just feeling like you are the victim, right? And you might just be stuck in this cycle of blaming and pointing the fin at the narcissist for, you know, the harm and the hurt that you've experienced or even potentially some of the physical or emotional symptoms that I've outlined in the book from the impact of narcissistic abuse. Now, when I've outlined the different symptoms of narcissistic abuse, right, the things that can happen, you know, we can experience things like depression, autoimmune disease, heightened anxiety, heart conditions. We can experience all types of things, right, that will manifest. Trauma itself will manifest in the body as emotional symptoms, mental symptoms, or physical symptoms. However, I don't want you walking away, number one, assuming that that's the reason and the only cause as to why you have those symptoms, right? Because that's a dangerous place to be. You need to obviously seek out medical attention for any health diagnosis or any potential health issue that you are experiencing. Again, whether it's mental health or physical health or emotional health.

Corissa Stepp [00:04:19]:
However, the reason why I put those in there is because there is a correlation, right? We have seen a correlation between unresolved trauma in the body and the physical manifestations of that trauma when it goes unresolved for years, decades on end. So the point is not to blame the narcissist for why you have an autoimmune disease. It could be a confluence of things. And remember, also, there's a reason why you attracted that person into your life. There's a reason why you were in that relationship for as long as you were in it. Part of it was because that dynamic felt familiar to you. And so not to say that it's your fault. Abuse is abuse and there is no excuse.

Corissa Stepp [00:05:05]:
It's not your fault that the other person was abusive. You didn't deserve to be treated that way. You didn't deserve to be only given breadcrumbs in a relationship. No, absolutely not. However, again, that pattern or those dynamics might have been very familiar to you from potentially dysfunctional family dynamics at home or past relational trauma that you might have experienced. I don't want you walking away, continuing to just blame the narcissist. Because if that were the case, like, if that's all this book was meant to do, was to help you identify who's to blame for all of your issues or all of the hurt, all of the pain that you've experienced, you know, all of the setbacks, maybe that you've been feeling or your emotional state or whatever it might be, then I'm not doing a very good job as, number one, a coach. But number two, also the author of the book.

Corissa Stepp [00:05:59]:
The book is really to guide you into a more empowered position, to move you from a state of maybe victimhood and blaming someone else for why things happened or what happened, but also to take ownership and do the work that you need to do in order to heal and to no longer attract these types of relationships into your life, these type of personalities into your life. And so I want you to come to this place of feeling empowered, of knowing that it's possible to heal and recover, knowing that it is possible to do the deep inner work on yourself so that you can rediscover who you are, to come into closer connection with your authentic self, to reconnect back to your intuition so that you can make good and healthy decisions for yourself, right? Where you're not seeking outside validation, and you're not seeking it from somebody who is toxic and unhealthy, who might be leading you down the wrong path, or who is only manipulating you for their own good. And to also help you come into a place of deep understanding and awareness, not only of yourself, but also of the narcissist, to see that they are a deeply wounded child living inside of an adult body. Now, that doesn't mean having compassion and understanding for them where you be, you continue to tolerate the behavior. No, it doesn't mean that you have to necessarily even forgive them. Although really forgiveness, I believe, is having an understanding as to why someone might have behaved in a certain way, right? Knowing that they're acting from these deep inner wounds, knowing that they carry a lot of shame that maybe even prevents them from seeing themselves fully, from even being able to take accountability for their actions, because that shame is so overwhelming that they have built up this self image to deflect and project any sort of accountability or any type of blame for hurt they may have caused because it's too painful for them to really accept that there's a part of them that is hurting other people because their shame runs so deep and it's so big beneath the surface that they have constructed this outer Persona and need to believe for their own self protection, that that is who they are, that they don't really have true self awareness. Right? They believe that that outer construct, that outer Persona that they have created to keep themselves safe is who they are. And they are too scared to go deeper.

Corissa Stepp [00:08:56]:
They're too scared to peel back the layers of all that pain and hurt because it doesn't feel safe. So ultimately, at the end of the day, I want you to see that the narcissist has been created from a place of deep pain. It is their way of protecting themselves. We might even say that that is a protector part that shows up for them. And that protector part has many different expressions. Now, again, that doesn't mean that you need to forget how they have treated you. That doesn't mean that you have to accept that type of treatment. That doesn't mean that you put yourself in a position to be disrespected, to be misunderstood, to not be loved in a way that you deserve.

Corissa Stepp [00:09:49]:
That doesn't mean you have to stay in the relationship. But I want to release you of the energetic burden of holding that grudge, of placing yourself in the victim seat, because that takes a lot of energy to hold when you are constantly directing your energy outwards towards somebody else and pointing the finger and blaming them and saying, this is their fault. And this is why I am the way that I am. And I honestly find that a lot of this happens when you are a child of a narcissistic parent. It's like your inner child comes out and is not able to understand that your parent was also very immature, that they were also just another hurt child trying to raise another child. And so we come away as adults and we start to blame the narcissistic parent for all these things, right? For the childhood you didn't get to have, for all the judgments you've ever felt, all of the criticism you ever received, all of the devaluing that might have happened, all of the ways in which you were unsupported, misunderstood, unheard, unseen. And I get it, you have to let that little inner child grieve that childhood that you didn't get to have, that the love that you thought you were receiving from your parent was healthy love. And you come to realize as an adult that it really wasn't healthy.

Corissa Stepp [00:11:16]:
So there is a grieving process that is involved. And it's very important that you allow yourself that opportunity, that space to process all of those emotions that come with grief, right? The anger, the sadness, the justifying, the bargaining, all of it. But don't settle in just the anger and the blame and don't just settle in the sadness, the loss. You have to move past it. So the way we move past it is by getting curious and understanding them at a different and deeper level. You may have to look back at maybe how your parents were raised. What kind of environment did they grow up in? What kind of trauma did maybe your grandparents experience that would have impacted your parents growing up? Right. What were their wounds that they were acting from that created your narcissistic parent to be who they are? Maybe they were the golden child and they had to live up to being perfect all the time.

Corissa Stepp [00:12:24]:
And if that were the case, they could never accept that there was anything wrong with them because they were constantly being told that they were perfect, that they were wonderful, that they were great, that they were smart, that they were God's gift, so to say. And maybe it's because your grandparents tried for years to have a child and it never happened for them. Or maybe your grandmother had a series of miscarriages and then came along your father or your mother or whoever, and so all their love and joy and attention went into this only child. And as a result, maybe that child was the golden child. They could do no wrong. They were the apple of their father's eye. And so they believed in this over inflated version of themselves. And they've created a Persona around that.

Corissa Stepp [00:13:11]:
And I'm just giving you an example. So the point is, I want you to, after reading the book, come to a place of feeling more empowered, moving away from the blame, moving out of victimhood, while feeling validated in your experience. It is very important that we feel validated that what we experienced was not healthy, because it wasn't, and eventually come to a place of empathy and understanding. And I understand that that might be a leap. And maybe you'll never get there. Maybe you'll never be able to have empathy for this person. And that's okay. But if you can just understand that likely they are acting from their own deep insecurities and wounds and hurt and pain and shame, because we can all relate to that.

Corissa Stepp [00:14:00]:
We all carry our own insecurities, we all carry our own inner wounds. We've all experienced trauma. So if we can get to that place of understanding, we can let it go. And we can maybe, maybe at some point be almost grateful for the experience. Because as a result of that experience, you came to know yourself even better. You've hopefully will get to a place where you're able to love yourself even more. Because now you really understand at a deeper level who you are because you experienced who you are not, right? You are not the people pleaser, you are not the anxious person, you are not your autoimmune disease, right? You're so much more. You are a multi dimensional being full of vitality, full of potential.

Corissa Stepp [00:14:56]:
And when you learn to love yourself in a healthy way, you're able to maintain healthy relationships with other people. So even if you still have to maintain a relationship with the narcissist, I'm not saying that that relationship is ever going to turn healthy. However, you can get it onto a path where it's healthier for you because you're then able to set boundaries, communicate, feel safe even just communicating the boundaries and then reinforcing them. And maybe you have to place some distance from them in your life and maybe at some point you'll be able to bring them in a little bit closer. Knowing that there's certain things you just don't share. You don't get too personal. You can still care. It's a parent.

Corissa Stepp [00:15:44]:
I know it's hard. As our parents get older, you don't want to cut ties completely and that's a really hard thing to do. But you can minimize the time you spend with that parent. You can minimize the amount of confrontation you have. When you start to recognize that they're stirring the pot and trying to create conflict, or they're saying things to try and guilt you or to make you feel bad, inspire you in some way through manipulation to reassure them, you'll know that that's what they're doing. You'll be aware of that pattern. And you can very easily say things like, hey, or I sense that maybe you need a little reassurance right now to know that you're a good person. Right? Because at the end of the day, narcissists are not a hundred percent bad.

Corissa Stepp [00:16:32]:
They're not complete and total monsters. If they are, then they're a different personality type or they're narcissistic with maybe a blend of other personality types. But narcissistic people are not all bad, right? And if they were all bad, you never would have gotten into a relationship with them or you wouldn't have, um, stayed close to them for as long as you did. They have good attributes as well. So focusing on the good can be helpful. And you can remind yourself, okay, right now I think I'm talking to my, you know, 78 year old father, but I have to just keep remembering that he really is like a five year old child inside. So I have to speak to him like he's a five year old child. And that doesn't mean condescending, by the way.

Corissa Stepp [00:17:19]:
That just means if you were talking to a five year old and they were throwing a temper tantrum, you're not going to fight back with them as an adult. Right. You're not going to belittle them, make them feel bad. You're not going to go tit for tat with them, you're not going to stoop to their level. You're going to connect with them through empathy, show understanding. I see you're really angry right now. When you're ready to talk about it, I'm here. I see that you're really angry right now and you have a lot of emotions coming up that you're struggling to articulate or you're struggling to identify.

Corissa Stepp [00:17:53]:
I'm going to give you some space, but know that I'm here for you when you're ready if you want to talk about it. Right. So I really wanted to bring that up because it can be really hard when we are stuck in codependent patterns and when we're stuck in a codependent pattern. Right. If you were, if you did read the book, I do mention. And we talk about the Cartman drama triangle, which is the drama triangle of codependency. And that drama triangle has three different roles that come into play. The persecutor, the victim, and the fixer, slash, rescuer.

Corissa Stepp [00:18:25]:
So when we are sitting in victimhood, oftentimes we are positioning someone else because we kind of rotate around this triangle and we're never in the same role at the same time. The other person is the persecutor. So that's what we're doing when we're just blaming the narcissist. Like they're the persecutor, they're the bad guy. It's their fault. I did nothing wrong. It's all them. It's their fault that I feel this way.

Corissa Stepp [00:18:50]:
It's their fault that I'm in this position. But if we try to move out of that triangle, then we're no longer playing that role. We move into what we call an empowerment dynamic, where instead of being the victim, we can actually be the creator. Let's turn this into something else. Let's alchemize this pain. Let's alchemize this shitty situation and turn it around. Because I have choice. I am in a place of choice.

Corissa Stepp [00:19:15]:
I am in a place of personal power. And I can choose how I respond. I can either sit Here and continue to feel hurt and to blame someone else. Or I can reframe this and I can change the trajectory of these conversations or of these interactions that I'm having with this person that I believe might be a narcissist. And you also don't want to slip into that fixer, rescuer role thinking, oh, now that I understand the narcissist so much better and where they're coming from, I can fix them or I can rescue them, because maybe that's how you got into the relationship to begin with. Because the narcissist might have been playing the victim and you might have thought, oh, I'm going to swoop in and make it better. I'm going to be the white knight and I'm gonna help resolve these issues for them. I'm gonna help them get better.

Corissa Stepp [00:19:59]:
But you can't. You're not here to fix or rescue anyone. The only person you can fix or rescue is yourself. So stop looking for a savior. Sometimes women don't get out of these relationships until they find someone else that can save them from it. And listen, I will say this. In my dating life, when I was in my 20s, that's typically what I did. I kind of trapeze from one relationship to the next because whoever the new guy was was like rescuing me from the bad relationship that I was in right before it.

Corissa Stepp [00:20:28]:
Right. I was always looking for that savior, that white knight, and let me tell you, it doesn't lead to anything good. I ended up in just more narcissistic relationships. So jumped from one narcissist to another narcissist. They were all different flavors. So you can only fix or rescue yourself. No one's coming to save you. You have to save yourself.

Corissa Stepp [00:20:49]:
You have to do the work, you have to heal and you have to recover. The other thing that is important is that as we are going through this healing journey is to also be able to begin to rewrite your own narrative about who you are and healing the wounds so that they just become scars and they're not just gaping wide open holes in your soul. Because if we don't heal those wounds and allow them to become scars, then what can happen is, number one, we will continue to seek out things to fill those holes within our soul. So we have to really do that deep inner work and come into a deep place again of self love, but also being able to rewrite our narrative. And something that I don't think that a lot of us really think about is looking back at the past and rewriting the story. Because sometimes we remember things that happened where maybe we had more accountability than we thought, right? And again, this is not to victim shame or blame or anything like that, but maybe consider where perhaps you were very good at making excuses for someone's bad behavior, and maybe that was a pattern that got instilled in you from childhood. And as a result of being very good at making excuses for other people's bad behavior, you tolerated more of that in your relationships. And with a narcissist, the minute that they pick up on the fact that they can get away with things because you're so quick to excuse it or to even sweep it under the rug, because maybe you had a big fear of confrontation.

Corissa Stepp [00:22:34]:
And instead of actually addressing issues and problems in the relationship, instead of communicating about it and bringing up the topics and broaching that subject with your partner, maybe you're very quick to. And this might be in the past, right? But maybe your pattern was to very quickly sweep things under the rug and to just move on and pretend like it didn't happen because that was easier, that felt safer. Especially if confrontation with the narcissist did not feel safe, maybe it escalated to emotional and psychological abuse. And maybe you didn't realize that was happening at the time, but maybe you were just aware enough that at the end of an argument, you walked away often feeling really badly about yourself, right? Or you felt really deeply confused after conversations. Or maybe you felt like, again, like those conversations would just go in circles with absolutely no resolution, which is very typical when you're in a narcissistic relationship. Things don't usually come to resolution because the narcissist is just waiting for you to take the fall, right? To take the blame, to apologize to. To accept accountability for it. Because they're not going to, right? And they don't believe that they need to do anything to change.

Corissa Stepp [00:23:41]:
So as a result, maybe you adapted this pattern of just sweeping things under the rug and not addressing things. And as a result, issues in your relationship continued to fester and resentment started to grow, and that caused maybe a bigger divide between you and your partner at some point. And as a result, maybe that's the reason why the relationship ended. It wasn't even because you realize or recognize that your partner was a narcissist. Sometimes people don't even realize until they kind of review it and do like that Monday morning. Monday Morning Quarterback Report months after the relationship ends and then start to realize, wait a second, I think maybe my former partner was a narcissist. I mean, I can look back on a lot of my relationships that I have had over my life and realize now that they were narcissistic. But I didn't know that at the time.

Corissa Stepp [00:24:29]:
The relationships ended for other reasons, but I didn't recognize that some of the things that I was experiencing was manipulation and emotional abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse. So I can look back and say, oh, these are patterns of mine. I'm not comfortable with confrontation. And as a result, if I started to set a boundary or there was something that I was upset about, I learned to make myself small. I learned to keep my mouth shut. I learned to sweep things under the rug. I and not bring it up for conversation, for discussion, for resolution. Because I was conditioned to believe that it never got resolved.

Corissa Stepp [00:25:11]:
Because that's what would happen in those relationships. We'd go in circles, things would never get resolved. Even if I tried to have the conversation or things got so uncomfortable that I would eventually just shut down and shut up. And that felt easier to eat my feelings than to deal with the discomfort of knowing someone else was upset with me. And because that was easier for me, the narcissist assumed that I was taking responsibility and accountability for it. Probably they didn't ever had to take accountability because I would just let it go. But that built up resentment and also disconnected me from my ability to trust myself, to trust that I could advocate for myself, to trust that I was worthy of resolution, that I was worthy of the repair after an argument, that I was worthy of an apology, that I was worthy of being able to have adult conversations about conflict or things that hurt or upset me. And also that can lead you to maybe even having a pattern of always seeing the good in people, never seeing the bad, kind of putting on those rose colored glasses.

Corissa Stepp [00:26:27]:
So those were patterns of mine that I had to address and I had to take accountability for. So I had to rewrite the narrative of it wasn't all this other person. It was also my own patterns that led me to sustain the relationship for as long as I did. Because it was what I was used to. It's what I was conditioned to believe I had to do in order to stay in the relationship and not be abandoned by another person. So anyway, those are just some other things. Also is like when you're thinking about on your past and your experiences and everything like that is rewriting the narrative, getting curious, understanding yourself at a deeper level. I hope that you will read the book in its entirety and I'd love to hear what you think of it.

Corissa Stepp [00:27:14]:
I'D love to hear if you've got questions I've been asked when the second book is coming out. I don't have plans for a second book just yet, but obviously if you guys have questions and there's things that you want to share that will help me formulate what maybe this next book might look like, things that I can address, things that I can answer, places where I can go deeper. Please send them along. Reach out to me on Instagram arissastep. You can always reach me through my website or email me carissaarissastep.com and thanks for tuning in. I hope you have a wonderful day. Until next time, everyone be well.

Corissa Stepp [00:28:00]:
Thank you for tuning in to awaken her. Today's conversation may have ended, but your journey towards healing and empowerment is ongoing. Remember, every challenge you face is an opportunity to grow stronger and more resilient. If our stories today inspired you, consider sharing this episode with someone who needs these empowering messages. I'm Carissa Stepp, cheering you on as you take the steps to heal, grow and transform your life. Keep believing in yourself and until next time, stay empowered.