2. You doubt your abilities and your competence
This is another very big sign that you might be a victim of narcissistic abuse.
The narcissist loves to take any opportunity they can to degrade your intellect, your competence, your perceptions, or your abilities to do anything independent of the narcissist. The goal of the narcissist is to gain control over you. And they certainly do not want you to have any faith or confidence in your abilities because they know you’re competent. And know you’re capable. They just don’t want you to know that.
They will use all kinds of overt and covert manipulations to make you believe that you enable incompetent or just too stupid to do whatever it is. The problem that happens here is that if we do not understand what the narcissist is. If we think that their motivation is coming from a genuine honest or even a protective place, we come to accept and believe these things about ourselves when their reality is nothing could be further from the truth.
3. You have a cruel inner dialogue or inner critic as it’s sometimes referred to
This is nearly always present when you’ve been exposed to narcissistic abuse, especially if you were raised by a narcissistic parent. The narcissist loves to degrade, humiliate, criticize, ridicule, and destroy all aspects of a victim that they find threatening or difficult to control, and your self-esteem, self-compassion. And self-worth is at the top of the list.
And because we’re treated like this for years on end, and we do not know what the narcissist is, and what their motivation is, we internalize that voice. We eventually start berating ourselves. Not knowing that the voice in our head is the voice of your abuser, not knowing that the voice is a liar and not truthful. And not knowing that the things it says to us are abusive, cruel, and wrong.
A book: Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse
Essentially, we start talking to ourselves in treating ourselves no differently than the narcissist. If you have a mean destructive cruel, or unforgiving inner dialogue or critic, I highly suggest you take a long hard look at the people that surround you. This is a huge red flag that you have been exposed to a significant amount of narcissistic abuse.
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