In this article, you’ll learn:
- Why recovery after narcissistic abuse is not a straight line
- How IFS and Jungian perspectives explain self-worth, self-trust, self-esteem, and self-love
- Practical ways to rebuild each pillar in daily life
- Why healing is about integration, not perfection
- How these four pillars protect against falling back into old patterns
Recovery after narcissistic abuse is not a straight line. It curves, it falls, and sometimes circles back on itself. You’re strong and clear some days and right back where you began the next. That’s not failure, that’s just how narcissistic abuse recovery works. What gets you through is that you have pillars to return to. Think of them as supports that hold you up when the old patterns try to pull you down.
These four pillars (self-worth, self-trust, self-esteem, and self-love) are not ideals. They are lived experiences, daily choices, and practices that restore what abuse stole. And if we look at them through Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Jungian perspectives, we see that each pillar is not so much a “skill” to be learned but a posture of relating to the parts of us that have laboured too long under pain, shame, or silence.
Self-Worth: Remembering You Matter
Narcissistic abuse tends to leave a shame scar. Victims learn to trade fragments of themselves just to stay connected, hoping “at least I won’t be alone.” But every time we trade our truth for the comfort of someone else, self-worth is eroded.
According to the IFS, this is where exiled parts are carrying the weight of “I’m not good enough.” They are telling stories planted by the abuser: You don’t matter. You’re weak. You’re unlovable. The healing process begins when we, as Self, confront those parts with compassion instead of further judgment.
Little things, like standing up to that guy in the supermarket line who pushes in, become little ceremonies of reclaiming value. They re-tell the young, hidden self inside: “I will not abandon you again. You are heard.” Jung would term this the work of individuation: integrating dark corners of the mind into equilibrium and demanding that they be given a seat at the table.
Self-Trust: Re-gaining the Inner Compass
Abuse thrives on confusion. Gaslighting deconstructs faith in your own body and mind. Soon, you may no longer hear your intuition. That silence stings—it feels like being cut off from your own inner compass.
Trust yourself again by listening. In IFS, this typically resembles helping protective pieces (doubters, second-guessers, procrastinators) notice that they no longer have to do it all. They were once attempting to safeguard you, but they no longer need to silence your knowing forever.
Jung described the Self as a guiding centre, a locus beyond the ego that can be paradoxical, unknowable, and mysterious. Coming back to trust yourself is like returning the steering wheel to this deeper Self. Every time you listen to your body, “How do I feel about this person? What’s my gut sense about this choice?”, you connect more deeply.
And if you act on that feeling, even in tiny ways, you get to know your internal guide.
Self-Esteem: Releasing the Saboteur
Low self-esteem usually shows up in two crippling ways: giving up before you start or sabotaging yourself at precisely the moment when success is just around the corner. These are not signs of laziness; they are coping mechanisms. They once kept you from drawing attention to yourself, which in an abusive relationship could have been dangerous.
IFS helps us to meet these saboteur pieces without shaming them. Instead, we get curious: What are you in terror of would happen if I were to succeed? More frequently, we discover they worry about being rejected, envied, or punished, remnants of the past. Jung might call these meeting archetypal images of the shadow, parts of ourselves we learned to exile but which hold unexpressed strength.
Boosting self-esteem involves strengthening such defences. Instead of falling apart when things get difficult, you experiment with healthier strategies—seeking assistance, attempting small gambles, and accepting mistakes. Each time you catch yourself not falling apart, the saboteur relaxes, and esteem builds.
Self-Love: Reparenting the Inner Child
The four pillars are mostly tender, but self-love is actually the way you talk to yourself when you are alone. Abuse is likely to plant an inner critic that repeats the abuser’s voice: “idiot, ugly, unworthy.” The voice does not let up, and many mistake it for reality.
In IFS, self-love emerges through reparenting the rejected Inner Child who continues to feel cast off and disregarded. Instead of rejecting that child, you keep him or her close. You tell him or her: You deserved to be protected. You deserved to be loved. And I will not leave you now.
For Jung, this is a refrain of the union of opposites: accepting both the hurt and the beautiful, the broken and the whole. Self-love is not avoiding pain; it is creating a new paradigm in which your value is not predicated on perfection or others’ validation.
Radical self-care, resting when you’re tired, feeding yourself well, speaking to yourself kindly in your own mind, is not indulgence. It’s the immune system of the soul. It’s what keeps you from stepping back into patterns of abuse.
Keeping the Four Together
Healing after narcissistic abuse is not about “getting over it.” It’s about intertwining these four strands into the tapestry of your daily life until they are unbreakable.
Self-worth reminds you to set boundaries.
Self-trust gives you the courage to leap and believe in your inner voice.
Self-esteem helps you go on instead of killing yourself.
Self-love stands firm, gentle, and whole.
On tough days, you can see that one pillar is wobbly. Okay. You don’t need perfection, just practice. The practice of returning, again and again, is the work itself.
In IFS terms, recovery is about reconciling all of the parts of you, angry, afraid, ashamed, hopeful, to a relationship with your Self, that calm, loving centre. In Jungian terms, it’s a life’s work of individuation: becoming a whole self, baggage included.
And here’s the soft secret: as you tend these pillars, you discover that the ground you were searching for has been within you all along. This is the heart of recovery after narcissistic abuse: not erasing the past, but growing stronger roots from it.
