At Sound Mind Counseling, we see lots of people who are trying to survive narcissistic abuse. As a survivor myself, I am always looking for ways to support these clients and help them rebuild the sense of self that has been systematically destroyed by their abuser.

One of the things that is inevitably sacrificed for victims during their relationship with an abuser is their own understanding of reality. The endless chaos, confusion, and self-doubt that toxic people create leave their targets bewildered and disempowered. Where once they may have been strong people with a distinct voice and point of view, they now find themselves twisting about like a fish on the line, just trying to catch their breath and survive another day.

By the time a survivor lands in therapy, their internal compass has often been so broken that they wonder if they are the abusive partner. As a therapist, it will never not be unnerving to sit with a person who is obviously ethical, compassionate, and intelligent and have them ask me if they are abusive—sometimes even insisting that whatever terrible things their partner has done are understandable and make sense, given that they are just reacting to that client’s selfishness, laziness, stupidity, or any of the other things that have been projected onto them.

The term gaslighting gets bandied about a lot these days, and for good reason; there’s a lot of gaslighting going on in our culture. But its overuse has also stripped it of its original power, which was to describe a long-term relational experience that destabilizes one’s own organic understanding of self and reality. It is a torture that is difficult to describe and even harder to recover from.

Imagine this: you grow up looking at lovely blue skies. You never question that the sky is blue; there it is in plain sight! Everyone you know talks about the beauty of the blue sky, and even if some see a shade of azure and others would describe it more like turquoise, there is a general agreement that what is overhead outside when the sun shines is blue.

Then you fall in love with someone who is wonderful, except there’s one little argument you seem to keep on having. When he talks about the sky, he calls it green. At first, you laugh it off. You love him. Who cares if you each call the sky something different? Eventually, though, it starts getting on both of your nerves. You let it go. People are allowed to have opinions, right? Maybe it looks greenish to him, you think. No big deal.

But it’s a huge deal to him. He insists it’s green. He begins to tell you that you’re stupid if you don’t see the color he sees. He tells you to stop talking to all the other people you know who call it blue—they are just trying to drive a wedge between the two of you. You start to cringe every time you go outside together; you know what’s coming. Endless conflict and discussions about the color of the damn sky. For a while, you stand your ground. It’s blue! you say. It’s blue.

Then something changes. You are so tired from fighting that you concede, “You’re right, in some lights it does look green.” You still don’t believe it, but you want the fight to end. And that’s when things really go into overdrive. It seems to become a moral principle for him to not only insist you’re seeing green, but to say you’ve been lying about it this whole time.

He wants you to admit that you’ve been lying about it to make him feel crazy. This admission is proof, he says, of your selfish, perverse nature—a nature so terrible that no one else in the entire world but him could ever love a lying, selfish, shitty person like you. And while you’re busy trying to discern whether there could be any truth to any of these statements, you look up. And suddenly the sky seems pretty darn green after all.

By the time you land on the couch in front of me, you have no idea what the color of anything is, but you’re sure there is something seriously wrong with you. That’s when you ask me some version of the question every victim of narcissistic abuse eventually asks: am I the problem?

Am I the one who always needs things to be my own way, even if it hurts the people I care about? Am I bad for wanting validation and understanding? Am I the one who is trying to convince my partner that his truth is wrong? Am I crazy? Am I the narcissist? When you’re on the outside looking in, as friends, family, and therapists are, it’s easy to see that the answer to all of these questions is no. But when you’re in the toxic cloud of psychological abuse, it isn’t. There are two qualities non-abusers have that abusers never do: a wish to collaborate and an ability to perceive nuance. Identifying the presence of these qualities in oneself, and the lack of them in one’s abuser, can be the key to sanity.

A narcissistic abuser is always on his own side. The loving and caring things they perform are always manipulative. The love bombing at the beginning of the relationship and the breadcrumbing throughout feel authentic and keep victims stuck and second-guessing themselves, but are, in reality, more proof of their non-collaborative, black-and-white thinking.

Victims can ask themselves:

• Is my partner able to consider the viewpoints of others in a thoughtful, measured way?
• Is my partner consistently a team player?
• Is my partner able to empathize with others without bringing himself into the conversation?
• Does my partner have a victim mentality?
• Does my partner expect that others should adapt to his needs/expectations?
• Does my partner accuse me of things that are objectively not true?
• Does my partner feel the need to be right at all times?
• Does my partner look at the world through an “us vs. them” lens?
• Is my partner open to change?
• Is my partner comfortable speaking to their own shortcomings?

After considering these questions (to which the answers will likely not be black and white, because victims tend not to think that way), they can ask themselves:

How would I respond to these same questions myself?

If the answers are nuanced, and there are conflicting emotions while considering them—including guilt, anger, or confusion—those are signs of a person who cares about the experiences of others, about truth for the sake of truth, and about morality, ethics, and personal growth. They are not the answers of a narcissist or an abuser.

Part of what happens when we are in the middle of a toxic relationship is that we are often or always in some form of a trauma response, be it fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. When our brains are using survival strategies, our executive functioning goes offline, which is why it is so important to have an objective way to evaluate reality that is clear and easy. Being able to discern whether someone is or isn’t a black-and-white thinker and is or isn’t collaborative is the pro hack.

Anyone who is made to feel “crazy” in the presence of another person has a right to ask what’s going on. They have a right to explore their experience and walk away from it if they need to. They have a right to compassion and to support. As someone once said, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We must be careful not to waste our lives stuck in the vortex of someone else’s agenda and madness. If you have questions about your own sanity, that may be a sign that you are being abused. And abuse does not have to be physical to be valid. You owe it to yourself (and to your kids, if you have them) to find someone—a friend or a professional—who can help reorient you to your true north and begin the long and difficult process of reclaiming your freedom.