Summer Survival Series – Part 2
If you read my previous article, Why Do Narcissists Ruin Holidays?, you may have recognised that familiar feeling of arriving somewhere beautiful and yet never quite arriving at all.
Your suitcase is unpacked. The weather is warm. Everyone else seems to relax almost immediately.
You don’t. Instead, part of you is listening.
Listening for the tone of voice that tells you something has changed. Watching for the look that means the day may not unfold as you’d hoped. Wondering whether now is the right moment to suggest the boat trip, the museum or the little restaurant everyone has been recommending.
Nothing dramatic has happened. Yet your body is already working.
One of the hidden costs of emotional abuse is that it quietly changes what your attention belongs to. Instead of belonging to the holiday, it belongs to the relationship. Instead of noticing the place you’ve travelled so far to see, you find yourself noticing someone else’s moods, trying to predict them, manage them or avoid triggering them.
By the time the holiday is over, many people tell me they feel more exhausted than when they left home. Not because of the travelling. Because they never really stopped being on duty.
The Holiday Becomes About Them
A client once told me about a holiday she had taken in Greece. She showed me photographs of whitewashed houses, tiny harbours and crystal-clear water. Looking through them, she said. “I know it was beautiful,” she said, “because I can see the photographs. I just don’t remember feeling that I was really there.”
When I asked her what she did remember, she didn’t talk about the scenery. She remembered breakfast.
She remembered trying to decide whether it was safe to suggest hiring a boat for the afternoon. She remembered the silence that settled over the table because she’d chosen the “wrong” café the day before. She remembered watching him more than she remembered looking at the sea.
I think that captures something many survivors struggle to explain. The hidden cost isn’t simply that another person dominates the holiday. It’s that they begin to dominate your experience of it.
Gradually, almost without noticing, your own thoughts, preferences and curiosity are pushed into the background. The day becomes less about discovering somewhere new and more about working out how to keep the atmosphere manageable. That is an exhausting way to travel through the world.
The Things You Stop Seeing
One of the saddest consequences of living with emotional abuse is that the world slowly becomes smaller. Not physically. Emotionally. Your attention narrows until it settles almost entirely on one person. You stop noticing the little bakery because you’re wondering whether they’re annoyed. You walk past the market you’ve been looking forward to because it doesn’t seem worth suggesting anymore.
You hear your children laughing in the swimming pool, but part of your mind is already wondering whether the noise will irritate someone. If you’ve lived like this for long enough, it can begin to feel normal. It isn’t. It is an adaptation. Your mind has learnt that keeping an eye on one person’s emotional weather is more important than enjoying the sunshine, tasting the local food or wandering through a place you’ve never seen before. It’s an understandable adaptation.
But it comes at a cost.
Let The Holiday Become Bigger Than The Relationship
There is something I often encourage clients to experiment with when they are unable to avoid spending time with a narcissistic partner or family member. I don’t suggest trying harder to change the atmosphere. Most people have already spent years doing that.
Instead, I invite them to make the holiday a little bigger. Not by booking more excursions or trying to create the perfect itinerary, but by allowing the world outside the relationship to matter again. Perhaps that means lingering over breakfast because the owner of the little café enjoys talking to visitors. Perhaps it’s joining the guided walk you almost talked yourself out of because you didn’t know whether they would enjoy it. Perhaps it’s sitting beside the pool while the children play and finding yourself in conversation with another parent. Or maybe it’s simply wandering through the old town on your own for half an hour, noticing things that catch your eye without feeling you have to justify why they interest you.
At first glance, these moments seem insignificant. I don’t think they are.
They remind you that most conversations don’t require careful preparation. That most people don’t punish you for having an opinion. That warmth can be offered freely and received without suspicion. More than anything, they remind you that the narcissistic person is part of your holiday. They are not the whole of it.
A Different Kind Of Safety
People often ask me how they can feel safe on holiday when they’re with someone who makes them feel so unsettled. I don’t think the answer is to spend every waking moment trying to avoid conflict. That simply keeps your attention where it has always been.
Sometimes safety begins in much smaller ways. It begins when you notice that you’ve spent ten minutes talking to someone in a market without thinking about the relationship. It begins when you realise you’ve been watching the sea instead of watching their face. It begins when you catch yourself laughing with your children and, for a few moments, forget to wonder whether somebody else approves. Those moments may be brief. They may not change the rest of the day. But they matter because they interrupt a pattern that has often been running for years. They remind your body that there is another way to experience the world.
What Recovery Quietly Looks Like
When people think about recovery from narcissistic abuse, they often imagine big decisions. Leaving. Going no contact. Starting over. Sometimes those things are part of the journey.
But there are quieter beginnings too. One of them is recognising the hidden cost of what you’ve been living with. Perhaps the greatest loss isn’t the ruined holiday or the missed excursion. Perhaps it’s that, somewhere along the way, your own life became less interesting to you than someone else’s moods. Once you see that, something begins to change. You don’t have to force yourself to be positive. You don’t have to pretend the relationship isn’t difficult. But you can begin to notice when your attention has drifted away from you and gently invite it back.
Back to the view from the balcony. Back to the conversation that makes you smile. Back to the sound of your children laughing. Back to the person you were before you learnt to organise your life around somebody else’s emotional weather. That, to me, is one of the quiet beginnings of recovery. Not changing them.
Finding your way back to yourself.
If you’re beginning to recognise these patterns, you may also find my article Why Do Narcissists Ruin Holidays? helpful.
Read next: Why Holidays Still Feel Different After You’ve Left a Narcissist
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