Journaling Prompts for Recovering from a Narcissistic Relationship
Coming out of a relationship with a narcissistic person can leave you deeply confused about what was real—about your own perceptions, your own memories, your own sanity. Gaslighting leaves its mark. So does the experience of organizing your life around someone else's needs while your own quietly disappeared. Recovery from this kind of relationship often involves rebuilding trust in your own judgment, your own feelings, and your own account of events. Writing can be one place where your version of events simply gets to exist, without being argued with or reinterpreted.
Journaling Prompts
Write your own account of what happened in that relationship—not the version they offered, not the charitable re-read, but what you actually experienced, what you actually felt, what was actually said.
What did you give up in that relationship in order to keep the peace or earn approval? Make an honest list. What does that list say about how you saw yourself at the time?
When did you first have the feeling that something was wrong? What did you do with that feeling, and what made it hard to trust it?
What do you know now about what a healthy relationship actually feels like—in terms of how you feel about yourself within it, not just how the other person behaves?
What is the most compassionate, accurate thing you could say to yourself about why you stayed as long as you did? You don't have to defend the relationship—just understand your own experience with kindness.