How Narcissistic abuse damages your intuition—and how to rebuild it
Your intuition is your internal compass—that quiet voice that guides you toward what feels right and warns you when something is off. It's meant to be your most trusted ally, helping you navigate relationships, make decisions, and stay aligned with your authentic self. But when you've experienced narcissistic abuse, this inner guidance system becomes compromised, leaving you feeling lost, confused, and unable to trust your own perceptions.
The damage isn't accidental. Narcissistic abuse systematically targets your ability to trust yourself, creating a perfect storm of self-doubt that makes it nearly impossible to hear your inner voice. Understanding how this happens—and more importantly, how to heal from it—is crucial for reclaiming your power and rebuilding your relationship with your intuition.
Manipulation and gaslighting
There's a cruel irony in having a narcissistic parent or caregiver: for most survivors, it activates your intuitive abilities and heightens your somatic empathy from a very early age. You learn to read them with razor-sharp precision. Yet because of narcissism's undermining nature, instead of realizing you're developing a superpower, you're left doubting yourself and questioning everything you're sensing due to the constant gaslighting.
Narcissistic abuse systematically dismantles your connection to your inner knowing. Through gaslighting, manipulation, blame-shifting, and constant invalidation, abusers train you to distrust your perceptions and rely on their version of reality instead. The result? You don't know what you think, you're confused by how you feel, and you doubt yourself because you've been led to believe you're misreading the signals.
If you can't trust what you're sensing, you can't trust yourself. This leads to self-doubt, fear, and confusion—all of which crush your confidence and erode your ability to trust and develop your intuition.
What to do
Name it. Simply being able to name your experience and see it clearly and honestly can be a powerful first step toward recovery as a survivor. We can't heal and change something we're not willing to acknowledge. Narcissism exists on a spectrum, so you might be dealing with traits rather than full-blown narcissistic personality disorder—but seeing them clearly and understanding their effects on you is transformative.
Honesty is required, which can feel painful. However, this is the essential step toward receiving the help you need to heal and change yourself and/or the situation you're in.
Further reading
Four reasons why Highly Sensitive People ‘attract’ narcissists
Trauma
Having lived with a sense of threat and unpredictability for an extended period with a narcissist can lead to trauma symptoms and/or Complex PTSD—leaving you with symptoms such as panic attacks, nightmares, flashbacks, living on high alert, anxiety, depression, and suppressed rage, to name a few.
When the body is in trauma response, we don't feel safe in our bodies. We can be overwhelmed by sensation, triggered into a panic attack by a look or a slamming door. We can retreat to our heads unknowingly or dissociate because being inside your body feels like a scary place to be. It also makes it hard to trust the body's signals when we live with ongoing emotional explosions and intense physical sensations—regardless of the external environment or whether the threat is even still present.
This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to listen to our intuition in this state, since we register intuitive information and intelligence through our bodies. We need to work with this trauma experience first and find healing before we can effectively develop our intuition.
What to do
Get help. If you suspect you have trauma symptoms, take it seriously and seek professional support. This isn't something you can manage alone—you'll need guidance to heal and return to a regulated nervous system.
Further Reading
Pleasing people
It's common to develop a people-pleasing personality or become an empath/highly sensitive person when you have a narcissistic parent or caregiver—it's a coping strategy in response to their constant criticism. Yet once again, this erodes your ability to hear your intuition as you're continually overriding your instincts to do what others want or need rather than being able to hear and trust your inner voice.
Being a people pleaser can leave you stuck being a "good girl," unable to relax and be yourself. You become scared to do things differently or get things wrong because you need to aim for perfection to be even remotely acceptable. You fear upsetting anyone and assume it must be your fault. You feel guilty or selfish for having any needs or negative feelings. This leads to codependent relationships where you're constantly seeking validation from others, and the lack of self-belief and low self-esteem results in poor life choices.
People pleasing takes you away from your feelings and your thoughts as you override them for the sake of others. It makes it hard to listen to yourself, trust yourself, and own what you need and want—which makes it impossible to listen to your intuition. If you do have intuitive hits, you deny them or talk yourself out of them, just like you do with your feelings.
What to do
Listening to your intuition requires honesty. You need to know how you're feeling and own it. This isn't a comfortable journey—it requires that you learn to trust yourself, register ALL your feelings (not just the "nice" ones) and needs, and take action on them. This all requires support from personal cheerleaders, the development of healthy boundaries, and the growth of self-confidence in honouring yourself, not just others.
Further reading
The importance of rewilding for highly sensitive women and what the first feminine has to teach us
How to quit being a social perfectionist and create healthy boundaries as a HSP
Boundaries and anger
With people-pleasing tendencies and a fear of conflict (and the threat of verbal attack), setting healthy boundaries can become a real challenge for children of narcissists later in life. You've been made to feel guilty or fearful for having needs or feelings! Narcissists excel at violating personal boundaries, and when they feel their dominance is tested, they threaten you with emotional withdrawal, denial of love, verbal attacks, or explosive anger.
This creates anxious and avoidant attachment patterns in you, causing you to feel unsafe asking for what you need, saying how you feel, or expressing what you think—particularly if you disagree with them. We often have to learn from scratch what reasonable adjustments look like and what constitutes a healthy boundary at work, in relationships, in friendships, and beyond, because we've had such a distorted experience.
Learning to listen to our intuition at this point and recognize what are, in fact, our reasonable expectations for how we're treated—including the ability to hear our own "No!"—can feel quite frightening to move toward. It's brave work for a child of a narcissist because saying no felt like a threat to our survival as children, whether from violence or abandonment. Yet when we come back to the body and learn to know our boundaries, we no longer fear hearing the message of our intuitive voice (which might be "get away from this person or situation!") but actually take action on those intuitive hits.
What to do
Developing healthy boundaries is no small task. For me, it began with strong role models in friendships and then a lot of inner healing with various modalities—EFT, BodyCode, Shiatsu, and so on—to move past the fear of having boundaries, which was significant. Get help in different forms because you need an outside perspective to help you rebalance—you can't see yourself clearly at the moment. Then it becomes a case of setting the intention and practicing, over and over, until it feels natural. Now people say I'm one of the most boundaried people they know—but that was training. If I can do it, you can too.
Further reading
Six reasons why highly sensitive people are wrong to believe it's unkind to say no
Eight limiting beliefs highly sensitive people have about boundaries
Intuitive gifts
As damaging as narcissistic abuse is, recovery is possible from my experience—albeit it's a journey. There are skills we develop, unfortunately, learned the hard way as narcissistic abuse survivors (with the aid of a lot of therapy, alternative healing, and training for most of us!). Once you've recovered from the trauma symptoms, developed healthy boundaries, and stopped people-pleasing, you can start to recognize and use the intuitive superpowers you developed from the experience.
Reading people - You can read people like a book, whether you realize it yet or not. With your heightened sense of somatic empathy (feeling other people's experiences in your body) developed from trying to read your narcissistic parent without words, you know what someone is feeling, you can sense their intentions, and you have a first-class bullshit radar waiting for you to acknowledge it once you stop trying to be "nice" and just be honest.
Hearing thoughts and reading minds - Same skill applied differently. Some of us can read minds—you can hear people's thoughts in your head. Everything is energy, and thoughts can be read just like a book with your heightened awareness, intention, and attention.
Reading atmospheres - The same is true of atmospheres and group dynamics. You can read not only people but situations well. You sense the tension or that "something just happened."
This ability you developed for survival as a child may have increased your sense of confusion at the time because you didn't know how you felt—what feelings were yours and what wasn't. You wouldn't have known you were feeling other people's feelings. The key now is to recognize it so you can trust the information and knowledge you're picking up, trust yourself, and then use it for good—whether that's protecting yourself or others, navigating social situations, deepening relationship connections, or like me, applying it to your working practice. It's one of the reasons I can do my job so well today as an Intuitive Healer—I've refined and honed this skill.
So out of adversity and challenge, valuable skills can be developed that bring healing and hope to others. We each have our own path to express this—what's yours?
What to do
The first step toward developing your intuitive skills is knowing where you are on the healing journey. How far along are you on your personal transformation? Walk before you run—recover from your trauma symptoms first. Then explore modalities that help you develop your intuitive skills, or perhaps invest in intuitive training to build your confidence in your natural ability. Your intuitive abilities are at your fingertips—it's learning to hear your intuitive voice, trust it, and take action that you'll need to train. Learning to believe in yourself.
Further reading
Four different ways of intuitive channelling for HSPs
Five Intuitive super powers of highly sensitive people
Finally
If you're a narcissistic abuse survivor, seek therapeutic support and educate yourself—read up on the subject, listen to podcast interviews with experts, and so on. You may have emotional wounds, but you can heal, grow, and change.
