How to Start Healing When You’re Still in Contact With a Narcissist

In 1944, Frida Kahlo painted herself open.

The painting is called The Broken Column. It is a self-portrait — but not of the version of herself she presented to the world. It is a portrait of the interior. Her body split down the centre, her spine replaced by a crumbling Ionic column that is fracturing in multiple places simultaneously. The landscape behind her is barren and cracked, the earth itself splitting apart in the same direction as her body. And across her skin, from her neck to her waist, hundreds of nails — each one driven in, each one present, each one accounted for with the precision of someone who has decided to make the invisible visible rather than perform the fiction that it does not exist.

She was wearing a medical corset when she painted it. A steel and leather structure that covered her torso from hips to shoulders, prescribed after her thirty-fifth surgery — the consequence of a bus accident sixteen years earlier that had shattered her spine, her pelvis, her right leg, and produced a level of chronic physical pain that her diary described as a companion she had stopped trying to make leave.

She was also, at the time, still in a relationship with Diego Rivera. Not the marriage — they had divorced in 1939. The remarriage — they had re-wed in 1940. A dynamic that her diaries described with the specific anguish of someone who understood, with complete clarity, what the relationship cost her, and had not yet found a way to make that understanding produce a clean exit.

She painted The Broken Column from inside all of that. Not from safety. Not from distance. Not from the clean, uncontaminated space that healing is supposed to require before it can begin. She painted it from inside the fracture, while the fracture was still active, using the tools available in the room she was actually in.

I want us to stay inside that image. Because it is the most honest answer I have found to the question this article is built around.

Every piece of advice about healing from this kind of relationship assumes, at some level, that you have left. That the contact has ended. That you are operating from the clean distance of no longer being inside the dynamic — and that the work of recovery can therefore begin from a position of safety that the relationship no longer threatens.

But what about the woman who has not left yet? The one who shares children with him and will be in the same room for the next fifteen years of school pickups and parents’ evenings and graduations. The one who works in the same organisation and cannot afford, financially or professionally, to be the one who moves. The one who is still in the relationship and knows, with the specific cold clarity of something she has been circling for years, what it is — and has not yet found the exit that the knowledge should, by rights, produce.

Kahlo did not wait until she was out of pain to begin painting the pain. She painted it from inside. And the painting is one of the most complete and honest accounts of human suffering in the history of art — not despite being made inside the wound, but because of it.

You do not have to be out of it to begin healing. You only have to be willing to paint from where you are.

Step OneStop Waiting for the Exit to Give You Permission to Begin

The first and most damaging thing the standard advice does to women in your situation is to locate healing exclusively in the future. In the version of your life that begins after the contact ends. In the clean, uncontaminated space on the other side of a door that may be years away from opening.

This is not only unhelpful. It is actively harmful. Because it frames every day you spend still in contact as a day of pre-healing — a waiting room, a suspension, a period that does not count toward recovery because recovery has not yet been granted permission to begin.

You do not have to wait.

Healing is not a location you travel to after the contact ends. It is a relationship you build with yourself — with your own perception, your own needs, your own account of what is happening — that the contact does not have to reach in order to damage. And that relationship can begin today. In the room you are actually in. With the tools you actually have.

The exit, when it comes, will not begin your healing. It will change the conditions under which your healing continues. Those are different things. And understanding the difference is the first step — because it returns the agency to you rather than to the timing of an exit you do not yet control.

How to begin today

Identify one belief about yourself that the relationship installed that you do not accept as true. Just one. Write it down — not to process it, not to build a case, just to name it on paper in your own handwriting and note, beside it, the evidence from your own history that contradicts it. That is the beginning. Not dramatic. Not dependent on distance. Just the first nail accounted for.

Step TwoBuild an Interior That the Contact Cannot Enter

The specific damage that ongoing contact does to healing is not physical proximity. It is the way physical proximity keeps refreshing the dynamic — keeps running the same patterns, producing the same responses, reinforcing the same neural pathways that the relationship has spent months or years building.

You cannot stop the external contact. But you can build something he cannot reach.

What Kahlo had — what kept her making work through thirty-five surgeries and a marriage that her diary described as both the love of her life and the source of her most corrosive damage — was an interior life that the external conditions could not fully colonise. Not because she was exempt from the damage. The nails in The Broken Column are there because the damage was real. But alongside the damage — simultaneously, in the same body, in the same room — she had something the damage could not touch: her own witness of it. Her own precise, unflinching account of what was happening.

That witness is what you are building. The specific, internal relationship with your own experience that does not require his confirmation to be valid — that exists independently of whether he acknowledges it, whether he accepts it, whether the version of reality he is maintaining has room for it.

My therapist — Tuesday afternoons, the chair by the window — described this as building a room inside yourself that has a lock. Not to hide in. To return to. A place where your account of events is the only account being held, and where the work of holding it accurately is the primary activity.

How to build it

Choose a daily practice that is entirely yours — that belongs to you completely and has no connection to him, the relationship, or the management of the dynamic. Not as self-care in the spa-and-candles sense. As the deliberate, consistent claiming of twenty minutes in which you are accountable only to yourself. Writing. Walking a specific route alone. Reading something that has nothing to do with any of this. The content matters less than the consistency and the ownership. You are building the habit of returning to yourself. That habit is the room.

Step ThreeName What Is Happening in Real Time — Without Requiring a Verdict

One of the most insidious effects of ongoing contact is that it keeps the fog active. Every interaction refreshes the confusion — the self-doubt, the second-guessing, the trained reflex of running his counter-reading of events alongside your own until you are no longer sure which version is reliable.

The antidote to fog is not distance. It is naming.

Not to him — naming to him produces counter-reframes and the specific exhaustion of a conversation that always ends somewhere other than where you started. But to yourself. In real time. In the specific, undramatic practice of noticing what happens in an interaction and noting it clearly — not as a case you are building, not as evidence you are gathering, but as the simple discipline of a witness who is present for her own life.

After Daniel — the man I spent four years trying to love correctly — I spent months understanding that the fog was not a property of the relationship. It was a property of my relationship to my own perception. The relationship had trained me to run his interpretation of events alongside mine and treat his as the more reliable one. That training did not require his presence to keep running. It ran in his absence too — which meant that distance alone would not have cleared it. What cleared it was the practice of naming what I observed without immediately offering it for counter-interpretation.

How to practise it

After each significant interaction, write three sentences — not a journal entry, not an analysis, just three sentences in the plainest possible language. What happened. What you felt. What you noticed. No interpretation. No fairness audit. No space for the counter-reading. Just the witness account, written in the first person, held privately. Over time those sentences become a record that belongs entirely to you — and the record, returned to, makes the fog thinner than the contact alone can make it.

Step FourRebuild Your Relationship With Your Own Reactions Before You Try to Manage Them

The relationship has spent months or years teaching you that your reactions are the problem. That your responses to things are disproportionate. That the appropriate response to your own distress is to manage it, edit it, reduce it to something more presentable before you allow yourself to have it.

The healing that is available to you right now — inside the contact, with the conditions unchanged — begins with the reversal of that training. Not through confrontation. Through the quiet, internal practice of allowing your reactions to exist before you evaluate them.

This is not permission to act on every reaction. It is permission to have them first, to let them be present in your body for long enough to tell you what they are actually about, before the editing reflex kicks in and reduces them to something more manageable.

Priya — my closest friend, the one who had been watching from the outside for two years before she finally said anything — said something that I did not understand until I was out of the relationship and could look back at it clearly. She said: you used to know what you felt about something before you knew what to do about it. At some point you stopped knowing what you felt at all. You went straight to what to do.

She was right. The management had replaced the feeling. And the feeling — the raw, unedited, first-response signal that your nervous system sends before the training intercepts it — is where the healing lives. Not in what you do with it. In the fact that you let it exist at all.

How to start

When a reaction arrives — anger, hurt, confusion, the specific discomfort of something that did not add up — give it sixty seconds before you do anything with it. Not to wallow. To witness. To let the signal complete itself before the management begins. Sixty seconds of not explaining it away, not asking whether it is proportionate, not running it through his expected response. Just the reaction, present, yours. That sixty seconds is the beginning of reclaiming the instrument.

Step FiveFind One Person Who Holds the Full Version — and Let Them Hold It

The isolation that ongoing contact produces is not only physical. It is epistemic. The longer the contact continues, the more your account of what is happening gets managed — edited for the audiences available to you, softened for the people who would not understand, redacted for the ones who know him and whose knowledge of him complicates the full version of your story.

Healing while still in contact requires at least one person who holds the unredacted version.

Not a group. Not a forum. One person — a friend, a therapist, someone who knows your full history with him and whose understanding of the situation is not compromised by their relationship with him — who you can tell the complete, unmanaged, not-made-reasonable-for-the-audience account of what is happening.

The function of this person is not to validate you. Validation is pleasant but insufficient. The function is to reflect your account back to you accurately — to confirm that what you are describing makes sense, that your reading of events is coherent, that the fog you are operating inside is a product of the conditions and not a deficiency in your perception.

That reflection is what Kahlo’s painting did for itself — it held the complete version, the full inventory of nails, without softening any of them for an audience. The painting did not make the damage more palatable. It named it exactly. And the exact naming is what gave it, and gives it still, its extraordinary power to make the person looking at it feel less alone.

Who this person needs to be

Not someone who will tell you what to do. Not someone whose primary response is to problem-solve the situation before they have finished hearing about it. Someone who can sit with the full version of what you are describing without needing to resolve it — who can hold the complexity of your still being in contact without making that complexity into a judgment about your choices. If you do not have that person in your life right now, a therapist who understands this specific dynamic is the most efficient way to find them. The investment is not in the therapy. It is in having somewhere the full version is held.

Step SixRedefine What Healing Looks Like When the Conditions Have Not Changed

The version of healing most of us have absorbed is linear and destination-based. You leave. You process. You recover. You arrive somewhere better. The progress is measurable, the stages are identifiable, and the endpoint — the healed version of yourself — is distinguishable from where you started by the fact that the damaging conditions are no longer present.

That version is not available to you right now. And treating it as the only valid version of healing is the thing that will keep you in the waiting room — performing pre-healing, gathering strength for a future that keeps not arriving, measuring yourself against a standard that requires conditions you do not yet have.

Kahlo’s healing — whatever that word means in the context of a life spent inside chronic physical pain and a relationship she could not resolve — was not linear. It did not arrive after the conditions changed. It happened simultaneously with the conditions, in the same body, in the same life, using the same hands that were also managing everything else.

What she produced from inside that complexity — the paintings, the diary, the self-portraits that refused to look away from anything — is not evidence that the complexity was resolved. It is evidence that something was built inside it anyway.

What to measure instead

Stop measuring healing by the distance between you and the contact. Start measuring it by the distance between your current relationship with your own perception and what it was six months ago. Are you naming things more accurately? Are your reactions reaching you before the management intercepts them? Do you have a room inside yourself that holds your version of events without requiring his endorsement? Those are the measurements that matter when the conditions have not changed. And they are entirely available to you. Right now. In the room you are actually in.

What Kahlo Made — and What It Means That She Made It Then

The Broken Column was not made after the fracture healed. The fracture never fully healed. She painted it in 1944 and lived in some version of that pain for the rest of her life — dying in 1954, at forty-seven, inside a body that had spent decades requiring more of her than any body should.

The painting is extraordinary not because she survived the fracture. Because she witnessed it. Because she put down on canvas, in complete and unsparing detail, exactly what was happening inside her — while it was happening, from inside it, with no distance and no protective remove and no requirement that she be finished with the experience before she was allowed to account for it.

You do not have to be finished with the experience to account for it.

You do not have to be out of the contact to begin building something the contact cannot reach.

You do not have to wait for the conditions to change before you start changing your relationship to them.

The healing that is available to you right now — inside the contact, with the fog still active, with the exit still uncertain — is real healing. It is not the version the books describe, and it will not look like the destination you are waiting for. But it is the version available in the room you are actually in. And it begins not with distance but with witness. Not with leaving but with seeing. Not with the exit but with the decision, made now, to start painting from exactly where you are.

Kahlo wore the corset. She painted the nails. She held the full account of what was happening in her body and her life without softening any of it for an audience.

The nails in your version are yours to name. You do not have to wait until they are gone to begin counting them.

Begin where you are.

With what you have.

In the room you are actually in.

That is where every piece of work that has ever mattered was made.

If you are still in contact — if the exit is not yet available and you have been treating that as a reason to delay beginning — this is written for exactly where you are.

He Didn’t Break You is 41 pages of the work that does not require distance to start. The patterns named, the fog mapped, and the specific steps available to you right now — in the room you are actually in, with the conditions as they actually are, without waiting for a version of safety that may still be a long way away.

It comes with The Clarity Pages — 30 prompts designed to do what this article has tried to do: help you begin building the interior that the contact cannot reach. Your account. Your witness. Your room with a lock.

Get it here →

You do not have to be out of it to begin. You only have to start where you are.