If you never thought you’d have to deal with narcissistic abuse in marriage, you’re not alone. To see if you’re experiencing any of the 19 types of emotional abuse you’ll experience from a narcissist, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

If you are experiencing narcissistic emotional abuse, you will need support. For live support, attend a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session today.

5 Clear Signs of Narcissistic Abuse in Marriage

1. You’re constantly second-guessing yourself.

Gaslighting makes you doubt your memory, instincts, and even your sanity. You start asking, “Is it really that bad?” That’s by design.

2. He makes big promises—and never follows through.

Future faking sounds like: “We’ll go to Italy next year” or “I’m applying for jobs tomorrow.” It’s all smoke and mirrors designed to keep you hooked.

3. You’re carrying the entire relationship.

If you’re paying the bills, managing the emotions, and making excuses for his behavior—you’re being exploited, not partnered.

4. Therapy made things worse.

Couples therapy often misses narcissistic abuse. When the abuser charms the therapist, you walk away feeling more confused and blamed.

5. You think choosing yourself is selfish.

Survivors of narcissistic abuse in marriage often struggle with guilt. But choosing you isn’t selfish—it’s survival. And it’s the first step toward freedom.

Transcript: How To Deal With Narcissistic Abuse In Marriage

Anne: I have Ingrid Clayton on today’s episode. She’s a clinical psychologist and trauma therapist in Los Angeles, California, and the author of the memoir, Believing Me. Welcome, Ingrid.

Ingrid: Thank you so much, Anne. So happy to be here.

Anne: Ingrid, let’s start at the beginning of your story.

Ingrid: Wow, for me, it goes back to my childhood. So my parents divorced. And my mother rapidly remarried my dad’s best friend. That already sets the stage of the first betrayal. And this man, I can now use this language. This is not language I had for a long time, but he started to groom me. And what I now know set me up to please, appease and do everything I could to keep myself safe in a very unsafe environment.

So with my first husband, with so many boyfriends before him. My blueprint was, I will find a way to keep myself safe in an unsafe relationship. So my memoir is about me unpacking decades of that experience.

Sort of untangling it as a survivor, but also as a therapist who didn’t know that she had complex trauma. Because as we know. With narcissism, it’s decades of gaslighting and I believed it wasn’t that bad. Maybe it’s me, and if I try a little harder, you know, all those things.

Anne: So when you say blueprint, you didn’t know that you were continuing to encounter abusive people. What labels did you give them back when you were unaware of the type of character these people had?

Ingrid: I don’t think I would have used the word abusive, that felt too strong. But I saw there was a pattern, I saw they were dysfunctional relationships.

Patterns Of Dysfunctional Relationships

Ingrid: I went and sat on many therapist couches. And a lot of the language given back to me, things like codependency. I couldn’t see myself in that label, this idea that I was trying to control. There was this lens that felt shameful and stigmatizing, and that also didn’t feel like it helped me. So I kept going and trying. And I thought maybe one day it would shift. Meanwhile, there was just a lot of wreckage, and I didn’t know why.

And the narcissistic abuse always presented a little differently. It was active alcoholism, someone who was compulsively cheating on me, exploitation, financially and otherwise. It looked differently in each relationship, but I certainly saw the thread. And it was so painful. So devastating.

Anne: This is why you’re not codependent, you were doing safety seeking behaviors. While you were sitting on those therapy couches, did any of the therapists say the word abuse to you?

Ingrid: Gosh, it’s a good question. I know none of them used the word trauma, which was the piece that finally became so helpful to me. They may have used the word abuse in relation to my upbringing. So here’s the other part of my story. Growing up, I went to the counselor at my then high school. Eventually, I said, here are all the things happening. I think this is wrong. And she said, “I’m a mandated reporter. And we need to call social services.”

So it turned into what was essentially me initiating this intervention on my family. I was about 16 at the time, but if we rewind even further, maybe 12 years old, a friend’s parents had called social services on my behalf.

Intervention & Family Betrayal

Ingrid: And they orchestrated this sort of secret meeting with me and a social worker. She sat me down with her clipboard, and this seemed like this formal way. And asked me all these questions. She wanted to know where’s the physical abuse. And I was like, I know he’s hit my mom, but I’ve never seen it. I didn’t have the words. I’ve just seen her bruises. I know he’s done this to my brothers, but it wasn’t about physical abuse.

And at 12 years old, this woman said to me, emotional abuse isn’t reportable.

Anne: Wow.

Ingrid: Okay, so I get to 16 years old, and here we are. I have a counselor who’s taking me seriously, and she’s said, I’m a mandated reporter, we gotta bring social services in here. And what happened then is, they brought my stepdad in and he said, Ingrid, You’re a liar. You made this all up. I have no idea what you’re talking about. This is all a figment of your imagination.

And then we turned to my mom, who basically said, I believe him. So this is such a big piece of the trauma landscape, right? There’s the, what happened to us. And then there’s how people responded to what happened to us. In fact, a deeper cut as far as I’m concerned, in my personal experience. I knew what my stepdad was doing was wrong, but I believed the people meant to protect me and help me were going to do that.

Ingrid: And when they didn’t. Not consciously, but in my body, I started to believe, particularly when my own mother wasn’t able to step in and protect me.

Narcissistic Abuse In Marriage: Struggles With Self-Worth

Ingrid: I must not be worthy of protection, love, safety, so it’s this additional layer to what informed me going out into the world. I wasn’t experiencing physical abuse in any of my relationships. So it’s not like I went to a therapist and said, Oh, you know, here’s my experience. And they were trying to reflect that back to me as abusive. I was talking about cheating or unavailability, but I don’t think they were using that language.

Anne: They discounted you to the point where you thought you were not worthy of protection. But was there also a part of you that thought, maybe this isn’t abuse? Not understanding what narcissistic abuse in relationships is made it hard to identify. Like, maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, or maybe I’m crazy, or maybe this is my fault?

Ingrid: I would say both things became true. This is where I picked up on those story lines, and I wasn’t sure. I never thought I made it all up. So it’s not like I thought I was a liar. I knew what happened, but I did wonder, and this is so classic for complex trauma survivors, was it that bad? Like we all walk around with this trauma measuring stick. I can think of someone else who had it worse. So suddenly mine doesn’t really count.

The thing that we know about trauma is that it’s not even about the traumatic event. It’s how the traumatic event overwhelmed your nervous system. So this whole idea about a measuring stick related to the event is just ludicrous anyway. But honestly, I wasn’t the only one carrying that measuring stick around. I think therapists in the mental health field carried it similarly for many years.

The Journey To Self-Discovery

Ingrid: You know, trauma was related to acute single events. It was related to veterans, which meant it was largely related to men. I’m 50 years old now. So I grew up when we didn’t have as much information. And consequently, even my own training as a clinical psychologist. I mean, I’ve been practicing in the field for almost two decades, and that didn’t give me the lens and language either for trauma from narcissistic abuse.

And the story of my memoir is that I have to become my own trauma therapist. And I’m just sitting at my kitchen table, writing these stories, reclaiming them again. So that I could look on the page and see for myself, this was narcissistic abuse. I didn’t have that lens or language either. I’m so grateful that I received this call to write in this fast and furious way that wouldn’t let me go no matter how much I tried.

I also think it’s the most heartbreaking thing. I’ve been asking