One of the most painful questions I hear from people recovering from emotionally abusive or narcissistic relationships is: “What if I’m actually the problem?” Often, this question comes after a moment where their own reaction has frightened them. A raised voice. A sharp sentence. An emotional outburst. A strong physical reaction. A reaction they keep replaying afterwards with shame. Many people describe it somewhere along these lines: “I’ve never been like this before.”, “I don’t recognise myself anymore.”, “What if I’m the abuser?”
This is one of the most confusing aspects of recovering from narcissistic abuse. Not only are you trying to make sense of what happened in the relationship, you are often trying to make sense of what happened to yourself. Many people become preoccupied with the moments they lost their temper, raised their voice, or reacted in ways they do not feel proud of. The shame attached to those moments can become so powerful that it obscures the wider picture. Instead of asking what happened to them, they begin asking what is wrong with them. Understanding reactive anger can help restore some of that lost context, because often the reaction is not where the story begins. It is where years of adaptation, self-doubt, and emotional strain finally become impossible to ignore.
Reactive Anger Is Not the Same as Abuse
In emotionally abusive relationships, one person often controls the emotional climate through invalidation, gaslighting, blame-shifting, silent treatment, subtle humiliation, or repeated boundary violations. The tragedy is that these patterns often don’t look dramatic from the outside. There may be no shouting, no obvious cruelty, and no visible signs of harm. Yet over time, they can profoundly affect a person’s sense of safety, reality, and self-worth.
When you are in a close relationship with someone who rarely takes ownership of their behaviour, has limited capacity for self-reflection, becomes defensive when confronted, struggles to tolerate frustration, or consistently shifts responsibility onto others, you end up carrying far more than your share of the emotional burden.
Many people adapt by becoming hypervigilant. They learn to monitor moods, anticipate reactions, soften their words, suppress their needs, and carefully manage the emotional atmosphere in the hope of preventing conflict. They become the one who reflects, repairs, apologises, explains, and tries harder. Living this way is exhausting.
The impact is often less like a single traumatic event and more like a slow erosion of the self. Some people describe it as “death by a thousand cuts.” No individual interaction may seem significant enough to justify their distress, yet the cumulative effect can be devastating.
Reactive anger often emerges within this context. Think of it like a fire alarm going off because there is smoke in the building: the alarm is not the problem, it is responding to a problem. In the same way, reactive anger is often the nervous system’s attempt to signal that something is wrong, not because you enjoy conflict or because you are abusive, but because your system has been under prolonged emotional strain and can no longer contain what it has been carrying.
Most people do not enter these relationships shouting or lashing out. They try to communicate calmly. They try to understand the other person’s perspective. They reflect on their own behaviour. They apologise when appropriate and look for ways to repair. But when every attempt is dismissed, distorted, or turned against them, the body eventually reaches a limit. Something inside says: enough. Anger then appears not because the person is cruel, but because their system is overwhelmed.
One of the most painful consequences is that this reaction is often used as proof that they are unstable, aggressive, or equally responsible for the dysfunction. Over time, many people begin to believe this. They start to see their most distressed moments as evidence of who they are, rather than recognising them as a response to what they have been enduring.
What often gets overlooked is the profound confusion that emotional abuse creates. Many people find themselves questioning their judgement, doubting their memories, and wondering whether they can trust their own perception of reality. Some even begin to question their sanity. Within this context, reactive anger is often a normal response to abnormal relational patterns.
For more on how these relational dynamics take shape, see our related article on the formation and expression of narcissistic personality in relationships.
Why Your Own Anger Can Feel So Frightening
Many people who find themselves in emotionally abusive or narcissistic relationships are thoughtful, empathetic, and highly self-reflective. They care deeply about not hurting others. They often spend a great deal of time considering other people’s feelings, questioning their own behaviour, and trying to do the “right” thing.
For many, these tendencies did not begin in adulthood. They were shaped much earlier. Some grew up as the emotional peacekeepers in their families, learning to smooth over conflict, absorb tension, or take responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of those around them. Others learned that their own needs were less important than keeping the connection intact. They learned to adapt, accommodate, and stay small. Some internalised the message: “To stay connected, I must adapt.” Over time, self-sacrifice can begin to feel normal, while self-care feels selfish.
Against this backdrop, anger can feel deeply threatening. When people who have spent a lifetime being understanding, accommodating, and emotionally responsible finally reach a breaking point, they are often horrified by their own reaction.
Instead of asking, “What was happening to me?”, they ask, “What kind of person does this make me?” Instead of seeing the months or years of accumulated stress, they focus on a single moment of reaction. But that moment rarely exists in isolation. It often comes after a long period of adapting, appeasing, self-monitoring, and suppressing needs that were never truly allowed to matter. It may come after years of being interrupted, dismissed, blamed, criticised, or made to doubt your own perception of reality. And perhaps this is what makes reactive anger so painful: it collides with the identity many people in these relationships built their lives around. When that person suddenly finds themselves angry, it can feel as though they have lost themselves. In reality, the anger may not be evidence that they have become someone else. It may be evidence that they have been carrying far too much for far too long.
The body eventually tells the truth
Emotional abuse does not only affect our thoughts. It affects our entire physiology.
When someone spends months or years in a relationship where they are repeatedly invalidated, blamed, criticised, ignored, or made responsible for another person’s emotional state, the nervous system gradually adapts. It begins to organise itself around survival rather than safety.
You may find yourself constantly scanning for subtle shifts in tone, facial expression, silence, withdrawal, criticism, or blame. You become highly attuned to what is happening around you because your body has learned that anticipating danger feels safer than being surprised by it. Over time, this state of hypervigilance becomes exhausting. Stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline are released again and again. Sleep may become disrupted. Digestion may change. The body may become tense, inflamed, or depleted. What began as an adaptive survival response can gradually evolve into chronic physiological stress. Many people don’t initially recognise the impact the relationship is having on them because the body often speaks long before the mind catches up.
I have worked with clients who arrived in counselling carrying a long list of physical symptoms: chronic fatigue, digestive issues, headaches, muscle tension, dizziness, heart palpitations, hormonal disturbances, anxiety, or recurring health concerns. They spent years trying to understand what was wrong with them physically. Only later did they begin to recognise the role that chronic relational stress was playing. This does not mean that all physical symptoms are psychological. It does mean that the body and nervous system are deeply affected by prolonged emotional strain.
At first, survival may look like appeasing, explaining, over-functioning, staying reasonable, or trying harder to be understood. You become the one who carries the relationship, smooths over conflict, and absorbs emotional impact. But if none of this creates safety, the nervous system may eventually shift into a fight response.
This is often the moment people become frightened of themselves. The angry outburst that appears seemingly “out of nowhere” is rarely out of nowhere at all. More often, it is the expression of a nervous system that has been living on high alert for far too long, adapting, coping, accommodating, and carrying more than it was ever meant to carry.
This does not mean every angry reaction is okay, or that words never matter. They do. But responsibility is not the same as self-erasure. We can take responsibility for our behaviour without accepting the idea that our reaction is the whole story. Sometimes anger is the body’s way of saying “This is not safe.”, “This is not sustainable.”, “Something needs to change.” And sometimes, long before the mind is ready to acknowledge it, the body is already telling the truth.
The trap of self-blame
After reactive anger, many turn against themselves. They replay the conversation again and again. They remember the exact words they used, the tone of their voice, the look on the other person’s face. They analyse every detail, searching for evidence that they were wrong. Sometimes they are told directly that their reaction proves they are “too much,” “crazy,” “unstable,” or even “the real abuser.” For someone who genuinely wants to be fair, reflective, and accountable, these accusations can be devastating.
In my clinical work, I often notice how readily people take on the blame for what has happened. Many become highly skilled at examining their own behaviour while barely allowing themselves to examine the behaviour of the person who hurt them. Over time, they may even begin to adopt the narrative of the abusive partner. The logic often sounds something like: “If I hadn’t been so difficult…”, “If I hadn’t brought it up again…”, “If I wasn’t so sensitive…”, “If I had communicated better, they wouldn’t have reacted like that.”
Part of the reason self-blame can be so difficult to let go of is that it creates the illusion of control. If I am the problem, then perhaps I can fix it. If I just become calmer, more understanding, more patient, more accommodating, maybe the relationship will finally become safe.
There is also another force at work: shame. Shame has a remarkable ability to keep people stuck. When people feel ashamed of their own reactions, they often stop talking about what is happening. They become reluctant to confide in friends, family members, or professionals because they are afraid that others will see them the way they have started to see themselves. The shame also clouds their own thinking.
Instead of seeing a relationship clearly, they become preoccupied with their perceived failures within it. Their attention narrows around the moments they lost their temper, raised their voice, or reacted in ways they regret. Meanwhile, the months or years of invalidation, manipulation, blame-shifting, and emotional erosion fade into the background. This is one reason people remain in harmful relationships far longer than they otherwise might. Shame obscures clarity.
If you find yourself wondering whether the person who hurt you is capable of change, this is a question we explore in more depth in Do Narcissists Ever Change? A Therapist’s Perspective.
Yet one of the most important distinctions in recovery is understanding that reactive anger is not the same as abuse. A reactive response may be messy, imperfect, or regrettable. It may be something you wish you had handled differently. But a reaction to prolonged mistreatment is not the same thing as a pattern of controlling, intimidating, manipulating, or harming another person. The way out of this trap is rarely more self-criticism. It is self-compassion. It is the willingness to look honestly at the full picture of what has been happening rather than reducing yourself to your most distressed moments. And it is learning to recognise that while your reactions are yours to understand and take responsibility for, they do not tell the whole story. Sometimes healing begins when we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What happened to me?”
Anger as Information, Not Identity
From a trauma-informed perspective, anger is not simply a problem to eliminate. It is information.
For many people in these relationships, anger is the emotion they have spent the longest trying not to feel. They have learned to prioritise understanding over confrontation, adaptation over self-protection, and connection over their own limits. They may have become highly skilled at explaining away hurt, giving the benefit of the doubt, and questioning themselves before questioning what is happening around them.
Yet emotions do not disappear because we suppress them. They wait. And eventually they find another way to be heard.
Anger often emerges when there is a gap between what is happening and what we know, somewhere deep inside, should not be happening. It can signal that a boundary has been crossed, a need has gone unmet, a truth has been ignored, or that we have abandoned ourselves in order to preserve a relationship.
Many people become frightened of anger because they focus on the behaviour that follows it rather than listening to the information it contains. The emotion itself is not the problem. The invitation is to become curious about what it is trying to reveal.
In my clinical work, I often meet people who can explain their partner’s behaviour with remarkable compassion and sophistication. They understand the trauma history, the attachment wounds, the insecurities, and the limitations of the other person. Yet somewhere along the way, they have lost access to the question: “What is true for me?” Their attention becomes organised around understanding the other person, while their own experience gradually disappears from view.
Sometimes anger is the part of us that refuses to participate in that disappearance. What if anger is one of the few parts of you that has not lost contact with reality? What if it is the part that still remembers your needs, your limits, your dignity, and your worth, even when the rest of you has become busy adapting?
This does not mean every expression of anger is wise or skilful. But healing rarely begins by suppressing anger. More often, it begins by listening to it.
Beneath anger there is often something deeply human: hurt, grief, fear, disappointment, loneliness, or a longing for something that never arrived. When we become willing to feel those experiences directly, anger no longer has to carry the burden alone. And sometimes we discover that what looked like anger was actually a neglected part of ourselves trying to lead us back home.
What actually helps
Healing from reactive anger is not about becoming calmer at all costs. Many people in these relationships have already spent years trying to be calmer, nicer, more patient, more understanding, and less reactive. What often gets overlooked is that these strategies were never the problem. They were attempts to preserve connection.
The difficulty is that when we spend years adapting to a reality that does not feel right, we gradually lose contact with ourselves. We stop trusting our perceptions. We override our emotions. We ignore the signals coming from our bodies. We become highly skilled at understanding everyone else’s experience while becoming increasingly disconnected from our own.
Healing requires a reversal of this process. It begins by becoming curious rather than critical: curious about what the anger was protecting, curious about the boundary that was crossed, the truth that was ignored, or the need that went unmet, curious about the part of yourself that had to be abandoned in order to keep the relationship going.
Insight matters, but insight alone is rarely enough. Many people know intellectually that something was wrong long before their nervous system feels safe enough to believe it. The body may still brace for criticism, anticipate rejection, or prepare for conflict long after the relationship has ended.
Healing often begins when we learn to listen earlier: to notice tension before it becomes collapse, resentment before it becomes rage, exhaustion before it becomes numbness, and to recognise the difference between what we believe when we are frightened and what we know when we are grounded.
Over time, many people discover that beneath the anger was never simply anger. There was grief. There was betrayal. There was loneliness. There was the pain of abandoning themselves in order to preserve a connection that was costing them too much. And there was something else as well: perhaps this is why healing is often less about learning something new and more about remembering what you already knew before you learned to doubt yourself, a healthy part of the self that never stopped knowing the truth. Healing is not the absence of anger. It is the ability to listen to yourself before anger becomes the only voice left speaking.
If you recognise yourself in this article and are looking for support in working through relational trauma or reactive anger, you can explore therapists on It’s Complicated.
Sources
Durvasula, R. (2024). It’s not you: Identifying and healing from narcissistic people. Open Field.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving: A guide and map for recovering from childhood trauma. Azure Coyote Publishing.
Simone Witte is a Clinical Psychologist based in Neukölln, Berlin, working with adults recovering from relational trauma, narcissistic abuse and complex family dynamics. She integrates attachment theory, trauma-informed practice and somatic understanding, and works in English and German, online and in person. Find Simone Witte on It’s Complicated.
