It was always there…

One of the hardest things about healing from narcissistic or emotionally abusive people is realising the behaviour wasn’t as rare as you once thought.

Years ago, when these things mostly stayed hidden behind closed doors, there was still some comfort in believing society agreed it was unacceptable. You thought if people really saw it clearly, they’d be horrified.

Now it’s all out in the open.

And I don’t even think the world suddenly became more dysfunctional. I think social media just pulled back the curtain. Behaviours that once played out quietly inside families, relationships, workplaces and social circles are now happening publicly every day.

People are seeing cruelty as ‘just being honest’. Manipulation gets reframed as confidence, and lack of empathy gets praised like it’s some kind of strength.

Once you’ve experienced those dynamics closely, you lose a certain innocence about human behaviour. You start noticing things other people either don’t see yet, don’t want to see, or have normalised because they grew up around it.

And for those of us who’ve already been psychologically injured by those traits, it can feel deeply disorienting watching society increasingly tolerate, and sometimes openly admire, the behaviours that once devastated us personally.

At the same time, something else has happened. People are finally speaking openly about things previous generations never did.

Things that were once explained away as, ‘that’s just how families are’, or ‘marriage is hard’, or ‘don’t air dirty laundry’, are now being recognised for what they really were.

So in a strange way, we’re seeing more dysfunction, but we’re also seeing more awareness of dysfunction.

That’s why so many people no longer feel like part of some isolated little club after surviving these experiences. Once upon a time hardly anyone spoke openly about emotional abuse or psychological manipulation. Now huge numbers of people recognise parts of those patterns in their own lives.

The downside is that internet language has flattened a lot of nuance. Everything becomes toxic, narcissistic, gaslighting, trauma. Sometimes the words get thrown around so much they lose meaning.

But underneath all those buzzwords, I do think there’s a real collective exhaustion happening. A lot of people are slowly waking up to the fact that emotional immaturity, self interest, manipulation and performative behaviour are far more common than they once wanted to believe.

And honestly, I don’t think screaming into the void changes much. Neither does endlessly fighting strangers online. Most people only wake up when life eventually forces them to. And even then, some people would rather protect their ego than admit they were hurt, manipulated, wrong, or part of the problem themselves.

You would think that once dysfunction becomes this visible, outrage would naturally lead to change. Instead, a lot of it has simply been absorbed into everyday life, and I think that’s the part I struggle with the most. The visibility didn’t just expose the problem, it exposed how many people were willing to accept it.

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This is a little something I shared on my page today.

Every morning I open Facebook and I’m greeted by the same kind of outrage from the people who fall into my algorithm. The ones with the similar mindset, the same disillusionment, the same disdain for the current climate.

We keep circling the same conversations. The same frustrations. And I think deep down most of us know we’re not really changing anything, because honestly, we don’t know how to anymore. We tell ourselves we’re on the right side of history, and maybe we are. But at the same time there’s this strange feeling of being drowned out by people who are louder, harsher, and increasingly comfortable with things we once thought society would never openly accept.