Compensations & Corrections Month

January 2026

Healing From Narcissistic Relationships

Month Overview:

Happy New Year….  And a good place to begin are corrections.  I have been thinking a lot about this topic as I navigate some painful physical therapy after my surgery.  I was walking “wrong” for years, in essence “compensating” for a hip that was out of whack and turns out I was doing it my whole life, because I was born with a hip deformity. My body was correcting for it – my back, the other hip, other parts of my leg – leaving me with a lot of pain, and now I am trying to “correct” it to fix the other pain I got from compensating for it.  And as much as this is painful as hell – it is NOTHING compared to having to engage in psychological corrections. 

This is a good place for the top of the year – because depending on what has happened in our lives and relationships, through trauma, and narcissistic abuse, and just life -we have compensated for what we didn’t have or what we didn’t get or what happened to us  – and got into some unhealthy patterns.  But just like with my leg – I had to walk, you had to live – so the compensations were a way to stay attached, stay safe, be a part of a family system,  keep a marriage going, keep a job, and in many cases, the only way you knew how to do it.  We learned to do things in an unhealthy way to survive, and we have to correct that to heal. 

The most frequent place we see this is trust – MOST survivors of narcissistic relationships will say trust is an issue and this is also an issue in trauma.  We see a pendulum that swings between trusting too much or too quickly and not trusting at all.  Relationships are something we want, and something we fear.  As we heal – we may overcorrect – just like I overcorrect with my left leg, even though I have a new hip. Survivors of narcissistic relationships may under-trust, over-rescue, over-blame themselves, under-discern, OR may over-trust, may not want to do ANYTHING for ANYONE, may not be willing to take responsibility, or may OVER-discern.  We can under or over correct.   

Let’s call this physical therapy for the soul this month – and learn how to unlearn and relearn (or learn for the first time), how to psychologically use the healthiest parts of ourselves in the best way possible before we get hurt more than we already have!!