How I Work With Clients:
In Recovery From Cluster G Abuse in any and all relationship types: A.J. Mahari has 33 years experience working with clients. Each client’s process may differ from any other client’s process. There are, of course, many common themes not only in how you were narcissistically abused, whether by a person with BPD, NPD, HPD, ASPD, SPD or a Dark Triad or Dark Tetrad. Common to most, maybe not all, is Codependency – a trauma or adverse experience response to a dysfunctional family of origin. A.J. Mahari works with clients who have been in any Cluster B relationship of any type with anyone with any personality disorder in Cluster B (or suspected Cluster B Personality Disorder.
Codependency Recovery is often a big part of any Cluster B abuse recovery: Codependency is a childhood response to emotional neglect, verbal abuse, parents continual arguing and fighting, having one or both parents that are not emotionally available. Often people with Codependency, which is its own adverse to trauma response in dysfunctional families, may well have one Cluster B parent (could be both) and/or one very Codependent parent with a Cluster B (or suspected of) parent. In childhood children are wounded in many various different ways and not all are malicious, obvious, or involving a Cluster B parent and/or a Codependent parent. Most dysfunctional families of origin fail children emotionally in a wide variety of ways. There is a very high correlation to people who have a significant other relationship with any personality disordered person in Cluster B and carrying unconscious woundedness from childhood, whether the younger years or in one’s teenage years. Codependency is a mental health challenge in its own right. It is not a word or construct that in anyway should be thought of as “blaming you” or “shaming you”. Codependency is rampant in our world today and working to recover from it is just as important as recovering from any Cluster B relationship. These recovery process are multi-layered.
In Recovery From a BPD Relationship & Breakup: The healing and recovery process from a relationship with a person with Borderline Personality (BPD Abuse) involves the dual process of understanding and working to heal from borderline abuse and the relationship along with Codependency Recovery. In these recovery processes it is the goal to Break the Trauma Bond, replace negative core beliefs, of the inner critic, and to use the modalities described below to help you not only get “yourself” back again but to know that self as a secure home within perhaps for the first time in your life. Surviving a BPD relationship breakup means healing from the trauma of borderline abuse and the duality of relationship shame wounds and the abandonment, shame and other wounds also from childhood that come from Family of Origin and the root causes of Codependency.
In this process with clients I use an eclectic humanistic approach. Chief among these modalities that I have found most helpful to clients over the last 33 years, are Family of Origin work, Inner Child Healing work, and Self-Differentiation along with self-integrative healing work and also included in an eclectic multi-faceted humanistic approach and process other modalities I use also include: but which are not limited to, Somatic processing of trauma, polyvagal methodology “talk process”, as well as strategic psychoeducation that teaches clients how to get into the action of their emotional landscape, along with other tools and techniques to help people learn an strengthen new emotional coping strategies, and narrative story Life Coaching, that include a cognitive re-framing process, and other approaches or a mix of approaches that help each individual client in his or her own process of recovery and on-going personal growth.
In recovery from Narcissistic Abuse clients are guided in processing and re-framing the “programmed” thoughts and negative core emotions/beliefs that those thoughts are driving as you continue to be in a heightened state of high flight/fight/freeze/fawn response to emotional, visual, and/or somatic flashbacks. The first thing I help clients do is to learn how to settle their nervous systems down. How to ground. How to deep breathe, and more, that can really begins to help you learn to cope with the change on an emotional level required for healing and recovery processing to help you get some very quick relief in the short term building toward the shadow work of integration in the longer term. The more you practice these coping tools/skills and more, and talk through things as well the more you will understand and then be able to process your way through your healing and recovery.
I will help you come to find your own self, your voice, your narrative and to break free from all that still hurts over and over as you remember, perhaps ruminating on all that the Borderline or Narcissist abuser said to you and blamed you for – that was really all the abuser’s “stuff” that they projected out onto you and that they have no self-awareness of. They can’t take responsibility. You need to know you now and to be there for you now. A key central core aspect of this recovery from Narcissistic abuse is coming back to your for the first time really fully knowing yourself and/or learning more about yourself to have different boundaries and a strengthening resilience of self. It is one of the best remedies to protect you from any further narcissistic abuse or Cluster B’s you may encounter in this world, in life in general that you will then be able to effectively cope with and not be traumatized again by.
I have come through this myself in recovery from a toxic Narcissistic Dysfunctional Family of Origin. I want to help you heal and recover from Narcissistic abuse. I know that you, too, can do this. It is a process. Each individual person’s journey is a little bit different. I honour that and individualize the process to each client to ensure that how I can support and help you with your healing and recovery process and goals will the best way for you. That this method and process of healing and recovery is optimized to where you are, how you are coping, or not, with that, how you learn, how you process, and of course, with the steady slow pace or medium pace or perhaps a more accelerated pace, depending where, you, individually, are in either beginning or continuing your narcissistic abuse recovery journey.
I look forward to working with you, as the individual that you are, beginning with you wherever you are in a caring, accepting, non-judgmental way, and with validating support and true understanding in a safe, comforting and confidential process.
© A.J. Mahari – 1995-2023
