From Part 1: Recapping the First Five Dimensions of Trauma
Last episode we opened a framework together — seven dimensions of traumatic experience that explain with research why some people carry more than others.
We moved through the first five: what happened, how long it lasted, who caused it and who failed to stop it, where it happened, and when in your development it arrived.
Today we pick up where we left off. And I want to tell you, the two dimensions we cover today are the ones I have been thinking about the most since we recorded last week. Because they ask harder questions than the first five. Not just what happened to you, but how it was carried out. And why?
And somewhere inside the how sits a question I know many of you have been holding for a long time without quite having the language for.
Did the narcissist know what they were doing?
We are going there today. And I think the answer will surprise you.
Find somewhere quiet and let’s dive in.
Dimension Six: How Did It Happen? Calculated Versus Unintentional Harm
a) Calculated and Intentional Harm
If you have ever watched the Netflix documentaries The Tinder Swindler or Bad Vegan, you will have witnessed something that is genuinely difficult to comprehend from the outside.
Intelligent, educated, perceptive women being systematically deceived by someone who had calculated every detail of the deception in advance. Who had studied what they needed, what they feared, and what they most longed for—and built an entire persona specifically designed to provide it.
And if you watched from the outside, you may have found yourself asking, “How did she not see it?”
But now I want you to ask yourself a different question. Did someone do that to you? Did someone enter your life already knowing what they were going to do—already having decided, before you had exchanged more than a few conversations, that you were someone they were going to use?
Did they study you before you even knew you were being studied?
Because if they did, you were not dealing with someone who made a mistake, or who lost control, or who didn’t understand the impact of their behavior. You were dealing with someone who deliberately closed the gap between your trust and their agenda.
Someone who read your needs not to meet them, but to use them. Who identified your vulnerabilities strategically.
That is one end of the spectrum. Cold. Deliberate. Eyes open.
b) Unintentional Harm
At the other end sits a different kind of harm entirely.
The harm that is caused by someone’s own unprocessed pain, their emotional immaturity, and their unconscious patterns.
The person who causes damage not because they aimed at you, but because they were so consumed by their own unhealed wounds that you simply happened to be in the way.
They didn’t target you. They couldn’t see you clearly enough to target you. The harm was real, but it was not a targeted campaign. It was the collateral damage of someone who never learned to carry their own pain without projecting it on the people closest to them.
Both of these categories exist. And both cause genuine suffering. But they are not the same thing. And understanding the difference matters—because the wound they leave and the work required to heal from it are not identical.
Now here is where I want to pause. Because there is a question sitting in the room that I think you have been holding since I first said the words “calculated harm.” And the question is this:
Where does narcissistic abuse fit?
c) Is Narcissistic Abuse Calculated or Intentional? The Third Category Nobody Names
It is not a simple answer. And I want to give it to you honestly.
Most narcissistic abuse is not consciously premeditated in the way a con artist’s plot or scheme is. The narcissist is not sitting across the dinner table thinking, “Tonight I will make her doubt what she heard. Tonight I will withdraw just long enough to make her desperate for my return.”
That level of cold, deliberate, step-by-step calculation is the territory of the sociopath, the romance fraudster, and the Tinder Swindler. People who know exactly what they are doing and feel no internal conflict about doing it whatsoever.
But narcissistic abuse is also not unintentional in the way that harm from emotional immaturity or unprocessed trauma is. It is not the careless damage of someone who simply cannot regulate themselves. It is not blind. It is not random. And it is not equally distributed to everyone in the narcissist’s life.
It is aimed. Precisely and consistently aimed at you.
Narcissistic abuse occupies a third place on this spectrum. Something the clinical literature describes as goal-directed but not fully conscious.
The narcissist has a psychological agenda—to maintain control, to protect a fragile ego structure that cannot tolerate criticism, abandonment, or perceived inferiority, and to secure the emotional supply that keeps that structure intact. Every behavior serves that agenda.
The love bombing, the idealization, the devaluation, the gaslighting, and the DARVO we discussed in the last episode—all of it, with remarkable consistency, in service of that underlying need.
But here is what makes it categorically different from the romance scammer’s cold deliberation. The narcissist largely does not experience themselves as causing harm.
They experience themselves as responding to a threat. Protecting themselves. Correcting an unfair situation. Giving you exactly what you deserve. Their internal narrative is almost never “I am hurting this person.” It is “This person is threatening me, failing me, or deserves what they are getting.”
Remember for a narcissist:
- Vulnerability is perceived as a mortal threat in the narcissist’s mind. Being seen weak is intolerable.
- They are experiencing their own thoughts as normal. From the inside there’s no distortion to correct and nothing obvious to fix.
- The defense is always worth more than what it destroys. Preserving the self-image beats preserving the marriage, the money, the children, or their well-being. Whatever has to be sacrificed to protect his always gets sacrificed.
Because they haven’t really thought through their actions, and that’s why their actions are so consequential. Their actions are only to achieve short-term goals.
Goal-directed. But not fully aware.
And now I want to say something that I think will land differently than anything else in this episode.
The impact on you is the same regardless of his level of awareness.
The damage does not care whether he planned it or whether it arose instinctively from his psychological structure. The gaslighting dismantled your perception of reality, whether he sat down and designed it or whether it emerged automatically from his need to never be wrong.
The trauma bond formed whether he engineered the cycle of idealization and devaluation or whether he simply could not help oscillating between the two. The damage to your identity, your instincts, your nervous system — all of it is identical. Whether he knew or didn’t know. Whether he meant to or couldn’t help it.
Which means the question—”Did he know what he was doing?”—while intellectually fascinating, is actually the wrong question for your healing.
The right question is, “What was done to you—and what does it require to rebuild from?”
I am going to devote a full episode to this question—did the narcissist know what they were doing?—because it deserves more than a paragraph. We will go deep into the distinction between their actions and the consequences of those actions. Between awareness and intent.
Between knowing and feeling. And I think the answers will genuinely surprise you—because they are not what most people expect.
But for now, what I want you to take from this dimension is something simpler and more immediate.
Whatever category the harm in your life belonged to — whether it was cold and calculated, whether it was the careless damage of someone’s unprocessed wounds, or whether it was the specific and particular precision of narcissistic abuse — the damage it did to your perception is real.
The work of rebuilding trust in your own instincts, your own readings of other people, your own sense of what is safe — that work is the same regardless of what he knew or didn’t know.
And that is exactly the work that comes after therapy. Not processing what happened — rebuilding from it.
As you may already know by now, recovery from targeted harm from romance scams & manipulative relationships requires something beyond processing what happened. The work beyond processing the trauma entails rebuilding trust in your own perception and rebuilding safety within yourself.
And that is a very particular kind of work. And it’s in fact the work I do. Not instead of therapy—after it. When you have done the processing and you are ready to rebuild your identity, your instincts, and your sense of what you deserve. If that is where you are, come find me. The door is open.
So that was dimension 6: How it happened.
Dimension Seven: Why Did They Do It? The Intention Behind the Harm
The final dimension is the one that lives deepest and longest. And it matters because you are a meaning-making machine—your brain is. You do not simply experience what happens to you—you interpret it. You build a story around it. And the story you build shapes, in profound ways, how you carry it forward.
But I want to begin this dimension with something important—something that connects directly to what we just explored in Dimension Six.
We established that the right question for your healing is not “Did he know what he was doing?”. And yet, the human need to understand why is real. It is not weakness. It is not an obsession. It is one of the most fundamental things about being human.
We are wired to search for meaning, to construct narratives, and to make sense of the events that shape our lives. And when something as profound and as disorienting as this happens to you, the question “why” is not something you can simply decide not to ask.
Sit with this for a moment.
Why did they do it?
Was it unintentional? The result of someone who was themselves deeply wounded, who reproduced patterns they had never examined, who caused harm without fully understanding that they were causing it? There is a particular kind of grief in that.
The grief of damage not from cruelty, but from incapacity. The grief of a person who couldn’t give what they never received—and who took something from you in the process of their own unhealed life. There is no villain in that story. And somehow that doesn’t make it easier.
Or was it intentional? Was it to punish you for leaving, for speaking, or for existing in a way that threatened them? Was it to silence you — because what you knew, or what you might say, was dangerous to them? Was it jealousy, disguised as love and then revealed as control? Was it revenge for something you may not have even known you caused?
Or was it something in between? The goal-directed but not fully conscious harm we explored in Dimension Six? The harm that was aimed at you without being fully planned? The harm that served a psychological need for the person causing it but brought total destruction to you.
All three of these are real. All three happened. And all three leave a different grief, a different set of questions, a different path to heal.
But here is where I want to redirect your attention. Because the question “Why did they do it?” — as necessary and as human as it is — has a way of keeping you oriented toward them. Toward his motivation, his psychology, his internal world, his level of awareness, his reasons.
And many of the women I work with have spent years — sometimes decades — in that orientation. Trying to understand him so completely that the understanding will finally bring relief.
It doesn’t. Not because understanding is worthless — it isn’t. But because his why was never really about you. And no amount of understanding his why will answer the question your nervous system is actually asking underneath it.
Which is this: “What does it mean about me that this happened?”
The Question Underneath the Question: What Does It Mean About Me?
That is the question that lives at the bottom of all the other questions. And it is the one that causes the most additional suffering—because the answer your wounded self constructs in the absence of better information is almost always wrong.
That you were not enough. That you were too much. That you deserved it. That a person who could see you clearly would have treated you differently—and therefore the way you were treated is evidence of what you actually are.
That is not truth. That is a nervous system trying to make sense of something that was never about your worth.
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, the psychologist who developed the Shattered Assumptions Theory, found that trauma doesn’t just hurt us—it shatters the foundational beliefs through which we understand the world.
The belief that the world is broadly safe. That it is broadly fair. That what happens to us is connected in some meaningful way to who we are and what we deserve.
And this is where the why becomes most dangerous.
Because when we cannot find a satisfying answer to why this happened — when the reason is incapacity, or unconscious need, or the cold calculation of someone who saw us as a resource rather than a person — the mind does something very human and very painful. It turns the unanswered why into evidence about the self.
If there is no good reason—then maybe I was the reason.
That conclusion is almost universal among the women that I work with. And it is universally wrong.
So here is what I want to offer instead. When we ask the question of “Why did he do it?” The why of what happened to you lived entirely inside the person who caused the harm.
Whether it was their unprocessed wounds, their psychological structure, their deliberate calculation, or their incapacity to love without controlling—it was theirs.
It was a revelation of who they were. It was never a verdict on who you are.
Returning the Why to Its Rightful Owner
And the moment you can begin — even just a little bit — to return the why to its rightful owner, something shifts. Not because the pain disappears. But because you stopped carrying a question that was never yours to answer.
The right question—the one that actually leads somewhere—is not “Why did they do it?”
It is, “What do I need now, in order to rebuild?
Who do I want to become moving forward… What did I learn from this experience…
As my friend said to me the other day, “We don’t notice our chains until we start to move.”
These are the questions that belong to you. These are questions with an answer you can actually find. And these are questions we will keep exploring together in the episodes ahead.
Now. We have explored why they did it. But there is a deeper question sitting underneath that one. A question that every victim and every survivor have asked themselves. A question that is not about him at all. A question that is entirely about you (previously covered in episodes 2 -4 )
It’s a question I have been asked by my clients: “Mariam, what does it mean about me that this happened to me?”
Of all the people it could have happened to, why me? Why this relationship, this family, this wound, this depth of suffering?
That question is not the same as “Why did he do it?” It is more personal. And it is the question that — depending on how you meet it — either keeps you in the deepest suffering or becomes the beginning of the most profound understanding of your own life.
I am going to dedicate the entire next episode to that question. Because it deserves more than a paragraph. It deserves the same depth we have brought to everything else in this series.
And I will tell you this much before we get there—the answer is not what most people expect. And it is not what the wound tells you it is.
The Seven Dimensions Together: Why Your Suffering Was Never About Your Worth
So those are the seven dimensions.
What happened? How long it went on.
Who did it — and who didn’t stop it.
Where it happened.
When in your development it arrived.
How it was carried out — and the specific and particular precision of narcissistic abuse on that spectrum.
And why? — The intention behind the harm, and what your meaning-making mind does with an answer it was never designed to carry alone.
You did not suffer this much because you are fragile. You did not suffer this much because you chose poorly, or loved too easily, or failed to see what you should have seen—things that only time could teach you.
You suffered this much because of the specific combination of these dimensions in your history.
And when several of them stack—when the harm was interpersonal and intentional and prolonged and private and arrived during your developmental years and was carried out with the specific precision of narcissistic abuse and accompanied by betrayal and by the silence of someone who should have protected you—the suffering that results is not a mystery.
It is a predictable, measurable, documented outcome.
Understanding that is not the end of the work. It is the beginning of doing the work without punishing yourself for needing to do it.
And we are not done yet.
Because before we move into the world of the sensitive soul specifically — before we explore why everything we covered today lands differently, runs deeper, and leaves a different mark when the person moving through it feels everything at full depth — there is one question we need to answer first.
Why did it happen to me?
That is where we go next. And I promise you—it is worth the wait.
And remember, what happened to you was a revelation of who they were. It was never a verdict on who you are.
Because who you are and who you are becoming is far greater than what happened to you.
Until then—stay empowered and true to yourself.
~ Mariam
BONUS SEGMENT
Bonus: The Contributing Factors — What Else Shapes How Deeply You Suffer
A Personal Note from me
Dear Reader,
As I was recording this episode, I realized that I had so much more to say that was more nuanced that could not fit in the recording.
I am now sharing it with you here, and I hope you can see the whole picture of why suffering is deeper for some than others.
If you have been suffering for a long time, I hope that understanding all these layers helps you to be more compassionate with yourself and what you have been through while also knowing that this is not the end of your story.
With love and compassion,
~ Mariam
Beyond the Seven Dimensions: The Internal Factors That Shape Your Recovery
Trauma can be described as events so shocking they challenge our core beliefs that life is safe and predictable.
And that could not be truer than in a relationship with a soulmate from hell. Or being born into a family of dysfunction. Because the betrayal trauma in dysfunctional relationships causes existential, spiritual, mental, emotional & psychological damage to the innocent people who find themselves in these relationships.
Beyond the seven dimensions of the experience itself, there are factors that live inside you — in who you are, in what you already believed before any of this happened — that shape both the depth of the wound and the recovery.
I want to name three of them, because they are rarely discussed with the honesty they deserve.
How Long Before You Found Support — And Why the Gap Was Never Your Fault
The research is clear that early, appropriate support changes outcomes. Symptoms addressed early are less likely to consolidate into chronic patterns. The window between a traumatic experience and the arrival of genuine help is a window in which suffering either begins to integrate or begins to entrench.
But I want to say this carefully, because there is a version of this finding that gets turned into blame. As though you were somehow responsible for your own chronicity if you didn’t seek help immediately. That is not what the research says.
What it says is that the barriers to seeking help are: the shame, the absence of language for what was happening, the lack of access to someone who could understand, and most devastatingly, being told repeatedly by the person causing the harm that nothing was wrong—those barriers are themselves part of the harm.
The gap between the experience and the support is rarely a gap of choice.
It is a gap of circumstances. And filling that gap with self-blame compounds the very suffering it is being used to explain.
Why Forcing Processing Too Soon Can Cause More Harm
There is also something important that runs counter to a popular idea. Research shows clearly that universal psychological debriefing—the practice of having everyone who has been through a traumatic event immediately process it in a structured way—does not work, and, in some cases causes harm.
Forcing processing before safety is established, before trust exists, before a person is ready, is not healing. This is why it never works with our loved ones, especially those we deem to be “a problem.” Because until a person is ready, it will never work.
What Genuine Healing Support Actually Looks Like
What matters is not speed. It is attunement, connection, and the right support, from the right person, at the right moment.
Sometimes people who have been through developmental trauma never seek out help because they think that it will resolve on its own, and it does not work that way because trauma lives in the body.
And eventually, the trauma will manifest in some form as a physical illness to get us to pay attention, and even with that, sometimes we still don’t listen.
And it’s not because there is something wrong with us, but because society always tells us to “fight.” And this “fight” takes the form of resistance. Resisting the message, the condition, instead of listening.
Everything that shows up in our world is in communication with us at all times, to listen and to make choices.
When we stop fighting and we accept the condition that we find ourselves in, we are one with life, in communication with life, and we start to understand ourselves from a whole new perspective, and we seek the help that we need.
Because we know it is not only essential for our mental health but also a sign of strength rather than weakness. Please don’t suffer in silence. And you don’t have to suffer any more than you already have.
So, if you have been listening to me for a while and still haven’t searched for support and you would like some help with finding the right contacts, send me an email and I will be in touch.
Who You Are — Neurodivergence, Wiring, and Why Your Suffering is Proportionate
Wired Differently — Not Broken Differently
In 2026, consensus seems to be moving towards finally looking at all human beings and saying “you are different” rather than through the eyes of a diagnosis. This is a welcome change in our perspective as humans.
For decades, if you were seen as different, automatically, it was assumed that there was something wrong with you. For example, parents were seeking medications to calm down their hyperactive children.
And some of us grew up masking who we really were because we understood that who we really were was not acceptable. So, we hid our gifts and dumbed them down to fit in. We pretended to be a part of the herd.
If you are listening to me, most likely you are wired differently. Not broken differently. Not damaged differently. Simply wired differently.
You may have a formal diagnosis. You may have been told at some point in your life that you have ADHD, or that you are autistic, or that your sensory processing works outside what is considered typical.
And if that is you—I want you to hear this clearly. That diagnosis is not a verdict on your worth. It is a description of your wiring. Nothing more and nothing less.
But some of you — perhaps many of you — have never received any diagnosis at all. Like myself, I do not have a formal diagnosis for anything and have never sought to have one, knowing full well that I am wired differently. (And yes, wired differently does not mean there is something wrong with you or something needs to be fixed)
That might be similar for you as well. Something in the way you move through the world has always felt slightly out of step with the people around you.
You process more deeply.
You feel more intensely.
You notice what others miss.
You have always needed more time, more quiet, more space to recover from experiences that seemed to roll off everyone else without effort.
You may have spent years being told you were too sensitive, too intense, too reactive, too much—without anyone ever offering a name for what was actually happening underneath those descriptions.
Both of these experiences are real. And both belong in this conversation.
Because neurodivergence is not a disorder. It is not a pathology. It is not something that needs to be fixed or that makes you less of a person. It is a different neurological architecture — a different way of receiving, processing, and experiencing the world.
And the difficulty that comes with it is not caused by the wiring itself. It is caused by the friction between that wiring and a world that was largely not designed with it in mind.
Now here is where this connects directly to everything we have been exploring in this episode.
What the Research Says About Neurodivergence and Trauma
Research by Freya Rumball and colleagues at King’s College London found that among trauma-exposed autistic adults, approximately forty-five percent showed probable current PTSD and sixty-one percent showed probable lifetime PTSD—compared to a general population rate of roughly four to five percent.
Sarah Cassidy and colleagues found that seventy-two percent of autistic adults in their study scored above the clinical threshold for suicide risk, compared to thirty-three percent of the general population.
I share these figures not to frighten you. I share them because they validate something that neurodivergent people — diagnosed or not — have often been told is an overreaction.
The depth of your suffering after trauma is not a character flaw. It is not evidence that you are weaker than other people. It is a documented, measurable reality. Your nervous system processes experience at a depth and intensity that the research now confirms.
And that confirmation matters—because you deserve to stop wondering whether what you feel is proportionate.
It is proportionate. It has always been proportionate. The research simply caught up.
What the figures also point toward is this: a nervous system wired for depth and intensity is both more likely to be exposed to adverse experiences and more likely to carry them deeply when they arrive.
Not because something is wrong with it. Because of how it is built. And because the world — including many of the therapeutic and healing frameworks designed to help — was not always built with that nervous system in mind.
There is one more thing I want to name here. And it connects to something we will return to again in future episodes.
There is a profound difference between genuine recovery and what researchers call “masking”—the performance of being fine.
The Hidden Cost of Masking — Survival Strategy Versus Genuine Recovery
The exhausting, invisible daily work of suppressing who you are in order to appear more ordinary, more manageable, more acceptable to the world around you. If you have spent years being told you seem fine while privately knowing that you are not fine—that is not resilience.
That is an enormous expenditure of energy in the service of an appearance that protects everyone around you from having to respond to your actual reality.
And for a nervous system already wired for depth — already working harder than most to process and integrate experience — masking carries a cost that compounds over time. It is not a sustainable strategy. It is a survival strategy. And there is a significant difference between the two.
You were not too much. You were too much for spaces that were not built to hold you. That is not the same thing.
And part of what rebuilding looks like — the work that comes after therapy, after surviving, after finally understanding what happened — is building a life and a relationship with yourself that does not require you to be less than you are in order to feel safe inside it.
Meaning and Worldview — Who You Were Before Trauma and What It Did to That Worldview
The final contributing factor is perhaps the most personal. And it is this: who were you before this happened? What did you already believe about the world, about yourself, about whether you were safe in it?
Because the meaning you make of a traumatic experience is shaped, in significant part, by the meaning-making framework you brought into it.
If you had already experienced harm before this—if trust had already been broken, if you had already learned in some earlier chapter of your life that the world was not reliably safe—then this experience may have deepened an existing wound rather than creating an entirely new one.
It may have confirmed something you were already afraid was true. And that confirmation, on top of an already fractured foundation, can drive suffering into places that feel unreachable.
When Your Belief System Shatters Alongside the Relationship
If, on the other hand, you came into this with an intact sense of the world’s basic safety — if you were, in Janoff-Bulman’s language, someone whose assumptions were whole before they were shattered — then the experience may have done something different.
It may have produced not only pain but also a profound disorientation. A loss of the map entirely. The particular anguish of someone who genuinely believed in people, in love, in safety — and then had that belief used against them.
Neither path is easier than the other. They are simply different. And understanding which one is yours is part of understanding what recovery needs to look like for you specifically.
Kenneth Pargament’s research adds one more layer here—the role of spiritual and philosophical belief.
A lot of us are born into families with some spiritual belief systems. That there is a source of all things. That which some people call “God” or the “Universe.” Some of us are born with a strong spiritual attachment to the unseen, a strong spiritual knowing that there is more to life than that which we can see with our physical senses.
These belief systems teach about suffering being part of the human experience. That there is a sense that we will not be abandoned in our suffering and that it serves a genuine purpose in our lives, perhaps to strengthen our faith or help us learn more about ourselves and others.
A coherent belief system that holds the belief that suffering is not random, that life carries meaning even inside the pain, can be genuinely protective. It can be the container that holds you while everything else is falling apart.
But when trauma triggers what Pargament calls “spiritual struggle”—feeling abandoned, feeling punished, having the entire framework through which you understood existence collapse alongside the relationship—the suffering deepens.
Spiritual crisis and trauma arriving at the same time is common after narcissistic relationships because it challenges the very idea that there is a “God” out there who has been looking out for you and protecting you.
Because if that God existed, there is no way he or she or it would put you through so much suffering, knowing full well that you were a good person and did not deserve it.
Perhaps the case in point is a loving child being born into a dysfunctional family and enduring untold and invisible trauma behind closed doors, somehow surviving the ordeal. And then as luck would have it, ends up in a relationship with a narcissist as an adult.
Why Bad Things Happen to Good People — The Question That Defines Recovery
It’s hard to grapple with this question that most people have asked themselves: “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
It’s genuinely difficult to understand why some of the most horrible events would happen to sweet, sensitive souls whose only ask was to be loved.
And yet, the meaning that we take from such ordeals defines us for the rest of our lives. The meaning we choose can either diminish our suffering or exacerbate our suffering.
The Wound as Poison or Medicine — The Choice That Shapes Your Future
So, the meaning we make from our traumatic ordeals and the worldview we take on is by far the greatest defining factor of our future happiness.
What is the meaning you have made regarding your suffering?
Is it some punishment by the gods?
Is it karma for something you did in the 16th century?
Or is there a purpose for your life in this whole traumatic event?
The wound can be a poison or medicine.
The choice is ours to either let the trauma be poison that consumes us or to transform the trauma through alchemy, learn from it, and rise from the ashes just like the phoenix.
What choice are you going to make today?
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