Expressive Art Exercises for Healing After Narcissistic Abuse

Kathy Morelli
5 hours ago
5 min read

Creative expression can help transform confusion into clarity, giving shape and voice to experiences that are difficult to put into words.

Expressive Arts as Part of Healing from Narcissistic Abuse

In this article, we revisit Susan as she works through healing and reclaiming her sense of self after a long, emotionally abusive relationship with Donald, the narcissist. The other articles about Susan and Donald are Am I Losing My Mind? and Reclaiming the Self.

Susan has been working with a therapist who combines psychoeducation about narcissistic relationships with deep emotional work and somatic and expressive approaches to healing.

As Susan navigates the overwhelming waves of anger and grief upon realizing the extent of the gaslighting and future faking in her relationship, she dedicates time to self-reflection as part of her deep emotional work.

An additional element of Susan's profound emotional work in therapy involves recognizing that her identity requires rebuilding and then dedicating time to reconstruct herself in a healthy way.

Therapeutic deep listening and reframing are key to reconstructing the narrative and rebuilding the self. Emotional healing often involves profound, non-verbal elements that a verbal narrative alone cannot capture. These felt sense experiences can be accessed through somatic and expressive practices.

Expressive practices enable you to observe how relationship experiences manifest in your body and influence your presence in the world. Expressive therapies focus on identifying areas of protection, tension, alertness, or weight.

Gaslighting, denial, and DARVO often create confusion that is difficult to describe in words. Survivors may know something felt wrong long before they can articulate what happened.

Expressive arts practices can help bring these experiences into awareness, making them visible, tangible, and easier to understand.

Expressive Art Exercises to Heal from Narcissistic Abuse

Visual Journaling to Rebuild the Self

Susan created a private journal to help her re-capture and develop her own voice. It is a tangible creation of her own reality using photographs, collage, and color, with her own words, in her own handwriting.

This exercise is about rebuilding the self and self-recognition, not about right, wrong or accountability.

Timeline: Clarifying the Three Stages of

DARVO: Denying, Attacking, Reversing

Looking back, Susan noticed that her unease did not begin with the final public injury. It began years earlier with subtle denials, dismissals, and attacks on her perception of reality.

To help clarify her experiences, Susan created a timeline of when she started to feel her unease in the relationship and in herself. She thought about the threes stages of DARVO into three stages: Denials, Attacks, Reversing Victim & Offender and wrote these down on a piece of paper.

Then, on the same paper, she drew a line, and began identifying the flashbulb memories of confusion and hurt and unease that came with Donald's denials, attacks, and reversals of blame. She noted these memories and the approximate years on the timeline. Then, she sat back and reworked the memories in light of the new information she had about narcissism and DARVO.

Externalizing the DARVO pattern on paper removed it from the murky emotional interior of self-doubt, and make it a thing she can look at — something with edges, something that happened to her rather than something that is inside of her.

Seeing the patterns laid out on paper helped her rework the memories and add her truths to her own life.

Draw Your Resources and Sources of Strength

Externalize your list of resources to draw strength.

Susan made a list of the people who supported her and the resources she has that help keep her strong and build her up. The list included people she felt safe with, people to talk with, people who help her, who cheerlead her, her pets, her own talents, her hobbies, her interests, her therapist and what she likes to do.

Susan's partial list:

Noreen, her sister

Joseph, her brother

Sammy, her dog

Joanne, her good friend

Beth, her pottery teacher

"The Game Exposed" podcast, YouTube and book author, Yaz

Her mom and dad

Her job as an elementary school teacher. (Susan has received many awards over the years)

Her interests include: learning yoga, fashion, hiking and cooking

Etc.

This is just a partial list of her supports. She can add to it as she appreciates more her support network.

Susan keeps this list in her phone and she looks at it every day. This helps her stave off feelings of loneliness before they happen.

"Before and After" Body Maps

Narcissistic abuse often affects more than thoughts and emotions. Many survivors notice that their experiences live in the body as chronic tension, vigilance, exhaustion, numbness, or a persistent feeling of unease.

To explore this, Susan created simple outline drawings of the human form.

On one drawing, she marked where she experienced the impact of the relationship while she was still living within it. She noted the tightness in her chest, the heaviness in her shoulders, the knot in her stomach, and the feeling of always being "on guard."

On a second body map, Susan reflected on her present experience.

She noticed areas that felt more relaxed and areas that still carried pain, grief, or fear.

The goal is not artistic skill. The goal is awareness.

By placing these experiences on paper, Susan could see how the relationship had affected her nervous system and her sense of safety. The body maps helped her recognize both the wounds she was carrying and the gradual changes taking place as she healed.

Over time, these drawings became a visual record of her recovery and a reminder that healing often happens in small, meaningful steps.

Yoga and Nervous System Regulation

The hypervigilant state characteristic of DARVO exposure is a nervous system state — a prolonged mobilization response that never fully discharges.

Practices such as yoga, restorative yoga, and trauma-informed approaches that focus on interoception can aid in fostering a heightened sense of safety, grounding, and regulation of the nervous system.

By practicing mindful movement and breathing, Susan's system can re-learn, gradually, that she is safe in the present moment even when her social environment feels threatening.

Yin yoga's long-held poses, combined with guided awareness of sensation, can also help Susan metabolize the freeze component — the part that went still and stopped trusting her own perceptions during the years of denial-stage gaslighting.

Conclusion

Healing from narcissistic abuse is not simply a matter of understanding what happened. Recovery often involves rebuilding trust in your own perceptions, reconnecting with your body, and rediscovering parts of yourself that became hidden or silenced within the relationship.

Expressive arts, journaling, body-based awareness, and gentle movement practices offer ways to explore experiences that may be difficult to put into words.

Over time, these practices can help transform confusion into clarity, strengthen self-recognition, and support the gradual process of reclaiming your voice, your story, and your sense of self.