Midlife Women Worksheet for Healing After Narcissistic Abuse

Worksheet Introduction: Healing for Midlife Women After Narcissistic Abuse

This midlife women worksheet is for those recovering from narcissistic abuse. It explores how praise and criticism were used to manipulate your choices, undermine your worth, and prevent emotional autonomy. Each section offers reflection prompts and tools to help dismantle internalized control mechanisms and rebuild your connection to your own voice.

Use this in quiet reflection, therapy sessions, or supportive group discussions. You are not alone. You are awakening.

🌘 Stage 1: Praise, Obedience, and Emotional Manipulation

Understanding Praise as Control in Midlife Women’s Lives

1. What were you most often praised for?

• Were you praised for being self-sacrificing, silent, helpful, or invisible?

• How did that shape your self-image?

2. What desires or dreams did you abandon because they were discouraged or ridiculed?

• Educational? Creative? Personal?

3. Did you feel your worth depended on staying small or useful?

• What was the cost of that belief?

🖋 Reframe Prompt:
Write one sentence praising a disowned or minimized part of yourself.

“I honor my boldness, even when it made others uncomfortable.”

⚡ Stage 2: Midlife Women Confront Narcissistic Threats

Recognizing Empty Threats and Reclaiming Truth

4. What threats were used to stop you from growing?

• “No one will love you.”

• “You’ll lose the kids.”

• “You’ll be alone.”

• “You’ll never make it.”

5. Which of those threats were never followed through on?

• Write them out and evaluate their truth.

6. When did resentment toward the narcissist first appear?

• What sparked it?

• What did it teach you about your values?

🖋 Reframe Prompt:
Choose one false threat and rewrite it as an empowering truth.

“They said I’d be penniless. I’ve learned to manage my finances and invest in my future.”

🌞 Stage 3: Rebuilding Self-Worth for Midlife Women

When Disapproval Validates Growth and Confidence

7. What compliments now feel like manipulation?

• Identify moments when praise was used to silence or redirect you.

8. What types of criticism used to wound you that now signal your liberation?

• Boundaries, joy, confidence, ambition?

9. Where in your life are you still imagining the narcissist’s disapproval?

• Are you performing for an internalized audience?

🖋 Affirmation Prompt:
Choose or create one grounding belief to carry with you.

“My worth isn’t dependent on anyone’s approval—not then, not now.”

🔄 Integration: Reclaiming the Midlife Woman’s Voice

Complete these sentences:

• “I used to think disapproval meant ______. Now I believe it means ______.”

• “I thought I had to be ______ to be loved. Now I know I’m lovable when I ______.”

• “I once feared rejection. Now I fear living a life that isn’t my own.”

Self-Celebration List:
List 5 traits or choices that once brought disapproval but now bring you pride.

1. ---

2. ---

3. ---

4. ---

5. ---

🌱 Practice: Keep Returning to Your Truth

Return to this midlife women worksheet each month to track your healing and notice shifts in voice, strength, and self-permission. Share it in supportive spaces or bring it to depth psychotherapy as part of your recovery journey.

 

Resources:

Midlife women: When rage becomes a healing force

Midlife Women: When Disapproval Validates and Approval Undermines

Healing Your Hungry Heart: recovering from your eating disorder  Each chapter contains exercises for personal empowerment and healing.

 

Joanna Poppink,MFT, private online psychotherapist. Licensed in CA, OR, AZ, FL

Contact Joanna for free telephone consultation
📧 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

 

 

*pix   Diane Keaton RIP  Beloved and forever remembered   2025

(written in 2011) When I saw the headline, My five-year bulimia nightmare, by Diane Keaton, I felt pangs of sorrow and a tender connection with Diane. (Her book,Then Again, discusses her bulimia experience).

Path to healing

Summary

Eating disorder behavior as panic attack reveals how the body tries to regulate overwhelming emotion. Understanding this connection between body and psyche opens a path to genuine recovery through depth psychotherapy and emotional awareness.

Eating Disorder Panic Attack: The Hidden Panic Beneath Control

For many people, eating disorder behavior can be a form of panic attack. What appears to be control — counting calories, restricting food, purging, or exercising beyond exhaustion — is often the body’s attempt to stop inner chaos. The surface appears disciplined, but underneath lives panic, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm. The person may not tremble or gasp for breath as in a typical panic attack; instead, the panic shows itself through urgent and repetitive behavior around food.

Midlife Women and the Cost of Compliance: Which path do you take?

How cultural roles shape identity—and how to claim a life of your own

At a Glance

• Compliance can appear as kindness or devotion—but often comes at a cost to women, erasing their autonomy and identity.
• Midlife brings a reckoning: the roles once rewarded no longer fit or sustain us.
• Suppressing needs and desires often leads to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, or compulsions.
• Depth psychotherapy offers a path to rediscovering your authentic self and living life on your own terms.
• Also see Worksheet: Midlife Women's Compliance, Reflections on Cost and Current Choices.

I. The Shape of a Life Not Chosen

For many women, compliance begins as a means of survival. It looks like kindness, generosity, and cooperation. But, beneath the surface, it can mean living according to pressures and expectations that originated outside of her true self.

These pressures aren’t always overt. Sometimes they arrive wrapped in love, guidance, or reward. Other times, they’re enforced through punishment or exclusion. Over time, they become internalized.

A woman learns to police herself. She believes her desires are excessive, her needs inconvenient, her longings shameful. She stays quiet. She adapts. She tries to be what is wanted.

By the time she reaches midlife, the shape she has formed herself into may be all she knows. But it doesn’t fit. It never did.

II. Where Compliance Comes From

From childhood, women are trained to please, adapt, and serve. Culture, religion, family, school, and peer relationships all participate in shaping this early conditioning.

• A girl is praised for being quiet and cooperative.
• She’s rewarded for meeting others’ needs before her own.
• She’s criticized or excluded when she asserts herself.
• Her education often prepares her to support others rather than lead.

Over time, she learns to take pride in being useful and supportive—even as her contributions are overlooked or absorbed into someone else’s success.

The tragedy isn’t just that others fail to recognize her value. It’s that she’s been conditioned not to claim it herself.

III. The Voice That Lives Inside Her

By adulthood, external control is no longer necessary. Compliance becomes self-policing. Now an adult, the woman hesitates to speak her mind. She shames herself for wanting more—more respect, more rest, more life.

Signs that compliance has become self-erasure include:

• Reluctance to ask for recognition or support.
• Avoiding conflict at any cost.
• Dismissing her ambitions or desires before naming them.
• Feeling guilty when setting boundaries.

And symptoms emerge: anxiety, depression, compulsions, fatigue, and eating disorders. These are often treated in isolation, but they’re rarely random afflictions.

“The self she has had to suppress to comply is demanding to be heard.”

(Read more: Women and the Stages of a Midlife Breakthrough)

IV. Outliving the Script

Women are raised into roles with clear cultural value: to be desirable, supportive, fertile, and emotionally available. These roles are rewarded—but they have an expiration date.

By midlife, a woman may find she no longer fits into any recognizable cultural category. She has outlived the script, but she hasn’t died.

“When a woman crosses a certain age, the culture doesn’t know what to do with her.”

For many, the response is to hold onto earlier roles with intense effort. We see it in:

• Cosmetic surgeries and Botox treatments.
• Rigorous exercise and restrictive diets.
• Striving to preserve a youthful appearance to maintain social acceptance.

But when a woman shows up fully—intelligent, sexual, assertive—she risks criticism or mockery. Her presence challenges the narrative that she is supposed to disappear.

(Related reading: Midlife Women: When Disapproval Validates and Approval Undermines)

V. History Repeats

This isn’t new. During World War II, when men left to fight, women stepped into roles in factories, shipyards, and offices. “Rosie the Riveter” became a national symbol of women’s strength and capability.

But when the war ended, women were fired, sent back home, and expected to resume domestic roles so men could return to the workforce. Their competence was acknowledged only temporarily.

We see this pattern repeated: a woman is allowed to step forward only under exceptional circumstances—and only for a limited time.

VI. The Consequences of a Life Deferred

Long-term compliance has consequences. A woman who has spent decades shrinking herself, denying her needs, and internalizing blame may not recognize the cost until something breaks.

Common consequences include:

• Depression and anxiety
• Compulsions and addictions
• Fatigue and chronic stress
• Eating disorders and body image distress
• Loss of identity and diminished self-worth

Too often, treatment focuses on the symptom rather than the cause. The compliance—the life lived under imposed roles—remains unexamined.

Worse, a woman’s desire for autonomy, freedom, and vitality may itself be pathologized. She may be told she’s unstable, selfish, or erratic for refusing to comply. But the disturbance isn’t in her—it’s in the system that demanded her silence.

(Read more: Midlife Women as Consciousness Pioneers)

VII. She Is Not Alone

Some women, at great cost, stop complying. Not to rebel, but because they can no longer lie to themselves.

They begin to listen inwardly. They ask hard questions:

• Who decided this life for me?
• What if I want something different?
• What does freedom look like for me?

At first, they may feel lost. There is no script for the woman who refuses to vanish. But she is not alone.

Across generations and cultures, more women are choosing to live on their own terms, meeting their true identities for the first time, and discovering how to stand, speak, and hold ground—even when the world pushes back.

Summary

Midlife often brings a quiet reckoning. The roles that once kept you safe no longer fit. Compliance may have protected you, but it has also constrained you.

You are not wrong for wanting more. You are not unstable for seeking freedom. You are discovering what has been limited and stepping into your authentic life.

And you are not alone.

 

From My Library

• Midlife Women: When Rage Becomes a Healing Force
• Midlife Women Worksheet: Power After Narcissistic Manipulation
• Women and the Stages of a Midlife Breakthrough
• Midlife Women as Consciousness Pioneers: Claiming Your Unlived Life

Feminist & Depth Psychology

• Karen Horney — Feminine Psychology
• Virginia Woolf — A Room of One’s Own
• George Sand — Memoirs and Letters

An Invitation to Depth Psychotherapy

“If these themes resonate with you, I invite you to explore depth psychotherapy with me. Together, we can uncover the patterns holding you back, heal what has been silenced, and help you claim a life that is fully your own.”

Even if compliance shaped your life, it doesn’t mean your life was empty. You may have had sincere joy, delight, and meaning within the roles you were given. But those joys were often time-limited and role-limited. Now, in midlife and beyond, you may want more—and different. You may not even know yet what that “more” is.

Depth psychotherapy with me offers a space to discover it. Together, we explore what compliance has cost, what joy has already lived in you, and what is waiting beyond roles handed down by others. You don’t need to make this journey alone.

Joanna Poppink, MFT

Licensed in CA, AZ, FL, and OR, online appointments only

For a free telephone consultation, write: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.