Annie Kaszina

Have you ever thought how closely the fear of making mistakes relates to the whole experience of emotional abuse?
Narcissists  teach you that you have to attain their impossible standards of perfection in order to be good enough to be loved by them – and therefore, by extension, loved by anyone else in the entire world.
In […]

As a child, I used to love maze games. As far as I could tell, I was pretty good at them – at least, I solved them fast enough. Only later on did I learn that I have a hopeless sense of direction and I don’t do too well with real world mazes. Not to […]

“What do you know about it, anyway?” my brother asked, with all the gracelessness that decades of practice could produce.
He was asking what I thought gave me the right to adjust the height of my mother’s walker.
I refrained from asking him what kind of idiot he was that he couldn’t see that the handles were […]

What do you do when you feel lost or down?  I’ll tell you what my programmed, first reaction is: to wallow like a buffalo or hippopotamus.
It’s not a good look, for sure.
Plus, it doesn’t do too much for my mood or motivation.  Whether that urge to wallow is temperament or training, I can’t be entirely […]

This is the time of year when, traditionally, there is significant social and media pressure to look back, look forward and make New Year’s Resolutions.  But 2020 has been a year like no other. We have seen a major tear in the fabric of our reality.  Our lives have been adversely affected by Covid 19. […]

Nobody ever “should”s themselves as much as a survivor of emotional abuse.  That happens for a reason. That reason is not because there is anything remotely unworthy about those of us who have walked through the long, dark tunnel of abuse, Rather, abusers use shoulding to brainwash us into feeling terrible about ourselves so that […]

What was the best piece of advice that you ever received? And why? Also, how soon did you act on it?
The best piece of advice that I ever received was from my dear, Roman friend, Teresa – and it actually wasn’t a piece of advice, at all.
In reality, Teresa has given me a load of […]

The client I was speaking with was struggling with the injustice of being demonized by her narcissistic, fast becoming ex-partner. He is just cycling through his narcissistic end-game routines. Having performed “I’m leaving you FOREVER” to mediocre response, he transitioned – after due consideration of his finances and creature comforts –  into realising just how […]

This week, I had the pleasure of talking about boundaries with a very special group of emotional abuse survivors. All of them have come a long, LONG way on their healing journey. Yet, just like every other survivor, they still sometimes feel that they are on shaky ground when it comes to boundaries.
Why?
As one of […]

Anyone who has ever come out of an abusive relationship has faced the unnecessarily cruel question, “Well, why did you stay so long?” The answer to that is, of course, a complicated tangle of reasons, many of which we cannot even formulate – including this one:  “Because I honestly couldn’t be sure that the relationship […]