by Anna Laskowska | Jan 22, 2026
As someone who has experienced narcissistic abuse, I once came across a statement attributed to a therapist suggesting that those who truly need therapy rarely seek it—their victims do.
At first glance, it sounds true.
But it is also deeply incomplete.
What I want to make clear in this post is this: the real issue does not live at the level of roles, but at the level of pain.
Whether we call someone a victim or an abuser, an empath or a narcissist, suffering is present in both individuals.
It simply takes different forms.
After a prolonged immersion in what felt like the deep recesses of purgatory, I began to see relationships differently. More precisely, instead of focusing only on what happens at the surface, I started looking beneath it. If healing is to occur, we must be willing to examine the empath–narcissist dynamic from a deeper perspective—not as a moral dichotomy, but as a psychological and emotional system.
Healing doesn’t happen on the level of labels, but on the level of suffering in both individuals.
On the surface, the pattern appears obvious: one person inflicts pain, the other receives it. Yet during my own healing process, I noticed that this dynamic does not exist solely within romantic relationships. It repeats itself across many forms of interaction. The intensity may vary, but the pattern persists along a spectrum.
My understanding is this: whether we consciously manage ourselves or not, unresolved emotional material will continue to recreate the same relational dynamics. The issue, then, is not limited to the empath–narcissist or victim–abuser labels. Something deeper is at work—something beneath the surface that keeps replicating itself. And because of that, both sides of the dynamic require attention and healing.
As someone who identified as the empath—the one consistently on the receiving end of pain—I was struck by a difficult realization: the very same unprocessed emotional material within me was binding me to people who occupied the opposite end of that spectrum. The pain we carry inside corresponds to the pain that sustains the dynamic.
Removing oneself from such situations is a crucial step. But it is not enough. Disengagement alone does not heal the underlying wound, nor does it guarantee the ability to form a healthy partnership in the future. For this reason, all participants in this dynamic—regardless of the role they play—require an equal commitment to healing.
by Anna Laskowska | Jan 15, 2026
Relationships have always fascinated me—or perhaps more accurately, their absence, even when they technically existed, or the poor quality of the ones that did.
I never had it in me to move through life with dominance or aggression. I disliked creating conflict or externalizing my inner struggles by producing chaos around me. And yet, chaos seemed to follow me regardless.
At heart, I carried a deep desire to connect with someone who shared similar values. I genuinely tried to live according to healthy relational principles. But that approach did not work.
During my healing process, despite wanting to be strict with self-imposed rules, I found myself repeatedly exposed to the temptation of breaking every single one of them. That tension forced me to look inward—to understand what kept returning to me, even when my intention to live differently was clear and definitive. As it turned out, the rules themselves quietly collapsed, which required me to change the method rather than the intention.
That alone became a powerful realization: instructions, frameworks, and discipline mean very little on their own. No matter what rules you impose or how rigid you become, whatever remains unresolved within you will eventually find its way back to you.
Pause here for a moment and consider this: how is it possible that a deeply loyal person repeatedly attracts someone who embodies the opposite?
I have come to believe that the core of a wound is often made of the same material—it simply expresses itself differently. These complementary distortions form what I call a perfect suffering pair.
If you have ever been cheated on, and you stop for a moment to feel how excruciating betrayal truly is, I can almost guarantee this: the very same emotional pain exists in the person who cheats—but it manifests differently. Instead of betrayal, it appears as boredom, restlessness, or a lack of excitement. Unable to face that internal emptiness, the person acts out the wound through betrayal in order to escape the pain it generates.
Both people are miserable—just in different ways. Together, they create the ideal conditions for the wound to express itself fully.
And yet, seeing how these wounds operate does not erase the longing beneath them. I believe that women and men—people in general—are meant to live in harmony, in relationships that nourish and support both individuals. I believe this desire exists, at least unconsciously, in every human being. And yet, a naturally loving and flourishing relationship is incredibly difficult to achieve. We are saturated with inherited patterns and paradigms that promote the opposite. This is why humanity has been suffering in relationships since the very beginning.
Moments of genuine joy are rare. What fills most of our days are problems—some epic, some small, but persistent nonetheless.
When I entered a deeper healing process, all my rules and internal regulations quietly dissolved. It felt as though I had entered outer space—everything suspended, weightless, temporarily unanchored. In that state, every lived experience—from the beginning of my life and even beyond—came sharply into focus, stripped down to raw emotional truth.
Everything I disliked, everything I avoided or rejected, returned to me with quadruple force. And within that confrontation, I finally saw that whatever I rejected externally had always lived within me as well.
It was important for me to recognize that what I experienced was not something I had consented to, nor something I deserved. There was a quiet but necessary reckoning in seeing that my boundaries had been crossed in ways that contradicted my own values and sense of self. And yet, despite knowing this, it all still happened.
To me, it felt profoundly wrong. This is not what life should be about. And yet, in one form or another, this is precisely what most of us are forced to confront.
Seeing this clearly did not erase the pain immediately. But through sustained inner work—and by taking responsibility for what was living and expressing itself through me—I began to change my relationship with reality. What once felt deeply personal gradually revealed itself as structural, woven into patterns far older and wider than my own story.
There is a deeper kind of work that lies beyond clarity and virtue—work we all inherit, whether we are aware of it or not.
It is easy to blame the other person, to label the other side as broken, spoiled, or wrong. This is nothing new. Humanity has been doing this since the beginning of time. The question is whether awareness and healing can finally become the next step—or whether the cycle continues simply because it remains unseen.
