Ask Soniya

Living With a Narcissist: When Love Starts Feeling Like a Trap There are some relationships that hurt loudly. And then there are relationships that slowly rearrange your mind. You do not notice the damage in one dramatic moment. You notice it in the way you stop trusting yourself. In the way you rehearse conversations before speaking. In the way you apologise for things you did not do. In the way you start feeling guilty for having needs. In the way one person slowly becomes the centre of the relationship—and you become the person constantly adjusting around them. Living with someone who shows strong narcissistic traits can feel exactly like that. And before I go any further, one thing is important. The word narcissist is used very casually these days. Someone being selfish, arrogant, insensitive or difficult does not automatically mean they have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. That is a clinical diagnosis that should only be made by a qualified mental-health professional. But whet...

  Can We Unlearn What We Learned From Our Mothers and Grandmothers? “Don’t answer back.” “Learn to adjust.” “Keep the family together.” “Good women don’t complain.” “Think about what people will say.” Most women have heard some version of these sentences while growing up. Sometimes they were spoken gently. Sometimes they came as warnings. And sometimes no one needed to say them at all—we learned them simply by watching the women around us. We watched our mothers eat after everyone else had finished. We watched our grandmothers forgive without receiving an apology. We watched women hide their exhaustion, silence their anger and continue serving people who rarely stopped to ask, “But how are you?” Slowly, sacrifice became our definition of love. Silence became our definition of strength. And abandoning ourselves became our definition of being a “good woman.” But can we unlearn what we learned from our mothers and grandmothers? I believe we can. The harder question is: Are we ready to...