When betrayal is no longer hidden but unmistakable, life collapses into a crucible. Narcissistic abuse forces shadow integration, while public propaganda during Covid deepened the rupture. In the blackened stage of alchemy, nigredo, empathy becomes the fire that turns lead into gold.
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The Breaking Point
Ordinary hurts can be absorbed. But when someone you love turns openly hostile and reveals that they wish you harm, something far deeper shatters. After the discard, the malice is no longer veiled. The wound is not simply “they hurt me.” It is “my map of reality was wrong.”
Jordan Peterson once said the most devastating truth of narcissistic abuse is confronting the fact that the beloved actually wished you harm. That realisation is soul-destroying because it undoes the very premise of love as a safe harbour. You must hold two truths: you loved this person, and they harmed you deliberately.
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Nigredo: The Blackening
Carl Jung drew from alchemy to describe individuation, the lifelong path of becoming whole. The first stage of alchemy was called nigredo, Latin for “blackening.” It means putrefaction, the breaking down of material before transformation. Psychologically, it is the dark night of the soul; the collapse of meaning, the chaos before new form.
Recovery from narcissistic abuse is a lived nigredo. The false self, which denied instincts, smoothed over cruelty, and bent to keep connection alive,crumbles. Shadow parts rise: grief, rage, instinct, and boundaries that once felt forbidden.
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Empathy as Crucible
In abuse, empathy is weaponised. Your tenderness becomes the lever of control. In recovery, empathy must be reclaimed. It becomes the vas bene clausum, the sealed vessel in which transformation occurs.
Empathy turned inward allows you to hold contradictions: grief without drowning, rage without burning up, shame without annihilation. In this crucible, raw material is refined. Lead begins to glow with the hint of gold.
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Public Betrayal, Private Betrayal
As my partnership dissolved, another betrayal unfolded in the collective sphere. During Covid, the media’s voice grew strident, certain, and coercive. It carried the unmistakable tone of propaganda; the kind we expect from China or North Korea, not from nations that claim to be democratic.
This was its own kind of gaslighting. Institutions charged with informing us, instead pressed a single narrative; punishing questions as selfish disloyalty. The parallel to narcissistic abuse was chilling: just as the beloved’s cruelty destroyed my private trust, the state’s voice eroded my public trust. Both left me with no outer anchor. Only inner truth-telling remained.
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Turning Lead to Gold
The alchemists taught that transformation requires fire. Nigredo is not the end but the beginning: the blackened mass becomes the fertile soil where renewal takes root.
Forced individuation hurts. It feels like death. And yet, within the crucible of empathy, betrayal can be transmuted. Boundaries emerge, not from bitterness but from dignity. Compassion returns, not as submission but as choice.
Lead becomes gold. The shattered soul, contained and tended, proves unbreakable after all.
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Call to Action
If this speaks to you, consider: what truth feels like lead in your life right now? And how might empathy, directed first inward, begin the alchemy?