Hating herself, racked with chronic anxiety and suicidal thoughts, and feeling utterly worthless, Ronia Fraser’s relationship was literally killing her.
‘I thought I was losing my mind,’ confessed Ronia. ‘I didn’t recognise the person looking back at me in the mirror. And even worse, the people around me started to believe I was crazy. I reached a point where I knew that if I didn’t get away now, I wouldn’t be alive in a few weeks.’
Now aged 39, Ronia is a survivor of narcissistic abuse, one of the most common yet least acknowledged forms of abuse.
After many failed attempts, she finally fled the relationship and dedicated her life to healing, both herself – and others. She has gone on to become the UK’s first narcissistic abuse recovery coach, based in London and Los Angeles, one of only a handful of dedicated experts in the world.
‘Narcissistic abuse is one of the most common and least acknowledged forms of abuse which without fail has a detrimental and life-altering effect on the survivor’s mental health and quality of life,’ she said. ‘Against the common narrative, something can be done about it. It is not a life sentence, with the right tools and the right support you can and will fully recover from the complex trauma.’
Ronia had been living her ‘California dream life’ – she was head of finance for a multi-million pound global music business in Los Angeles and had a beautiful home in the sought-after Hollywood Hills.
But behind the successful façade, she was trapped in an abusive relationship, and she says that abuse survivors rarely fit the concept of abuse victims.
Her award-winning trauma recovery programme has helped the likes of doctors, lawyers, accountants, head teachers, senior managers and executives, business founders and high-flying performers, who are strong, independent, smart, successful and powerful women.
Considered a pioneer in the field of narcissistic abuse recovery, Ronia has come a long way from the dark days of that relationship.
She said: ‘He would break me down emotionally and psychologically and then made sure to leave a knife or box cutter behind for me to use and do his dirty work for him. I was drugged without me knowing for almost a year, resulting in blackouts and a loss of reality. I suffered gaslighting, brainwashing, intentional sleep deprivation, and emotional blackmail. I developed a most profound and unimaginable sense of loss and sadness and deep self-loathing. No one on the outside world however would have ever known that my life was less than perfect – sunshine, palm trees, the career, the lovely house in the Hills and all…’
To survive, she quit her high-powered job, dropped everything she had created for herself in America and returned to the UK where she went into hiding for two years.
‘Back then, I was really struggling with my mental health as a consequence of the abuse,’ she said. ‘Narcissistic abuse wasn’t really a thing at that time and there was little information available. I got very frustrated with the lack of results I was getting from therapy so went out on my own with a mission to find something that would fix this.’
Nowadays, Ronia is an internationally-certified, highly sought-after coach and has run her narcissistic abuse recovery coaching business for the last five years, helping and supporting women from all over the world to get back on their feet, regain their mental health and recover who they were always meant to be.
‘I was convinced that there had to be something that could undo the damage as effectively as it was caused,’ she said. ‘I had nothing left to lose, so I went all in. Once I found it, it took me only five months to become symptom-free. So I got extensively trained in the modalities that worked and modified and refined those for the particular purpose of recovering from complex posttraumatic stress disorder (cPTSD), which narcissistic abuse always causes. Today I’m a certified trauma recovery coach, clinical hypnotherapist and hypnotherapy trainer, NLP master practitioner and trainer, and Havening techniques practitioner.’
Ronia says she has developed a proven roadmap to narcissistic abuse recovery.
For her ground-breaking work in the field of narcissistic abuse recovery and the proven positive impacts her programme can have on the mental health of abuse survivors, she was nominated as a finalist for the NLP in Healthcare Awards 2021. Her results-oriented, structured and integrative approach, combining a whole range of holistic trauma intervention methods, is specifically designed for the purpose of recovering from complex posttraumatic stress caused by narcissistic abuse.
She added: ‘Today I’m leading a drama-free life I couldn’t have even imagined before. Healthy, free and so authentically me. I let go of everything that didn’t serve me and held onto all the good qualities I like about myself. Ronia 2.0. I love my life, I love my work. This is what I’ve been put on the planet to do.’
