When you live with a narcissist long enough, your brain is bathed in stress hormones, specifically cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline, day after day, month after month, and sometimes, unfortunately, year after year. Cortisol is supposed to be a short-term survival hormone, but with a narcissist, the danger never ends—it’s always lurking in the shadows. So, your brain stays in a constant state of preparedness we call hypervigilance. Chronic cortisol does three very specific things to your brain.
Number one, it enlarges your amygdala, which is your fear center. It shrinks your hippocampus, which is your memory center. And third, it weakens your prefrontal cortex, which is your decision-making and emotional regulation center. This is measurable brain damage, not a myth or a theory. We’re talking about something that scientists can see on brain scans. So when I talk about the five everyday signs, I’m not talking about your personality; I’m talking about what the narcissist did to the physical structure of your brain.
Sign 1: Sudden Irritability
The first sign is sudden irritability. You get triggered by small things that should not matter. Someone bumps into you slightly, and you feel a flash of rage. A friend asks a harmless question, and you feel defensive and ready to fight. Your partner uses a certain tone, and you snap even though they did nothing wrong. You feel like your fuse is so short that the tiniest spark sets off an explosion. Here is what is happening: your amygdala, the fear center of your brain, has been enlarged and overactivated. Think of your amygdala like a fire alarm. In a normal brain, the alarm goes off when there is an actual fire. But in a brain that survived narcissistic abuse, the alarm is now hypersensitive. It detects smoke when there is no fire, and it detects danger when there is no threat. A slight tone that reminds you of the narcissist’s tone before they exploded—that is smoke. Your amygdala cannot tell the difference between a real threat and a reminder of a past threat. This is really about survival. Your brain learned that small things were never small with a narcissist; a slightly off tone meant a three-hour fight. Your irritability is not you being difficult; it’s your brain trying to protect you from dangers that are no longer there.
Sign 2: Sudden Waves of Anger
Number two: you experience sudden waves of anger that seem to come out of nowhere. You are sitting quietly, and suddenly you feel this rush of fury. Or you are washing dishes, gripping the sponge so hard that your knuckles turn white, and then just as suddenly it fades. What happened is that your body is releasing stored trauma. When you were with the narcissist, you could not afford to feel your anger fully. If you expressed anger, they punished you. So, you learned to suppress it; you swallowed it and pushed it down. But anger does not disappear; it gets stored in your nervous system like a pressure cooker building steam. And now that you are safer, your body is finally allowing that pressure to release. Why does it feel so intense, though? Because you are not just feeling today’s anger. You are feeling the anger from every time the narcissist dismissed you, belittled you, and hurt you. This is really about release. Your body is doing what it needed to do all along: feel the anger, process it, and let it go.
continue reading on the next page
Sharing is caring!