As the years go on, the pressure becomes too much, and your system does the only thing it can do to protect you: it shuts down. This is the work of your vagus nerve. When you cannot fight because they’ll punish you, and you cannot flee because you are trauma bonded or financially trapped, your body enters what we call dorsal vagal shutdown. This is the “playing dead” response. It is that heavy, suffocating brain fog where you cannot remember your own phone number or find yourself staring at a wall for two hours as time passes by. Your body is slowing your metabolism to a crawl and shutting down your immune repair systems to conserve energy. It is a protective cage. Your biology has decided that the only way to survive the narcissist is to become a ghost.
I want you to hear this clearly: you cannot medicate your way out of a burning house, can you? You cannot supplement your way out of a trauma bond. True physical healing only begins when you change your environment and start the work of re-regulating a shattered nervous system. This is exactly why I built the Thrive After Narcissistic Abuse community, a place where we do not just talk about the “why.” What is narcissistic abuse? What happened? We focus on the mechanics of recovery. We look at how to flush these toxins out of your tissues, how to wake up your vagus nerve, and how to teach your nervous system that it is finally safe to stop attacking itself.
If you’re tired of being the one who’s always sick while they stay healthy, I would love to help you reclaim your body. The link to join the community is in the description below or pinned in the comments.
So, what actually happens to your body the moment you finally go no contact and the smoke starts to clear? Initially, you may feel worse. That’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? This is the cortisol crash. When the external threat is finally gone, your body feels safe enough to collapse. You may sleep for 12 hours a day for a month. Have you experienced that? Let me know in the comments. You might feel a sudden, intense wave of illness as your immune system finally tries to process years of suppressed inflammation.
But then something incredible happens—unbelievably incredible. Many people have reported to me, and I have experienced this personally, that the inflammation—the puffy, swollen look in the cheeks, you remember that?—and under the eyes suddenly vanishes. You appear 10 years, 20 years younger in a matter of weeks. Your sense of taste and smell returns; that is basic stabilization. The mystery allergies to certain foods often disappear because the gut lining is finally able to heal without being bathed in stress hormones. Your body is remarkably resilient. It spent years attacking itself because it was trying to tell you something your mind was not ready to hear. It was screaming, “This is not safe,” through your joints, your skin, and your stomach.
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