As a narcissistic abuse survivor, if brushing your teeth feels like climbing a mountain, you’re not lazy or weak; you’re just done surviving. If you feel exhausted even after sleeping for hours, that’s not in your head; it’s literally in your body. As a survivor of extreme abuse, you have spent so long in survival mode that your body has forgotten what safety even feels like. You have been hyper-alert, hyper-aware, always predicting their next mood swing, trying to avoid another fight, trying to keep the peace, and now your nervous system is fried, your hormones are shot, and your energy tank is way past empathy. This isn’t just emotional burnout; it is physical collapse.
Here’s what no one tells you: the trauma doesn’t just live in your memories; it lives in your cells. It affects how your brain works, how your gut works, and how your immune system works. You may feel like you are falling apart, but really, your body is trying to protect you. It is speaking the truth your mind was forced to ignore.
Sign 1: Emotional Numbness and Exhaustion
You feel emotionally numb and exhausted, even after resting. There is a kind of tiredness that no amount of sleep fixes. You lie down, you rest, you cancel plans, but the exhaustion stays. That is because you’re not just tired; you’re depleted. When you have spent months or years with a narcissist, your body has been living in survival mode. That means your sympathetic nervous system, the part of your body that deals with stress, has been working nonstop. It has been constantly scanning for danger, preparing you to respond. Even when you were asleep, you weren’t truly resting; you were bracing. Over time, this state burns out your adrenal glands, the tiny glands that sit on top of your kidneys and release stress hormones like cortisol. When they get overworked for too long, your whole system starts crashing: your mood, your energy, even your immune system, they all drop. You’re not just tired because life is busy; you’re tired because your body has been holding the line for too long, and now that it’s safe (or it’s at least safer), it is falling apart because it finally can.
Sign 2: Brain Fog and Memory Issues
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You feel foggy, forgetful, and unable to focus. And no, you’re not losing your mind; you’re not crazy. This one hits really hard. You used to be sharp; you could think on your feet. Now, you reread the same line five times and still can’t remember what it said. You walk into a room and forget why. You blank out in the middle of conversations. This isn’t you getting older or losing your mind. It may not be ADHD; it’s not stupidity; it’s trauma. Here is what is happening: when your body is constantly flooded with stress hormones like cortisol, it begins to shrink the parts of your brain responsible for memory and focus. What am I talking about? The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. At the same time, your amygdala, the fear center, gets overactivated. That means your brain is prioritizing survival over thinking. You are scanning for danger, not solving problems. People call it brain fog, but really it is neuroinflammation. Your brain is inflamed from constant emotional stress, and what does that do to you? You feel disoriented, confused, and mentally exhausted. As I said, you’re not crazy; you’re just operating from a brain that was trying to keep you alive in an emotionally and maybe physically unsafe environment.
Sign 3: Sensory Overload
You get easily overwhelmed by noise, lights, touch, even smells. You walk into a crowded room and your body tenses. A loud sound makes you flinch. The smell of someone’s cologne turns your stomach. It is called sensory overload. What is happening here is that your nervous system has lost its ability to filter out sensory input. Your thalamus, the part of your brain that sorts what is important and what is background noise, starts glitching. And since your body has been in high alert mode for so long, it treats everything as a potential threat. Every bit of information feels overwhelming to process why? Because your brain has had to process too much, too fast. I want you to know that you’re not being dramatic for needing silence or space. You’re not being too sensitive. Your system is overwhelmed because it never got the chance to come down from alert. This is what happens when you have spent too much time around someone whose emotional unpredictability kept your body locked in fight, flight, or freeze. Every part of you became tuned to react, even your senses. Certain textures, smells, sights, and sounds can hurt like hell, like it used to hurt me in my early stages of recovery. It feels like your nerves are on fire 24/7.
Sign 4: Persistent Flu-like Symptoms
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You keep getting flu-like symptoms, but you are never actually sick. I’m talking about low-grade fevers, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes. You feel like you’re coming down with something all the time, but your lab tests are normal. No virus, no bacteria, just something. Here is what it is: your immune system is responding to emotional overload the same way it would respond to an infection. When you are under long-term stress, your body starts producing pro-inflammatory cytokines, the same chemical messengers it would release if you had the flu. That is why it feels so real: the fever, the aches, the heaviness. Your immune system is overactive, trying to protect you from something, but that something is not a virus; it is the emotional war you have been living through. When I was starting my own weight loss journey after surviving narcissistic abuse, you may have noticed it, I realized something strange. Every time I pushed myself even slightly, like walking a little faster or exercising more than usual, I would feel feverish within hours. At one point, I genuinely thought I had cancer, it was that frequent, that intense, and that scary. So I stopped trying to push. I learned to go gently because my body wasn’t just out of shape; it was inflamed from trauma.
Sign 5: Delayed Fatigue Onset
You feel fine during an activity but crash hours or a day later. This is the one that confuses people the most. You manage to get through a social event, a work meeting, even a walk. You’re okay while it is happening, but hours later you crash. You can’t move, you can’t think, you can’t feel anything except exhaustion. This is called delayed fatigue onset. Your body uses emergency energy, usually adrenaline, to get through something it perceives as stressful, and it works, but for a while. Once the event is over, your system crashes. Why? Because your adrenal glands, which are supposed to help regulate your energy through cortisol and other hormones, are already depleted. They do not have any backup, and so you fall apart, not out of nowhere, but because your body paid for the activity with energy it did not actually have. This is why pacing is everything in recovery, not just emotionally, but physically. You can’t go back to functioning like nothing happened because your body is still in triage mode.
Sign 6: Digestive Issues
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You constantly feel bloated, nauseous, or get stomach pains, and it gets worse when you are anxious or tired. The gut is often called the second brain for a reason. It has its own nervous system called the enteric nervous system, which is directly connected to your brain through the vagus nerve. That means emotional stress directly impacts digestion. When you have been in survival mode for too long, your body shuts down digestion. It stops producing stomach acid, it slows muscle contractions that move food through your gut, your good gut bacteria get thrown off, and suddenly you’re bloated after eating a banana. You feel nauseous for no reason. You get cramps, diarrhea, or constipation that comes and goes without warning. On top of that, most of your serotonin, the hormone that regulates mood, is produced in the gut, so when your gut is inflamed, your mood drops too. It is all connected. If your stomach is constantly off and doctors keep saying it is just stress, they’re not wrong, but they’re not explaining it well either. It is stress that has become biological. It is emotional pain that has gotten stuck in your gut, literally.
Sign 7: Emotional Crashes
Your emotions crash when your energy crashes. Some days you’re okay, you’re functional, then suddenly, out of nowhere, you are weeping or snapping or completely shutting down, and you’re left wondering what even triggered this. Why am I like this? The answer is your energy, or rather, your lack of it. We tend to think emotions are just psychological, but the truth is they’re also deeply physiological. Your brain needs a steady supply of glucose and oxygen to regulate your mood. When your blood sugar drops or even your body is too exhausted to circulate energy well, your mood tanks. It’s like trying to run a software program on a computer with no battery left. That’s why you feel fine one moment and like you are losing it in the next. Your body simply does not have the fuel to keep your emotional stability online. This is why narcissistic abuse survivors can seem so up and down during recovery. It’s not that they are unstable or crazy; it’s that their energy levels are unpredictable. Their body is still trying to find a rhythm that feels safe.
Sign 8: Simple Tasks Feel Impossible
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Simple tasks feel impossible, and you are not just being dramatic. Taking a shower, making your bed, brushing your teeth, as I said, things that once felt like part of your normal routine now feel like climbing Everest, and maybe you have started beating yourself up about it, telling yourself you are just lazy, that you need more discipline, that you should be over this by now. But what you are experiencing is real. It has a name. It is called post-exertional malaise, or PEM for short. It is a condition where even light activity, like standing too long, having a conversation, or washing your hair, can drain your body so deeply that it crashes for hours or days after. This isn’t psychological; it is metabolic. When your body is in this state, your mitochondria, the little engines in your cells that produce energy, stop functioning properly. That’s why I said it’s in your cells. They can’t produce enough ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the molecule your body uses for energy, so even the smallest task feels like too much. I used to brush my teeth and then lie down on the bathroom floor, can you believe that, because my heart was pounding so hard. I would take a shower and I’d have to sit down halfway through because I felt dizzy, and I remember thinking, “What is wrong with me?” But now I know nothing was wrong. My body was just finally falling apart after years of holding everything together.
Conclusion
Bottom line: your symptoms are not your weakness; they are evidence. They’re the physical proof of how strong you had to be, how long you endured, how deeply your body tried to protect you. This isn’t about pushing through, you see; it’s about listening. If your body is asking you to slow down, to rest, to recover, please listen. It is not broken; it is healing.
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