You Made It Out. Why Doesn’t It Feel Like It?

You did the hard thing. You left — or they left, or it ended in whatever way it ended — and now you’re supposed to be free. But free doesn’t feel like what you were promised.

Instead, you might feel confused about your own memory. You second-guess yourself constantly. You feel a pull to go back even though you know better. Small interactions leave you exhausted. You don’t fully recognize yourself in the mirror of who you used to be.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not broken. You’re describing the aftermath of prolonged nervous system dysregulation — which is exactly what happens to a body that has spent months or years in close proximity to someone whose behaviour was unpredictable, self-serving, and eroding.

What a Narcissistic Relationship Does to the Nervous System

The nervous system is designed for rhythm. Activation and rest. Effort and recovery. It learns what’s safe by reading the patterns around it.

In a relationship with someone with narcissistic traits, the patterns are deliberately — or compulsively — disrupted. Warmth followed by coldness. Praise followed by criticism. Closeness followed by withdrawal. Your nervous system never gets to settle into baseline because baseline keeps shifting.

Over time, your system adapts by staying in a state of low-grade hypervigilance. You become an expert at reading moods, anticipating reactions, and calibrating yourself to manage what’s coming. This is not weakness. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do — trying to keep you safe in an environment it correctly assessed as unpredictable.

The problem is that the system doesn’t automatically reset when the relationship ends. You leave the person, but the pattern stays in your body.

Why Talking About It Has Limits

Therapy is essential, and I say that as someone who believes deeply in the value of professional mental health support. But talking about what happened — naming it, contextualizing it, understanding the psychology — is often not enough.

The reason is physiological. Trauma lives in the body’s threat-detection system, specifically in the amygdala and the vagus nerve. These parts of the brain and nervous system don’t speak the language of narrative or analysis. They speak the language of sensation, movement, breath, and rhythm.

To heal from narcissistic abuse fully — to actually feel safe in your own skin again, not just understand that you should — the body needs to be brought into the healing work.

What Somatic Practices Offer

Somatic healing is any practice that works with the body to process what the mind alone cannot fully reach. In my work, that primarily means Kundalini Yoga — but it also includes breathwork, embodied meditation, and the kind of slow, intentional movement that teaches the nervous system it’s allowed to rest.

Here’s what this can look like in practice. You learn to notice activation in real time — the tightening in your chest, the held breath, the way your shoulders come up around your ears — and you develop tools to work with it rather than be swept away by it. You practice staying present in your body during difficulty, which builds a felt sense of resilience that goes deeper than any affirmation. You begin to locate yourself again — to have preferences, opinions, needs — because the somatic work makes it safe to inhabit yourself.

The goal isn’t to become someone who never gets activated. The goal is to have more room. More time between the trigger and the reaction. More access to your own knowing.

Healing Happens in Community

One of the most insidious effects of narcissistic relationships is isolation. You were probably slowly separated from the people and parts of yourself that would have seen what was happening. Healing in isolation — alone with your thoughts and your questions — can inadvertently replicate that dynamic.

Harmony Within is a community of women who are rebuilding. Not performing wellness, not racing to be okay — actually doing the slow, honest work of coming back to themselves, in the company of others who understand what that takes.

We practice together. We talk honestly. And we hold a container that doesn’t ask you to manage anyone else’s comfort in order to belong.

You don’t have to figure this out alone. Explore Harmony Within — or book a 1:1 Yoga Therapy session.