Your brain got accustomed to such spurts of sudden dopamine caused by their love-bombing sessions’ idealization. The sudden withdrawal of those spurts of dopamine leaves you in emotional numbness and emptiness. Suddenly, the calm you needed makes you rigid and alien since your brain quite literally does not know how to live without the craziness energized by the adrenaline and the dopamine. You wake up, and life tastes stale.
Enjoyment feels irrelevant. Habit seems unexciting. The disconnection between the depth of emotion and the silence now creates a biochemical lack. Coming back takes time while your neural circuits rewire. Normal to start with feels awkward and nearly frightening because your brain doesn’t immediately detox and adjust to a healthier norm. You’re not crazy, you’re just recovering from emotional chemical warfare.
Number 2: Guilt and self-doubt.
The guilt-and-doubt rollercoaster in your head. The narcissist made you your own worst enemy. How? Through constant gaslighting and brainwashing. They manipulated your reality until you doubted every single feeling, thought, and decision you ever had. You lost faith in your instincts. You started apologizing for being alive, didn’t you? They slowly made you believe that you were the one who caused all the problems, naturally defective, too sensitive, or even bad.
They projected their doubts and shadow onto you and made you believe their story as your reality. Some of the examples of how they used gaslighting on you include constantly blaming you for being in the wrong, manipulating what you say while having a conversation, and punishing you for feeling healthy, normal, and natural emotions. You did something innocent, and they acted as though you took their life, as though you committed a crime. You cried, and they laughed at you. Straight DARVO. Even after they’re deceased, this horrible inner narrative doesn’t end. That’s the madness component. Rather, it grows louder and more critical.
You might be going crazy each time you do or say something that brings you back to their cruel responses. This emotional harm is caused by profound psychological imprinting, where your mind learned their voice as your internal critic. This programming of the mind is unwritten by committed and resolute trauma healing and therapy. I can’t stress all of that strongly enough. You are not weak for having it. You were simply conditioned to doubt yourself, and that conditioning must be carefully unwound.
You may also want to read this:
7 Signs That A Narcissist Is Done With You
What Happens To Narcissists When They Get Older?
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