Does Narcissistic Abuse Impact Your Health?

Your body remembers what your mind couldn’t name. We explore how narcissistic abuse leaves a somatic footprint—chronic pain without clear injury, IBS and gut distress, bone-deep fatigue, and sleep that turns into a nightly replay of threat—and why these patterns persist even after you leave the relationship, workplace, or community that caused the harm. Drawing from clinical experience, trauma texts, and hard-won personal insight, we break down the science of implicit memory, nervous system dysregulation, and the gut-brain axis to show how hypervigilance becomes a full-body habit.

We get practical about what the body is trying to say through jaw clenching, shoulder bracing, and lower back pain, and how to respond with tools that rebalance the autonomic nervous system. You’ll hear how chronic sympathetic activation fuels cortisol surges, microbiome shifts, and mitochondrial slowdown, and why shame quietly locks these changes in place. We also unpack the addiction loop of love-bombing and withdrawal, the rumination spiral that hijacks sleep, and the identity collapse that happens when you stop living the story a narcissistic system wrote for you and start living your own.

Download the FREE Break the Trauma Bond Process today.

This is Soma Rising: Conversations for a Conscious Future —where health, wealth, love, and purpose flow together on the Golden Path of alignment.  Learn more at somatribe.org

Continue Your Journey

If this episode touched your heart, please share it with someone you love and help awaken others to the Golden Path.

Website: soma-massage.net

Instagram: @somawellness.center or @tabitharmacdonald

TikTok: @tabitharmacdonald

YouTube: @tabitharmacdonald

✨ Ready to take this work deeper?

If today’s episode spoke to your soul and you’re ready to rise into a life aligned with your truth, I’d love to invite you into Soma Tribe—my signature transformational journey for people who are done playing small and ready to reclaim their power, purpose, and intuitive knowing.

✨ Learn more and sign up online.

Tabitha MacDonald is an Intuitive Coach and Bodyworker committed to helping people overcome pain fast so they can experience the love, success, freedom, and fulfillment they deserve.

Additional Resources:

• 💻 Book a Free Consultation: Schedule now
• 💻 Download the Heartbreak and Trauma Bond Clearing
• 🌀 Soma Flow Library of Healing (Free Trial!)
• 📘 Download my eBook: Conscious Communication
• 📺 YouTube: Tabitha MacDonald Channel
• 📸 Instagram: @tabitharmacdonald

Transcript

COVID, Clients, And Trauma Awareness

Defining Narcissistic Strategies

Weight Gain As Protection

Atypical Pain Patterns In Clients

Explicit Vs Implicit Memory

Terror Responses Without Recall

Nervous System Dysregulation

Chronic Pain As Somatic Expression

Jaw, Shoulders, Back: What They Say

Gut-Brain Axis And IBS

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Today's topic is near and dear to my soul. We are talking about the somatic aftermath of narcissistic abuse. You see, in 2020, I really started to notice the correlation between pain in the body and pain in the mind and pain in the emotions and pain in the soul. I started reading a book called Your Body Keeps the Score because I noticed that a lot of my clients in my massage clinic were coming in with a lot of trauma from COVID. And they were having a very hard time reintegrating. There wasn't a lot of help for them. Therapists were booked out nine months ahead of time. And I knew that massage therapists, hairdressers, people who talk to people were kind of the frontline workers of trauma. So I started studying trauma and getting more into working directly with trauma instead of saying, have a nice day, go take that emotional release to someone else. Because I just felt like that was irresponsible. And also, as I was reading Your Body Keeps the Score, I started realizing probably that I had my own unprocessed trauma. I mean, I was at that time living with and actively engaged with a narcissist, a very, very out-of-control narcissist who at the time I really didn't fully understand narcissism. I didn't understand what it was. I didn't think that I was experiencing narcissistic abuse. I literally had no clue. And so what I really want to talk about is how the body communicates what the mind does not understand or does not have language for. And then he can see the matrix. That's what it felt like. Like I was um looking at the world completely differently, and I had no idea that I was in a prison. And it was a prison of narcissistic abuse, and it was literally draining my soul. And I didn't really understand what that meant. And if you don't know what that means, hold on, I'm gonna explain it in just a second. So one of the most perplexing realities that survivors of narcissistic abuse um uncover is the bodies, their body carries the trace of trauma as profoundly, if not more so, than their minds. We tend to conceptualize trauma as primarily a psychological phenomenon, but new research, um, like such as the groundbreaking book, you know, Your Body Keeps the Score, um, helps us understand that the body is actually communicating with you about your trauma. Um, in massage school, we're taught about like emotional release and how when you work on somebody, they might start crying and that's like an old unprocessed memory coming up. But these like um traumatic experiences are bigger than that. Because if you have somebody that has endured a long, a long-standing narcissistic abuse, for instance, if they were married to a narcissist, if they dated one, if they uh were raised in a narcissistic household. And uh just for clarity here, when I say narcissist or narcissistic, I am not talking only about narcissistic personality disorder, which can be diagnosed by a mental health practitioner. I'm talking about the tools and strategies that somebody uses to control and manipulate another person. So for ease of use, we're just going to call it narcissistic abuse. The abuser does not necessarily have to be a narcissist. They could be somebody struggling with addiction because the strategies are exactly the same. They could be somebody who just has a really um dominating or controlling personality. Um, there's many different types of people who use narcissistic strategies to control your mind, emotions, your thoughts, your behavior, and basically your soul. And I know that's a really um intense statement, but it's true. So, what we're gonna talk about tonight is how the body is communicating it to the person experiencing it. So back in 2020, I started just seeing people come in. And I think 2020 was like a mass narcissistic trauma because of all the gaslighting and like basically the prison state. You know, we were like locked in our homes and able to connect with other people, isolated. All of these are narcissistic strategies. Now, I'm not making any commentary about government or anything, I'm just talking about the experience. We went into full-blown scarcity. There wasn't enough uh like toilet paper. And I know that sounds like a random thing to think that was scarce, but I remember being panicked about it because it was my what my normal way of life was using toilet paper, right? Uh, we couldn't get pasta for a while, we couldn't get um access to money, especially for those of us who worked for ourselves and our businesses were closed down. It basically sent people into a global state of scarcity. One I don't think we have fully recovered from as a society, but I want to stay on the body for a moment. So when I started going back to work and I started seeing all of these people coming in in this state, uh their pain was worse, uh, their mental health was declining, emotional health was declining, and it it was scary and there wasn't enough help. And so we would start working on pain. And, you know, there were certain patterns of pain that were coming up that are what we're gonna talk about today, and that is like this somatic dimension of trauma, and it's minimized. And that I think is what frustrates me because people aren't talking about the root cause of a lot of illnesses. And when I started realizing that, you know, I was really dealing with something a lot bigger than I, a lot bigger than I knew I was gonna, like, uh than I than I knew I was. I just started reading up on narcissistic abuse and I started gaining an understanding, and then the universe responded by sending me helpers. Um, like a client would come in and explain what triangulation was, and I was like, well, I don't even know what that is. I've never heard of it. Turns out I had lived my whole life in a drama triangle without even noticing it. Um, I uh started reading other books like uh The Human Magnet Syndrome, which talks about the polarity between the narcissist and the empath or the codependent. You'll hear me use the term codependent or empath interchangeably. Um, I think they're very similar. I don't know the exact like difference between the two. Um, I'll just say I had an anxious attachment style, I was a raging codependent, and I'm definitely an empath. So what I saw in my own unraveling was my body put weight on when I was around someone who was a narcissist as a protection mechanism. So as soon as I took my ex back, who was very narcissistic, I started gaining weight and I couldn't figure out why. Now, part of it was unconscious eating patterns, over drinking because it was COVID and um also getting less movement because it was COVID, but also because my body was literally saying, this person is not safe. I'm putting the protection back up. And it was frustrating to me because I didn't have context or understanding for it at the time. I also didn't know about protector controller parts of our unconscious mind, which we'll talk about more in another episode. But I I just didn't know what I didn't know. So as I'm starting to like put the pieces together, I'm looking at my own family dynamics and thinking, holy smokes, like I think my mom's a narcissist. And, you know, without diagnosing her, she definitely has strong narcissistic control qualities. Like that's how she operates in the world, lose using a lot of lying, a lot of mind control, emotional manipulation, shame-based tactics, and triangulation to control everyone around her. And it's really to keep herself in the hero role of her reality, her very interesting and twisted reality. Now, um what I noticed when I was looking at the clients that I was working on, a lot of them were coming in with unique pain patterns, meaning um their trigger points did not match the norm. They were in a completely different wiring system. And they also had some unconscious strategies for protecting themselves. And those were the reasons these health conditions could not shift. Or they had a lot of idiopathic health conditions like fibromyalgia, um, migraines, they had um always digestive problems, uh IBS, ulcerative colitis, uh, really intense things that caused them a lot of pain and a lot of issues with their health. And they were not getting the help that they needed. And so I knew like there was a there was that moment where I knew this was the thing that I was here to unravel. Like I knew this was a mystery that my soul was like leading me towards because it felt like suddenly like the invisible forces of the universe just started pulling me forward and I started learning at like this rapid pace. And it was as if I was remembering what I came to earth to do, right? Like I think we all have a purpose, and it it felt like this is this is what it was. So to understand why the body carries this trauma, first we have to understand the difference between an explicit memory and an implicit memory. Explicit memory is that which we are aware of. It's a memory that you can recount. For instance, I can remember August 5th, 2005, at 12.06 a.m., my daughter entered the world. I can remember it very, very clearly. This memory is primarily stored in the hippocampus and can be verbalized. But there's another form of memory called implicit memory, which operates outside of our consciousness. This memory is stored in older, more primitive brain structures, the amygdala, brainstem, cerebellum, and importantly within the body itself. It encodes not the narrative facts of the trauma, but the sensations, the emotions, and the physiological responses that accompanied it. For instance, when I was in uh Florida at Podfest, I was traveling alone and I had some trauma happen to me when I was traveling within the last five years, and I had to really work through it. Now, when I got to Florida and I got to my hotel, it was a very similar-looking environment to the one where I had uh been drugged. And I didn't know this was still bothering me and it was still impacting the way that I make decisions. Because once I got to the hotel, I suddenly just started having trauma tremors and somatic responses to terror that I wasn't having a memory for. I didn't not have any memories. I was not hearing anything, I was not seeing anything. I was totally unaware that I that I was having a trauma response, except for the fact that I treat trauma and I knew what my body was doing. And so I was having a felt sense of terror, even though I was not experiencing it. So what that means is you might have a memory in your field of awareness that creates a physiological response, but you might not remember a trauma. You might not have any kind of experience of a trauma event. Now, I don't want to make this too complicated, but we can also inherit our parents' trauma, their parents eight generations back. So you might even have a visceral reaction to something that's like your great-great-grandma's. So we're just gonna put a pin in that one. We'll talk about that one later. But I just wanted to make you aware that your body might be remembering something you never even experienced. So simultaneously, our body recorded something else, maybe like a terror event. And for me, it was very terror. It was a terror event. Um, and so I would have panic attacks. I had um, I used to have like trauma seizures and I used to have ticks and all kinds of weird things uh after I had these this big trauma. And I and I was having them come up again, and I was like, oh no, not this again. Like I were, I recoded the heck out of this. But my body was re-experiencing it like it was happening in the present moment, but I was very present. So these bodily sensations, repeated dozens or hundreds of times throughout uh, like let's say a toxic relationship, toxic workplace, or you know, even in your family of origin, they create somatic imprints. The body learns to hold itself in a certain way, to breathe in a certain way, to react in a certain way. And these patterns become automatic, unconscious, and they persist even when the dangerous environment has disappeared. At the core of somatic after effects lays a deep dysregulation of the automatic nervous system. This system, which regulates all involuntary bodily functions, your heart rate, respiration, digestion, temperature, immune response, it operates in two main modes, the sympathetic system, activation, mobilization, fight or flight, and the parasympathetic system, rest, digest, recovery. In healthy functioning, these two branches of the ANS balance each other out. The sympathetic system activates in response to a challenge or danger, mobilizing the body's resources. Once the challenge is met or the danger has passed, the parasympathetic system should take over, allowing the body to rest and recover. This cycle of activation and recovery is natural and healthy. But in the context of prolonged narcissistic abuse, this cycle is deeply disrupted. The sympathetic system remains chronically activated, keeping the body in a state of constant alert, even when there is no immediate danger. The nervous system cannot return to a state of rest. It's as if the accelerator is constantly pressed down with no possibility of hitting the brakes. So if you've ever met someone who's constantly tense, looks like they're always ready for a fight or to be attacked, the heart beats faster. I usually see them because their jaw is clenched, they're they tend to breathe out of their neck, and um they they they look like they're uh very unhappy, not unhappy because a lot of them smile, but there's just this kind of deep um sense of I'm not hypervigilance, like they're looking for danger all of the time. They might even kind of react that way in the way that they talk to you, a little bit defensive or hypercritical. This chronic sympathetic activation has cascading consequences for all body systems. The cardiovascular system is overworked, creating an increased risk of hypertension and heart problems. The digestive system, which functions optimally in parasympathetic mode, is constantly disrupted. This is why I had horrific ulcerative colitis, I believe, because I had this chronic narcissistic abuse. The immune system is completely weakened by chronic stress, and that makes the person more vulnerable to infections and illnesses. And the endocrine system produces abnormally high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, creating widespread hormonal imbalance. The somatic after effects of narcissistic abuse are not abstract or theoretical. They manifest as concrete and often debilitating physical symptoms that significantly affect the survivor's daily life. One of the most common and frustrating manifestations is the development of chronic pain. Now, this is what led me to working with narcissistic abuse because I saw that chronic pain sufferers had in some place in their life some form of narcissistic abuse. This does not have to be in the home. This can be in your workplace. It could be from your medical system, a school system. It could be from the PTA, a mom's group. It can be anywhere. So don't be closed-minded when you're thinking, oh, I do have this, but I don't have, I'm not married to a narcissist. My parents are lovely people. You could be receiving it somewhere else. So if this is you, I'm just inviting you to think about other places you might be experiencing it. Because chronic pain without an unidentifiable medical cause is often linked to some form of narcissistic abuse. So this pain is very real, it's not imaginary, but it does not result from a tissue injury or detectable organic pathology. It is the somatic expression of unresolved trauma. I have many books that will help you communicate to the part of the body so that you can see what the body is holding in that area. And it helps you understand the trauma behind the disease. And um I have, oh, I think the there's like the healing questions guide. There's another book about chronic illness, but there's a there's a lot of books out there, and I can put some links down below that will help you understand, like, oh, okay, so these are questions I can ask myself to understand what my body's trying to tell me. Chronic muscle tension in particular is very common. Shoulders rise and stiffen into a defensive position, the neck tightens, creating persistent tension headaches, the jaw clenches, sometimes to the point of developing uh TMJD or temporomandibular joint disorders, the lower back tightens, literally carrying the weight of emotional stress. I see a lot of hip pain, I see a lot of shoulder pain because they're like carrying the burden. Uh, and it's it's no joke what people with chronic pain are going through because they feel crazy, because they're like, I can't, I know I have pain, but nobody seems to be able to help me get to the bottom of it. And I'll just say that the pain serves as a psychological function. Now, I'm not saying all pain is like this because I treat a lot of low back pain where somebody was just doing something stupid at the gym and they threw their back out. So, you know, that's common too. But if it's a chronic repetitive Issue, we cannot ignore the psychological, emotional, and energetic imprint that the body is trying to communicate, the only way it knows how. So oftentimes the body will communicate something that the mind cannot or does not want to acknowledge. For instance, my um intuition keeps telling me to talk more about narcissistic abuse and to launch a coaching program specifically designed to help people break free from the prison of narcissism. And I have not wanted to do it. I have been stubborn. Like, but what I realized was that it was a somatic response to not confronting narcissists. It was a defense strategy to keep me safe. So as I'm going through my narcissistic abuse recovery certification program, I'm listening to this and I'm getting triggered because, and I don't like saying triggered, I'll say activated. I think triggered is overused. Um, but I'm having a somatic reaction to it. Like last night, it was the section on, you know, helping them prepare to leave. And I was remembering the whole like last year of my marriage to my kids' dad. And it was awful. Like I was, you know, secretly hoarding money to get out. I was um building a business so that I could support my kids. I knew I wouldn't get any financial support. I knew he'd come after me for everything I had. I knew he would try to destroy me the second I asked for divorce. And I was scared and I forgot how bad it was. I forgot the, you know, the reason I left was because the police showed up and gave me a long talk, actually, a short talk with a very long message. It they basically just said, man, there comes a time in everybody's life where you have to make some hard choices. And today is that choice for you because we cannot protect you from him. And I I remember um knowing deep inside that that that that was a message from the universe that I'd better, I better listen to. And so going through the program brought up a lot of stuff that I thought had been healed, I thought had been um, you know, worked through. And it luckily, I mean, I have a whole library of healing tools that I teach in Soma Tribe that are basically also designed to help you heal from narcissistic abuse. I don't talk about straight narcissism as much in Soma Tribe because for me, that product, that program, that membership is there to help you create your new identity. Um, but I have been talking about it more as I'm realizing a lot of the people that just come into my world are people recovering from some form of narcissistic abuse in their life. And they don't want to go to therapy and talk about it for the next 20 years. They just want fast solutions. And I'm I'm a seven on the Enneagram. I came up with the fastest solutions. So here I am. And so it, but as I'm like going through the recovery certification program, I'm remembering a lot of the things that I went through that I had dissociated from, that I had forgotten about, um, that I just wasn't paying attention to anymore because I was moving forward. But my body last night started remembering and it started doing very similar things that it that it used to do. And I was immediately wanting to stuff my face with chocolate, and I was immediately felt like I was standing in the middle of my mind screaming, and everything around me was shaking, but nobody could hear me. And I don't know if you know what that feels like, but I I explain it like this when I'm working with people who've had a stroke or who have had a big trauma, where it's like the real you is inside of you and everything is moving fast around you and it's screaming, but like nobody can hear it. It's almost like someone put the mute button on. And it's an awful feeling to feel that way. Um, but when we look at like, let's just talk about some specific types of tension in the body. Um, like I said before, the shoulders often say I'm carrying too heavy a burden. Um, the pain in the jaw says there are things I can't say, screams I had to hold back. My truth is not gonna ever be heard. So I'm gonna choke it back and make sure that however whatever I say is going to be formulated in a way that prevents some kind of like meanness from the other person. Um, the pain in the lower back basically says I do not feel supported and I have to carry everything alone. Some survivors also develop complex pain syndromes, like I mentioned before, like fibromyalgia, uh, which is like this diffuse pain throughout the body, extreme fatigue, sleep disturbances. Fibromyalgia is legitimate. So when I talk about these things, I'm not saying that this is the answer to all of it, because I think a very holistic approach is needed. But if you're getting treatment for fibro and you're getting treatment for low back and shoulder pain and things like that, and it's not resolving itself, I'm gonna invite you to take a look deeper. Because I was terrified at looking at my trauma because I didn't want to open Pandora's box. And I thought that it meant me going and sitting and talking to a therapist, unpacking all my mommy and daddy issues. And I didn't want to do that. Um, I I guess most people probably don't want to do that, but I really didn't want to do that. I was like, I ain't got no time for that. I'm a single mom, I'm running a business, and my soul has a mission. And who has time for that? I don't. And I went down the path of working with coaching and superconscious work. And that was the path that worked fastest for me. And I'm not dismissing any of the other tools. I think any kind of help is going to be the step in the right direction. But if I'm inviting you, if you have chronic pain, if you have unresolved health issues, please empower yourself with the knowledge that it could be something more. And I just think we're not talking about this enough. I'm not sure that people, I mean, in my world we do, but then I realize I live in a very small world, right? Like I live in a world of people who inquire about their health and who, you know, take responsibility for it and you know, they find alternative health practitioners. So that's the world I live in. I forget every well, not everyone lives in that little world. So um I also want to talk about um why digestive digestive disorders are also really high for people who are recovering from narcissistic abuse. The distressed second brain, basically. The digestive system, often referred to as the second brain, due to its dense neural network and its intimate connection with the main brain, is particularly vulnerable to the effects of chronic stress and trauma. Digestive disorders are extremely common among survivors of narcissistic abuse. Irritable bowel syndrome is one of the most common manifestations of narcissistic abuse. Basically, it alternates between constipation and diarrhea, abdominal cramps, bloating, nausea. These symptoms can be constant or triggered in stressful situations. For many survivors, the digestive system becomes an emotional barometer, reacting immediately to any anxiety, trigger, or trauma-related thought. I can't even tell you how bad my ulcerative partitis was. It was the most uncomfortable thing of all of the health conditions I've had. That was one of the most humiliating. I remember even just trying to go on a hike with my daughter at Silver Falls, and I was like 280 pounds at the time, and I had back pain and foot pain and neck pain, and it I was constantly in pain. And it made it worse because every time I tried to go for a walk, I'd like have diarrhea. Yeah, and it didn't always make it to the toilet. So um, it was awful because it was humiliating, and it also put a huge wedge between you know how I wanted to live my life. This connection between brain and gut is not metaphorical at all. The gut-brain access is a real bidirectional communication pathway. Stress and trauma affect intestinal motility, the secretion of digestive enzymes, the composition of the gut microbiome, and even the permeability of the intestinal wall. These physiological changes create real and persistent digestive symptoms. Many survivors develop problematic relationships with food. Some completely lose their appetite with food becoming tasteless or even repulsive. This happened to me after I um was dumped by the narcissist in 2019. I literally couldn't eat. I I went the complete opposite where food was repulsive. I would look at food and I felt like it would kill me if I ate it. Now, I have had emotional eating issues my entire life. This was not something that I was accustomed to. Uh, others develop compulsive eating behaviors. That's usually what I um leaned on when dealing with narcissistic abuse, using food as a means of emotional regulation, comfort, or filling an internal void. These dysfunctional eating patterns can lead to clinical eating disorders requiring specialized treatment. Now, I have a lot of processes in the tribe that address emotional eating at the root and help people overcome that because I think that it's part of living in an alignment with your higher self, is eating healthier. And it is part of learning to, you know, recognize, especially for empaths, when you're taking on other people's emotions as your own. I feel like we we carry it around with us, and that can look like an extra 20 pounds. Um, we also need to look at chronic fatigue. I remember when I had chronic fatigue syndrome, it feels like forever now, but this is exhaustion at like the cellular level. We've already like mentioned fatigue in the in the context of like depression, but it deserves a deeper exploration in its somatic dimension. The chronic fatigue experienced by survivors of narcissistic abuse is not simply a desire to sleep or a lack of motivation, it is a deep exhaustion at the cellular level, a depletion of the body's energy resources that can be biologically measured. Chronic stress affects the mitochondria or the powerhouses of cells. Under prolonged stress, mitochondrial function deteriorates, reducing the cell's ability to produce energy. Simultaneously, the adrenal glands, which produce cortisol and other stress hormones, can become exhausted after months or years of overactivity, leading to what is sometimes called adrenal fatigue. And there's like a specific muscle sequence that when I'm working on someone, I can always tell when their adrenal glands are being taxed. And I'll just say ashwagandha is a really helpful herb for this and restoring healthy adrenal function. Um, if you know, if you've been told you have adrenal fatigue, you definitely want to look at like long-term stress on the body and the real cost of it because it's it's real and it's it's hard to understand when you're in it because it's just feels like uh you're too tired to even figure it out. Uh, you wake up exhausted, you um feel like maybe taking a shower might be too too much of an effort. Climbing stairs leaves you breathless, your body feels heavy as if you're walking through molasses, and it's just like you didn't get enough sleep, but it doesn't matter how much sleep you get, you're just not getting enough sleep ever. Um, your muscles feel tired. Every cell of your body feels exhausted. It feels like your bones just can't hold you up. This fatigue has cascading consequences. It makes physical exercise difficult, which could otherwise aid in recovery. It affects the ability to work, socialize, and take care of oneself. It creates a vicious cycle. Fatigue leads to inactivity, which leads to more fatigue, which leads to more inactivity. The chronic fatigue is often misunderstood by other people. Loved ones may perceive it as laziness or a lack of willpower. You might think that you have that you have a chronic case of laziness or lack of willpower, that you should just push yourself harder. Maybe you're just getting old. Maybe if you exercised more or you had you'd you'd have more energy. Or maybe, you know, you just can't figure out what's wrong. Your body just won't move. Well, what happens is, well-intentioned as they may be, um, these ignorant comments add shame and isolation to the already overwhelming exhaustion. And I don't know if you know this, but shame acts like a bigger chain to the prison of narcissism because shame is basically what they keep you in to control you so that you never leave. Because shame is heavy. I don't care how much you weigh, shame is heavy. A lot of people will also experience sleep disorders, and sleep is an essential restorative function, and it is profoundly disrupted in most survivors of narcissistic abuse. Sleep disorders take multiple forms and have multiple causes, all related to the dysregulation of the nervous system and the persistence of trauma. Insomnia is common, laying awake at night. I remember after my um big, big heartbreak in 2019, I would lay there ruminating all night long. And I could not get my mind to stop racing. It only made it worse. And that's why one of the first tools that I teach is to how to break the rumination patterns because it is crazy making, and you're only creating deeper grooves in your brain that make this person feel like the only solution is them. It's the same as quitting cigarettes, it's the same as coming off of sugar, you know, quitting drinking if you have a drinking problem. Um, it's the same as getting off of drugs because it creates a drug loop in your brain. You become literally addicted to the narcissistic abuse. You might not know it, but narcissistic abuse is highly addictive. I know that sounds a little out there, but it's true. And they've done research. Um, think of heroin, right? Like heroin makes you feel euphoric. I don't know, I've never done it, but I hear it makes you feel euphoric. Coming off of heroin makes you feel like you're gonna die. A narcissist, when they love bomb you, it makes you feel euphoric. When they start to pull away, it makes you feel like you're gonna die. It's the same loop. Different drug. Nighttime awakenings are also characteristic. Uh the survivors may fall asleep but wake up several times during the night, often suddenly with a racco, sweating, um, nightmares, uh, just really not feeling safe in bed. Uh, nightmares uh are really prevalent, and they are often the somatic manifestation of trauma. I used to have horrific nightmares all of the time, and I did not understand why. I very rarely get them anymore unless I'm doing lucid dreaming intentionally to shift trauma. Um, but they they are literally replays of trauma when you're sleep, when you're sleeping. And the brain is attempting to process and integrate traumatic experiences. And, you know, sometimes we just don't want to go to sleep because we don't want to experience terror in our sleep, especially when we've had to endure it in our daily life. And you might not equate your narcissist, whoever they are, um, or whatever system it is, because this can also come from religious organizations. Um, but it you probably don't want to keep experiencing it at night. It's like, you know, at least during the day you know what to expect, but in your nightmares, you never know what's gonna come through. It's it's a it's hard. So if you're going through that, I just want you to know that I I get it and it's hard. And um I'm sorry that you're experiencing it. And I and I want you to know that there's a solution. There is a solution, and it's faster than you know. It does take commitment because narcissism is coming out of an addictive prison, it it does take a commitment to your future self because it collapses the identity that they created. So let's say, for instance, that you had a narcissistic parent, they created an identity for you. And when you begin to heal, that identity collapses because it was one built on fear and shame and scarcity, and you're not enough, and you're not worthy, and this is all you're ever gonna get out of life. And then your higher self is gonna come in and they're like pure, unconditional love. And they're like, you're totally worthy. You don't, you're not broken, like you're perfect, you're beautiful, you're exactly who I hoped you would be. That identity is in direct conflict with the identity that the narcissistic system created for you, so you'll clash with your higher self because the opposing identities need to be resolved. And that's where getting help from someone who can see the real you, the real, real you, not the one that they made you believe you were, but the real you. And in community. Because now, whenever I go into a little shame spiral, I call someone and I say, okay, I'm having a shame spiral, and this is what it feels like in my body, and I need to just say it out loud so that somebody outside of me is witness to it, and then all of a sudden it just goes away. Because shame can only grow in silence, right? It only anchors into your identity without expressing it to another person. Shame will make you sick. Do not underestimate the cost of shame on your health. We were in a um uh a class the other day, and I said, I don't know how to put a value on narcissistic abuse recovery. I don't know how to give it a dollar value. And the coach asked me, Well, how much did you pay? And I'm like, to be honest, I've probably paid about$300,000 to get outfit. And there's no way I'm gonna ever charge anyone that because I think that it should be free, number one. And I I don't think that, like, had I known it was gonna cost me that much money when I started it, if I had known how messy it was gonna be and how many different professionals I would seek out that were selling a promise that they couldn't deliver on, um, which just left me feeling more broken and more frustrated. If I had known then that the cost, I wouldn't have started the journey. So I'm gonna tell you right now that um when you work with me, the cost is nowhere near$300,000, even though that was my investment. I want you to know though that it costs you a lot of money because if you're physically sick all of the time, like your back is always going out, or you're you're having migraines, you're having chronic fatigue issues, um, you're not able to make the kind of money that you would if those things were not blocking you. And if you've ever said to yourself, well, I'm just lazy, that's why I can't stick to a gym routine, that's not true. Your nervous system is not calibrating correctly. And that's when we have to identify the block in your system that is preventing you from taking action with the person you were meant to become. Now, that's what I have developed in Soma Tribe. Um, and I am also, if you're interested, I am going to be launching a new narcissistic healing program that's just focused on education and um healing for people who've endured narcissistic abuse. It's going to be a three-month container, and it's going to be like very interactive and heavily supported. Because looking back at the beginning of the journey, I think if I had been in a container like that, it would have been a lot smoother. Um, but I kept denying and and denying and denying. And I looked and I looked and I looked, and I couldn't find something like what I'm creating right now. And I'm pretty sure that's why I'm creating it. Because I'm creating the program that me in 2019 needed, that me in 2014 needed, that me in 1993 needed. I'm creating the program that my younger self is begging me to create so that other people don't have to live this prison sentence. And I I've said this to a lot of people where I'm like, I feel like it's not fair because coming out of that imprisonment of narcissistic abuse is hard. And it's like it's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And people will ask, like, why I did it, why what kept me focused and committed. And it's because of my my daughter and my son. Because when I started understanding energy, epigenetics, and um familial patterns, not only through learned behavior and um you know beliefs, but from energy, I realized that if I healed, they would heal. And that the more I worked on myself, they didn't even have to go to therapy. They just received the benefit. Now, I think that's partly because I show up as a different mom. Um, I'm very uh self-aware and I am very self-reflective. So if my kids make a complaint, or you know, they're teenagers, they should make complaints. So no, that's their job, right? But I mean, I don't, my daughter's not a teenager anymore. Oh my God, she is now 20. Okay, so um if if you know they if they're complaining and stuff like that, I like to be self-aware enough to go, okay, is that from me? Is that because of, you know, my old codependent strategies? Um, or, you know, do I try to take it into account and and question it. I'm always in inquiry with myself about my own behavior because I think it's really, really important, especially being someone who came out of narcissistic abuse. Um, because I did not question other people enough. I always self-blamed. And self-inquiry is not the same thing as self-blaming. So we'll talk about that on another episode. But for today, I feel like this is a good stopping point. And um, I'd like to know like what kind of somatic experiences, and when I say somatic, that's like in the body, um, you experience that maybe you haven't been able to resolve. And have you sought like solutions and haven't been able to figure it out, but you know there's something out there that you just can't quite put your finger on it. Now it might be like, you know, trying to lose weight and and you're chasing symptoms. It could be menopause or perimenopause, because I'm gonna tell you right now, I did not have menopause or perimenopause, and I'm pretty sure it's because I went through the process of healing my energy, my body, my mind, and my emotional state. And I believe I the releasing of my baggage is why I didn't experience menopause the way that other people are saying they're experiencing now. And I'm also sure that's why my body, you know, healed the IBS and why a lot of the chronic pain that I used to have has also resolved itself. So if you're interested in learning more, uh, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a link below into a free clearing loop. It's the trauma bond clearing loop, and it basically clears your um unconscious mind of all trauma bonds from the past. Now, it could even be a past lifetime, you never know. Um, it's in there. So I'm gonna put a link down. You can just sign up for it, and then you'll get um a little mini course on narcissistic abuse recovery. Um, but then the just the trauma bond is the thing that you're gonna want to listen to. So I listen to it at night. It helps untangle the unconscious programming that is installed during narcissistic abuse. Now, this is going to work for you if you were in a cult, if you were in a community that had narcissistic abuse, this is gonna work if you were in a um work or school environment that had narcissistic abuse. Um, the PTA, I'm just saying. Um, if you were in um, you know, uh just a friend group where you were targeted and you maybe didn't know, um, it could also be from loved ones like a parent. You don't have to know who it was for the energetic imprint to have been to have impacted you. I've had narcissistic clients that I had to remove from my care because they were so abusive and I couldn't see it at the time. So there's there is a tangled web of very, you know, tactical narcissistic people out there. So you might not even know you have one, but maybe some of these symptoms resonate with you. So, like I said, you don't have to know who it is, you don't have to know where it came from. The trauma bond will break it using the superconscious recode and clearing loops, um, which help restore your true higher self as the authority of your mind. And that is what I want for people, and that's what I want for the planet. Uh, because when you're in alignment with your higher self, you heal faster, you create faster, and you get back to creating what your soul came here to create instead of getting lost in uh trauma and comfort and illusions that are not supporting you.