Narcissistic abuse is one of the most insidious and least understood forms of domestic abuse. Not because it's rare — it's extraordinarily common — but because it leaves no visible marks and operates through mechanisms that are genuinely difficult to name while you're inside them.
What it does to the nervous system is specific. It creates hypervigilance — a constant state of scanning for threat, reading the room, anticipating reactions. It erodes the capacity for self-trust — because you've been gaslit, because your reality was consistently denied. And it creates a profound disorientation: who am I when I'm not responding to this person?
The recovery work is nervous system work, fundamentally. Rebuilding the capacity to feel safe. Rebuilding the connection to your own intuition — which was systematically undermined. Learning to recognise your own signals again, and trust them.
I work with women at every stage of this recovery — still in the relationship and trying to understand what's happening, recently out and trying to make sense of it, years out and still finding its fingerprints on other relationships.
You got out, or you're getting out. What comes next is yours to build.