Feeling stuck after a breakup with a toxic person is the worst.
Because even though you’re physically away from them, they still take a up a lot of mental real estate.
And your friends and fam’s well intentioned advice, telling you to “forget him” and “focus on yourself, babe”…
Isn’t exactly helpful – it still carries undertones of “you should be over this by now”.
And part of you thinks they’re right. Because you understand what happened (you’ve done plenty of research about it).
But you still can’t stop the constant self-doubt and worry. Or replaying every moment of your relationship and blaming yourself for not seeing the signs.
And that’s because there’s a disconnect between what your brain knows and what your body feels. That’s the gap that’s keeping you stuck after your breakup.
The bit between knowing you were abused and actually feeling “normal” again – without your nervous system losing its shit every time you recall a memory.
So it’s about learning to live in your body again after trauma tried to disconnect you from it. And as it turns out, you’re in good company…
How it Starts
Before FKA Twigs’ realised she was being abused, she genuinely believed she was in a unique relationship. She described feeling like it was “me and him against the world”, with an energy that no one else could understand. Evan Rachel Wood used that exact same language too, describing her relationship as “us against the world”.
My ex came at it from a different angle, saying other couples would be jealous of us. Like we were better than them and everyone else was too basic to understand our bond.
It’s how narcissists hook you in. They make you feel special, chosen and like you’ve found something rare that no one else has. Because once you’re convinced you’ve found something irreplaceable, you’ll do anything to keep it—even when it’s unhealthy.
How they maintain their grip on you:
Love bombing ❤️💣
The relationship begins with dramatic professions of love. It’s an intense start where they spoil you with attention and compliments, so you really do feel amazing. And when something feels that good, it’s very hard to not get sucked up in it.
To understand love bombing vs genuine interest, you can read this blog here.
The pedestal 🪜
There’s a honeymoon phase that lasts anywhere from days to months. Then you’re knocked off the pedestal and spend the rest of the relationship trying to climb back up it. You’re chasing the initial magic, convinced you can get back there if you just try hard enough.
Blame-shifting 🫵
Once you’re in the cycle, there’s a shift in the power dynamics and everything becomes your fault. The problems in the relationship, his moods, the fact that things aren’t “great” anymore – all of it lands on you. And the love bombing becomes a dangling carrot you’ll only get if you play by their rules.
Two different people 🎭
They have one version reserved for you and another they show everyone else. So when you finally speak out, nobody believes you. Because how could the guy who “feeds the homeless at Christmas” be abusive?
The Invisible Damage
Most of us grew up watching telly where abuse looked like black eyes being covered up with makeup. Nobody told us it could be invisible too. That it could look like “tiny stitches”, that eventually create a pattern you can’t see until you step back.
Narcissistic gaslighting is the slow erosion of your sense of self and reality. And because it’s invisible, you can’t see it at work. When you’re head-over-heels in love, you’re loyal and protective. So your bond to them blinds you to what they’re doing. You’re unsuspecting. Which is exactly how they want you to be.
That’s how you end up believing you’re the problem. It’s how someone who always prided herself on being gentle and calm becomes convinced she’s a terrible person. Every look, smile or decision you make – all of it gets twisted into evidence that you’re the issue.
It makes you question all your memories and perceptions and lose your sense of what was real. And when you can’t trust your own mind, you become completely dependent on theirs.
When The Penny Drops
For Twigs, the moment came during a show. Thousands of people screaming her name. And she thought:
“If I was that terrible at everything, then no one would be screaming my name right now”.
For me, it was my therapist. She had to spell it out to me that I wasn’t the problem, validating me with proof from the history of our sessions.
The breakthrough often comes from outside validation because by that point, you can’t trust your own internal compass anymore. Someone else has to plant the seed that what you’ve been told isn’t true.
The Patterns That Keep You Stuck
If you’ve had your ‘aha moment’, you might recognise these patterns too:
- Believing someone uniquely understood you when they were just mirroring you
- Excusing behaviour because of those rare good moments
- Taking responsibility for his abusive actions
- Losing yourself whilst trying to make it work
Awareness is the first step. But knowing you were abused isn’t enough to heal from it.
The Gap That Keeps You Feeling Stuck After a Breakup
Leaving is just the beginning. Then comes the work of figuring out who you are again.
At first, you do what most survivors do: you feel this primal need to tell everyone what happened in your relationship. To explain it, justify it and make them understand you. Because you need them to see you weren’t the problem. That you’re not the crazy person they made you out to be.
Which makes sense. Because when you’ve been gaslit, you’ve been told you’re the problem over and over again. So when you leave, your first instinct is to prove you’re not. You become hyper-aware of how others see you.
I was desperate to tell everyone my side of the story, how much my ex had hurt and betrayed me. I wanted people to know I was the victim, not him.
But talking about all the awful things they did to you doesn’t fix how you feel about it. It just keeps you stuck in the story, reliving the trauma. And avoiding the grief, the anger and the pain you’re actually sitting with.
You’re intellectualising what happened to you, rather than processing it. And that’s the gap your healing needs to work towards closing.
Why Body-Based Healing Helps Get You Unstuck
What you’ve got to understand about recovering from trauma is your nervous system plays a crucial role in how you respond to it. So when you remember what happened and your chest and fists tighten. Or you get a wave of panic rush over you – they’re physiological responses to the memory.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk shows this in The Body Keeps the Score. Trauma survivors often experience physical symptoms like chronic tension, digestive issues and hypervigilance. And those are things you can’t just talk yourself out of.
Your nervous system speaks in sensations, movements and survival responses. So you need somatic techniques to create new physical experiences that teach your nervous system what balance feels like.
How healing happens in the body
Healing happens when you learn to live in your body again.
After her abusive relationship ended, Twigs (a classically trained dancer) couldn’t just go through the formal motions anymore. She needed something that felt free and was just for her. So she started experimenting with movement as medicine. Simple ritualised movements became prompts for grounding. Like rubbing her hands together when she felt herself dissociating whilst scrolling social media [artnet].
I use Peter Levine’s “voo breath” before meeting new clients when I feel that nervous-excited energy. I sit, take a breath in, and on the exhale let out a “VOOOOOOOOO” until I come to a natural stop. A few rounds of that settles my heart rate and helps me feel less edgy in my body.
Which is what body-based work does: it reconnects you with yourself and helps you feel more present and in tune with your feelings.
It regulates your nervous system so the logical part of your brain can come back online instead of being hijacked by survival responses (freeze, fight, flee, fawn).
Your body needs new experiences that show your nervous system the danger has passed. It’s about teaching your system new patterns and showing it that calm is a possible state it can live in too.
Healing involves a combination of approaches
Healing from narcissistic abuse takes a mix of things to help you get there.
In my own recovery, I’ve tried CBT, IFS, EMDR, somatic work, coaching, meditation, breath work, weight training, and Brazilian jiu jitsu. And I also immersed myself in communities where I could feel connected to others again.
What helped me most was combining:
- Trauma informed therapy to process emotions and develop compassion for the version of myself that stayed.
- Body-based practices to calm my stress responses to triggers.
- People who got it without judging my timeline
- Creative expression to process what I’d been through which is what I do through writing. What Lily Allen does through her music, what Twigs does with her performance art. And what Evan Rachel Wood does with acting.
Healing is an individual journey and requires trying different things that work for you and your needs. So hopefully you’ve got some ideas to try for yourself.
Rebuilding Trust in Yourself
After abuse, even simple decisions feel massive. Like choosing what to wear, where to eat or just giving your opinion. All of it becomes terrifying because you’re constantly second-guessing yourself, and judging whether you’re making the “right” choice.
I couldn’t even pick a meal from a menu without getting a second opinion. Or judge whether it was cold enough to bring a jacket out with me!
Decisions become overwhelming because abuse conditions you to distrust your instincts. You’ve learned to override your gut feelings, dismiss physical discomfort, and shrink yourself to fit someone else’s agenda.
Body-based healing is the slow process of rebuilding that trust from scratch. You learn to feel into your body’s signals again and notice what they’re telling you. Because you might still get triggered or experience physical effects from the trauma.
For example, Twigs still gets random and intense neck pain that shows up as a stress response [Man Enough podcast]. And Wood’s whole body would tense up and hold on for dear life, just trying to voice her opinion [Navigating Narcissism podcast].
The difference is you can learn the tools to pick up those fear signals. You can understand what’s happening in your nervous system and know how to bring yourself back to calm.
That’s what healing looks like: being able to move through it instead of letting it rule you for days.
Learning What Safe Actually Feels Like
Experiencing an abusive relationship makes you question everything in new relationships. Because your last one resulted in the happiest days turning into the worst. So your nervous system learned that joy is dangerous and connection comes with a price. And now it doesn’t know how to recognise safety anymore.
Twigs described toxic relationships as swinging between 10s and 1s – extreme highs followed by crushing lows. Whereas healthy love sits somewhere in between, it’s consistent and steady, and not like a rollercoaster you can’t get off.
For ages, I didn’t know what that middle ground felt like. In my current relationship, I always felt anxious whenever things were going well, convinced it wasn’t going to last. Like I couldn’t relax into the joy because I was always worried something was going to spoil it.
So I had to actively learn what stability felt like in therapy. Unlearn that healthy love doesn’t include helicopter rides and apology flowers after periods of silent treatment and explosive arguments.
And that felt wrong at first…boring, even – if I’m honest. Because my nervous system had been trained to associate intensity with love and it wasn’t used to consistency.
So if you’re feeling this too, know that it’s completely normal. When you’ve lived in chaos, your system learns to predict it. So you need time to teach your body the difference between genuine safety and trauma-bonded intensity. And body-based work helps you build that discernment.
Through healing, you reclaim all the parts abuse tried to take from you, like your gentleness and empathy. And you embrace the full spectrum of who you are – including the more intense and uncomfortable emotions too.
What This Means For You
If you’re still feeling stuck after a breakup, body-based healing is often the missing piece.
I know this because I’ve been there. For ages, I felt like I was just coping with life, rather than actually living it. Everyday things affected me more than they should. Like the anxiety I’d experience between waiting to receive text messages. Or the urge to always have to defend my choices – life felt exhausting to me.
But when I discovered somatic work, it gave me agency over my emotional responses – it put me back in the drivers seat.
It teaches you how to restore balance after triggers because you develop the instincts to know what your body needs. And you no longer rely on someone else to soothe you, as you have the skills to do that now.
That’s why I trained in somatic trauma informed coaching. So rather than tell you to “focus on yourself”, I can show you how because I’ve already walked this path myself.
So if you’re reading this and seeing yourself in these stories, know you’re not stuck forever – you just need the right tools. And I can teach you them whenever you’re ready.