When cruelty and love come packaged together for a stretch of time, your brain stops being able to tell them apart.
It just learns that this is what love’s supposed to feel like.
Which is why no contact feels like you’re quitting the most addictive drug. And has you inventing all kinds of excuses to go back to them for one last snort.
So what feels like a pull towards love, is actually just your brain pulling you back to the familiar.
It passes off your history as fact – even when it’s harmful.
And that’s because when you were in a relationship with your ex-narcissist, it learned a pattern.
Your on and off again relationship basically became predictable to your brain.
It learned that when a bad thing happens – like a discard, a good thing – love bombing, then follows. And when this goes on for years, your brain gets used to it because it predicts the familiar – not what’s always best for you.
In this post, I want to break down why that is, what’s going on when you get those overwhelming urges. And what you can do to start trusting yourself again.
Why “trust your gut” is incomplete advice
So many healing accounts will tell you to “trust your gut” after narcissistic abuse. And look, I get the appeal of that. After years of being gaslit and told your feelings weren’t real, of course you want to believe in yourself again.
But that advice misses something important, especially early in your healing.
You see, your brain needs more than words to update its meaning. Because it also takes your physical state into account to construct your emotions [Lisa Feldman Barrett]. So when your nervous system was conditioned inside a toxic relationship, predictions were made from a skewed reality.
That’s why you can tell yourself he’s bad for you until the cows come home. And it still won’t stop you reaching for your phone to unblock him and check if he’s tried to contact you.
Because what your brain does instead of telling you the truth, is it make its best guess based on everything that’s happened to you before.
So it takes your history, matches it to what’s happening now, and makes you feel something based on that prediction.
So what feels like a gut instinct, is more often than not, your brain categorising your current experience through the lens of your past.
Your physical state colours your perception
There’s a study that illustrates this really well. Judges were found to be significantly more likely to deny parole right before lunch than at any other time of day.
And the reason for this was because their brains were mistaking hunger — a physical sensation — for a “bad feeling” about the prisoner [Danziger, S., Levav, J., and Avnaim-Pesso, L. 2011].
That’s how powerful this is. These are trained legal professionals, making high-stakes decisions. And their bodies were feeding (no pun intended), them inaccurate information that felt like an absolute truth.
So your physical sensations have a big influence on how your brain builds a story around them. Which is why a body that’s carried years of fear, anxiety and self-doubt will keep shaping the narrative your brain reaches for.
What this looks like during no contact
Sometimes when you’re going no contact, you can get a good streak on. And then, out of nowhere, you get this overwhelming urge to break it and check in on them.
It feels desperate and compulsive, like you can’t control it and need them back again.
But your brain is doing the same thing it did with the judges. It’s mistaking a familiar physical sensation for evidence about your situation.
Just reflect on the pattern you lived in for a moment:
When your ex gave you the silent treatment, you felt anxious. Your body craved him back and you chased him. Because the alternative – sitting with that unbearable weight in your chest, or stomach pit the size of Africa – felt next to impossible.
Every time he pulled away, you panicked and reached out. So over time, you learned a very clear equation: this feeling means go back to him.
So now, even though going no contact is the right choice for you, that urge doesn’t feel like its a choice. It feels more like a force you can’t ignore. And that distinction matters a lot.
Your brain gets hardwired for danger
After a narcissistic relationship, your brain has been rewired and so it has more than a few bad memories to contend with. Plus, your nervous system picked up on the chaos and normalised it too.
So that rewiring affects your whole way of being. From how you read and respond to people, to how safe you feel when things are going well.
But this is not a sign your brain is broken, it’s functioning exactly how it should be.
Let me explain…
When you were with your ex, it was observing your environment, building a model of what normal looked like and setting your baseline accordingly.
Even though the relationship was abusive, it was still predictable. And your brain prefers predictability over the unknown, because it can plan for that. The unknown is something it can’t anticipate and that feels more dangerous to your survival.
So when you left, two things happened simultaneously. The pattern your brain had built got interrupted, which your nervous system then reads as destabilisation rather than relief.
And because your relationship was so unstable, your brain never accumulated enough experiences of safety to counterbalance all the threat it learned to predict.
So it doesn’t yet have a “safe” baseline to return to, just a threat-based one.
Which is why your nervous system keeps sounding the alarm even after you’re out. It’s adapted to the pattern it spent years building inside that relationship.
Why you feel so anxious around decent people
This is why, after leaving your ex, you might find yourself feeling anxious around people who are just being kind to you. Or suspicious when nothing shady is happening. Or on edge even when there’s nothing to be tense about.
Your nervous system became hypervigilant because it learned that it had to do that to keep you safe. So after that level of betrayal, it makes complete sense that you’d start treating a lot of things as potential threats – you’re protecting yourself.
The more you act on those urges, the stronger they get
This part can feel a little confronting when you first read it…
Every time you followthrough on one of those urges (so every time you give into the pull and go back, or make contact, or act from a place of fear), you are essentially confirming your brain’s prediction. You’re telling it: yes, that alarm was accurate, that response was correct, keep doing that.
In other words, you’re not really healing – you’re engraining the old pattern, over and over again. And your brain, being the efficient learner it is, gets better and better at running it.
This is why you might feel stuck after your breakup. Like you understand everything intellectually, but nothing ever seems to change or get better. Because you need to also show (not tell) your brain physical proof that helps influence more accurate predictions.
It can only update them when you’ve given it a lived, physical experience that contradicts the old one. So choosing not to act on the urge, and then nothing bad happening as a result, is what finally starts to move the needle.
And the way you do that is by interrupting the pattern in the moment — before it gets the confirmation it’s looking for.
How to start rewiring — without dismissing yourself
I just want to caveat this by saying that I’m not telling you to ignore every feeling you have; that would be completely mad. (If you need a wee, please trust that)! All I’m saying is this: get curious about your feelings before you act on them. Because curiosity sparks choice.
Step one: separate the sensation from the story
When you notice a strong feeling coming up, slow down before you decide what it means.
And ask yourself: what am I noticing in my body right now? Is there a tightness in my chest? Are my shoulders creeping up towards my ears? Is my breathing starting to feel more shallow?
Notice the physical sensations with as much detail as possible, and without immediately attaching a meaning to them. You’re just gathering information. And giving yourself enough time to register that you’re not in any actual physical danger right now.
Step two: ask whether this is now or then
Once you’ve noticed what’s happening in your body, ask yourself this: am I responding to something that’s happening right now, or am I responding to something from the past?
Because when you remember something, it’s more than a thought, you experience it in the body too.
You don’t just remember the moment he cheated, or lied, or disappeared. You feel the shock of it. Like the drop in your stomach, the curling of your spine, the breath you’re holding in. And your brain can struggle to distinguish between that memory playing out in your body, vs what’s happening to you right now, in the present.
You’re not always going to be able to answer that question clearly, especially at first. But the act of asking it, is the practice itself. It introduces a pause between sensation and reaction. And in that pause, lies choice.
Why this helps
When you practice slowing down, noticing, and choosing not to react immediately, you are giving your brain new data. You’re showing it that you felt the sensation, didn’t act on it, and nothing harmful followed.
And it starts to rewire. Slowly, with repetition, it learns that this feeling doesn’t always mean what it used to mean. It’s learning that safety is a possibility and you can trust yourself to know the difference.
None of this is your fault — but it is your responsibility
Your nervous system adapted to a threatening environment in order to keep you safe. And you kept going through something that would have broken a lot of people.
So if part of you is tempted to read all of this and feel embarrassed or frustrated at yourself, I’d really encourage you to sit with this instead:
Your brain did its best job to protect you and keep you alive.
None of the abuse or the patterns that formed as a result of the abuse were your fault.
But – and I say this with love – the healing is yours to take on. Which, when it sinks in, gives you a sense of agency you might not have felt in a long time. Because it means you’re not waiting for someone else to fix you and you’re not at the mercy of what happened.
You’re in charge of your brain and you can influence how you give it new information to update its predictions.
The most powerful thing you can do right now
Is to start learning to read your body’s signals.
That’s the foundation of everything. Because when you can tell the difference between your body responding to a real, present threat and an echo from the past, everything starts to get better.
Your responses become more measured and your choices become more yours. And over time, the noise from the past starts to get quieter.
If you want practical tools to help you start doing exactly that, my free Boundary Blueprint has exercises and examples to help you put what you’ve learned here into practice. Download it below — it’s free and a gentle introduction to somatic work.
🩵 Download the free Boundary Blueprint here.
If you’re ready to work with someone who specialises in narcissistic abuse and somatic coaching, then you can check out how we can work together here.